Review: THE SOCIAL RECKONING

 by Rob DiCristino

Drop the “director.” It’s cleaner.

Any list of the most important films of the twenty-first century should include David Fincher’s 2010 docudrama, The Social Network. Written by Aaron Sorkin and adapted from Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, Fincher’s generation-defining masterpiece traces the origin of our Post-Truth Era (era) to a Harvard dormitory where nineteen-year-old Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is reshaping the world in his own lonely, hostile, self-righteous image. Pounding out the code that would eventually spawn Facebook, Zuckerberg had no idea — or at least we hope he didn’t — that he would be the architect of a new attention economy, an empire of rage-bait and misinformation that would provoke the most radical transformation of our sociopolitical infrastructure since the printing press: “We lived on farms, and then we lived in cities, and now we’re going to live on the internet!” exalts Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker as he celebrates Facebook’s triumph. And how right he was. How gruesomely, tragically, horrifically right he was.

Sixteen years later, Aaron Sorkin has returned to the Facebook Cinematic Universe with The Social Reckoning, a retelling of the events that led to The Wall Street Journal’s scathing 2021 exposé on the company and its voluminous betrayals of the public trust. Jeremy Allen White stars as Jeff Horwitz, a seasoned political reporter who, despite having about as sophisticated an understanding of the technology sector as Aaron Sorkin himself, launches an investigation into Facebook’s shady ethical practices with the help of insider Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison, who spends half of her screen time in lingerie for reasons that had better be Based on a True Story), a data engineer who believes that Mark Zuckerberg’s (now played by the extremely normal Jeremy Strong) thirst for cultural hegemony is corrupting his company’s core mission of connectivity and collaboration. Facing a decrease in engagement from an aging user base, Zuckerberg has built algorithms that use anger, disgust, and fear to keep people liking, posting, and sharing.

And if you’ve participated in The Discourse at any point over the last decade, that will hardly be news to you. The dead internet hellscape, the political extremism, the proliferation of hate speech and conspiracy theories, the distrust of authority figures — nearly every tangible backslide in our societal values can be traced directly to Facebook’s corrosive influence on our media literacy. As Horwitz discovers during a year’s worth of clandestine meetings with Haugen — a self-described whitehat who, perhaps naively, believes she can save Facebook from the inside — Zuckerberg’s companies intentionally target their users’ emotional vulnerabilities to boost engagement. Seated behind a mock-deposition table for most of the film, Zuckerberg resolutely insists that Facebook is simply “a corkboard” and “a public square” that bears no responsibility for what those users post. But even his media advisors (including Wunmi Mosaku, Bill Burr, and Billy Magnussen) struggle to spin this position as anything but self-serving and profit-hungry.

But again, you know this. Everyone does. The trouble with The Social Reckoning is that it all seems genuinely revelatory to director Aaron Sorkin, who — without David Fincher there to guide him — presents the story from the dramatic point of view of, well, an entrenched Hollywood relic loudly misremembering something he heard at a cocktail party. Docudramas deviate from real events, of course, and The Social Reckoning isn’t any worse because it makes changes to fit a conventional Hollywood narrative. Instead, it’s Sorkin’s catastrophic misunderstanding of Facebook’s moral turpitude that makes it all ring so hollow. True good cannot comprehend true evil, it seems, and since Sorkin lacks Fincher’s appreciation for perverts and sickos — as well as any insight into the lived experience of the people he’s depicting — The Social Reckoning becomes a toothless polemic tone-deaf enough to crescendo with Haugen’s testimony before Congress, as if a fucking West Wing speech on Good Government will ease the existential terror the film has instilled in its audience.

Indeed, it’s Sorkin’s maddening preoccupation with the same lazy crutches — the rat-a-tat banter, the syntactic gymnastics, the musical theater references, etc. — that proves he still isn’t disciplined enough to direct any film, especially one reaching this hard for the grandeur of All the President’s Men or Spotlight. He simply cannot grasp the gravity of the events he’s attempting to dramatize, a fact made painfully clear as the film fades out on Mikey Madison fist-pumping in victory. Victory over whom, I would ask? Over what? Facebook rebranded to Meta. Frances Haugen went on a book tour. Mark Zuckerberg attended Donald Trump’s second inauguration. While The Social Network closes with an uncomfortable anti-catharsis that forces its protagonist (and its audience) to confront the devastating consequences of his narcissism, The Social Reckoning deludes itself with an old-world fantasy where justice and integrity win out over greed and ambition. That certainly sounds like a lovely world, Mr. Sorkin, but it’s not the world that any of us live in.

The Social Reckoning hits U.S. theaters on Friday, October 9th.