What’s Aaron Sorkin up to? What does he think about Zohran Mamdani? What about Abdul El-Sayed? Any thoughts on the upcoming televised assassination of Nidal Malik Hasan? Has he made any statements? Posts? What are his socials? Oh, he doesn’t have any. Strange… you’d think a guy as politically-plugged in as Sorkin would have some kind of social media account… even on the down low… how else is he going to find out what’s really going on in our country and the rest of the world?
Judging by The Social Reckoning, he hasn’t got a clue. Sorkin struck a nerve in 2010 with his script for The Social Network, an acknowledged modern classic directed by David Fincher and featuring the performance that will likely lead all of Jesse Eisenberg’s obituaries whenever his time comes. When The Social Network was released in the fall of 2010, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg were still new to the American scene: the company started in 2004, opened registration to the general public in 2006, and saw its user base dramatically shift from college and high school students to their Baby Boomer parents around… 2011. Like Super Size Me six years earlier, Sorkin’s polemic had more of an effect as an advertisement. It’s not a stretch to say that the events depicted in The Social Reckoning may never have occurred if not for the release of The Social Network, a movie so good it spurred millions of adults to swamp their kids’ playground and make it their own.
This aspect of Facebook’s history is ignored; so is Zuckerberg’s impressive image rehab. Jeremy Strong, a fine actor who makes anything he appears in at least interesting, plays Zuckerberg like a Bond villain, complete with dead eyes, swivel neck, and stick-up-your-ass posture. The comparison’s perhaps unfair but inevitable here: Strong’s Zuckerberg is a view onto who Kendall Roy of Succession would’ve become had his father chosen him as his successor. We don’t see much of Zuckerberg in The Social Reckoning, and most surprisingly, there isn’t a single scene of him testifying before Congress. Most of his screen time is during hearing preparation, with a coach and a team of advisors to say yes, no, lose the “Well, Senator” and just go with “Senator,” and on and on. Bill Burr makes the most of his “WITH” credit, bounding out of the shadows of the prep session to lay into Zuckerberg while the rest of his team founders before their boss’ formidable reserve.
A sequel to The Social Network isn’t folly per se, but you’ve got to find a story that at least approaches the drama and intrigue surrounding the founding of Facebook, and there have been plenty of stories and angles in the last 16 years that no one will touch. Burr, playing an op-ed columnist hired to give Zuckerberg some truth, lays into the founder for not “cracking down” (censoring) “bad information,” “misinformation,” “hate groups,” and “extremist groups.” Zuckerberg says he’s a “free speech absolutist” and that people can not only decide for themselves, they know when they’re being lied to. One of his aides chimes in with an apocryphal story about Gilligan’s Island that somehow stops movie-Zuckerberg in his tracks. “A woman called the Pacific Coast Guard and reported seven people stranded on an island in the middle of the ocean.” Yes, one woman. The other tens of millions of people who watched the premiere could tell that Bob Denver and Tina Louise were just playing pretend.
Sorkin, like all liberals, has lost his mind. Some have gone crazy, some have become leftists, while others have buried their heads in the sands of the Pacific Coast. People like Sorkin wanted the events of January 6, 2021 to resonate with the public in the same way September 11 did—even a Canadian told me they were equally tragic events! I’ll never understand the fetishism revealed by liberals that day, so repulsed by the sight of, well, those people “storming the Capitol” and contaminating the sacred halls of Congress with their flaking hick white skin and beyond-gaudy getups. On January 6, the world learned what I’ve known all my life growing up in a media family: cosmopolitans hate Middle America and refuse to understand the millions of people in Middle America; whenever the people have spoken, the media have done their best to misunderstand them.
The Social Reckoning opens with a bizarre non-sequitur scene where a drunk, rich white “Karen” is waiting for a tow truck on a highway in the middle of nowhere. A couple of cops pull up, and they quickly determine that she’s drunk. She’s tipsy, but she knows her rights, and both the cops and the woman start filming each other; both cops (not white) humor her mildly inflammatory rant about “DEI cops” before arresting her for resisting arrest and threatening an officer (she knew the law but she just couldn’t help herself from screaming “I’LL KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING BITCH!”). The video goes viral, and that’s how we meet Mikey Madison, Facebook employee and eventual whistleblower. It’s still a mystery what this scene had to do with the rest of the movie, and it’s not until Jeremy Allen White, Wall Street Journal reporter, makes contact with Madison that she explains she knew the woman in the video, and that just four years ago “she was championing progressive causes.” Madison is convinced Facebook’s algorithm “did this to her,” as if she didn’t have a choice.
The Social Reckoning argues that people don’t have a right to pick their own news or think for themselves. While Burr is grilling Strong’s Zuckerberg over misleading political ads and “vaccine misinformation,” Zuckerberg points out that The New York Times misidentified the surfboard he was famously pictured using in 2016. Burr says he doesn’t work for The New York Times, but we know that all the major papers and cable/broadcast channels are compromised by now. This isn’t 2010, or even 2016—the few people who will see The Social Reckoning (currently bombing) may have a hard time sussing out exactly what Sorkin is so worried about here. Luckily, people have stopped paying attention, and the number of “politically homeless” Americans keeps growing. Sorkin doesn’t understand that the very soft racism of the opening scene isn’t offensive or even unreasonable next to today’s leftists, who cheer the assassinations of their political rivals and “protest” funerals like the Westboro Baptist Church.
“Racist white lady” will be an obsolete trope by the end of the decade as more women break from peer pressure and admit the obvious: the majority of rapists aren’t white, nor are they American citizens. Politically, this is very inconvenient—so inconvenient that a woman running for Congress didn’t report her own rape because the rapist was “undocumented”! Are you people insane? Apparently it’s more important to be politically correct than to stop someone else from getting raped.
None of the “hate groups” invoked throughout The Social Reckoning are ever named. We’re way past the point of neo-Nazi fear mongering: Muslims are rampaging through Europe and, with the help of the Democratic Party, are attempting to set up shop here in the States. Everything in The Social Reckoning falls flat because it all looks like a walk in the park next to what we’re about to deal with. It’s as if Sorkin knows he’s come up short: Donald Trump isn’t mentioned once, his dialogue is spoken by everyone with a flat, rapid fire, and indecipherable clip, chock full of jargon and so beyond bland that the cast appears just as bored as the audience. Despite working with cinematographer Jeff Cronenweth, Sorkin continues to demonstrate that he’s a horrendous director with zero visual sense and no feel for blocking—or acting at all. The Social Reckoning is a polemic delivered four years too late, a musty thing that only indicates the absence of something new and much needed. Luca Guadagnino’s OpenAI movie Artificial? We’ll see this Christmas.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM