{"id":16,"date":"2013-05-30T02:25:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-30T07:25:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2021-03-26T09:45:16","modified_gmt":"2021-03-26T14:45:16","slug":"humanising-a-character","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/?p=16","title":{"rendered":"Humanising a Character"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My wife and I only have free-to-air TV, which&nbsp;means I don&#8217;t waste as much time watching TV as when I was living&nbsp;in a shared house with a Foxtel connection.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt1285016\/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Social Network<\/a><\/em> was on the other night and, having read the script, I was pretty keen to see it.<\/p>\n<p>The&nbsp;movie&nbsp;seemed to adhere closely to Aaron Sorkin&#8217;s script, which I had enjoyed. It&#8217;s quite long and&nbsp;&#8216;talky&#8217; (161 pages), but it&#8217;s eminently readable.<\/p>\n<p>One thing of particular note was how Sorkin got us on-board with the character of Mark Zuckerberg.<\/p>\n<p>The movie opens with a scene involving Mark Zuckerberg and a young woman named Erica Albright. There&#8217;s some rat-a-tat dialogue which races from one topic to another but the end result is that Mark blows his chances with Erica.<\/p>\n<p>She becomes the &#8216;one-that-got-away.&#8217; And it&#8217;s Zuckerberg&#8217;s desire to reconnect with her that seems to drive the emotional heart of the movie.<\/p>\n<p>We start with her. Part-way through Zuckerberg meets her again, with much the same result. And the movie finishes with him sending her a friend request. It creates empathy between audience and&nbsp;the character, and provides a way of tracking the emotional heart of the story.<\/p>\n<p>I thought it was a great choice by Sorkin, as it helped make Zuckerberg a relatable sort of guy.&nbsp;I will never be a billionaire, I&#8217;m not a computer genius&nbsp;but I do know what it&#8217;s like to lose at love.&nbsp;Without that humanising touch, Zuckerberg would have been a remote protagonist I couldn&#8217;t have invested in (emotionally, not financially :).<\/p>\n<p>The interaction between Zuckerberg and Erica also planted and paid off later with the Sean Parker character.<\/p>\n<p>In the opening scene&nbsp;Zuckerberg tells&nbsp;Erica that,if she goes out with him, she&#8217;ll&nbsp;get into parties she otherwise wouldn&#8217;t have been able to attend. Needless to say, she doesn&#8217;t take this well.<\/p>\n<p>Towards the end of the movie Sean Parker&nbsp;tells Zuckerberg that because he is hanging around, Zuckerberg will see women he otherwise wouldn&#8217;t. The repetition loads the phrase with meaning&#8211; in fact, this was one of the lines I was really watching out for when I watched the movie (the other line was Mark calling the Winklevoss twins the &#8216;Winklevi&#8217; :).<\/p>\n<p>I enjoyed both the script and movie versions of <em>The Social Network<\/em>, and I&#8217;m glad both versions received recognition at Oscar time a few years ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My wife and I only have free-to-air TV, which&nbsp;means I don&#8217;t waste as much time watching TV as when I was living&nbsp;in a shared house with a Foxtel connection. Anyway, The Social Network was on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-character","category-the-social-network"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}