At what point do you know you’re watching a masterpiece? Did it hit the 1941 movie-going audience while watching Citizen Kane that it was one of the greatest movies ever or after? Was it on the first viewing, the second, or maybe the tenth for the tastemakers to whisper “masterpiece”? Famously, it took Citizen Kane a while to be deified as the greatest film of all time, growing in the collective consciousness of, well, just about everyone who saw it. However, some films are so epic in their scope and thematic volume that their greatness is instantly registered, like Lawrence of Arabia or Chinatown, both of which won rave reviews and plentiful Oscar attention. All three of these films consistently rank highly on best ever lists, and in fall 2010 they greeted a new member: David Fincher’s masterful The Social Network. It had the swift embrace of Lawrence and Chinatown but the thematic underpinnings of Kane, and both the film and Fincher ought to have won Oscars in 2011. It broke into theaters with something to say so vital and so inspired, like the social media website from which the film has its name, it’s amazing it took that long.





The Social Network is Citizen Kane for the contemporary era, using the margins of big business, greed, and betrayal as the touchstones of loneliness and isolation. It is the story of Facebook’s founding and of the he-said, she-said murkiness over who should get credit for the most important innovation since the Internet. When we first meet the famed Mark Zuckerberg (Jessie Eisenberg), he’s a snobby sophomore at Harvard University, and for reasons foggy to him but crystal clear to us, he’s pissed off his cute girlfriend (Rooney Mara). She breaks up with him, leaving him reeling with something to prove. Drunk and feeling seditious, he creates facemash.com, an Internet application where you rank girls by picking between two pictures. Amazingly, the site netted 22,000 hits and crashed the Harvard network. Enter the Winklevoss twins (Armie Hammer, Josh Pence) and Divya Narendra (Max Minghella), who invite Mark to work on “Harvard Connection,” a social networking site that promises its members exclusivity. He agrees. Not much later, he tells best friend Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) about his idea for a website that will transport the entire social experience of college. This is what became facebook.com, and it sets forth a hailstorm of legal disputes that raise issues of ownership, creativity, capitalism, and loyalty.