Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Infighting in the Social Network

What is the next big thing?  We all hope for a cool story with it: if you’re the creator, a story of triumph and wonder; an outsider, a story of scandal and intrigue.  In 2010, The Social Network looked at the story behind a site that is on millions of laptops and cellphones; the site that more students update in class than their notes.
 A question asked about this movie is how can watching someone type on a computer for two hours be enjoyable?  Yet, in our life that flickering feed is a major source of entertainment.  Still, it’s a fair question: I find myself itching to refresh the page when I’m bored at work, but I can’t say that watching my roommate update his status was the most entertaining Saturday night of my life. I think its David Fincher’s use of contrasts that makes it so riveting:  the intense, single-minded concentration of Mark Zuckerberg is pushed against sharp dialogue and fast paced images.  Dissonance is in the music too:  In the first of many sequences of Zuckerberg running, ominous, reverberating tones are taken over by classical melodies; tempos overlap:  slow piano with frenetic strings. And the story itself contrasts: the triumphant success of the underdog and the scandalous world of lawsuits, drugs, betrayal, and pride.

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