Director David Fincher’s new film, which follows the story of Mark Zuckerberg and the humble beginnings of Facebook, portrays geek culture, geek habits and geek speak in a spot-on way. The technical dialogue may be watered down a little, and the tedious debugging process is never shown at any point, but The Social Network gets the nuts and bolts right in a way that’s uncharacteristic for Hollywood.

Shots of web code being banged out on laptops appear throughout the movie. PHP scripts, MySQL queries, a wget command-line routine. At one point, an algorithm used to rank chess players is scrawled on a dorm-room window in grease pencil.

We hear a snippet of Bill Gates delivering a lecture on BASIC. There’s a discussion about setting up a LAMP stack. We see the physical aftermath of a 36-hour code marathon, and the engineers’ desks are littered with Mountain Dew cans.

Zuckerberg himself is portrayed (by Jesse Eisenberg) as a geek-genius archetype, a hyper-driven prankster punk with zero social skills. If you’re connected to this industry, you know somebody just like him.

The Social Network, which opens Friday, is required viewing for anyone who works in tech. But there’s still plenty to chew on for non-geeks. In fact, if you have any interest in Facebook, the two-hour movie goes down like candy. Try to see it with as many geeks as you can round up. Chances are they’ll love it.

Max Minghella, left, and Armie Hammer portray ConnectU founders Divya Narendra and Cameron Winklevoss.

Geek Spirit

The screening I attended in San Francisco was packed with coders, techies and bloggers — a GigaOM T-shirt in my row, two women in front of me dressed in Eventbrite red, the ubiquitous Laughing Squid shirt. At one point in the movie, a Perl script is mentioned (undoubtedly a first for Hollywood) and it was punctuated by a loud, “Yeah, Perl!” from the back of the auditorium.

A scene of a regatta race was shot with tilt-shift effects, which drew knowing howls of delight from the Flickrati in attendance. Cyberpunk poster boy Trent Reznor scored the film with Nine Inch Nails collaborator Atticus Ross, giving it a dark, edgy, Radiohead-esque vibe.

Mostly, it’s rare to find a film even discussing code, never mind actually showing it on screen.

Hollywood’s depiction of computers and people with an intimate understanding of them in popular culture has been especially lacking in both truth and believability since the birth of the microprocessor. For every minor triumph like Sneakers or Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, there’s a totally unrealistic farce like Hackers, Swordfish or the entire CSI television franchise.

So The Social Network comes as a refreshing change. It’s certainly the most accurate depiction of computers in a blockbuster film since War Games. While the 1983 thriller dared to show Matthew Broderick’s coupler modem, The Social Network dares to show a LiveJournal text field marked up with raw HTML.

On top of that, it makes a great thriller. The Social Network fits in nicely with other fact-based re-tellings of history like All the President’s Men, Frost/Nixon and Good Night, and Good Luck. The action in these movies didn’t take place on a battlefield, but in offices and conference rooms. Just as you don’t need to be a journalist or a television producer to find those films riveting (Typewriters! Phone calls! Exhausting research!), you don’t need to be a geek to enjoy the sausage-making in The Social Network.

The coding stuff is mostly in the first act. Once the website begins to take off, the excitement of building a web app is transferred to the excitement of launching a company.

Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) hangs with Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) in The Social Network.
Photos: Merrick Morton/Columbia Pictures

Startup culture gets romanticized, but why not? The Facebook guys live in a playground world filled with fancy VC dinners and late-night parties. Their peers treat them like rock stars, except instead of writing killer guitar riffs, they’ve written a MySpace killer. And it gets them just as many girls — “We have groupies!” one of them gushes excitedly after a tryst in a restaurant bathroom.

The buzz on The Social Network is that the Facebook movie is pretty racy. But any controversy about the on-screen action is uncalled for, as references to coke-sniffing, bong-hitting and half-naked interns dancing are kept at a PG-13 level. And most of that action happens after wild-boy Napster founder Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) joins the Facebook crew, bringing his swagger with him.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin uses Zuckerberg’s personal blog and the documentation of his early social networking code as primary source material for The Social Network’s script. The rest of the film is sourced from the book The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich, and from two separate depositions, from when Zuckerberg was being sued by both his ex-CFO and by three Harvard students who accused him of stealing their idea for Facebook.

The rest is historical fiction. Well-informed and realistic-feeling fiction that represents a step forward for how programming is portrayed in modern cinema, but fiction nonetheless.

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Watch The Social Network Trailer

See Also:

• Sex! Hackers! Embellishment! The Inside Story of the Facebook Movie
• Zuckerberg Comic Book to Follow Social Network
• Download Trent Reznor's Social Network Sampler for Free

Authors: Michael Calore

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