…fiction almost always makes a better movie. After seeing the movie Social Network, which chronicles the legal wrangling that ensued after the founding of Facebook, I was compelled to go home and “fact-check.” The movie was so perfectly thrilling and beautifully structured that I assumed it had to be made up or at least plumped and stretched.
Not long into my research, I came to the same conclusion that had been reached by the film’s writer, Aaron Sorkin (who wrote the West Wing and A Few Good Men, among other films and TV). At its heart, this movie’s thesis is about the truth, and how subjective it may be. So is the movie “true?” Well, that will depend on your point of view.
The film is built on purely objective content comprised of the legal depositions of the principals - founder Mark Zuckerberg, his original partner Eduardo Saverin who sued him, and the alarmingly handsome Winklevoss twins who also sued Zuckerberg on the premise that he stole the idea from their concept for an online directory called “Harvard Connection.”
The words in the depositions are accurate in that they were spoken under oath and recorded by the courts. But even these words illustrate how every individual can have a vastly different point of view about what actually happened, when and why.
In an interview in W Magazine, Sorkin says, “With most of my work, I haven’t needed to worry about the so-called truth… With Social Network I was forced to care about the facts because there were legal consequences. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that everyone in this story believed their own story.”
So, is the truth really so subjective? If you want to ponder this further and have a great time at the movies, go see Social Network.
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