Anyone who's ever used Facebook — which would be approximately 99.9 percent of NYU's student population — knows just how tangled and uncertain a place it can be. Likewise, "The Social Network," director David Fincher and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's high-profile account of the site's origin story, can best be described by a single phrase: It's complicated.
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"The Social Network" is Sorkin's rigorous attempt to reveal the true story behind the creation of Facebook — however many times it takes him to tell it. (It takes three: one from Mark's perspective, two from the perspectives of the people who sued him.)
"I did not pick one version and decide 'I think that's the truth so I'll dramatize that, I think that's the juiciest so I'll dramatize that.' What I liked is that there were three different, and oftentimes, conflicting versions of the story," Sorkin said.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, refused to cooperate from the start in the making of the film, which is based in part on Ben Mezrich's book "Accidental Billionaires."
The writers paraphrased Facebook's official stance on the film: "Don't set it at Harvard, and don't call it Facebook." Or, as Sorkin wryly pointed out, "In other words, we'll help you out if you write fiction, but we're not going to help you out telling the true story."
What the filmmakers came up with may not be the Truth with a capital T, but it definitely has some truthiness.
"That fact that we know what brand of beer Mark was drinking on a Tuesday night in October seven years ago when there were only three other people in the room," Sorkin said, "should tell you something about how close our research sources were to the subject and to the event."
Sorkin hopes that in a film that "most closely relates to courtroom drama, where we are certain of someone's guilt or innocence at the beginning," we end up "changing our mind five times all the way through."
Eisenberg hopes the format might enrich our perspective on Zuckerberg himself.
"Even though [Zuckerberg] acts in a way that might be hurtful to other characters, it can be indicated that by the end of the movie it's totally understandable," he said.
"I think everyone gets their say, and I think by the end of the movie we want to give Mark a hug," Sorkin added.
Thanks to Fincher's grueling directorial style — it took him 99 takes to film the first scene — it's safe to say that nothing in the film is an accident. The characters are all multifaceted individuals, with their own pieces to add to the story. The ambiguity and complexity are there for a reason.
And it's entirely appropriate. Justin Timberlake, who plays the inventor of Napster in the film, acknowledged that Facebook's contribution to humanity still remains an open question.
"Social networking, in general, is still a hypothesis," he said. "We still wonder if it's going to create great things in the world or if we're going to waste away with it."
