"The Social Network" may or may not be the movie of the year. There's still three months to go, after all. Here are Ty and David Denby giving reason to think it might be. What "The Social Network" definitely is is the latest example of a very old and successful Hollywood defense mechanism: absorbing competing media, subverting them, or both.Make no mistake. Social media like Facebook are a bigger threat to the movie box office than anything since the arrival of television six decades ago. Ask a 14-year-old whether he or she would rather go to a movie or be on Facebook, and chances are the question won't even have been heard since he or she is actually already on Facebook and too engrossed in it to pay attention to what you're saying. Going to a movie used to be one of the best ways to escape parents. Now escape is just a mouse click away. It's not that moviegoing has lost its appeal to teens or is likely to. It's that moviegoing as a habit threatens to. Video games were bad enough. But Hollywood's been on to them at least since "Tron" ("Tron: Legacy" is coming out in December). More generally, movies have become bigger-screen versions of video games, courtesy of pinball editing, Krakatoa-scale explosions, and lowest common denominator character motivation.
