Despite its fabrication of Facebook’s origins, movie ‘The Social network’ is highly captivating

If I said I know Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and CEO of Facebook, you would say I’m lying, and you would be right. But on some level, I feel like I do know him, and if you’ve seen “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s new film about the creation of Zuckerberg’s society-altering website, you might feel that way too.

A movie about real people is nothing new of course ““ it’s not a revolutionary idea like, say, Facebook. Just this year we have, for example, James Franco playing the poet Allen Ginsberg in “Howl,” and Kevin Spacey as the lobbyist Jack Abramoff in “Casino Jack.”

If you ask Jay Phelan, a professor in the life sciences department, we often see these movies for the same reason we read People magazine. Both impulses are due to our brain’s inability to shake old habits, developed when we as a species lived in small groups and needed to keep tabs on our neighbors.

“Evolutionarily, it was important to have deep social information about the people around us,” Phelan said. “So now, there are people who aren’t really in our life, but our brain still thinks that we need that information, so as soon as it becomes available, we want to suck it down like candy.”

So we see Zuckerberg appear frequently in the news, and our brain assumes he’s someone we need to know about. “The Social Network” promises to deliver the juiciest kind of information, the kind our ancestors depended upon: whether we can trust this man, and with whom he was having social and sexual relations.

Our brains will remember these details long after we leave the theater, even the ones that aren’t necessarily true.

Zuckerberg’s preoccupation with a girl named Erica Albright is fabricated, for instance, while his actual girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, does not appear in the film at all.

And according to an article in The Daily Beast by David Kirkpatrick, who has interviewed Zuckerberg extensively for his book, “The Facebook Effect,” the real man is much more upbeat and much less angry than the version Jesse Eisenberg creates on screen. We could blame the screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin, who created “The West Wing” and wrote “A Few Good Men,” for stretching the truth and exercising some artistic license. Or we could thank him, for taking a series of already intriguing true events and, with some condensing and rearranging and a whole lot of sizzling dialogue, crafting the most captivating story Hollywood has produced this year.

At the heart of it is Eisenberg’s portrayal of a vindictive, turbo-charged genius. Zuckerberg would be wise not to complain too much; after I saw “The Social Network” this past weekend, several friends of mine left the theater announcing that they wished they were more like the 26-year-old billionaire, that they felt inferior compared to him.

I felt a number of things while watching “The Social Network,” the result of a perfect cocktail of emotional manipulation served up by Fincher and Sorkin and the cast and crew.

I felt inspired when Zuckerberg launched himself into the pantheon of social movers, triumphant when he stung an opponent with a particularly venomous insult, irritated whenever any of the less brilliant people around him threatened to slow his progress.

But I also empathized with Albright, who endures Zuckerberg’s insolence in the opening scene; Eduardo Saverin, his best friend and CFO who finds himself squeezed out of the company; and the Winklevoss twins, who enlist Zuckerberg to create a networking site exclusive to Harvard, only to watch him run away with the concept and build an online empire.

My brain must be mightily confused by all this emotion, identifying with several characters for several different, sometimes contradictory reasons.

But it is also, more importantly, set afire by this film, jolted awake by it.

It’s a visceral sort of reaction, on the same primal level, perhaps, as our desire to find out about the personal lives of famous people. “The Social Network” may not be strictly accurate, but it has in droves the kind of truth artists like to talk about, the kind of truth we feel. Stephen Colbert might call it truthiness, but in this case it’s the result of Hollywood at the absolute peak of its game, playing all sorts of wonderful tricks on our minds.

If you feel like you know Mark Zuckerberg after watching “The Social Network,” e-mail Goodman at [email protected].