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Aaron Sorkin's new Facebook evisceration opens with a prologue titled "White Girl Wasted." An attractive young blonde, waiting by her broken-down car in the middle of the night, is approached by concerned cops who soon smell alcohol and request a sobriety test. She cries reverse racism - the officers are Black and Latina - and whips out her phone to post a tirade to her alt-right followers on the social media platform.
Sorkin, who both wrote and directed "The Social Reckoning," apparently had no plans to revisit the world of Facebook after the critical and commercial success of 2010's "The Social Network." But his interest was reawakened when he read the Wall Street Journal's 2021 investigative series "The Facebook Files," revealing how the company knew of its toxic output (stoking misinformation, depressing anorexic teenagers, creating a haven for traffickers) but did nothing to curtail it.
"'The Social Network' was about how Facebook was invented," Sorkin told Vanity Fair. "‘The Social Reckoning' is about what it's become."
Which is … what, exactly? A cesspool? A refuge for bots and Russian agents and videos of shelter dogs choosing their new owners that turn out to be AI?
It has become, for many of us, variations of "White Girl Wasted": extremists or clownsticks imploring viewers to do their own research, which inevitably means believe my conspiracy. In "The Social Reckoning," a mild-mannered Facebook data scientist named Frances Haugen watches the wasted White girl on her desktop screen in 2018. Frances is horrified. She was once friends with the blonde, who back then identified as liberal. But just a few years later she's on the very social network Frances works for, streaming her derogatory meltdown for a flurry of likes.
"I wanted to find out who radicalized her," Frances tells the Wall Street Journal reporter with whom she is collaborating in secret. "We did."
"The Social Reckoning" is a solid entry into the field of classic journalism movies, with the relationship between reporter and source at the center of the plot. As journalist Jeff Horwitz, Jeremy Allen White is appropriately dogged and rumpled, and Mikey Madison as a mousy Frances is believable as the type of employee whose slightly off-putting demeanor makes her colleagues ignore her prescient warnings.
(Although: While I've always insisted that Sorkin can write great female characters, I started having my doubts when Frances announces that she has to come to every meet-up dressed in preposterously skimpy clothing in case a co-worker spots her. Because, apparently, "meeting a friend," "having a drink at the bar" or "I love the nachos here" are not excuses a woman can make, but "I am a secret call girl" is.)
Jeremy Strong steps into the role of Mark Zuckerberg with all the love and warmth of the second-place entry in a college robotics competition, the kind of robot that attempts to perform a basic human function, like running or dancing, only to completely fall apart, little metallic hands pawing at the air.
Who is the man inside this fleece vest? What does he love? What motivates him? Fear of losing money and clout, more than one scene vaguely implies, as the movie time-jumps between 2018 and 2021, dropping in on company meetings, congressional testimonies, the release of the Wall Street Journal exposé and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot.
Zuckerberg's repeated explanation for why Facebook is allowing the things it's allowing - false political ads, racist groups recruiting with the fervor of a career fair - is that "Facebook is not the referee. We're the town square." He says this as though he believes it. But it's incredibly far-fetched that a man who made his fortune understanding the connection that people desire would be so dense in understanding what they would do once they got it.
"The Social Reckoning," as a clinically crafted procedural, does a fine job helping tech-dummies like Horwitz (and us, the audience) understand terminology like "meaningful social interactions." Sorkin's dialogue is sharp, the set-dressing of Facebook is impeccable.
But "The Social Network" was a much better movie, because it never lost sight of the grubby, striving humanity behind the company. Whatever Sorkin might now say, that movie was barely about how Facebook was invented. It was about having rizz and not having rizz, about seeking popularity without knowing how to attain it, about the feeling of pressing your nose against the window of a luxury-goods store and being told none of it is for you.
Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) was the nose-presser in that movie, rejected by a girlfriend and jealous of his friend Eduardo, who has just been invited to join an elite "final club" at their university, Harvard. The insecurity becomes wrath, the wrath becomes Facebook, originally conceptualized as a sort of digital social-directory-with-photographs to connect students on campus. The symbolic gatekeepers of the luxury Ivy League are the Winklevoss twins - golden, pedigreed crew-gods who see Zuckerberg as a nerd to figure out the grunt work of their grand ideas.
By the end, Zuckerberg has won. The Winklevi, as he petulantly dubs them, have no idea what would make someone want to desperately belong. They were born with silver spoons ensconced so cozily in their mouths that they never knew what it felt like to be starving. Zuckerberg - seething, desperate, so afraid of being disliked that he goes out of his way to be unlikable - is starving, and so are the people he brings into his fold. In one of the movie's best lines, slick Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), an original main player, is arrested and frisked by the police, a process through which all of his hard-earned cool disappears. "That's an EpiPen," he whimpers, as the drug-fueled party he's organized gets busted. "That's my inhaler."
"The Social Reckoning" has no such thoughtful spelunking into the psyche of its characters. Horwitz does what he does because he's a curious journalist. Zuckerberg does what he does because he's apparently been calcified long ago. Frances comes the closest to humanity when she confesses that she wanted to work at Facebook because she knows what it's like to be awkward in person and your best self behind a screen. But the movie's most relatable characters are the ones we barely see at all: Facebook's users. The poor schlubs outside of Facebook's walls, who visited the site with regularity and became the casual victims of its algorithm.
If "The Social Reckoning" isn't about humanity, what is it about? Hell, pretty much. How hell can now be created by those algorithmic tweaks, each designed to make us a little less empathetic and a little more filled with rage. The networks that were supposed to connect us eventually realized that the best way to keep us on their products was to divide us.
At one point in the film, the sole skeptic on Zuckerberg's crisis management team, a delightfully cantankerous Bill Burr, asks whether, if Facebook won't agree to remove harmful content, the site could at least label it: "How about telling us which things are vegetables and which are carrot-shaped pieces of dirt?"
But a yes-man quickly jumps in to let Zuckerberg off the hook. "People know when they're being lied to," he says, which is perhaps the most untrue statement ever spoken about modern social media, getting less true every year and maybe every month.
Sometimes I recommend movies that I don't completely love, specifically because I think they're important to see: because they reveal something necessary about how we got where we are. Last year's "Nuremberg" comes to mind; the script and story were uneven, but the exploration of how a democracy falls to an authoritarian regime seemed as prescient as ever.
But I'm not sure "The Social Reckoning" has the same sense of urgency. The movie ends in 2021, and things have only gotten worse. We know social media is often bad for us. We often can't stop. Because we want to belong. We want to be liked. We are grubby and gullible and longing for connection. The movie will make you angry, but you're probably already angry. Everyone is already angry. We grew up on these sites, and now everywhere you look there's a White Girl Wasted by the side of the road.
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Previously:
• What the Sydney Sweeney nudity controversy is really about
• The abject hell of the Lindsay Clancy trial
• Every era gets the 'Odyssey' it deserves
• Parenting in the world of 'Million Dollar Nannies'
• RFK Jr. is now handling snakes. What does this mean?
• The Oscars are a lost cause
• I think I know why everyone's lost their minds over Taylor and Travis
• 02/23/23: Don Lemon returned with an apology in a can
• 06/02/22: The trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard was too much and not enough
• 03/30/22: The misguided chivalry of Will Smith
• 02/03/21: AOC compares the talking points of her GOP colleagues to the tactics of an abuser
• 11/10/20: The end of Trumpism? Yeah, keep dreaming
• 11/09/20: America's confused obsession with Mary Kay Letourneau
• 07/09/20: The debate over schools reopening isn't about education. It's about how parents are quietly losing their minds
• 07/06/20: Ghislaine Maxwell allegedly turned an intuitive female bond into a tool for abuse
• 06/10/20: The world is messy and hard to control. Take help, and give it, where you can
• 05/21/20: Knock, knock: Who's there? Answering the door is no joke during pandemic
• 04/15/20: Don't wave away frivolous pleasures. Those are also 'essential' in hard times
• 03/20/20: Pandemic, panic and toilet paper mathematics
• 01/13/20: Meghan Markle just flipped the princess fantasy on its big crowned head
• 01/08/20: In court, powerful men have a lot to gain by looking helpless
• 10/18/19: Does Mayor Pete sound assertive or ... shrill?
This time, it's not just female candidates beset by archetypes and associations
• 09/18/19: The messiness and meaning of Caroline Calloway
• 08/29/19: Andrew Luck, ultimate male?
• 08/12/19: Epstein did not deserve to keep his 'allegedlys'
• 08/02/19: The Dems' 2020 'Wife Guys'
• 01/09/19: R. Kelly, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK: How pretending to be bad boys helped them get away with being bad men