Aaron Sorkin’s effort to recapture the magic of The Social Network delivers a strangely outdated and incomplete portrayal of a world that demands sharper scrutiny.
Looking back, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network was a milestone for a quiet, even counterintuitive reason. Before its release, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin—a writer not precisely celebrated for his grasp of, let alone fixation on, the tech realm—was the right choice to narrate Facebook’s origin story. While Sorkin may have reframed Mark Zuckerberg into terms he could more readily grasp—namely, a fast-talking smart aleck who secretly yearns to win over a clever, earnest young woman—he and Fincher also created one of the first internet-focused movies to treat online existence as a natural outgrowth of real-world interactions, rather than the otherworldly tech gateway seen in many 1990s internet films.
Admittedly, that’s the essence of Facebook: its viral spread of social networking, something so simple and addictive that aunts, grandparents, and coworkers everywhere could grasp it. Yet understanding its simultaneous extension and distortion of the real world wasn’t a given; four years later, for instance, 2014’s Men, Women and Children was widely mocked for taking an alarmist view of the internet as a haven for adults seeking affairs, teens nursing porn addictions, and fame-hungry strivers of all ages. The Social Network, by contrast, is remarkably nonjudgmental about the basic mechanics of Facebook, anchoring its early flaws in the human weaknesses that spawned it. In hindsight, the movie only feels outdated to the extent that it underestimates Zuckerberg’s hunger for power and the potential for grim carelessness on which his online empire was built. Continue reading...
