NEW YORK -- By the time I got around to going to "The Social Network," four days after its $25-million nationwide opening, I'd read half a dozen blockbuster reviews and columns dissecting the film and its portrayal of Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It was impossible to go to the movie with a fresh eye and an open mind. What if I didn't like it? Well, I did. It's terrific. So let me dispatch quickly with all the issues surrounding the film that the critics (who adore the movie) and the social pundits have probed, held up for inspection, and looked at from all sides now. David Carr suggested in his column in The New York Times on Monday that there might be a generational split in moviegoers' response to the Zuckerberg character, a real-life boy genius tagged as the youngest billionaire in the world. He's 26. The young generation will cheer Zuckerberg, his duplicity and betrayals while grabbing a chance and running with it all the way to world domination. The older generation will see the movie as a story of an insensitive young man who betrays friends and partners and values for the sake of fame and money.
Read the full review here. See also:
The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
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The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World
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Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era
Despite a long apologetic addendum "in her own words" revealing her gratitude and affection for her own family's "stout and dark-skinned" maid, I confess I was slightly suspicious of Stockett and put off by her use of an inconsistent and condescending dialect for the working women ("her legs is so spindly, she look like she done growed em last week"). I know she wanted to convey hardships resulting from the steep racial divide but wondered if careless insensitivities laced through the narration were intended to underscore despicably egregious Jim Crow laws in force at the time, or if they reflected the author's own ambivalence.
Read the
full post by Bonnie Goldstein here.
