the movie that accidentally defined a generation?

And besides, on Social Network, I didn’t really agree with the critics’ praise. It interested me that Social Network was about friendships that dissolved through this thing that promised friendships, but I didn’t think we were ripping the lid off anything. The movie is true to a time and a kind of person, but I was never trying to turn a mirror on a generation.—David Fincher, interview in W Magazine

I found the above-quoted interview with David Fincher, director of The Social Network, pretty interesting. Currently The Social Network is a front-runner for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, but the article goes on to quote Fincher as saying that he doesn't even really consider it a "film": "It's a little glib to be a film." He considers it simply a "movie".

But what Fincher originally set out to do with The Social Network—show "friendships that dissolved through this thing that promised friendships"—is perhaps the very thing that unwittingly made it the mirror of a generation, a reflection of the digital age, when relationships are not legit in the eyes of society until they're "Facebook official" but, at the same time, Facebook friendships are comfortably impersonal. The term "Facebook friends" automatically connotes a relationship that doesn't require our responsibility, time, or thought—connotes a friendship that we haven't really put effort into pursuing in "real life".

It's the reason I think The Social Network deserves Best Picture. The King's Speech was heartwarming and impeccably crafted, but it doesn't have the same immediacy to it; it doesn't give us pause, make us examine ourselves and the nature of our so-called "friendships". It doesn't have the same keen (however unwitting) insight into society in the Facebook age.