The Social Network Is Overrated

Among all the high praise for Aaron Sorkin’s and David Fincher’s The Social Network, Nathan Heller at Slate offers a contrarian take: He calls the movie “maddeningly generic,” caught up in a “totally regressive concept” of class struggle at Harvard. Heller writes, “Sorkin and Fincher's 2003 Harvard is a citadel of old money, regatta blazers, and (if I am not misreading the implication here) a Jewish underclass striving beneath the heel of a WASP-centric, socially draconian culture.” That Harvard is only recognizable to people who graduated from it decades ago, or who know it from films like The Paper Chase. “To get the university this wrong in this movie is no small matter,” says Heller. “In doing so, The Social Network misunderstands the cultural ambitions, and the nature of Zuckerberg's acumen, that made Facebook possible.”