The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin. culminates Sorkin’s secular humanist artistic philosophy, which he’s showcased throughout his career, including the astute Steve Jobs, the melodramatic A Few Good Men and his involving NBC political manifesto The West Wing.
This new Sony Pictures movie is not a keen observation or insightful depiction of current events, let alone history. The sequel achieves a faintly yet strongly driven theme of self-made American individualism. Whatever falseness or truth of its claims, in shifting, layered perspectives arranged by a timeline within a few years before and after the cataclysmic and decimating lockdown during the 2019 pandemic, when life in America was severely prohibited and restricted by the government for two years, The Social Reckoning slowly delivers upon its title, which is excellent.
This film follows up a 16 year-old movie based on a book, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. At the time, the 2010 movie was overhyped, just as some were choosing up sides and beginning to doubt, malign, indulge, exploit and cash in on the phenomenon known as social media, led by Facebook, a website and app founded by an Ivy League-educated capitalist, geek/whiz kid/tech bro (choose your jargon). Terms shift, change and don’t matter. A capitalist is a capitalist and Mark Zuckerberg, portrayed in this picture by Jeremy Strong—in another outstanding performance by the actor who was the best thing about the rotten-themed camp classic Succession on HBO—is neither hero nor villain in Strong’s sterling performance.
Driven by Sorkin’s incisive screenplay, Strong’s portrayal of the industrial titan is not a mere character study. Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg gets less screen time than a different actor in the first movie did. This is a good thing. Because the lessons and, indeed, reckoning with Facebook and how it’s radically changed, improved and/or ruined lives across the globe derives from philosophy, not personality.
Strong, more deeply and insightfully than his predecessor, Jesse Eisenberg, captures the passion and contradictory premises underneath the blankness of today’s typically mixed American capitalist, personified here by Zuckerberg, who fundamentally embodies today’s blank American—particularly the college-bred American, most particularly the upper echelon college-bred American. The Social Reckoning belongs instead to the young American, who is hopeful, optimistic and idealistic. This reality-based character, Frances Haugen, portrayed by an actress named Mikey Madison, struggles to make sense of the world.
This means contending with her own depression, loneliness and despair amid the swirling madness of an industry fed by the best and worst of Americans mixed together resulting in a volatile blend which can both liberate and destroy lives. Besides capitalist Zuckerberg and technician Haugen, The Social Reckoning depicts the intellectual, Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) who writes for the Wall Street Journal, as the one who bridges the gap between the upper and lower level Facebook employees.
As two extremes on the scale of humanity, the journalist represents the middle of the road—he wins a Pulitzer Prize for his 17-part series about Facebook—and this, too, creates an interesting paradox. Purposely or not, Aaron Sorkin repudiates the false dichotomy between rich and poor, high income and low income, top executive and lower-level employee and other poisonous notions which power many of today’s ominously rising Communist, fascist and Islamic terrorists and their sympathizers.
Pivoting from the Haugen-Zuckerberg coupling, he re-directs focus to a Horwitz-Zuckerberg coupling—note how much the two men have in common as The Social Reckoning envelops the audience; how they’re moved by short gains, how they both emphasize, stress and act upon being at liberty to investigate, detect and gather information—and how they win. Zuckerberg powers the world’s most powerful website. Horwitz and his editors power one of the West’s most powerful media. Both men affect real change and billions and billions of dollars. Both radically change lives.
Yet it’s Haugen who’s posed to win the greatest prize and this is the point of The Social Reckoning. Watch the movie to find out what she gains, if anything, and whether she acts to re-gain and keep it.
Along the way, The Social Reckoning dramatizes this young technology worker’s challenge. Like Snowden, she begins by doubting the status quo. Like Snowden, she’s introverted. Like Snowden, she blows the whistle on what she learns but only after reasoning, judging and deciding to act upon her own independently reached conclusions based on knowledge of facts and evidence confirmed by her own experience and values. Emphatically and pointedly, Haugen’s not portrayed as feminist. Her activism comes only after a thorough introspection, because, like Snowden, she’s been hurt and damaged and handicapped—she’s withdrawn. Yet she’s curious. Hopeful, like Snowden, not anti-social. Haugen yearns to connect. The character Frances Haugen, as depicted here, seeks to know and understand.
“Be selfless,” instructs the employee guidebook for Facebook. Haugen discovers that she’ll need to go against this explicit advocacy of altruism as business policy (and altruism is why civilized countries, such as Australia, are right to prohibit social media for children, a judgment I’ve come to based on the writings of Cal Newport and evidence of social media’s industrial regression which ought to have been progression). The movie shows that, as predicated in altruism and programmed and engineered by blank, agnostic men of ability who refuse to judge and exercise rationality with clarity and consistency, social media atrophied, becoming a monstrosity that poisons the child and rots the soul. Altruism—through fostering chronic comparison to and living for the sake of others—is the cause.
Facebook, after Zuckerberg created it, became a behemoth with no purpose or point. It exists as a vacant vessel for numbers, statistics, metrics, algorithms and analytics, and The Social Reckoning dramatizes this, too, in number after number after number after number after number, relentlessly depicting living by numbers as death by showing the people driven solely by numbers. Note that the word is numbers, not profits—The Social Reckoning is not an anti-capitalist diatribe.
In fact, the journalist partly driven by his passion for truth mixes the same moral grayness as Zuckerberg, who is partly driven by his passion for connection. Both men lack any knowledge of how to achieve their goals to elucidate or connect. To their credit, they strive for it. Horwitz and Zuckerberg are both enterprising, curious and investigative. They both achieve success in their own fields. But it’s the egoist-individualist who self-enriches by valiantly, honorably pursuing her own happiness.
Aaron Sorkin’s thoughtful film contains great insight, whatever its flaws, including Alexandre Desplat’s overbearing musical score, which overwhelms the theater with overly percussive sound blaring when Jeremy Strong appears as Mark Zuckerberg and, again, during a montage depicting the 2021 riot on Capitol Hill, which Sorkin gets 100 percent wrong. The leftist screenwriter distorts the riot as he weaves fragments into the film to make his point.
“Get to the end,” someone says when the one who says it needs to stop and listen. Anyone who’s been on the receiving end of this cutoff to thought and conversation—today’s punitive interruptions of people who express themselves with cliches such as “I got you,” “no worries” and “you’re good,” which are often shorthand for “stop talking and shut up”—can relate to the blather in The Social Reckoning.
Philosophical arguments arise, too. That social media companies are a referee in a game is properly, correctly and rightly destroyed, countered by Zuckerberg, who points out that Facebook is the town square, not a referee in a game, pointing out that free speech is 100 percent absolute. This capitalist ideal is one with which the Wall Street Journal reporter fundamentally agrees and accepts: “You have to earn it,” he tells Haugen, his anonymous source.
Also, the interplay between a technologically ignorant reporter and the educationally ignorant technologist intrigues. The contrast dramatizes that we are all Comprachicos, to paraphrase Ayn Rand, lost in a world of machines, tools and organs, whether newspapers, apps or likes, designed to instill conformity and developed beyond our capacity to properly use them, let alone understand their impact on our lives. The exchange over the sexist claim of “mansplaining” is one of many exchanges in The Social Reckoning that makes you think and gain amusement from today’s tit-for-tat false dichotomies—all of them, or many of them, rooted in irrationalism.
Such knowledgeable, brilliant minds—founders, reporters, technicians—are all wasted, groping and struggling to breathe, yearning to live and be free, longing to belong in the world. The movie’s climax of the riot on January 6th, 2021, which cartoonishly depicts and distorts the riot without regard for those who were killed, strikes a false note even as it shows, perhaps without the filmmaker’s intention, the core of Mark Zuckerberg’s downfall.
“Take it down,” goes the phrase, repeated over and over and over during Sorkin’s anti-Trump/U.S. Capitol riots climax, an action which contradicts the moral absolutism Zuckerberg’s held throughout his young, brilliant and accomplished life. Silencing the voice of an American president, who never ordered, let alone endorsed or called for, let alone incited, anything remotely resembling a riot, let alone an insurrection, was, in reality, the beginning of the end of Facebook.
Facebook’s distorted impact on Western civilization—and not for reasons Sorkin would have you think—culminated in the asinine view that the riot was a serious attempt to overthrow the government by an incumbent president, a view for which there’s no evidence. The riot sequence, as stupid as it is, allows Sorkin to depict that Zuckerberg’s billion-dollar empire is built on a house of cards—almost literally a castle in the clouds—and this is why The Social Reckoning is a true dramatization of what it means to love your own life, which begins with owning your life.
The Social Reckoning refers to an interior process and Madison, the actress perfectly dramatizing this American whistleblower, performs the character arc from anxious, ignorant, neurotic young woman, alarmed at the radicalization of someone she knows, to the relaxed, grounded, romantic, rational—and happier—person she chooses to become, richer than anyone else on screen.
I know firsthand that depicted Zuckerberg sycophants are everywhere in Silicon Valley and other tech bubbles, such as Seattle. It’s especially prevalent in Silicon Valley, though today’s sycophancy can be rampant near you, too, whether on a military base, a Starbucks or polling place, TSA lines or a fast pass airport line where people trade privacy for speedier access to government-approved permission to travel. What you gain and what you lose by trading who you are, what you think, what you value and what you like—it’s fully accounted for in The Social Reckoning. As a reckoning, it succeeds by focusing on a character who values herself and dares to be vulnerable and reach out to a stranger on the other side of a computer monitor.
In this sense, The Social Reckoning challenges the Facebook premise that one ought to strive to be selfless, as its guidebook instructs. Whatever the awards, whatever the numbers, whatever the billions of dollars, whatever the movie’s box office receipts, whatever the multi-trillion dollar debt of a nation—or a corporation or movie studio—or your own net worth, you, too, can be rich. You, too, can be wealthy. You, too, can be healthy and happy here on earth.
This is the ideal of being social: to be selfish and begin again by choosing to connect with another man or woman—someone to whom you may give the benefit of the doubt, someone who can hold your hand or give you a thumb drive, or hug you, close, for longer than 10 seconds, longer than it takes to click like or swipe left or select an emoticon. Treat yourself like you’re an adult, not an ignoramus or a moron, The Social Reckoning proposes. You are and can and ought to be glorious, radiant and happy. This is the meaning of this movie.
I don’t know Frances Haugen and I don’t know whether this story depicts what she did with fidelity to what is true. But, in this movie, Aaron Sorkin dramatizes the power of the individual to change the world by putting herself first and foremost, and why reconnecting with reality as it is gives the individual the power to penetrate the thick clouds of disgust around you, transcend to a higher state of being with joy and profit from knowing you’re in company with the best people living in harmony with integrity on earth. Sorkin, who created or co-created the fine 1995 movie The American President, 2015’s best movie Steve Jobs, The West Wing, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Social Network, continues to create thoughtful movies. For now, The Social Reckoning is his best.
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