The Social Reckoning Isn't as Angry or Powerful as a Facebook Drama Should Be

Aaron Sorkin's attempt to return to the success of social network storytelling offers a strange and incomplete view of a world that deserves a closer look. Before the film's release, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin, a writer not particularly known for his command of technical subjects, was the right man to tell the origin story of Facebook. And while Sorkin

In retrospect, David Fincher's 2010 film The Social Network was a landmark for a quiet, even unusual reason. Prior to the film's release, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin, a writer not exactly known for his technical mastery, was the right man to tell Facebook's origin story. And while Sorkin may have cast Mark Zuckerberg in terms he could better understand—namely, a sane savant who deep down wants to impress a smart, earnest girl—he and Fincher also made one of the first Internet-based films that treated online life as a natural extension of the IRL dynamic, rather than the otherworldly technological portal seen in so many films.

Granted, that's what Facebook's whole deal is: the viral spread of its social networks, something so simple and addictive that aunties, grandpas, and co-workers everywhere can understand. However, understanding its extension and simultaneous distortion of the real world was not a given. For example, four years later, 2014's Men, Women and Children was widely derided for taking a cautionary approach to the Internet as a haven for adults looking for romance, teenagers nursing porn addictions, and fame-hungry seekers of all ages. On the other hand, The Social Network is remarkably uncritical of Facebook's underlying mechanics, rooting its nascent flaws in the human foibles that created it. In retrospect, the film is only somewhat dated by underestimating Zuckerberg's power and the potential for the terrifying recklessness upon which his online empire was built.

The Social Reckoning, a sequel written and directed by Sorkin without Fincher, aims to set the record straight while giving voice to a character who believes the site has real utility. Francis Hagen (Mikey Madison), who works for the site's civics team, is socially awkward and anxious, and when he realizes that some people are better at the keyboard than they are, it's clear that he's thinking of himself, even if he never says so. Francis is dismayed to learn that Facebook is helping to radicalize some of its users and drive them to extremist groups as a function of its free-speech approach to giving people what they want. He turns to a nearby journalist (Jeremy Allen White) investigating the company, and together they challenge the orthodoxy of Zuckerberg, who was last seen on the social network fruitlessly refreshing his Facebook page in hopes of a mutual friend request.

Appropriate for a film set primarily in the early 2020s, The Social Reckoning's Zuckerberg is a completely different person, literally: Jeremy Strong steps in with celebrity intensity instead of the rather charming Jesse Eisenberg. But anyway, Zook isn't the main focus here. Although he's portrayed as a mutant in the first film, the film's voice wants to be about the ways social media has metastasized beyond Zuckerberg's control. He can't do anything about the bad influences in real life - he laments the attacks from both sides that he will face no matter what he does - so he might as well reap the benefits.

This is where Sorkin both oversteps and falls short in his analysis of how online reality enters the real world. On the one hand, he links the radicalization of some Facebook users to the January 6 riots in Washington and jumps into Facebook's control room to take a chilling look at their passivity in the face of the violence fueling our country. Connecting that particular point requires a bit of a timeline separation of the whistleblower's and Zuckerberg's dual story threads, but you know why Sorkin went to the trouble. This is an event that represents the kind of behavior that Facebook is likely to have enabled both ideologically and logistically.

However, Sorkin also insists on keeping the treatment in dirty, old-fashioned terms. The January 6 riots are described as far beyond the pale because they harmed police officers—which is relevant to the film's opening sequence, where a drunk, racist woman broadcasts her horrible comments on Facebook Live to non-white police officers. Can someone please think of the police?! (As if Sorkin couldn't imagine racism so overt unless it was officially documented by the police.) That's how Sorkin is. He knows that proper order is threatened.

When Francis gives up his Facebook post and testifies before Congress, the footage of his moment of triumph suggests that an audit is imminent, and that Zuckerberg has been, to some extent, chastised and/or humiliated. The world has pulled back from the edge of the abyss. Meanwhile, there are less serious cases against Facebook, such as the idea that the company enabled genocide in Myanmar. You can't expect a movie to cover the entire world wide web, but that doesn't stop The Social Reckoning from feeling awfully small.

A more subtle sign is that Sorkin isn't orienting himself in the 2020s, preferring instead a world that no longer exists: every cultural reference point he summons throughout the film is from the mid-20th century. The reporter loves the boat show. Later, he expresses surprise and delight when Francis mentions Frank Capra – then proceeds to recommend more of the director's films, since he's only seen two. One of Zuckerberg's executives refers to Gilligan's Island to make a point about people's gullibility. The most contemporary thing he becomes, aside from the inevitable current events, is the Woodward and Bernstein name-check. Has there ever been a film that somehow portrayed the Covid-19 pandemic and refused to embrace popular culture for less than half a century?

Doubtless he considers this a personal whim; Sorkin loves musical theater and remembers classic era television, and so do his characters. What he's done unwittingly is create a world almost as isolated and fantastical as that of early Internet fantasy like Hackers or Virtuosity, a world where a Capra-esque victory remains within reach of his handy hero. Sorkin recognizes that the Internet is part of real life, not a mystical fad or a purely Internet world. He's not raging against the machine, which some of his detractors feared might be his return in 2010. But his conception of real life seems stuck in a time, if not before the Internet, then at least before Trump. January 6th may have been a disturbing event in that Facebook control room, but in this world, everyone was pardoned and the president, who used social media to boost it, was re-elected and emboldened. Perhaps, all these years later, those more cautionary notions of the Internet through cinema weren't so preposterous after all. Compared to Eddington's rabbit holes, the psychosis of the Red Rooms, or even the mediated worlds of David Cronenberg's Shrouds, the social take on the Internet movie doesn't seem nearly as paranoid, angry, or scary. Sorkin may think he's looking at the Internet with bright eyes, but he's wearing a cork.