Mark Zuckerberg is many things, not least a student of the classics. He reads Latin and ancient Greek, and his personal motto is said to be Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit, or, loosely translated, “Maybe one day we’ll look back on all this shit and laugh.” Lately, though, he’s probably meditating on another Latin phrase: annus horribilis. Because it’s been one lousy year for the 26-year-old CEO, despite (and also because of) the success of his dormitory-born company, Facebook, aka the most trafficked social-networking site on earth. His squirrely media appearances have been called Nixonian, his hoodie choices have been savagely and publicly critiqued. His occasionally Orwellian quotes have been obsessively parsed. He’s even been stalked by a Gawker paparazzo.

He might as well get used to it. When the movie based on his college exploits and Silicon Valley conquests hits screens this fall, he’ll become the first tech nerd to be granted Hollywood celebrity. But then, that’s what happens when Tinseltown turns your life into film, your callow college years into fable, and your billion-dollar company into a metaphor for American ambition and the inherent loneliness that lurks just beneath its dark-blue interface.

In early October, with much fanfare and an eye on the Oscars, Sony Pictures is releasing The Social Network, its liberally dramatized, completely unauthorized, and (its makers hasten to add) thoroughly researched Facebook origin story. In this telling, Zuckerberg (played by 27-year-old Jesse Eisenberg) is no mere code monkey with a fondness for dead languages and flip-flops. He’s a tragic archetype right out of Sinclair Lewis: the driven, wounded trickster-genius accused of stealing a million-dollar idea and throwing his friends under the bus, all in an attempt to summit the American dream. The filmmakers — Hollywood A-listers, all — can’t be accused of thinking small. Justin Timberlake, who plays Mephistophelean Napster cofounder and Facebook partner Sean Parker, calls the story arc “very Greek.” Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, compares his version of Zuckerberg to Shakespeare’s Richard III, saying of his protagonist, “Give him a hunchback and a clubfoot and you’re pretty close.” As for the film’s acclaimed director, David Fincher: He jokes that he’s made “the Citizen Kane of John Hughes movies.”

The Fight Club auteur may jest, but his Kane comparison isn’t far off. Like William Randolph Hearst — Orson Welles’ inspiration — Zuckerberg is the most recognized and recognizable figure in his era’s new media, and Facebook is as vital to mainstream culture as Hearst’s publishing empire once was. Like Hearst, there’s a tang of the ruthless and untoward about Zuckerberg. Like Hearst, he has a talent for pissing people off. And it doesn’t hurt that he’s an absurdly young, grotesquely wealthy Harvard dropout. That’s why Silicon Valley’s first true — or rather “truthful,” in Fincher’s distinction — zeitgeist film isn’t Linux: Revenge of the Fallen. (The news of a possible Google flick, no doubt inspired by The Social Network, generated little heat, probably because the company’s motto is “Don’t be evil.”) With Facebook, there’s just enough moral ambiguity, blended with just enough brand recognition, to attract Hollywood’s attention.

For Silicon Valley, The Social Network ends decades of celluloid neglect. Oh sure, moviemakers love hackers, the same way they love Magical Black Men and Rapping Grannies. Fictional tech-heads always come in handy whenever the hero needs to pop open a locked door or drain a bank account; they roll their eyes at n00bs and proudly display Boba Fett figurines on their desks. But silicon minstrelsy doesn’t confer much respect: Until The Social Network, the computer business has been denied a mainstream biopic or a resonating social drama. (Even the titanic Gates-Jobs struggle for the soul of the PC, the Valley’s very own Cain and Abel tale, warranted nothing more than a TNT Original.) Hackers have Hackers and WarGames and Sneakers,but they’ve never had their very own Wall Street: an empurpled, self-important, this-is-our-moment movie that makes splashy myth out of quotidian reality — where everybody looks sexy-tormented in the bargain.

Ironically, for all the prerelease rumblings about a Facebook movie (and this film has garnered far more than its fair tonnage of rumblings, practically confirming its currency), Facebook as we know it today barely makes an appearance in The Social Network. “From a plot standpoint, you could’ve told the same story about the invention of a really good toaster,” Sorkin says. “The fact that it’s Facebook just makes it ironic — that the world’s most successful social-networking device was the work of a socially awkward guy.”

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Authors: Scott Brown

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