Friday, December 31, 2010

a note on The Social Network:

To my mind, the key moment of the film, where everything clicks into place, doesn’t come until the final moments of the movie. Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerman sits in front of his laptop, debating whether or not to send an ex a friend request. It’s a simple irony, and one the film gets a lot of mileage out of – the creator of the social networking juggernaut is himself an anti-social prick. He ultimately sends the request (in what Dave Kehr has dubbed the film’s ‘Rosebud moment’), and then begins repeatedly refreshing the page. It’s in that succession of clicks that the film’s power grows, as it suggests the nadir of on-line culture. Isolated, we wait for the page to update, continuously, forever, and so on and so on… It’s an obsessive moment worthy of Zodiac, a compulsive stretching into nothingness.