The Social Network
The founding of Facebook and the lawsuits that followed, told as a Shakespearean tragedy of friendship and betrayal.
Aaron Sorkin's script delivers 9,000 words in 120 minutes. Fincher made a two-hour film about a website feel like the creation myth of our era.
Made when Facebook had 400M users and was still seen as a social network, not surveillance capitalism infrastructure.
Post-9/11 trauma shaped a decade of cinema. Superheroes became relevant (Spider-Man arrived seven months after). War films returned. Torture became contested on screen (Zero Dark Thirty). New Yorkers refused to be shown threatened cities for years.
The financial crisis prompted a wave of class-conscious cinema: Margin Call, The Big Short, and eventually Parasite were all responses to the same structural wound.