The Movies of Aaron Sorkin, Part 6

The Social Network: It’s A Masterpiece. I Understand Why It Lost Best Picture

As was a pattern of mine before the pandemic, I spent much of the fall and winter of 2010 seeing many of the potential nominees for Best Picture in the theaters and on DVD before the Academy Awards. I ended up seeing Inception well before it was up for Oscar nominations, The King’s Speech, The Fighter and True Grit all in the weeks and months surrounding and in the aftermath of the nominations and I ended up seeing on DVD Toy Story 3, The Kids are All Right and Winter’s Bone before the Oscars and I may have seen Black Swan by that point as well.

That said, I saw The Social Network before I saw the lion’s share of these movies, and I knew early on it was going to be a heavy favorite for the Oscars in 2011. By that point I was heavily following most of the many critics groups that gave awards at that point and by the end of 2010, The Social Network had won the lion’s share of the awards for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay. When the Golden Globes occurred in 2011, the only one of these films that didn’t receive a nomination for Best Picture in one of the major categories was Winter’s Bone. The Social Network took all three prizes and seemed set to sweep the Oscars that February.

Then momentum shifted. First the SAG Awards gave Best Acting Ensemble. Tom Hooper took the Best Director prize from the Directors Guild over Fincher and while the film took best Adapted Screenplay from the Writer’s Guild the tide had turned. When the most notorious Oscars of the century (to that point) took place that February, The King’s Speech was the big winner, taking Best Picture, Director and Actor. Sorkin won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay but that was the only major award The Social Network received.

Almost immediately afterward this choice was considered one of the worst blunders in Oscar history. I remember an article in Entertainment Weekly publishing it the following year, arguing that it was as abominable a choice as How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane and Crash over Brokeback Mountain. At the time and even years after the fact, I still don’t consider that as big a blunder as some of the other horrible choices. For one thing I still thing The King’s Speech is one of the best films I’ve seen in this century and I also think there were many other good choices among the nominees of 2010 with the sole exception of The Blind Side which is by far one of the worst choice they ever made. But most importantly with the knowledge of the kind of films that the Oscars love to recognize, I know in my heart that despite the superior quality of The Social Network and all the early critical raves, it never had a realistic chance of getting Best Picture.

I don’t deny it’s a brilliant movie. It has one of the best screenplays I’ve ever seen in a motion picture and that was apparent from the opening scene. The direction by David Fincher was one of the greatest tour de forces in his career and I’ll be honest, he should have taken the prize over Hooper. The acting is flawless from Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield, all the way down to the opening scene of Rooney Mara. The musical score by Trent Reznor is superb and all the technical aspects are flawless. I don’t think it’s the best film Sorkin ever wrote but it’s clearly one of the greatest accomplishments in film-making, particularly when it comes to telling a story of a subject that should have been, by all rights, unfilmable. On paper, it has all the trademarks of the movie that the Oscars should give Best Picture to — save for one critical factor. The story of The Social Network is not inspirational.

The Social Network is the story of how Mark Zuckerberg became the youngest billionaire in history which under other circumstances — perhaps in different hands than Sorkin’s — might have been sold as a rags to riches to story. If you’ve read all the other articles in the series I’ve written, you know by now that would too simple and uninteresting a narrative for Sorkin to tell, certainly by this point in his film career. (The Social Network was his fifth screenplay and his second adaptation.) So Sorkin frames a narrative by having Mark have a conversation with a fictional character in gamesmanship who calls him an asshole and storms out, goes home, gets drunk, creates a home page where he can rank all the women of Harvard by their beauty, crashes the Harvard website, goes before the board and says that he wants recognition from them, seems surprised when they don’t understand what he’s asking, basically the idea of Facebook from two men, feels no remorse then moves to Silicon Valley and sells his own friend out when he thinks he’s an inconvenience and then spends the entire film annoyed that he has to bother his days with depositions. I kind of get why the Oscars might have wanted to honor a story where George VI overcomes his stutter; it makes for a better highlight reel. (And if you don’t understand why The Blind Side was nominated for Best Picture, you clearly don’t get how the Academy Awards work.)

Roger Ebert, my north star, named The Social Network the best film of 2010. (For the record, The King’s Speech was number 2, followed by Black Swan and Winter’s Bone, Inception and The Kids are All Right were all on the list as well.) Because one can rarely improve on the master, I will be quoting at length from Ebert’s review, along with some of my own insights throughout this article.

Ebert says Zuckerberg reminded him a ‘touch of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer.” I don’t take offense when he says there may be a touch of Asperger’s (as it was known in 2010) in Zuckerberg: “They possess genius but are tone-deaf in social situations. Example: It is inefficient to seek romance by using strict logic to demonstrate your intellectual arrogance” — basically, the film’s classic opening scene. He also says the movie has ‘the rare quality of being not only as smart as its brilliant hero, but in the same way: It is cocksure, impatient, cold, exciting and instinctively perceptive.” (Makes you wonder if Zuckerberg even read the reviews before he tried to sue Sorkin and the filmmakers.)

He then gives a description that could be speaking for all of Sorkin’s work to a degree, though he seems to give perhaps too much credit to David Fincher: “It makes an untellable story clear and fascinating. It is said to be impossible to make a movie about a writer because how can you show him only writing? It must also be impossible to make a movie about a computer programmer, because what is writing in a language few people in the audience know?” That’s why I believe Sorkin deserves more credit than Fincher for making The Social Network function. For all his immense talents as a director and make no mistake Fincher is one of the best working today, this film would have impossible without Sorkin’s approach to it when he adapted The Accidental Billionaires.

Describing Facebook Ebert writes: “To conceive of Facebook Zuckerberg needed to know almost nothing about relationships or human nature (and apparently he didn’t)” Given what we now have seen about Zuckerberg, there’s a good chance we can strike the ‘almost’ from the sentence. Ebert speaks in terms of deep admiration for Zuckerberg in the film, mainly because in 2010 (and not until long after Ebert died) we knew very little about the kind of businessman he was and the kind of company he ran. Later reviews of The Social Network have described the movie as ‘a supervillains origin story’ and it’s hard to think of a better description given the world that Facebook has made.

I have written that The Social Network is the first in what I consider Sorkin’s toxic masculinity trilogy, with the other two films being Steve Jobs and Molly’s Game. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first two movies in that series are about Silicon Valley, one of the most misogynist industries in a world that seems to keep coming up with example of newer ones. It is telling not only that The Social Network is inspired by a sexist and illegal program that is immensely popular but that aside from Erica (who disappears after the opening scene) there are only two female characters of note: Rashida Jones all-too patient corporate attorney and Brenda Song’s Christy, an attractive Asian woman who is Eduardo’s girlfriend. Ebert points out that Sorkin never comments on the omnipresence of attractive Asian women in the film; he doesn’t have too, it’s practically understood.

In his review Ebert says part in admiration, partly appalled that ‘the genius of Facebook requires not psychological insight but its method of combining ego with interaction. Zuckerberg wanted to get revenge on all the women at Harvard. To do that he involved them in a matrix that is still growing.” Ebert had no way of knowing he was basically describing the model of every form of social media that has come around since then; one wonders just how appalled he’d have been to see so many amateur critics on Twitter.

Ebert calls Zuckerberg a prodigy. Here is his justification:

“It’s said that there are child prodigies in only three areas: math, music and chess. These nonverbal areas require little maturity or knowledge of human nature, but a quick ability to perceive patterns, logical rules, and linkages. I suspect computer programming may be a fourth one.”

Ebert is right as far as how many billionaires came out of Silicon Valley of which men like Zuckerberg and Jobs were the start. Given how much we have seen over the years. The difference has been that once these men manage to achieve their goals and become billionaires, they quickly become bored and find more ways to conquer the world.

Zuckerberg doesn’t seem to have much of a social life in the film, and we only seem to see him working. I now wonder how much of this is Sorkin trying to explain why Zuckerberg seemed so disinterested in so much of what was happening around him, why he seems to be loyal to Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) his roommate and only friend, only to freeze him out when Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake), the founder of Napster and Plaxo, grabs him by the ears and pulls him into the big time. In Sorkin’s version of events, Parker convinces Zuckerberg to come to Silicon Valley and introduces him into venture capitalism but can’t convince him (in the film) to go into the fast lane and enjoy the fruits of his labor. In that version of events Zuckerberg doesn’t seem aware of what he is doing when Sean redrafts the financial agreement of Facebook to write himself in and Eduardo out.

Based on what we’ve learned since I think there’s a greater possibility Zuckerberg was in fact aware of what was happening: he was just indifferent. Eduardo may have been Mark’s only friend but as we’ve seen throughout the film Mark has no real compassion for anybody and very well might have disposed of Eduardo when it became inconvenient. (There are numerous scenes in the movie that suggest he might very well have done so.) Mark doesn’t party or engage with women because he’s uncomfortable in social settings and as we know he thinks he’s above them. And as we see in the final scene of the film, Zuckerberg is looking at Erica’s image on Facebook, but I doubt it’s out of sympathy or regret. For all we know, he uses this instance to invent trolling.

I think there’s an argument that while Ebert was right to admire and love The Social Network he misread Sorkin’s portrayal of Zuckerberg. You can’t blame him for that: he was a movie critic of a different generation and he lived an era before the horrors of social media were all too apparent. His job was to review the movie before him as a work of art and The Social Network certainly qualifies as that regard.

In his rave of Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg Ebert says: “he’s a heat-seeking missile in search of his own goals.” While its agreed that Eisenberg was horribly miscast as Lex Luthor, if you see The Social Network you can at least understand why someone like Snyder might have thought it was a good idea: Lex Luthor is a powerful, ruthless billionaire whose made his fortune by means that are not understood and is a powerful figure in society, admired by many with only a few knowing his true nature. That fits Eisenberg’s portrayal of Zuckerberg to a tee; the fault may very well be in the screenplay.

I have to say that while this was a superb performance by Eisenberg, it may not have been the best thing for his career. As Ebert writes, prior to The Social Network, he was best known as a child actor for playing nice or clueless. He did this superbly well, mostly in such underrated indie films as Roger Dodger, The Squid and The Whale and Solitary Man and the sweet comedy Adventureland which paired him with Kristin Stewart for the first time. After that, he began to be typecast in roles that involved arrogance, Dan in Now You See Me franchise and Lex Luthor and other films that showed less of his innocence. Toby Fleishman was supposed to be sympathetic in Fleishman is in Trouble but the after-effect of Zuckerberg was so great, I had a lot of trouble drumming up sympathy for him. He’s still capable of great performances in smaller work — he played Marcel Marceau in Resistance — but we rarely see his softer side any more.

Arnie Hammer’s brilliance as the Winklevoss Twins is one of the great tricks in filmmaking. Hammer had worked mostly in television prior to The Social Network (his biggest role to that point had been on Gossip Girl and Reaper) but his work was his breakout performance. Sadly even before his career self-destructed he squandered much of his potential in horrible tv to film adaptations as The Lone Ranger and the nearly as disastrous The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Only occasionally for the rest of what is now the end of his career, in such movies as Call Me By Your Name, Nocturnal Animals and the undervalued On The Basis of Sex this we get a hint of the actor who had such potential.

But the standout performance in this movie comes from Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin. Those who only know Garfield for his work as The Amazing Spider-Man (and I know I’m given them to much credit) know that he has been one of the greatest actors of the 21st century. He started in British TV and films, most famously as the lead in Red Riding before having his breakout year in 2010 with this film and the just as masterful Never Let Me Go. He is equally brilliant in both movies and Eduardo is the first sign of the great actor he became. It was a tough field of Supporting Actors to break into in 2010 and its hard to know, considering the field was Christian Bale, Mark Ruffalo, Geoffrey Rush, John Hawkes and Jeremy Renner (for The Town) who you’d kick out in his stead. But Eduard is the one truly good person in The Social Network, a man who is loyal to a person who doesn’t know how to be good to other people, who is basically the public face of a company that is run by a man who can not be in public and who is frozen out due to expediency. Maybe Ebert is right that Eduardo was not the right man to be CFO of a company that took off without him but considering everything that happened afterwards, he might have been able to put out a few fires. (Or far more likely, become the sacrificial lamb down the line.) Garfield has slowly but surely built up an impressive resume in films such as Hacksaw Ridge, Silence and tick, tick…BOOM!, choosing his projects with care and usually delivering when he does. There is a common empathy is much of his work in almost all the projects he does and we get the first real sign of his depths here.

The way Sorkin frames The Social Network are among the most well known of all his films and how he does it are public knowledge, so I won’t go into it here. Ebert is polite when he says in the deposition that there is a case to be made against Zuckerberg, but I think he is wrong when he calls his flaws ‘sins of omission.” His own description of Zuckerberg belies that as he describes him as a chess-master who can see who can see into a system of unlimited possibilities and make a winning move. I find it hard to fathom that Zuckerberg could be only that clever when it came to programming and not in the world of business. Certainly everything we’ve learned about both him and Facebook in the last decade belies that. This is a man, remember, who popularized the statement “Move Fast and Break Things’. He wouldn’t have said if he hadn’t been willing to do it and this film indicates that Zuckerberg defines basic human contact as something that he is more than willing to break in order to move fast.

The Social Network as I said is a masterpiece and a classic in every sense of the term. But despite all the critical praise and awards, I know better now than I did before that it never had a chance to win Best Picture. Hollywood is as much a business as Silicon Valley and the most important part of Hollywood as a business is to do not do the most famous part of the tagline which is make enemies. And if you think that the Oscars were really going to give Best Picture to a movie that portrayed in the youngest billionaire on Forbes 500 at 2010 this accurately…well, then you might understand why they chose to give the Oscar to The King’s Speech instead.