Mark Zuckerberg Now a Cartoon

The Social Network, David Fincher's film about the founding of Facebook, arrived in October 2010 to widespread critical praise and commercial success, and almost immediately generated a debate that the film itself seemed designed to provoke: was Mark Zuckerberg the person depicted in the film — brilliant, cold, socially disabled, driven by resentment as much as ambition — or was the film's portrayal a dramatic reduction of a more complicated person?

Zuckerberg himself, in a series of public statements, characterized the film as almost entirely fictional. The specific scene that seemed to bother him most was the film's opening sequence, in which his girlfriend breaks up with him after he makes a series of dismissive comments about her intelligence and social status — an origin story that frames the entire creation of Facebook as an act of revenge against the social world that rejected him. Zuckerberg said this never happened and was an invention of Aaron Sorkin's screenplay.

What made the debate interesting was the extent to which the film's portrayal had already become, in the months between its release and Zuckerberg's responses, the operative public narrative of who he was. The Zuckerberg that most people who had never met him held in mind was increasingly the Jesse Eisenberg version — a portrait built from Sorkin's dialogue and Fincher's aesthetic choices rather than from Zuckerberg's actual behavior.

The power of cinematic biography to fix a person's image — to take a complex, ongoing human being and reduce them to a coherent dramatic character — is one of the more interesting features of the contemporary media landscape. Once you have seen The Social Network, it is very difficult to think about Facebook's origins without the film's framing present. Zuckerberg had built the most powerful social network in history and was powerless to control the narrative about how he had built it.