Aaron Sorkin, The Social Network and the Yawning Void that Cannot Be Filled
Most profiles of Aaron Sorkin usually mention the enormous gap between the bright earnestness of his work and the sordid chaos of his personal life. They do this because it’s insane. Between the reported facts and salacious rumors I’ve heard about the guy, Aaron Sorkin’s work ought to be like Bret Easton Ellis with snappier dialogue. It’s not that. For the most part, Sorkin is a chronicler of moral crusaders, principled professionals and fussy geniuses. Molly’s Game was the closest he came to pulp storytelling, and that still turned into a heartfelt legal drama by the last act. Somehow.
I’ve been hot and cold on the guy’s work for twenty years. I’m not immune to the charms of A Few Good Men or early West Wing, but I have to put myself in a very 90s mindset to enjoy them. Most of his stuff I just hate. I can see all the self-plagiarism and stylistic ticks. I recognize all of his stupid prejudices and peccadilloes, his knee-jerk technophobia, his gnarled sexism, his unrepentant snobbery. He constantly constructs straw men characters out of various things he hates so his protagonists can righteously scream at them; persnickety service workers, religious right-wingers, anyone under the age of 35. His political worldview is infuriating, pure limousine liberalism. His opinions piss me off even when I agree with him. If I had a Substack when Being the Ricardos was released I’d have written some STUFF, let me tell ya.
The Social Network is the one major exception. I quite liked it back in 2010, but I’ve seen it several times since, and I love it more with each watch. It’s one of the best Hollywood movies of its decade, one of the best of the 21st century, in fact. It’s the kind of endlessly rewatchable grounded drama that…well, that still gets made, but we’ll see for how much longer.
If you haven’t seen it by now (and you should, it’s been over a decade) The Social Network is about Mark Zuckerberg and the early days of Facebook, back when it was a faddish new website with massive growth potential, not an ailing tech dinosaur that sparked a genocide or two. Sorkin’s Zuckerberg is filled with arrogance and spite, yet he’s desperate for status and acceptance, infuriated by his exclusion from anything, anywhere. That obsession with cliques and popularity becomes the foundation on which Facebook is built; no one can see your profile but your chosen “friends,” with explicit invitation.
I say “Sorkin’s Zuckerberg” because the Zuckerberg portrayed in The Social Network is mostly fictional. Movie Zuck is a self-hating nerd who ends up friendless and alone, but Real Zuck was dating Priscilla Chan, his future wife, during Facebook’s development period, and maintained several close friendships as business boomed (just not all of them). Sorkin’s Zuckerberg hisses and seethes with envy and contempt, but the real Zuckerberg isn’t all that passionate. He comes off empty and awkward in interviews and congressional hearings, like a robot constantly optimizing for efficiency and profit. To summarize with a goofy movie analogy (‘cause why not), Movie Zuck is Charles Foster Kane and Real Zuck is Hal 9000; polite, guileless and dispassionate in his malevolence.
I suspect the anger in Movie Zuck is actually Sorkin’s. They’re more similar than you’d think, both precocious Westchester Jews from upper-middle-class families, but the speed and vigor of their success was markedly different. Zuckerberg became a billionaire before he was old enough to rent a car, while it took Sorkin ten years to find anything approaching celebrity. Aaron was the artsy black sheep in a family of civic-minded professionals, his father a WWII veteran, his sister a JAG lawyer, his brother an assistant DA for New York state. Aaron wanted to be an actor. He went to Syracuse for theater and spent a decade struggling in New York City, failing auditions, waiting tables, developing a bad coke habit. He finally hit when he wrote A Few Good Men with his sister as advisor and inspiration, making him a blue chip screenwriter at age 32. But I wonder if that decade of grinding it out in basement theaters did a number on his psyche. Sorkin is obsessed with accreditation, which he notably lacks. His characters are forever delivering big, huffy monologues boasting of their diplomas and professional eminence. That works fine when he’s writing for White House aides, but it sounds silly when he applies the same tone to show biz types. Just look at this scene. Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?
That arrogance born of deep insecurity is all over The Social Network. Movie Zuck is driven by a desire for esteem, despite being a charmless goblin who cares for no one. He envies his best friend and roommate Eduardo Saverin, a kindly nerd with more friends and more cash to his name (at first). He envies Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, two Harvard boys who come to Zuck with a business idea that kind of inspires Facebook; both tall, athletic, old money WASPs, members of the hyper-elite Porcellian Club, as close to aristocracy as Americans get. Zuckerberg happily abandons the Winklevoss twins and fires Eduardo before the company goes supernova, claiming they’re all dead weight. Sorkin implies that Zuck was just jealous.
Movie Zuck is probably the best character Aaron Sorkin ever crafted, and he’s unlike any protagonist he ever wrote. Your average Sorkin heroes are only flawed because they’re demanding perfectionists, like they’re the living embodiment of job interview bullshit. Zuckerberg starts a bad guy and ends a bad guy. The thing is, he’s not entirely unsympathetic. There’s a wounded vulnerability to his malice, like an abused chihuahua that can’t stop barking at everything. A piece of this is Jesse Eisenberg’s brilliant performance, but Sorkin gives Zuck just enough pathetic insecurity to make him interesting. Mark wanted everything and got it, but it didn’t salve his wounded ego. He wanted to be born with it. He wanted to be entitled to it.
To be bluntly honest, I relate to that. Sorkin and I have a few things in common; biting insecurity, artsy inclinations, an inexplicable desire for attention. Luck, money, love and opportunity never quite fills the void in the middle of everything. Where does this dissatisfaction come from? Maybe it’s because we’re Jews (still knocking at America’s carapace of White WASP dominance, no matter how much money we make), maybe it’s because we’re screenwriters (an oft-abused piece of the Hollywood machine, too ugly, grumpy and powerless to be invited to the good parties), or maybe it’s just being human. Maybe everyone has something to be grateful for, but yearns for something they can’t have. Maybe everyone feels like the disdained underdog in the story of their own lives. Maybe everyone wants to belong, but never feels like they do.
It’s so, so smart to connect this impossible desire for belonging with the invention of Facebook, a website that simulates community but ends up making you lonely and insane. It’s also why Hollywood’s many attempts at dramatizing Silicon Valley have run the gamut from “bad” to “just okay.” Steve Jobs, Super Pumped, The Dropout and WeCrashed are all fairly dull narratives about the pitfalls of ambition, even if they’re slickly produced and well-acted. The Social Network tries to get at why we get online in the first place; to be seen, heard and admired, and to have that admiration quantified by likes and follower counts. It’s remarkable that an ornery technophobe like Sorkin wrote one of the best American movies about being online. Actually, maybe it’s not that remarkable.
The final scene of the The Social Network has Mark Zuckerberg friending his ex from college, pathetically refreshing his browser to see if she’d accept. Like I said, this is purely Sorkin’s invention. Real Zuck isn’t a loner by any means, he’s been with his wife since 2003, the year of Facebook’s inception. They have two kids with a third on the way. In the meantime, his company grew from 500 million users in 2010, the figure quoted at the end of The Social Network, to 2.98 billion as of last quarter. In 2021, before rising interest rates gutted most tech stocks, Zuck was the third-richest person on Earth. (He’s still ranked 18th, so don’t be too sad.) Zuckerberg did this by peddling a product that verifiably makes your life worse. His company has destroyed journalism and publishing, online and off, for any outlet without a billionaire sugar daddy or major corporate partner. Facebook’s algorithmic news feed has changed global politics, provoking a bizarre era of nationalist violence and conspiratorial paranoia, eroding democratic governance and breeding lunatic cults of personality. Facebook’s ability to stoke chaos and race resentment may have sparked a genocide in Myanmar, resulting in 25,000 deaths and almost 700,000 displaced from their homes. Maybe some of these developments were inevitable as the globe got internet access, but Facebook certainly didn’t help. The last line of The Social Network, delivered by Rashida Jones, is “You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.” Turns out, she was wrong. Mark Zuckerberg is a huge asshole. He’s one of the biggest assholes alive. Aaron Sorkin relates. So do I.