That ‘fake’ Sarah Palin facebook account registered to her personal e-mail address.

It’s now closed.

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‘The Social Network’ Is a Pack of Lies That Conveys Nothing About Our Time

The Awl:

A film that takes liberties just as brazen and ludicrous with real life figures, a film that inserts similarly imaginary motivations into real life events, is being celebrated as a gripping drama and lauded by critics across America. It has won the Golden Globe for “Best Motion Picture: Drama” and is currently easily the front-runner for the Academy Award for Best Picture of 2010.

Yes, The Social Network is, no doubt, a finely crafted work. The acting is impeccable, the dialogue is zippy and zings along. As writer Aaron Sorkin himself pointed out in his bizarre speech last night, David Fincher made a story about computer nerds typing as entertaining as such a subject matter could possibly bear. But that’s not all he said.

That Sorkin thanked his researcher in his speech was audacious, at best. Any film that treats history as flippantly as The Social Network does deserves to be taken as seriously as the new Yogi Bear adaptation.

The film’s misstatements have been well documented. The jilted love affair that drives Mark Zuckerberg to create Facebook is invented. The resentment against the Harvard elite clubs that drives him to create an alternate society is invented. The claims of others involved in the creation of Facebook are given vastly too much credence in the film. Zuckerberg is portrayed as an angry, vengeful sociopath, which by most accounts and all appearances, he is not.

But other than that, it says a lot of fascinating things about the era.

A dramatic work need not be faithful to every fact of history. We do not expect dramatic films to be moment-for-moment, not-a-hair-touched recreations of history. Even documentaries are forced to exercise some altering power in deciding what to leave in and what to cut.

But what we do expect, and regarding which we should not compromise, is that when a film purports to be a telling of actual events and the lives of real-life people, it gets the basic facts of those events and people right. Or at the very least tries! A biopic about Marie Curie and the discovery of radium, if it purports to tell the actual story, will not show the great scientist dressing in bearskin rugs to get in touch with her atomic nature and taking hot air balloon rides up the Amazon in search of a legendary molecule, unless it is clearly indicated that this is a fantasia of Marie Curie, not meant to be a realistic telling of actual events. (See: I’m Not There.)

The Social Network offers no such disclaimers. In a narrative punctuated by legal deposition, it strives for hyper-realism, suggesting strongly that these events did happen as they are being shown. In doing so, it far exceeds the limits of any commonly understood dramatic license.

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