Soundtrack of a Script: "The Social Network"

You’d think a movie about something as commonplace as Facebook would be pretty milquetoast, right? What would it be about, anyway? The innovation of the status update? The intricacies of app requests? The art of the Facebook stalk? As uninteresting as all that sounds the movie is actually nothing like what you’d expect. Therefore I can only come to the logical conclusion that screenwriter Aaron Sorkin chose the title “The Social Network” (from his adaptation of the book “The Accidental Billionaires”) to deliberately avoid any affiliation between our everyday familiarities with Farmville and the “true story” of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

And the score. Don't forget that wonderful score.

Of all the former collaborators director David Fincher has had with music videos, from Rick Springfield to the Rolling Stones, who would have guessed that he would have teamed back up with Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor five years after he went headlong into the film scene? Well…me for one.

Given what buzz you may or may not have heard about the film and Zuckerberg’s less-than-beatific reputation, the choice of a grungier industrial score starts to sound more and more appealing the more and more you see. Let us begin with the opening fifteen minutes of the movie, shall we?

We open on a crowded pub in Cambridge on what looks to be a Friday night. The colors are warm and the shadows are deep. Kind of like Caravaggio for hipster yuppies. Meanwhile, pints of Guinness clink and laughter skitters beneath a tense banter between the would-be mogul (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and his soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend, Erica Albright (Rooney Mara). He's going on and on about final clubs. The conversation is swift and scathing. After a spitfire resolution in which nary a breath is taken nor an ounce of mercy shed, Zuckerberg is left wallowing in his own careful mix of awkwardness and douche-baggery wondering just where things went wrong.

And slowly, as he exits the bar alone and tosses himself into the Massachusetts cold, the first track builds to a rising hum.

It’s called “Hand Covers Bruise” and immediately we sense there is empathy beneath all the name-calling and casual cruelty of this cutthroat world of big business and hurt feelings. Hell, the title even suggests a vulnerability we should all be ashamed of. I mean what kind of a place encourages someone to pretend like they haven’t been wounded when they clearly have ? This forced tranquility, almost like a breathing exercise after a panic attack, is only matched by the building resonance of the anti-hero’s own self-loathing.

Amazingly, Reznor and his collaborator/programmer/mixer Atticus Ross manage to achieve this with nothing more than six simple notes struck against an ivory keyboard.

As the digital intonation rises in the background we sense ambition and pain lurking among the red brick buildings glowing in the winter semi-darkness as Zuckerberg weaves his way back to his Harvard dormitory for a night of self-pity and heavy drinking.

From there the first track segues seamlessly into the second energetic piece, aptly titled “In Motion”. Here, the tempo kicks the heart like a dose of speed.

In the film, the song catalogues a series of intercuts dodging back-and-forth between Zuckerberg’s fevered blogging and an indulgent frat party.

If I had to compare it to anything it sounds something like the kind a demented 8-bit chiptune that would have been popular in ancient Gomorrah. And when it’s all affixed to slow-mo shots of hot girls making out with each other, shirtless muscle-bound business majors snorting coke and a whole load of binge drinking, then you sort of get the idea.

But this is not enough to wrench even one emoticon from us. That is until we cut back to Zuckerberg.

We slice back from all of this youthful mayhem to the curly-haired prodigy punching away at the keys of his laptop as though each new line of code, each script, each algorithm were going to save him from the rejection he so clearly fears. But not even 100 words per minute is enough to outdo all the sex, drugs and frenzy he seems to be missing out on. And in a pulse-pounding sort of way we're brought into this world of exclusivity. Bit by glitzy bit. We start desiring things we never wanted before. Stuff we wouldn't normally care about.Thus while the design of the song is used ironically, it's actually employed quite beautifully.

A fashionable caste.

The drunken master then goes from a vicious rant against his ex to designing and uploading a program known as “Facemash”, a rudimentary version of “Hot or Not” comparing the student ID pictures of girls hacked from the University server. Here, “A Familiar Taste” works with a kind of dark, vengeful glory.

As Ms. Albright shuffles to her roommate's laptop to read Zuckerberg's vicious online rant, the humiliation taking shape in her tear ducts while the emotional damage builds at the feet of his virtual work (according to the film 22,000 hits on the website in 2 hours), the tone of the film is finally and irrevocably set. The riffing axes and the twisted twitch of the bass shout from the rooftops that this is Mark Zuckerberg! And he is not to be f*cked with. Let alone scorned.

From the bar to online, the span of only about 15 minutes have thus elapsed.

Other cool tracks include variations from NIN’s Ghost album plus a wicked-cool rendition of “In the Hall of the Mountain King”. But I’ll leave that for you, the viewer, to discover on your own.

In all “The Social Network” is one hell of a movie. The closest thing I could equate it to is “Citizen Kane”. With nerds. Angry, passionate nerds.

And this is where Fincher and his team of composers have jumped the beaten path for something that I don’t think I’ve ever really seen before. Fincher, Reznor and Ross have come together to create something inspired yet entirely unique in terms of genre. In fact, I believe those of you fortunate enough to have seen the movie already have just witnessed the birth of something new: the sinister nerd.

If the ‘80s taught us anything it was that the nerd could get the girl. The nerd could become famous and successful and powerful. The nerd could get his/her revenge.

From the first moments of “The Social Network”, however, it becomes clear that there just might be something amiss in the world of geekdom that most of us have either been too proud or too blind to see. Zuckerberg, for all of his geeky wit and talent, has a dark side. He has fangs. He’s vengeful, back-stabbing and reaching for the stars. The entire world just seems to be one big reminder of the things that he’d never have. And now he’s out to collect. For that, the movie is more than just a lesson in lofty personal ethics. It’s a lesson in humanity for “the losers”. And how not to leave it behind when you finally become “the winner”.

Suffering is desire.

---A.H.

*(If you liked what you heard then definitely check out the MP3 deals @ Amazon! They have the soundtrack for $5.00)