As the Oscars approached last year, my wife and I finally rented and watched The Social Network. I wasn’t too interested, but I mainly felt I had to see it because a few commentators were predicting that Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was more Oscar-worthy than Colin Firth’s portrayal of King George VI in The King’s Speech (we were pulling for the latter).
The Social Network purports to tell the story of Facebook. Almost no names or places are changed, and it concludes with little epilogue subtitles just before the credits roll. The movie showed a lot of unpleasant discord in the social circles surrounding Facebook’s birth, with Zuckerberg the main victor emerging from the costly dog-eat-dog war with figurative blood on his hands. I understand the danger that surrounds a proverbial gold mine (I remember Steinbeck’s The Pearl), but I left that movie thinking: Should I, even with having a free Facebook account, support a corporation with so much moral/ethical questionability in its roots? And with a co-founder so arrogant and uncouth?
As it turns out, the movie’s script is far from historic. Virtually every real figure in the story stated that the emotional drama surrounding Facebook’s origins is very overplayed. I’ll let the historians take it from here, but what I found the most interesting (both as a pastor and an artsy person) was screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s response to all the chatter.
"I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. What is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?"
Really? I don’t know too many people that weren’t remotely disappointed to find out the vast amount in historical inaccuracies in inspirational movies like Braveheart. In a world of agenda and old wives’ tales, I think people want to know what’s real, even if it’s not as eye-catching or profitable.
I don’t know how much Sorkin represents modern culture, but I hope it’s not too much, because the box office holds much more sway over what is seen as real or true than most scholars and actual truth-bearers.
1 comment:
That is one of the reasons I prefer docudramas made by Ron Howard: he sticks pretty close to the historical facts when making his films. Though there are some embellishments, from what I understand films are very accurate.
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