Remembering David Fincher's The Social Network

I remember that when I heard that Aaron Sorkin was writing and David Fincher helming a film about the creation of Facebook my thought was "Who the hell wants to see that?"

As happened every so often I was wrong about that, the film actually proving a commercial success. (It was also a critical success, but never mind the opinions of courtiers or claqueurs for now.)

What interests me about that success as I look back is the apparent receptivity of the public to the particular crapola Sorkin and Fincher had to sell (for it is indeed crapola). Film critic Kevin Kearney (one of a few to comment on the film that I think can safely be considered neither courtier nor claqueur) summed it up well when he wrote that the film's makers try "to channel the enthusiasm of youth capitalism" and enthusiasm about "revolutionary potential of Internet" that were "associated with the 'dot-com' speculative bubble of the late 1990s," and the associated "market populist" crapola that, as Mr. Kearney puts it, "substitut[ed] a number of red herrings for the great social issues," as with "the upstarts with computer skills vs. the wealthy stuffed-shirts, the young vs. the old, the hip vs. the boring, and so forth" in a film that, whatever its pretensions, "blithely devot[ed] itself to sex, status and the art of being cool."

As I said, CRAPOLA!

All as, being what it is, the film has not aged particularly well, Americans these days looking rather more critically than before at the propaganda, such that even writers for a publication like Vanity Fair admit the film's having aged badly as the realities that flew right over the heads of Sorkin, Fincher, et. al. grow harder and harder for even the more credulous members of the public to ignore by the year, the month, perhaps even the week.