3 hours ago
10
In retrospect, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network was a landmark for a quiet, even counterintuitive reason. Before the film was released, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin, a writer not exactly known for his mastery of, nevermind obsession with, the technical sphere, was the right man to tell the origin story of Facebook. And while Sorkin may well have converted Mark Zuckerberg into terms he could better understand – namely, a motormouthed wiseass who deep down wants to impress a smart, serious-minded girl – he and Fincher also made one of the first internet-centric movies to treat online life as a natural extension of IRL dynamics, rather than the otherworldly tech portal seen in so many 90s internet movies.
Granted, that’s the whole deal with Facebook: its viral spread of social networking, something so simple and addictive that aunts, grandpas and coworkers everywhere could understand it. Yet understanding its simultaneous extension and distortion of the real world wasn’t a given; four years later, for example, 2014’s Men, Women and Children was widely derided for taking an alarmist approach to the internet as a haven for adults seeking an affair, teenagers nursing porn addictions and fame-hungry strivers of all ages. The Social Network, on the other hand, is remarkably nonjudgmental about the basic mechanics of Facebook, rooting its nascent flaws in the human weaknesses that birthed it. In retrospect, the movie only feels outdated to the extent that it underestimates Zuckerberg’s grasping for power and the potential for grim carelessness that his online kingdom was built on.
The Social Reckoning, a sorta-sequel written and directed by Sorkin without Fincher’s involvement, aims to correct the record while still giving voice to a character who believes that the site has real utility. Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), who works for the site’s civics team, is socially awkward and anxious, and when she notes that some people are better at a keyboard than they are in person, it’s clear she’s thinking of herself, even though she never says so. Frances is distraught to learn that Facebook is contributing to radicalization of some of its users, funneling them into extremist groups as a function of its give-the-people-what-they-want approach to free speech. She turns to a luddite-adjacent journalist (Jeremy Allen White) doing some digging on the company, and together they challenge the orthodoxy of Zuckerberg, last seen in The Social Network fruitlessly refreshing a Facebook page hoping for a reciprocated friend request.
Appropriate for a movie set largely in the early 2020s, The Social Reckoning’s Zuckerberg is a completely different person, literally: famously intense Jeremy Strong steps in for the comparably charming Jesse Eisenberg. But Zuck isn’t the main focus here anyway; though he is depicted as a sort of mutation of the aggrieved nerd from the first film, still issuing cutting sarcastic remarks, but in the voice of an empty-suit automaton, the movie wants to be about the ways that social networking has metastasized beyond Zuckerberg’s control. He can’t do anything about ill effects on real life – he laments the both-sides attacks he’ll face no matter what he does – so he might as well keep the profits churning in.
It’s here where Sorkin both oversteps and falls short in his analysis of how online reality has bled into the real world. On one hand, he connects the radicalization of some Facebook users to the January 6 insurrection riots in Washington, jumping into the Facebook control room for a chilling look at their inaction of the face of fomenting violence in our own country. Connecting that particular dot requires some timeline fudging of the dual whistleblower-and-Zuckerberg story threads, but you understand why Sorkin went to the trouble. It’s an event representing the kind of behavior that Facebook likely enabled, both ideologically and logistically.
Yet Sorkin also insists on containing that behavior in stodgy, old-fashioned terms. The January 6 riots are framed as particularly far beyond the pale in large part because they bring harm to police officers – which connects back to the movie’s opening sequence, where a drunk and racist woman livestreams her horrible comments to non-white police officers on Facebook. Won’t someone please think of the cops?! (It’s as if Sorkin can’t conceive of racism so blatant unless it’s been officially documented by the police.) This is how Sorkin knows the proper order has been threatened.
When Frances quits her Facebook post and testifies in front of Congress, the movie implies with her moment of triumph that the reckoning is at hand, and that Zuckerberg has been, on some level, chastened and/or humiliated. The world has been pulled back from the brink. Meanwhile, the existence of even more damning cases against Facebook, like the idea that the company enabled genocide in Myanmar, doesn’t get so much as a mention. One movie can’t be expected to cover the whole of the global internet, but that doesn’t stop The Social Reckoning from feeling awfully small.
A more subtle sign that Sorkin hasn’t oriented himself in the actual 2020s, and instead prefers a world that no longer exists: every cultural reference point he summons throughout the movie dates from around the middle of the 20h century. The reporter loves Show Boat. Later, he expresses his surprise and gratification that Frances makes reference to Frank Capra – then proceeds to recommend more of the director’s films, because she’s only seen two of them. A Zuckerberg handler makes reference to Gilligan’s Island to illustrate a point about the public’s gullibility. The most contemporary he gets, apart from the unavoidable current events, is name-checking Woodward and Bernstein. Has there ever been a movie that has somehow both depicted the Covid-19 pandemic and refused to acknowledge popular culture less than a half-century old?
Doubtless he’d consider this a personal quirk; Sorkin loves musical theater and remembers classic-era television, and so shall his characters. What he’s unintentionally done is create a world nearly as insular and fantastical as the ones in early internet fantasies such as Hackers or Virtuosity, one where a Capra-esque triumph remains within arm’s reach of his plucky protagonist. Sorkin gets that the internet is a part of real life, not a mystical fad or a wholly internet world. He’s not raging against the machine, the way some of his detractors feared he might back in 2010. But his conception of real life itself feels stuck in a time that is, if not pre-internet, at very least pre-Trump. January 6 may have been a sobering event in that Facebook control room, but in this world, everyone was pardoned and the president who used social media to egg it was re-elected and further emboldened. Maybe, all these years later, those more alarmist takes on the internet via cinema weren’t so off-base after all. Compared with the rabbit holes of Eddington, the psychosis of Red Rooms, or even the mediated worlds of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, The Social Reckoning’s take on the internet movie doesn’t seem nearly paranoid, angry or scared enough. Sorkin may think he’s looking at the internet with clear eyes, but he’s wearing blinders.
English (US) ·