David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network opens with the wound that drove Mark Zuckerberg to create the largest social network and media company in human history. As the camera pans across the rooftops of Harvard University, Zuckerberg jogs past smiling students to his dorm, where he is grimly determined to create something, anything, that will get his mind off of being savagely dumped by his girlfriend, Erica Albright.
The scene has become so iconic it hardly matters the whole thing is ersatz. First off, the Harvard of the film is Johns Hopkins—the university refused to grant Fincher filming privileges. Mark Zuckerberg is of course Jesse Eisenberg, playing a character written by Aaron Sorkin, who’d never used Facebook before writing his screenplay and who based his portrait entirely around one book, Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires. And Erica Albright—the girl who delivers the immortal line, “It’ll be because you’re an asshole”—never existed. Zuckerberg has protested in interviews that he built Facebook simply because he “liked building things.”
But if the film has settled into a cultural parable—Facebook as revenge of the jilted nerd—it’s in large part because of this scene, which is when we hear the first notes of the film’s score. An upright piano, luminous and recorded very closely, plays a simple figure, reminiscent of Brian Eno’s “1/1” from Music for Airports, or perhaps Eno’s startup music for Windows 95. Backed by the busy chatter of tremolo strings, the piano theme drifts through the noise like a ghost. It’s dark, light, winsome, menacing— the film’s entire world telescoped down and reduced into 40 burbling seconds. Then, just as the camera pans up to the dorm, a deep, dark synth note resounds, glaring out at you with yellow eyes. At this precise moment, the credits reveal the composers’ names: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The Social Network represented a pinnacle for everyone involved: For Sorkin, who had created The West Wing and churned out some high-profile screenplays (A Few Good Men, The American President) but hadn’t been given his A-list moment in the sun. For David Fincher, who had already redefined American movies at least twice but hadn’t yet been handed the reins to a prime piece of Oscar bait. For Justin Timberlake, whose impish grin and Satanic cuteness personified the emerging Silicon Valley rock-star ethos and expanded his portfolio into “movie star.” For Eisenberg, whose performance inverted the usual karaoke-style rules of biopics: He sounded nothing like the real Zuckerberg, but his is probably the face most people see when they imagine Facebook’s creation.