“…in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like [Roger] Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I.P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements. […] each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep.” –Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

If Mark Zuckerberg is not busy opening up yet another portal to hell, he is probably nodding off during a meeting, making glottal noises. Sorry, what sound is he making? Is that like a tisk?

THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2010), from director David Fincher and writer Aaron Sorkin, in 2024 continues to radiates as one of the most important films ever while Facebook enters its twentieth year of existence. Facebook is now college-aged and going by Meta these days. By no means the first social media, Facebook established the framework for every endeavor to create an online “community” after, and would go to have deep influence on our money, political systems, and our own sense of self in ways we have and have not yet recognized. The internet, originally with its military function in ARPANET, perhaps primed us for something like Facebook to come along some day. However, Facebook was different in that it attacks the personal image, the self. Films like THE SOCIAL NETWORK remind us that the personality of a invention’s creator stays there, under the garden beds, infecting everything growing on top of it. We are all trapped in it with him now, in The Age of the Nerd.

The film, half courtroom procedural and half campus novel, provides a yarny mythology of a prolonged, demonic cyber-ceremony. It is played for a laugh, but after Mark Zuckerberg, back then just another Harvard Comp Sci major, launches “The Facebook” from his dorm, and Eduardo Saverin (ex-friend and business partner with a weenie-roast on his horizon) suggests the two should go grab a drink, but Mark does not respond. “Mark…are you…praying?” Eduardo asks. He isn’t yet he is. Jesse Eisenburg, in one of many masterful touches of acting work, gives a silent, almost tearful “thank you” to whatever devil sent up this powerful idea up into his head. Ironically, Zuckerberg here decides to make his arch devil another victim, another mind, or should I say set of minds, sent into a frenzy by his dangerous intellect (The Winklevoss). From the moment the idea “comes” to him, Zuckerberg begins his conquest from dark rooms bathed in bright blue screens.

Without digging deep into another shallow debate about “creative nonfiction,” the film achieves a voice true to all stories about the American project. It also speaks to the stilted way generations of imperial domination force us to shoehorn our commercial history into our heroic one, because to speak on the actual heroic history of America would require face-to-face and likely difficult conversation. I’m still uncertain by the text of the film how demonic of a tone they intended to convey, but I could not look at Mark and Eduardo’s sex-centered bonding ritual at the green-lit bars of Harvard in any other way. Or Shawn Parker’s EDM-drenched, satanic consecration with Mark over neon-green apple-tinis as he regales the Legend of Victoria’s Secret. Scenes play like villain origin stories; parables overlay and are mostly successful at expressing the main story arch in miniature and through worldy intrusion.

Much like Scorsese and Pileggi’s Nicky Santoro or Fariña’s Gnossos Pappadapoulis, Mark in the film wears a thick sense of indestructability. He has a sore winner attitude toward everyone, especially those trying to help. Acting upon his chaotic premonitions, Mark elects to give zero craps about money from day one because deep down somewhere he likely knows he’s going to have more of it than God someday. Which, admittedly, does tend to provide some immunities, like the Steve Martin jokes goes: If you’ve got a dollar and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve got 71 cents left; But if you’ve got seventeen grand and you spend 29 cents on a loaf of bread, you’ve still got seventeen grand. Zuckerberg today probably has the cash to send every single American a card that says “I’m CEO, bitch.” every day for the next century.

But you watch enough movies or live in the world long enough and you realize that money either creates a black hole in you or amplifies the strength of the one you already had. Which leads me to my main point of criticism toward the film – the ending. Marilyn Delpy, a lawyer helping Mark with Eduardo’s lawsuit against him, assures Mark that he is “not an asshole, [he’s] just trying so hard to be.” After she leaves, Mark opens Facebook on his laptop, and sends a friend request to his ex-girlfriend from the beginning of the film, Erica. This ending left a weird taste, primarily because this is not how the world typically ends stories for people like Mark, and sympathy should be one of the last feelings we have toward a figure at the top like that. We should see Mark in the high rise at the end not the troubled young mystic on a mountain the film suggests and more like the king wretch of a massive trash cloud, keeping all of us under him, stuck in some reverse money-shower.