Fine. I'm not exactly breaking any ground by choosing to write about this. It's been done 10,000 times already, but never by me. So let's take a crack at it. I was recently looking at a list of films about Millennials (born between 1980-1982 and 1996-1999, depends on who you ask) and I was trying to find which speaks best to this generation. I won't try to navigate everything, but we can get the wheels turning on this.
Having been born in 1987, I'm pretty much an "older Millennial", so maybe Mean Girls speaks more about the issues my contemporaries faced during our high school days. Yet, being raised in Puerto Rico, the environment was so much different, so while on the surface, I can relate, it didn't completely drive it home for me.
Which brings me to my point! The Social Network seems to me as the film that best captures the modern generation and foreshadows what comes after. Now, I'm not really discovering fire here. You're probably reading this and going "Ok, Captain Obvious"; but hear me out.
The title alone suggests a buzzword for Millennials; a central theme in all of our daily lives is our social networks. Now, as we approach 2020, that is truer than ever. Do you know what I do for a living? I work in social media. The beginnings of how that could be a career for someone is portrayed by the direction of David Fincher and the writing of Aaron Sorkin in the 2010 classic.
The good: The Social Network showed how Facebook was created and why it was created. At first, it was filling that gap of college students wanting to "get laid" or "meet people", as the movie suggests. There was a need for connection and while other social medias already existed, Facebook took it to another level.
This film also portrayed how the script was flipped and now smarter guys had en edge. I work in pro sports and you see it: Executives who are numbers-savvy are more looked upon than maybe former players. It's the norm now. In The Social Network, you see it in the battle between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss brothers, Tyler and Cameron. Revenge of the Nerds, I guess?
"The 'Winklevii' aren't suing me for intellectual property theft. They're suing me because, for the first time in their lives, things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to for them."
The bad: This movie brilliantly foreshadowed some negative aspects of what social media would entail. Early in the film, Mark gets dumped and writes terrible things about his ex on the internet. That's one. Then we hear Rooney Mara's character remark about people hiding behind the keyboard: "You write your snide bullshit from a dark room because that's what the angry do nowadays...". It seems ironic that the very creator of the biggest social media is himself a part of the very worst we see on the internet.
MARK: I have my final for "Postwar and Contemporary Art" and I haven't been to class. I'm supposed to write about these four paintings.
EDUARDO: That's a Facebook page.
MARK: Yeah, I opened it under an alias. I posted the paintings and asked people to comment. Every once in awhile I hop on and stir the pot to get a good debate going.
The Social Network doesn't exactly "speak" to the generation as The Breakfast Club did in the '80s. It more like describes and gives definition to the modern world we live in and what sort of behaviors people of our generation assume, both good and bad.
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