The Social Network soundtrack. Waaaaaaaay back in the dimly-recalled distant mists of time (well, February) I reviewed the soundtrack for Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and was left with the ironclad impression that A) even though 2010 had barely got going, there was unlikely to be another movie soundtrack released this year that could top it in terms of quality, and B) even in the improbable event someone could do better, there was no way, nowhere and no how they could come up with something that could match the Shutter Island soundtrack’s evocation of unsettling psychosis.
That a very strong argument can be made that the soundtrack to David Fincher’s The Social Network succeeds on both the above counts is therefore startling enough in itself. However when we then consider that this, lest we forget, is music conceived to accompany a movie ostensibly about the creation of Facebook, starring the awkward deadpan guy who isn’t Michael Cera, the new Peter Parker and one-fifth of N’Sync, those twin triumphs seem all the more remarkable. Deserving all the credit for crafting a superb soundtrack which is alternately elusive and visceral are Trent Reznor and his long-time collaborator Atticus Ross, and if we momentarily delve into the prior motion picture work of the former then we perhaps find a few helpful pointers towards this mini-masterpiece of anxiety-soaked electronica.
Reznor previously curated a Natural Born Killers album that many people preferred to Oliver Stone’s movie, while the Nine Inch Nails man discharged the same duty on David Lynch’s Lost Highway. That movie, as those who have seen it will readily attest, is a nigh-on impenetrable white-knuckle ride into the darkest recesses of the human mind, and judging from the strain of unease pervading many of the obliquely-titled compositions on The Social Network, Reznor and Ross have ventured into those same recesses as part of their assignment for Fincher.
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