The power of storytelling -- for better or for worse

So I watched The Social Network again about two days ago. It was a film we watched in Scholarship English last year as well but it turned out to be quite hard to write about. The idea it expressed to me was more of a byproduct of its existence more than the actual film itself. It became slightly clearer to me when Andrew Stanton's TED talk appeared yesterday morning and I watched it on my way into uni on the bus:

BTW Andrew Stanton wrote the screenplay for Wall-E, Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Finding Nemo to name a few.

He talks about elements of storytelling, what makes a story great. He talks about characterisation and how each character has one thing they always keep constant, and everything else can change around them if certain conditions are met. This reflects human nature, I suppose. But what happens when a real human is made to be abstracted into such a stock form and subjected to abstraction of screen writing?

Obviously, pseudo-documentaries such as The Social Network will have altered certain aspects of the truth, even if they were "based off a true story". I did some digging and found the two biggest misrepresentations of the truth in the movie that I found somewhat significant to the movie's overall representation of the story behind facebook...

1) Eduardo's character is painted as a victim. In fact, during the period where he was in New York, he partied a lot, while Mark's report from California was, "in general we don't do fun things. But that's OK because the business is fun." The situation was the exact opposite of how it appeared in the movie. He planted ads for his business project on the site without clearing permission with anyone else. He was accused of treachery by Zuckerberg "You developed Joboozle knowing that at some point Facebook would probably want to do something with jobs…putting ads up on Facebook to advertise it, especially for free, is just mean."

Actually this move makes sense because Eduardo Saverin (the real life guy) co-operated with the author of "Accidental Millionaires", which the movie is based off. No other co-founders of Facebook were involved with the book or movie. The viewpoint in the first place is biased. This first of all demonstrates how storytelling depends on perspective; in this case, it caused a misrepresentation of the facts. I guess not everyone can be objective.

2) Mark Zuckerberg did not create facemash and consequently facebook because he was pining over a lost love. He started dating his now-girlfriend Priscilla Chan in 2003, before Facebook even existed. Erica Albright in the film is a fictional character. The only reason I can think of to her concoction is to make Zuckerberg look like a bigger dick and also to retain the status-quo of society, where the stereotype of the 'loser nerd' wins out. Is it so inconceivable that the creator of facebook might perhaps have a normal social life? That he is not as withdrawn and awkward as Jesse Eisenberg made him out to be?

Perhaps it is just a convention of screenwriting to make stories more interesting in order to, as Andrew Stanton said in his post, make people care. However, where does the line come? When we need to be informed of something? When we are trying to document a moment in history? I suspect The Social Network is supposed to be entertainment rather than a documentary about the real beginnings of facebook, but many people take it to be 100% fact and do not bother to dig deeper. Popular culture as a way of replacing truth in our brains because the media is so prominent in our lives.

Such an example arises with the release of the KONY 2012 video tonight. An incredibly emotion-inducing video, a call to arms for change, for revolution because 'it's our time'. Andrew Stanton mentions the importance of hooking the audience in a film, to make them interested in what will happen next, to make them care. Surely in a movement that involves everyone in the world, KONY 2012 has done just that.

Yet, that is all the video is -- of its two main purposes, 1) spreading awareness and 2) getting donations for Invisible Children, only the first is beneficial to society. Many have dug deeper into the issue and found that the charity is not exactly the best (with merely 32% of donations making it to the country, along with lack of political knowledge concerning the situation in Uganda).

One of my college interviewers last month asked me whether I thought an idea could be better represented through a story (such as in film). He raised the point that film can oversensationalise an issue, whereas I disagreed and said that despite the sensationalism, awareness of issues and ideas can still be brought about as well as incite responses as maybe without sensationalism we are so desensitised in our regular lives that no other method can cause a reaction quite as strongly as a well-made film. With the overwhelming virility of the KONY 2012 film, I feel both our points have been well-illustrated; the dangers of a propaganda-like film being oversensationalised in the ideas it portrayed, yet the emotion and outrage and sense of community it caused.

However, something neither of us talked about was the proactivity of viewers in further research to dispel the inaccuracies represented in our media. Only with a keen eye for detail and the ability to think beyond what our minds are fed can real awareness come about. An ability to peel ourselves away from the ignorant masses. Yes, we are allowed to empathise with the child soldiers, feel outrage towards warlords, be entertained by Aaron Sorkin's Zuckerberg character, allowed to FEEL, allowed to care about the characters in the media we watch. Such empathy is part of our humanity. However, let not curiosity fall away as another part of our identities -- the yearning to learn more about stories told from real life, to know all sides of the story before we, blinded with emotion, make our next move.

And, of course, kudos to Jason Russell and David Fincher for creating great movies in their own right -- at the very least, their purposes have been fulfilled :)