Shriram | Week 1 | Maybe Mark Zuckerberg Was a Psychopath

    The 2010s was an interesting decade for movies, bringing with it masterful hits such as Inception, Whiplash, Hacksaw Ridge, and The Emoji Movie. However, there was also a rise in a different type of movie: biopics, one of which I recently rewatched. My second watch of David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network brought with it questions regarding its choice of subject matter: a biopic about a man who is still alive, whose identity and image will continue to be shaped by the media—whether truthful or fictitious—for years to come.

    The movie opens with a tense conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and his girlfriend Erica Albright. Frustrated by his lack of empathy and obsessive desire to get into selective, party-heavy Harvard clubs, she dumps him. Mark, now motivated by a bitter desire for revenge, creates the hit website FaceMash which later transforms into The Facebook.
    This setup works very well to motivate Mark Zuckerberg’s character into his spree of website-creation and to justify the extent to which it took over his life, as it was coming from strong emotion. In a response to the movie, however, Zuckerberg himself stated that much of it was purely fictitious and overly dramatized for the sake of entertainment; it paints Zuckerberg as an unstable, villainous character, someone who was cold and cunning even as a young college student. He notes how as opposed to his character who was motivated by rejection, Zuckerberg himself created everything he did simply for the joy of creating—which would probably make for a boring movie. The movie also greatly overstates the importance of the Winklevoss twins in Facebook’s creation as well as Zuckerberg’s desire to emulate Sean Parker, the founder of Napster; it frequently exaggerates or even fabricates parts of his identity to push its plot forward.
    The Social Network is often regarded as one of the best films of its decade—and is admittedly one of my personal favorites. The dialogue and direction is precisely crafted, and no one moment seems unintentional or uninteresting. However, when these characters represent real people—down to the exact shirts they wore—their depictions have real impact. This decision to highlight or alter certain aspects of one’s identity affects the image of them which is popularized in mainstream media; whether they are morally better or worse than their portrayal is debatable, but what is certain is that it creates a distorted and unclear representation of who they truly are. 
    To say that this portrayal of Zuckerberg’s identity is a complete miss, however, would also be bold. As the founder of a multi-billion dollar corporation, Zuckerberg has made many ethically questionable decisions. From gross violations of data privacy to the building of environmentally destructive data centers, his company Meta frequently prioritizes their own goals over the well-being of other people. Consequently, rather than souring audiences on a young innovative businessman, The Social Network may serve as an exposé for Zuckerberg’s darker side, warning us—explicitly—that you don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies.