Image via WikipediaIn fact there is now an actual figure on just how evil Facebook is: $100m worth of evil, plus Oprah. The former is how much the network's founder, Mark Zuckerberg (boooooo!), announced he is donating in his company's stock to help the public school system in Newark, New Jersey on – oh crazy coincidence! – the very day that The Social Network premiered in the US. And Oprah, of course, refers to the show on which Zuckerberg announced his upcoming donation, thereby multiplying its value by about a kajillion, and also to whom the heretofore very private Zuckerberg gave a tour of his house, throwing in a kiss of his girlfriend for the cameras.
There is no number high enough to quantify how much this move added to the original $100m, but it did suggest even Zuckerberg accepts that Facebook's image is surprisingly evil for a computer program that most assume exists to allow 16-year-olds to inform their 1,739 friends that they are "totally Gleeking out tonight!!!!!"
But just as Oliver Stone has managed to make a boring sequel to Wall Street, despite the real Wall Street's enthralling and nigh-on-cinematic recent wickedness (the inner Freudian torment of boring Shia LaBoeuf's boring character is apparently more interesting to Stone – once the great purveyor of conspiracy theories – than the near-collapse of capitalism), so the makers of the upcoming films about Facebook have missed an obvious trick with their movies. Facebook is evil, but the Facebook movies don't quite get why.
Part of the problem with The Social Network is that neither the director, David Fincher, nor the writer, Aaron Sorkin, want to admit it's about Facebook, which is somewhat maverick for a movie that is, um, about Facebook. "We're not fad-hopping," Fincher shuddered recently in the New York Times, possibly adjusting his blindfold so as not to see the Facebook logo format on the poster for his film. Sorkin insists it's much more universal and timeless than that, because it's about "an outsider wanting to belong". In other words, it's about the story behind Facebook or, to put it more bluntly, the creation of a website.
Now, call me a heartless wench, but the story of a nerd stealing a vague computer idea from a pair of wealthy twins called Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, as Zuckerberg was accused of doing, doesn't strike me as having the same dramatic hook as, say, saving the planet from imminent destruction, or escaping from the Nazis. It seems unlikely that Humphrey Bogart is weeping in heaven at the lost chance to appear in a movie whose Eureka moment is the creation of the "relationship status" function.
It is, then, a testament to the very credible forces of David "Fight Club" Fincher and Aaron "The West Wing" Sorkin that watching characters argue for an hour and a half with "I want the truth!"/"You can't handle the truth!" ferocity about – hold on to your hats, readers, this one's a gripper! – whether or not Facebook should have advertising is actually very good fun. Yet this debate about adverts on websites, like the tale of Zuckerberg vs the Winklevi, is familiar to anyone who has had access to a newspaper or the internet in the last half decade, and no amount of fast talkin' Sorkin dialogue or Fincheresque moody lighting can entirely disguise that.
Unlike The Social Network, the documentary Catfish has the merit of being made by people who actually use Facebook and are interested in it. Nonetheless, it is little more than an extended version of the New Yorker cartoon in which a dog tells his friend: "On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Again, this will come as little surprise to the millions of dogs on Facebook who use a photo of Jon Hamm as their profile picture.
Like I said, Facebook is evil. But perhaps the problem is that film cannot contain the true depths of its evilness. Let us dim the lights . . .
Opening scene: an office. A young man, MIKE, should be doing some work. Instead, he is flicking through the recent holiday photos of a guy he went to school with and hasn't spoken to in 27 years. This activity seems to bring him no joy, yet he persists for about 17 minutes, becoming increasingly subsumed with despair at why everyone always has better holidays, sexier partners and cooler lives than him.
Enter GOD.
GOD: Mike, I must show you something.
Suddenly, an image of a giant whirlpool appears, topped by the numbers 117:47:56
MIKE: What is that, God?
GOD: That is your life, going down the drain while you have spent a total of 117 hours, 47 minutes and 56 seconds on Facebook.
Suddenly, the whirlpool disappears and is replaced by three enormous Pulitzer prize-winning novels, an award-winning film, two symphonies and a cure for cancer.
MIKE: What is that, God?
GOD: That is what you would have achieved if you hadn't spent so much time on Facebook, looking at the holiday photos of people you never liked anyway.
Cut to Mike's computer screen. A notification has just flashed up that Mike has been poked by . . . his mother. Close up on his mouth, screaming in horror, and the celluloid bursts into flames in disgust.
Maybe some truths really are just too horrible to be committed to film.
source : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/29/how-evil-is-facebook
