The Social Network

Judged on structure, and the subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere. The prologue is required: Erica’s verdict on Mark is the wound the rest of the film answers, and the refresh at the end closes it. The two depositions are required, one for each betrayal, the twins’ charge of theft and Eduardo’s of friendship; neither could carry the other. Facemash is required, since the site that ranks women is the seed of the one that ranks everyone. The Summers scene shows the old order refusing to defend its own; the restaurant where Erica rebuffs Mark sends the network to other schools. What gives: Christy Lee’s jealousy and the burnt scarf are stock, and Henley, though it earns its place, is a set piece a sterner film would have halved.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the architecture of modern social life was built out of exclusion, by a man for whom friendship was already a matter of position, and the founding of the new economy is a story of trust converted into equity and settled by lawyers. The final clubs, the Phoenix and the Porcellian, are the model Mark copies and abolishes at once: exclusivity, put online, becomes the product. Eduardo’s dilution, his share cut to a fraction of a per cent while he signs in good faith, makes it concrete. Sixteen years have made the account look less like satire than diagnosis. It stands at the gate and not above it, because the motive that carries the plot, the lost girl, is a screenwriter’s device the film half admits, and because what the network does to everyone else is implied rather than entered.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The register is velocity and wit, and elevation is not its usual mode; when it rises, it is cold. Mark’s run back across Harvard at night after the break-up, through quads and streets under a piano figure and an electronic hum, raises a solitary humiliation to something like dread. Henley is a bravura of another kind: the twins losing a race by a few feet, the Edwardian world made a toy by a shallow focus, Grieg pressed into a pounding electronic march. Eduardo’s entrance into the Palo Alto office, soaked and quiet, is the film’s one hot summit, and the last refresh a small, exact desolation. Held below the other governed axes by frequency: between these moments the film moves on talk, brilliantly and on the level, and two hours carry four or five summits.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The archetype is built into the plot rather than cited: the founder who gains a kingdom and loses his one friend, the outsider shut out of the clubs who builds a larger club and is alone in it. Citizen Kane is the template, and the film knows it: a lost woman in place of the sled, a lonely ruler at the close, a story told through those who sued him. The Great Gatsby lies beneath it too, the green light become a browser refreshed. Parker is the tempter, offering the larger sum in place of the friend; the twins are the Dioscuri as Harvard oarsmen. Delpy names the frame, saying in substance that every creation myth needs a devil. Held below the gate because the pattern is inherited whole from Kane and Gatsby, and the particular, which stays vivid, carries it more than it deepens it.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance was the biopic, the courtroom picture, Citizen Kane’s frame of hostile witnesses and Sorkin’s own television drama of fast, intelligent talk. The turns are real. The subject was the near present, a company six years old and a founder of twenty-six, still living, made as tragedy rather than topical comedy, at the risk of being mocked as “the Facebook movie” and of dating within a year. The score turned the prestige drama, which had been scored for orchestra, toward an industrial and ambient record placed as the film’s nervous system. Dense, rapid dialogue was set in a dark, still, cool frame, where it had usually been staged bright and moving. The stake was moderate: a studio picture with a proven director and a proven writer, in a form classical by intention. Each turn bends a known path rather than leaving it.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Change the form and the film loses part of what it knows. Told straight, it is the rise of a start-up. Told through two depositions, the founding exists only as contested testimony, each scene of friendship already evidence in a suit, and the viewer sees the betrayal before the friends do. The cutting between conference room and dormitory makes every promise made at Harvard a liability years later. The prologue’s speed, two people talking past each other at once, is the form of the whole: Mark always answering a question one ahead. Held below the top because the depositions are a frame more than a demonstration: the flashbacks are given objectively, not bound to a witness as Kane’s are, and the two suits rarely make the past uncertain. The form organises the knowledge; it does not quite become it.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Sixteen years of evidence, which is short. The questions have stayed open and argued: whether Mark is a villain or a man trying hard to be one; how much the invented Erica explains; the film’s accuracy, disputed by the people it portrays; whether it is about friendship, class or property. Readings have gathered as the company’s history went on: the film reread, after the scandals over data and elections, as a founding document of the platform age; as a study of male entitlement and the ranking of women, from Facemash to the groupies; as one panel of Fincher’s films about obsession and procedure, beside Zodiac (2007). Formally it repays return, in the rhythm of the talk and the rhymes between the two conference rooms. Held at its figure by span, and by a lucid surface that yields much at once and renews slowly.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Released in 2010, so force and reach are scored together, against the cinema of its decade. Intrinsic force: the film showed that the present tense of technology and law could carry tragedy, fused a writer’s cinema of talk with a director’s cinema of control, and put an electronic score at the centre of a prestige drama. It perfected and joined existing manners more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the cycle of founder dramas that followed in film and television, Sorkin’s own Steve Jobs (2015) among them, and the later series and films on start-ups, their founders and their frauds; and Reznor and Ross’s scoring, which became a model for dark, synthetic drama scores and made their own career in film. The reach is real and fairly wide, and it lies largely within a genre and a sound.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Sixteen years old, and survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric across that span. The form survives whole: one version, no loss. Presence has been continuous and wide, in repertory and festival screenings, home video and streaming, the teaching of screenwriting, and a few lines in common reference. The surface is charged: the film is fixed to a technology, a company and a living man, the very surface the axis penalises. Against the charge, it is set in 2003 to 2005 and was made as period, and the company’s later history has kept it current rather than dated it; but currency of that kind depends on the company and would pass with it. The figure stands at the foot of what sixteen years can show, because part of the film’s present is borrowed from the news.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Read to the anchors of the elder arts; the making bears weight in every department. Sorkin’s screenplay is overlapping, rapid and exact, its scenes built as arguments, its lines carrying character and plot at once. Fincher holds a film made almost entirely of talk in tension by framing and cutting alone. Cronenweth’s low, warm light in the dormitories and cold light in the conference rooms divides the two times without a caption. Baxter and Wall intercut three times at conversational speed and never lose the viewer. The score is an event, not commentary. Eisenberg’s flat, fast, unblinking Mark; Garfield’s open Eduardo, whose hurt is the film’s warmth; Timberlake’s Parker, charm as a weapon; Hammer’s twins, one performance in two bodies. The costs: Sorkin’s voice makes almost everyone equally quick, the women other than Erica and Delpy are written thin, and some lines show the writer.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the Henley regatta, Edwardian sport on the Thames in a miniaturising focus, and the drinking-game coding contest in a Kirkland dormitory, where interns are chosen by speed with a shot at each step. One law governs both: every relation is membership and rank, and the excluded build the next club. The twins row for an order that will not protect them; the coders compete to be let into Mark’s. The Ad Board, the Summers scene, the chicken of the Phoenix hazing, Parker’s nightclub and the dilution obey the same law, and the ending applies it to Mark himself, a friend request to the woman who left him. The range, from campus comedy to betrayal, is held. The strain: Henley’s style is a showpiece the rest of the film never uses, and Parker’s arrest arrives as a plot convenience.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on what a film of two hours holds. Consciousness, in Mark, kept opaque by design, and in Eduardo, open; friendship, the order the film turns on; the university and its class system, in final clubs, an Ad Board and a president; capital, in investors, share structures and dilution; the law, as the medium in which the story is told; technology, as the new order; the sexual economy, in Facemash, the groupies and the women ranked. They are held in one plot: the site, the suits and the friendship are one story. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside it: the family is absent, the state appears only as civil law, the sacred is absent, labour is coding at night, and the millions who join the network are a figure on a title card.

Score: 7.4 / 10