All posts tagged "Zuckerberg"

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was America's most generous donor in 2013, giving nearly $1 billion of his fortune to charity, according to a magazine report on Monday.

So, after writing a largely positive review of "The Social Network" this morning, I was quickly and forcefully made to understand that a lot of people really don't like this movie. Not because of the acting, script, direction, themes (except maybe some suspicion---mostly from extra-textual sources---that Aaron Sorkin doesn't like the internet), or anything really in the movie, but what is outside of it. I've had people point out that they have problems with other things Sorkin's written, or aspects of his biography that make them think he's a prick. But the main objection to "The Social Network" has been what I jokingly said was the "nuh-uh" critique. As in "Nuh-uh, it didn't happen that way," or, "Nuh-uh, Harvard isn't really like that." (This is often aimed at the sequence at the party inside the final club, which I'm now 100% sure was a dream sequence, what the character of Mark Zuckerberg thinks happens at those parties, not how they actually are.) I must admit, I'm more than a little surprised to see so many people object, seemingly out of nowhere, to the concept of poetic license. I pointed out, repeatedly, that the movie is being compared to "Citizen Kane" because it's essentially the same story---that of a tycoon who captures the world by excelling like a motherfucker at the dominant media of his era, but who is a tragic figure because he can't get his personal life in order. William Randolph Hearst wasn't particularly happy about "Citizen Kane" when it was released, presumably for many of the same reasons that people who sympathize with Mark Zuckerberg are pissed off about this movie, and also because Hearst was a bad man and a control freak in a way I suspect Zuckerberg (the real person) is not.

Spoilers.