This evening we at last got around to watching The Social Network. This is another entertainment loosely based on a real life story and it is very well done. The plot plays cleverly on a series of ironies, not the least of them being the fact that the social network is created by an almost autistic code-writing genius and that on his way to fabulous success and riches the Mark Zuckerberg of the film loses virtually all of his friends. Jesse Eisenberg plays the Zuckerberg role brilliantly. As one of Zuckerberg’s friends, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, commented when the film came out,  ‘At the end of the day, they cannot help but portray him as the driven, forward-thinking genius that he is.’ Where the real Zuckerberg objected was in the portrayal of his basic motivation. This did not grow out of his inability to woo the opposite sex (as the film would have us believe) but his pleasure in building things. In the film he parties. In real life, he wrote code. But there is a fundamental authenticity about the portrayal nevertheless. We need our geniuses and they inevitably come with rough edges.