The social network

Welcome to my "The social network". The Social Network is the American biographical drama directed by David Fincher on the history of creating a social network Facebook. Aaron Sorkin's script was written according to Ben Mezrich's book "Billionaires willy-nilly: how Facebook was created, the story of sex, money, genius, and betrayal" (2009).https://www.blogger.com

The release of the film in the US took place on October 1, 2010, and during the first two weeks, the picture was leading in the national box office. On the screens of Russian cinemas, the film was released on October 28. With a budget of $ 40 million, the box office of the film by the end of 2010 approached 200 million.

In 2003, a student at Harvard University, Mark Zuckerberg, is born the idea of creating a website that allows students to form a rating in terms of attractiveness. It happens right after Mark was thrown by his girlfriend Erica Albright. Mark hacks the databases of various hostels, downloads photos, and names and, using the algorithm proposed by his friend Eduardo, where students can vote which of the two girls is more attractive.

University server, unable to withstand the load, broke down the same night, a few hours later, and four hours later the source of trouble was discovered. The university administration conducted an investigation and awarded Zuckerberg six months of probation. The popularity of the project and the fact that Mark created it in one night, and even on a drunken head, attracts attention from the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklyosov, as well as their business partner - Divya Narendra. They are trying to create an intra-university social network and invite Zuckerberg to work as a programmer.

Mark and Eduardo, in secret from the twins, begin to develop the idea of emulating real communication on the net: an exclusive social network for students. Eduardo agrees to help Mark and provides an initial capital for the site at a rate of thousands of dollars. When the site is launched, the twins declare that Zuckerberg stole their idea from them, and after long hesitation is suing him.

Eduardo, as the project's CFO, is trying to convince Mark to use the growing site as a platform for online advertising, but Mark does not like it. With the creators of a successful site, Sean Parker, the creator of the Napster scandalous network, is contacted. He says what you need to strive for - a billion dollars. However, he denies the use of money advertisers, and this seriously diverges in views with Eduardo.

While Eduardo is looking for advertisers for the site in New York, Mark, along with the company's headquarters, moves to Silicon Valley, where he again meets Sean. Having fallen under his charm, he gives Shawn a stake in the company. Sean also succeeds in finding a major investor, Peter Thiel, who invests half a million dollars in Facebook. Eduardo signs papers on the distribution of shares in the company, but after a while, he discovers that his share from 34% was lowered to 0.03%. He breaks off relations with Mark and Sean and threatens Mark with a court. Soon, Sean is detained at a party, accusing him of using cocaine.

All these events are shown in the form of flashbacks during two closed court hearings: on one of them Eduardo claims to be the plaintiff with claims to Mark about his being expelled from the company, on the other brothers are Winklewossy accusing Mark of stealing their idea. In the final, Mark, left alone, remembers his break with Erica, from which it all began. He sends her an invitation to Facebook on Facebook and endlessly updates the page in vain waiting for an answer. In the final scene, Zuckerberg appears as a "prisoner of the Internet, stuck on a single page - on the page of his past real life, which he should have been turned over long ago".

During the final credits, it is reported that, in court, Eduardo and the Winklevoss brothers received compensation and concluded an agreement on the non-disclosure of the circumstances of the case, and that Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire in the world.

Mezrich's book, published in the summer of 2009, did not claim to be a neat statement of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the famous social network. Although his works are positioned as documentaries, the dialogues in them are fictitious, and a single character can correspond to several real people. The author has repeatedly faced accusations of fictionalization of authentic events, so the book about Facebook was preceded by a remark of 285 words that chronology, details, and dialogues are not always true.

Work on the book began after Mezrich's acquaintance with Eduardo Saverin, who at that time just broke off relations with Zuckerberg and readily consulted the author on all issues.  Mezrich's attempts to meet with Zuckerberg and listen to his point of view did not arouse the interest of the billionaire. For Mezrich, the Zuckerberg paradox is this: "Mark became the youngest billionaire on the planet, but he was always indifferent to the material manifestations of success: he does not have any" Ferrari ", personal aircraft or houses with 15 bedrooms." He believes that in the film "he was made somewhat more a goat than he is shown in the book".

"Billionaires willy-nilly" had success with readers.  Intrigues. Oscar winner Kevin Spacey hastened to acquire the rights to her adaptation.  where he called the book "an exciting story of betrayal, rabid money and two friends who revolutionized how people communicate with each other, but quarreled themselves and still do not talk to each other. In 2010, the book was published in Russian in the translation of D. Ugorsky.

None of the people working on Facebook, including the founder of Mark Zuckerberg, did participate in the creation of the film. It is difficult to compare the evidence shown in the film with real judicial battles due to the fact that they were conducted in the closed mode and at the end of the process all participants signed an agreement on non-disclosure. Prototypes of the protagonists from the film distanced themselves, saying that he was "not about them. The history of the creation of the network in the book and in the film is told from the positions of the three main participants in the proceedings - Zuckerberg, Saverin and Winkles. According to the scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin, the creation of the film was monitored by lawyers representing the prototypes of the protagonists. They insisted that the film did not sound anything false and slanderous: if the views of real people on the circumstances of the creation of the network diverge, then the film focuses on this attention.

Casting began in early August 2009. The role of Zuckerberg was initially claimed by Shaya Labaf and Michael Sera, but Fincher and Sorkin decided not to consider candidatures of actors from the traditional youth clip, as they are associated with the comedy in the audience. Among them was Eisenberg. The filmmakers were looking for guys with "special high-speed intelligence" that would be able to say "very fast, very clever texts" without hesitation from the script. After "five hundred people were tried" (Fincher's words), the choice was settled by Andrew Garfield, who eventually played Saverin. "The time was already running out, I already had a traditional idea in such cases: that you have to go to collect a bath and cut the veins," Fincher ironically states. Finally, in September 2009, Jesse Eisenberg was announced to be the main actor.

Filming began in October 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Some scenes were filmed around the campuses of two Massachusetts preparatory schools, Phillips Academy and Milton Academy. From November 2 to 4, the shooting took place in the areas of Keizer and My man in the Home wood campus of the Johns Hopkins University. From November 16 to 22, the film's scenes were filmed at the California State University. The budget of the film was 40 million dollars. Fincher believes the tape is very straightforward, the most difficult from the technical point of view was to create similarly and at the same time different twins and also to withdraw their performance at the royal regatta in Henley-on-Thames. He says that he set himself the task of shooting an easy film in the spirit of John Hughes, but in such a way that something more rigid could slip behind this superficial ease.

Main article: The Social Network (soundtrack)

The music for the film was written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. This is not the first experience of cooperation between Fincher and Reznor: the film "Seven" begins with the sounds of one of the remixes of the latter, and it was Fincher who shot the clip for his composition "Only" in 2005. Fincher from the very beginning suggested to Reznor to write music for the film, but he declined the offer in view of the fact that he had just married and had completed a harassing tour. For several months, he did not leave the feeling that he had let down an old friend. Finally, he decided to call Fincher and offer his services for the following films. Fincher said that he still waits for his consent about the "social network". After Reznor and Ross joined the project, the music, optimistic at first, acquired a much darker tone. His version of the textbook Grigovskaya melody "In the cave of the mountain king", which sounds in the scene of the rowing race, Reznor considers "the least appetizing" in history. The melancholy-disturbing sounds of the song "Hand Covers Bruise" (English Hand Covers Bruise) welcome everyone coming to the official website of the film. In the final credits, the song of the band "The Beatles" Baby, You're a Rich Man.

Stephen Soderbergh persuaded Fincher instead of the digital camera Thomson Viper, which was removed "Zodiac", look at the more modern cameras Red One. Thus, the Red Digital Cinema Camera Company equipment was chosen as the main instrument of the operator. To align the "picture", when shooting outdoors, we used natural density filters. Subsequently, the footage was interim digital processing in the Hollywood studio of the company Red.

The pages of The New York Times focus on the art of building the art world of the Social Network: "It's hard to recall the film that Harvard would paint in such dull tones; the colors themselves are discolored. A restrained-dim palette and a minimum depth of the frame outline the limits of the world of the protagonist, and frequent, though smoothed switching between space-time layers gives an idea of the speed with which he achieved success. According to another critic, the depressingly unsettling atmosphere of many scenes is more in line with the "Cold War espionage film or the film about the resurrection of Frankenstein" than the picture of the life of modern students. Even Zuckerberg's sex with a boring admirer is filmed in "unhealthy greenish tones, typical for ribbons about monsters," he continues.

Almost all scenes Fincher wanted to give in dim lighting (poor lighting generally characteristic of his films). The most difficult thing was the realistic portrayal of the Harvard campus since the university banned the filming on its territory. To remove the passage of the main character at the beginning of the film against the background of the panoramic view of the Harvard campus, the tape makers had to resort to some tricks. When Zuckerberg wanders in the twilight toward the campus, the camera takes it from the side and from above, giving the scene an ominous hue, as if the viewer is following surreptitiously. In order not to attract attention, the survey was conducted in the twilight with the participation of a minimum number of specialists. They managed to agree with the authorities of the city of Cambridge and to change the lighting in street lamps to a softer halogen, and from the university's territory background illumination were provided by a man dressed in a wandering mime.

Another technically challenging scene is a nightclub where Parker preaches to Zuckerberg his vision of the future of the social network. It all begins with the fact that the giant crane moves the camera from the second floor of the club to the first and then back to the second one, unfolding it there by 180 degrees and creating a feeling of light dizziness for the viewer. In accordance with the demonic character of Parker, the director wanted to give this scene a subtle raid of the ominous. To this end, directly into the table, on which conspiratorially inclined poorly hearing each other because of the music of the heroes, were built-in LED displays that allow broadcasting multi-color films. Mysterious illumination of the heroes from below is intended to cause the viewer a feeling of psychological discomfort.

The previous Fincher film was built on complex computer effects. In the "social network" special effects had to be used to portray the twins of the Winklwos. During the casting, the director could not find any real twins that resembled the famous rowers, but he managed to find an actor similar to them, Hermi Hammer (who, like them, belonged to the cream of American society, is the grandson of Armand Hammer). The second twin was represented by a backup, then in the studio, Hammer's face was superimposed on his face. Whenever possible, resorted to combined shooting, when there is no (as, for example, in the rowing scene) - to computer technology. Realistic effects of light and shadow were superimposed on faces of twins in the Flame program from Autodesk.

When shooting the scene of the royal regatta on the Thames, which illustrates the doom in modern society of traditional forms of male competition and domination, a new complexity emerged - the excessive gravity of the chambers, which threatened to shed lightweight rowing boats where they were to be placed. To solve this problem, it was necessary to develop a lightweight camera weighing less than three kilograms. In the regatta scene, the tilt-shift effect was applied, which is usually used when replacing a real landscape with miniature mock-ups. Fincher admits that the regatta scene is perceived as an alien insertion into the fabric of the film, that it is a kind of music video clip in the middle of the film.

For the first time, the film was shown at the opening of the New York Festival on September 24, 2010, a week before the release of a wide rental [23]. For the debut weekend, the picture collected in 2771 a movie theater in North America about $ 23 million. In the second weekend, the fees fell by only 31.2% - the lowest level for the whole year. As of January 2, 2011, the film grossed 93.2 million dollars in the United States and 100.4 million in the rest of the world. At the same time, the largest leases were rolled in the UK (16.4 million with Ireland), France (12.9 million with Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco) and Australia (11.3 million). Russian viewers showed much less interest in Fincher's new work ($ 4.6 million for all CIS countries).

The DVD movie was released on January 11, 2011. Almost simultaneously, on the eve of the "Oscar" race, the tape returned to the screens of 600 North American cinemas. Usually, Hollywood studios prefer not to release movies on DVDs until they can be seen in a nearby cinema.

Initially, professional critics of the English-speaking world about the "Social Network" took out an almost absolutely positive verdict, although, by the end of the year, less enthusiastic voices were heard. Summarizing the reviews, the Rotten Tomatoes website concluded: "The impeccable script, amazing direction, first-class acting make" Social Network "an exciting and ambitious example of contemporary cinema at its best.

Roger Ebert attributed the creators of the film to the fact that a very specific and rather complicated plot from the life of programmers is set out clearly and clearly, and dialogues speedily and witty remind machine guns, resurrecting the pre-war comedies of Howard Hawks. From the point of view of Peter Travers from Rolling Stone magazine, the film clearly shows that social networks and interactive communication are the reverse side of sociopathy, inability to fully communicate with real people, and narcissism and play social masks on the Internet are two sides of the same coin. In their ratings, both Ebert and Travers called the "Social Network" the best film of the year.

For M. Trofimenkov, "Social Network" continues the line of Fincher films about spontaneous self-organization of society on a network principle. As in Boytsov Club, the main character from frustration takes up the creation of his own version of the world, an alternative to the existing one. Jim Hoberman of The Village Voice praised the energy from which the first part of the story was told, before meeting the protagonist with the "Mephistopheles charming" Timberlake hero who draws the whole attention of the auditorium. Hoberman sees the film's message that, even if secretly from himself, everyone just wants to be loved and claimed by others, and social networks are called upon to compensate for the lack of it in real life.

The editorial staff of the American Independent Cinema Channel called for seeing in the "battle for a stupid site worth of absurd money, several graduates successful in terms of studies, but socially inferior" not so much a comment about the communicative problems of modern youth as the traditional for Hollywood cinematography criticism about The American Dream. The tragic flaw of the protagonist of the "Social Network" is seen in his misunderstanding of the fact that to achieve success in business - does not mean to find happiness.

David Thomson, whose "Biographical Dictionary of Cinematography" has sustained 5 editions since 1975, declared that Fincher's painting is not able to "rise above the ruthless demonstration of unpleasant types that profit from petty heartlessness. At the end of the year, a negative review of the film appeared in Slant Magazine. The observer reproaches the "Social Network" in soullessness and automatism, which are similar to Zuckerberg's qualities, censuring the film for the cold calculation of the visual and sound series, for the overabundance of barely assimilated dialogues of "one-dimensional" heroes, for gender one-sidedness (female characters are pushed to the periphery of the plot) and for sentimental depiction of the outcast Saverin, who in the second half of the film more and more "resembles a puppy thrown out of the house.

Russian-language criticism reacted differently to Fincher's film. Roman Volobuev from the magazine Afisha in his review compared Mark Zuckerberg with Tyler Durden, noting that the hero of the film is the same fictional [34]. Yaroslav Zabaluev from Gazety.ru compared Mark Zuckerberg with Neo, as he created a mechanism that greatly facilitated the user's transition from the real world to digital. Vasily Koretsky from Time Out magazine noted that in Russia the film lost its social significance and fascination. And Mark Zuckerberg looks like an artist and a setter. Victor Matizen of Novye Izvestia called the film a classic American success story in the modern version and recommended to all those who guess that the value is created not by work, but by ideas. And Nina Tsyrkun from the Art of Cinema called the painting "new journalism", a dispassionate chronicle of the day, filed in a swift and chaotic information flow, and Mark Zuckerberg is a typical representative of the day. Sergei Obolonkov, in his review of Lente.ru, compared the main character of the film to a half-wicked genius, half an autistic, although, apparently, Mark is not in real life. However, Obolonkov noted the skills of Fincher and Sorkin.

The biography of the film implies that there is a real historical person in the center of the movie screen, but the main character of the "Social Network", according to most commentators, has little to do with the real Zuckerberg. In the film, he begins to construct an alternative social reality because of the desire to penetrate into the elite circles of Harvard and the inability to start a relationship with a girl he likes. Zuckerberg himself claims that Harvard clubs did not interest him, but he met his wife Priscilla in the second year of the university.

The artistic image drawn by Sorkin and Fincher is far from reality and represents a generalized psycho type. In critical reviews, the protagonist of the film was defined as a typical idiot savant, a modernized reprint of "Citizen Kane, the newly emerged Rastignac, "strictly speaking, not inhuman, but post-human: a chain of algorithms and calculations, a kind of computer program "(R. Corliss). The observer of the Russian "Kommersant" saw in Fincher's billionaire an impudent "walking computer", noting his "sexual ambivalence. Lydia Maslova defined the genre of the film as "anti-biopic", and his success was explained by the fact that he "allows a person even with microscopic self-esteem to feel better, smarter and more charming than the youngest billionaire on the network.

Ryan Gilby from the New Statesman magazine sees in the "Social Network" the continuation of the theme of Fincher's "Zodiac": through the prism of legal proceedings, the figure of a sociopath who is not understood by the surrounding people is being revealed, which reshuffles the surrounding world to himself, as well as all those whom he left behind in order to comprehend the deeds committed by him. Zuckerberg to the comedian is not in harmony with the world, the transformation of which he is so busy. He flanks on snow-covered Harvard in shorts and slippers, and at a business meeting appears in a bathrobe. Moreover, he is just as abnormal as any genius, for he is so obsessive about his business that he "does not notice the little people who are on his way. In the Time magazine, the protagonist of the film was interpreted not just as a scattered scientist, but as a sort of mental invalid: inventing a site that would give him 500 million friends instead of a single one, he is likened to the limbo that the wheelchair perfected.

The film caused a wide public response in the US. Critics wrote that the film highlighted long-accumulated questions about how network interactivity changes people's perceptions of themselves, that a generation of teenagers has grown up on Facebook, for whom the experience of communication is not connected with traditional limitations of ethical properties. In particular, Travers announced "Social Network" the defining film of the last decade, emphasizing the typicality for the current generation of the final film "the image of a single Mark who sits before a flickering screen and pretends to be not alone.

According to AO Scott from The New York Times, "at first the debate was about matching the" Social Network "to real events and whether it matters to the film's evaluation, but subsequent reviews, essays and debates about Facebook ", Online entrepreneurship, friendship, business, meritocracy and" Ivy League "were much more orderly and closer to the present than Sorkin's lively script or the refined atmosphere created by Fincher. As a result of all the disputes generated by the film, Zuckerberg's figure was "mythologized" to the point that Time magazine called him the man of the year. Habermann dubbed the ribbon "The Birth of the Cyber-Nation" ironically, noting that the last time the choice of Hollywood and the magazine intersected in the figure of Stalin - one of the heroes of the film "Mission to Moscow" (1943).

A great article about the film and its social problems was published in The New York Review of Books by writer Zedi Smith. She believes that the type of hero drawn in the film will soon be a thing of the past: "When I watched the film when I mentioned the early blog platform Livejournal (still popular in Russia), laughter rang out in the auditorium. I cannot imagine life without a computer, but I can imagine the time when Facebook will seem to us as an absurd relic as Livejournal.

One of America's most influential film critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum, described Zedi Smith's article as more information about social networks than the film itself, and the popularity of this "sour-sweet comedy" was explained by the cynical fatalism of its creators as to how big business corrupts the souls of those rushing toward the top of the social pyramid - a problem familiar to those who saw "Citizen Kane" and the first films of the saga "Godfather". "In the end, it does not matter whether to trade: drugs, pornography or network friendship - all these trade illusions", M. Trofimenkov expresses a similar idea.