Amy DeZellar

I’m not going to do a review of The Social Network, because most of you have probably already seen it and also because if you haven’t seen it, I don’t have much to add beyond: Just go see it now. It’s fucking brilliant.

It’s being compared to Network, The Graduate, and, yes, Citizen Kane, but could it be based on a dumber premise? Why does a movie about a Web site work so well?

I’ve thought a lot about this since I basically landed a career as an author due to a silly Web site. How do you make the story classic? How do you not sound like flotsam?

There’s a really brilliant scene where the co-founder’s girlfriend confronts him about why he hasn’t changed his Facebook status to “in a relationship.” The only way to have a line like that work is to anchor the film in the past. And by that I mean the ’70s.

This movie had a very Paper Chase feel and comparisons to The Graduate aren’t entirely off. I think if you’re going to make a movie about something frightfully contemporary and possibly written in invisible ink, it’s imperative to recall something older, hence more classic. Enter sexism.

The women in this movie strip to their underwear to dance for frat guys. They make out with each other at parties, they fuck guys in bathroom stalls because the guys got a lot of hits on their Web site. There are Palo Alto groupies who like to party. There are underage “interns.”

I honestly don’t think that the men who produced a screenplay this well-written were unaware that all young women don’t act this way. I’d like to believe that it’s a very purposeful and effective callback.

There’s a confrontation scene between the protagonist, Facebook founder and the woman who accidentally inspired the site, set at what looks to my non-Ivy League self as an eating club. She reprimands him that the Internet isn’t written in pencil, it’s written in ink.

This patina of the past that infuses this film makes me believe that’s actually so.

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