The Social Network - Opinion

This isn't a review of The Social Network.  I just want to explain how it changed my opinion on biopics.

I remember very distinctly what I thought when I first saw the commercial for The Social Network. It was ridiculous that they were already making a movie about it.  The ink had barely dried on the checks Zuckerberg wrote to settle and they had already made a movie about it.  We were going to relive in two hours what had just been chronicled in a year of news print.

I believed that you can’t make a “historical” film when the people are alive. They shouldn’t make movies about people until we’ve had time to collect all the facts and to sift through the bullshit. They shouldn’t make a movie about the youngest billionaire until he’s been dethroned, or at least until he’s grown up.

But that’s not the world that we live in.  This is the Facebook era and we don’t wait until someone dies to do a retrospective on their life.  We report congruently with the events, at the click of a button. You can watch parties in real-time as people check in, post pictures and update statuses, a whole night uploaded and digested even before everyone goes home or passes out.  

I have no idea if that was the intent of the filmmakers, but they pointed out that I was guilty of the old way of thinking, that you have to wait until tomorrow to get today’s news. It wouldn’t have made sense for them to make this movie in ten years, by then it would be old news and we would have already moved on.

-Josh