Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder (along with Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin and Chris Hughes) of the soulless succubus that is the Facebook empire, claims on website Quora (via NYMag) that from what he’s seen – which is the same trailer as the rest of us – David Fincher’s “The Social Network” “emphasizes things that didn’t matter … and leaves out things that really did.”
This is less-than-jawdropping news, as it might be expected that any film that has to condense the events of an eventful year into something resembling feature-length will take liberties with emphasis, and, in an effort to entertain, will collapse certain characters into each other, add in sex and intrigue scenes and generally display a cavalier regard for what Moskowitz (played by Joseph Mazzello in the film), not to mention his co-founders, might remember as the truth. But given Facebook’s somewhat shady rep of late with regard to what Big Dog Zuckerberg actually does think matters (profit over privacy, control over transparency) the real question is whether inevitable future billionaire Moskovitz’s notions of what is/is not important to this story are in any way material to what the rest of the us want or need to see.
To be fair, Moskovitz, doesn’t come across as a bad guy, and generally adheres to the image of a geek-done-good when he admits that the trailer makes Facebook’s gestation seem a lot “more exciting” than it actually was and that “it’s just cool to see a dramatization of the story.” In self-deprecating style he goes on to say that he is going to “choose to remember that we drank ourselves silly and had a lot of sex with coeds” rather than the more prosaic reality of working a lot and stressing out.
His emphasis on the film’s perceived inaccuracies however, could be a first shot across the bows in defense of his more-(in)famous partner who he says was “unabashedly attack[ed]” in the book and the screenplay. If the film does end up being a hatchet job on Zuckerberg, then it will be that much easier to shrug off if its credibility in other areas if questioned.
But bizarrely, and perhaps again fueling this writer’s theory that anyone close enough to major events to have a truly insightful perspective on them almost always has their view warped by that very proximity, Moskovitz says “I actually felt like a lot of [Mark’s] positive qualities come out truthfully in the trailer (soundtrack aside).” Hm, maybe if you consider ruthless ambition, disloyalty, social climbing, arrogance and greed positive, then ok, but aside from a certain self-awareness that he’s being, yes, a creep (and that could be a lot to do with how he’s being played by Jesse Eisenberg) and his and his partners’ obvious intelligence (they write equations on windows!), we don’t see a lot here that would make us want to invite Zuckerberg around for beers.
Except, of course, that he could pay for them and then buy us all steak dinners and hotel chains. So either Moskovitz has totally different standards of “positive” from us, or he is actually obliquely telling us that, since the pretty negative trailer shows the best of him, Zuckerberg is even more of an asshole than some of us (ok, me) already suspect. Fine, I don’t really think the latter is the case, and I’m undoubtedly stirring up a hypothetical big conflict between the two out of nothing, but work with me, people: this story needs a murder.
