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RC-2012-105: The Social Network (2010)
In this episode, Rob gives part of his attention—the minimum amount—to what was one of the best and most surprising films of 2010, the Fincher-Sorkin-Reznor masterpiece known as The Social Network. The commentary gabbing analyzes stuff like the project's unusual development, Ben Mezrich's unusual book The Accidental Billionaires, and why Jesse Eisenberg seems to get the relationship between genius and being socially unusual. Listen and learn about how the screenplay takes the right kind of dramatic license and what The Social Network has in common with Casablanca. Synchronize your copy of the film to the commentary using the Columbia Pictures logo that precedes the opening credits.
Listen to the mp3. Or get your Ivy League ass over to iTunes.
7 comments:
I can't seem to play or download the commentary.
Hey there—I'm sorry for the difficulty you've run into. I've double-checked the links and mp3 files in the post, and they seem to be functioning normally. Perhaps you're having a browser issue? (On my machine, Google Chrome has been acting weird when it comes to mp3s). At any rate, try downloading for listening directly from the Internet Archive page, where the file is hosted:
http://archive.org/details/TheSocialNetwork2010AudioCommentaryByRobCaravaggio
If your problem persists, e-mail me and I'll be happy to e-mail you a clean file.
That's brilliant, thanks very much! I'm just going to go listen to it now. Thanks!
Great, I'm glad it's sorted out. The larger-than-normal file size on many of these can also be a bitch at times. Sorry for that.
I think it was just my computer rather than anything at your end! It's less-than-reliable.
I really enjoyed the commentary by the way. I've listened to the DiF commentary, too (I love it when commentaries reference other commentaries). Two things:
1) I didn't pick up on the 'it was Mark that called the cops on the party' idea, either. That never crossed my mind, through multiple viewings of the film, until I heard it mentioned on a commentary.
2) The scene with the Winklevii meeting with the Harvard president-chief-guy never struck me as unneccessary, either (again, never crossed my mind until I heard other people mention it). I thought it was more than just an amusing scene of snarky dialogue.
There are several scenes in the film where we see Eduardo and the Winklevoss boys doing the accepted, proscribed Harvard things- rowing, attending parties, going through the silly finals club initiation rites, going through the correct channels to deal with their problems with Mark. Meanwhile, Mark is always busy alone in his room working on the website that will (we know) make him a billionaire and a significant world figure within a few years. When the Winklevii are informed that Mark has fucked them over, they're sitting in a pretend boat in a rowing tank where they spend hours every day, going through the motions, fixed in place while Mark's doing something significant. I thought that the idea was that the film presents the things Eduardo and the twins are doing as ridiculous, and even the people who they are trying to impress by 'playing the game' treat them with nothing but disdain (like president guy in this scene, and the prince guy in london after the race) Also, while the president is saying things that are clever in a smartarsey way, we know he's completely, totally, wrong and is completely failing to understand the new world that his students are operating in. The boys accidentally break the handle off the '200-year-old door' as they leave- very very obvious symbolism as well as funny.
sorry about the rambly comment. thanks very much again!
Rambly comments are what the Internet was made for, my friend.
Yeah, the character "Mark" that is portrayed in the film absolutely may have tipped off the cops to the party in an effort to solve his Sean problem. Repeat viewings do help one see the emphasis on certain moments—as when the camera lingers on Mark looking at his newly minted "I'm CEO, bitch" business card, which comes just before the scene in which Sean gets busted. Mark is alone in the office at that time, sitting (presumably) next to a desk phone. So, yeah. Before seeing the movie, I'd read the book and been somewhat familiar with the speculation that the real Mark may have done something like that, so I think that's how the idea first got in my head.
And yeah, that doorknob bit of business does underscore the whole bulls-in-a-China-shop conceit of the Winkelvii-Larry Summers scene. I actually see the film's attitude toward the twins and Eduardo as more sympathetic. (The real Eduardo and the real twins cooperated with Mezrich and the filmmakers to some extent; the real Mark, not at all.) I don't know whether or not Fincher's intent was to present them as ridiculous (perhaps that was his intent, perhaps not), but, as characters, they ended up getting much more of my sympathy than Mark. For me, the deposition scenes really highlight just how much Mark obfuscated and misled the twins, and how badly he double-crossed Eduardo. (Again, talking about the characters presented in the movie here, not the real chaps.) Eduardo's and the twins' actions, as presented in the film, are mostly reasonable and carried out in relative good faith. I feel like that's a big part of why they got screwed. In a sense, I see what you mean: by coloring inside the lines, they do appear kind of ridiculous. I think one of Sorkin's script's main thematic concerns is the idea of belonging. From the first scene, it's on Mark's mind. The twins and Eduardo are in their element at Harvard; they know how to work the system, how to flex their (or their daddy's) muscles. Mark feels like an outsider who must prove his worthiness. One thing (another thing!) the Summers scene does, I think, is demonstrate that Mark's feelings of inferiority are perhaps a little overblown. Sure, there's snootiness and nepotism in the Ivy League, but there was the president of the school—whatever his motivations were—essentially siding with the non-wealthy kid from White Plains, NY against the wealthy, my-daddy's-a-donor-to-this-school Winkelvii. Mark says that the twins are suing him because for the first time something didn't go their way, but there we had another scene that shows how this is an oversimplification on his part. For, the wealth and prestige of the twins' family name is precisely the thing that pisses Summers off to begin with. Sorkin and Fincher constructed a story that is in love with these kinds of ambiguities, I think—it never lets us decide that anyone is 100% right or wrong. Everyone's just playing the hand they were dealt in life, and personality flaws abound!
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