Aaron Sorkin Has Always Been Old-Fashioned. With ‘The Social Reckoning,’ He’s Gone Stale.
If Sorkin wants to write op-eds, he should go do that instead of subjecting us to his tedious, sexist movie.
Even a great director would likely hesitate to follow The Social Network, one of the best and most important movies of the 21st century. Great directors would hesitate to follow any of David Fincher’s films given his precise style and fierce craftsmanship. Aaron Sorkin is far from a great director. Still, he has a massive ego, so he’s tackling The Social Reckoning, a sequel of sorts to The Social Network, but without that film’s wider lens on how Facebook’s success represented a larger shift from old to new power in America. Instead, like an elderly relative sending you a link about a story you heard a decade ago as if it’s new, Sorkin is apparently the last person to realize that websites rely on enraging users as a way of upping engagement. Rather than exposing Facebook and the way social media polarizes users, Sorkin shows he’s a writer far past his prime, recycling the same tropes, characters, and prejudices without a single new idea worth considering.
Investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) doesn’t know how to work his car’s GPS (he doesn’t understand tech, you see), but he believes there’s a story about Facebook juking its stats, so The Wall Street Journal hires him to look into the powerful company. Meanwhile, Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison), an awkward data scientist working on Facebook’s Civic Engagement Team, is concerned that the algorithm is leading people to more extreme content, which she believes clashes with the company’s mission to bring people together. When her bosses refuse to hear her concerns, she starts working with Jeff to shine a light on the company’s abuses. Two years later in 2021, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) is preparing for a congressional hearing, a prep forum where he has to answer for his choices, and does so in his snide, condescending fashion.
Sorkin clearly wants to make a movie about how we got here in terms of polarization, but doing so misses both history as well as Facebook’s numerous abuses. It’s a movie that’s stumbling towards its purpose and is never clear-eyed enough to grapple with context. For Sorkin, there’s a clear line leading from Facebook’s reliance on “MSI” (an acronym that’s breathlessly reiterated by characters throughout the movie that means “Meaningful Social Interactions”) and the insurrection on January 6th. However, because this is a Facebook movie, Sorkin then cuts out players like YouTube and Twitter as well as legacy institutions like Fox News. This myopia makes the world smaller, cutting the world down to Facebook and its users without understanding who’s using the site. Even when the movie acknowledges that Facebook’s users were getting older and MSI was to rope in younger people with more extreme content, it doesn’t click. Frances goes on a date with a finance bro who repeats some misinformation he saw on Facebook, and someone in their mid-20s in 2019 wouldn’t quote the site like that, especially on a date where they wanted to look cool. They would either say, “I saw it online,” or at most, “I saw it on Instagram or a YouTube video.” But Sorkin needs the movie to be Facebook-centered regardless of how false the note sounds.
I love all of my subscribers, but the paying subscribers are what allow me to host this on newsletter on Ghost. So while I would like this post to be for everyone, I want to show some love for my paid subscribers by giving them longer reviews. If you’d like to sign up for a paid subscription (only $5/month or $50/year), I’d really appreciate it, and you’ll continue to get longer pieces like this one.
