The American, The Social Network, etc.

PHOTO CREDIT: Giles Keyte

Last week I convinced my friend Lindy to go see a matinee of The American, George Clooney's latest movie. I've loved George Clooney since ER so when I saw the movie posters around the city, knowing nothing about the movie, I wanted to go see it. The movie was beautiful but slow. As much as I love George, I still had to struggle to stay awake for the first half. Things picked up about halfway through, but as Lindy aptly stated, it felt very self-indulgent. George is getting older, but he still looks pretty good.

Before the movie started, I saw the trailer for The Social Network, a movie about the origins of Facebook coming out in a couple of weeks.


I've seen the trailer a few times at this point, and each time I watch it I cringe. Facebook was created when I was a senior at Harvard, hot on the heels of another infamous Mark Zuckerberg creation, Facemash. Facemash was basically "Am I Hot or Not" using randomly generated ID photos of Harvard undergrads. Mark was "ad-board"-ed (Harvard's disciplinary board) but managed to escape being kicked out of the school.

I've actually known Mark since we were kids. He is friends with my younger brother, Doug, and when we were in high school (Mark went to my school before switching to Exeter), I'd jokingly push him into lockers during track practice (our school was small and we didn't have an indoor track so sometimes we'd jog in the hallways when it was too cold to run outside). He and Doug were computer-nerd buddies and kept in touch from time to time so when my brother visited me the spring of my junior year (Spring of 2003), we paid a visit to Mark. Even then he had two huge monitors on his desk for coding. He was working on a program that would build a playlist based on your music preferences, kind of like the Genius application in iTunes, but several years ahead. He was talking to Microsoft about selling it.

What impressed me about Mark was his dedication to what could essentially be described as his art. He is obviously a very smart dude, but he was the first to admit that in reputation and in tested arenas, my brother was known for possessing more raw intelligence. However, he loved programming and would devote every waking moment to it, often staying up late at night and skipping class to work on different programs. This is why I get annoyed when I read articles about the allegations made by the ConnectU team. Although I didn't know the Winklevoss twins and only knew Divya Narendra as a casual acquaintance, I find it hard to believe, knowing what I do know about them, and what I know about Mark, that a) Mark stole the idea from them (it seems to be a natural and organic progression from the FaceMash idea) and b) that they could ever have built it up into something as big as what Facebook has become.

At Harvard, at the end of your freshman year you're randomly placed with your blocking group (an up to 8 person group of people) in one of the undergraduate houses, where you live until you graduate or transfer to another house. Mark coincidentally ended up in my house, Kirkland, so I would see him from time to time. (He was a sophomore when I was a senior). Since Mark and his roommates started Facebook, there was a little buzz about it around the house when it all began the spring semester of my senior year. I'll admit that I thought it was a dumb idea when it first started, and only joined when my friend asked me to so she could up her friend count. (I'm user #384). One of the ways it came in handy was facilitating hookups and friendships with other seniors during the spring when we were all relaxing and enjoying ourselves. If you met someone casually you could friend the person on Facebook and if the response was good, move on from there.

I've only seen the trailer so maybe the movie isn't quite as I am interpreting it, but what annoys me about it is the way it portrays Mark. He and I aren't super close but seeing him in college and afterward visiting Facebook HQ and seeing what it has become, it irks me to see him portrayed as this insecure dork who created a social network to become cool and get into the final clubs. First of all, he created Facebook after punch season for the final clubs, so that doesn't make sense. Secondly, he is one of those people that doesn't really give a shit about being cool, and just cared about creating something great. So I guess what I am annoyed about is how Hollywood has decided to put Mark's character into this little caricature of a box.

From the trailer it's hard to tell how they will portray the conflict with the ConnectU boys, but I imagine that they will try to place Mark in a negative light, as is often the case in the press. As I stated earlier, that whole thing seems ridiculous to me as well.

I will probably reluctantly watch the movie just to laugh at how they use all of the Harvard stereotypes to portray life at Harvard, but I wrote this long post to state that the movie should be treated as the work of fiction it is, and not an accurate portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg or the events leading to the creation of the phenomenon that is the Facebook.