Aaron Sorkin operates between ‘typage’ and toadying.
Ever since Aaron Sorkin wrote The West Wing (1999–2006), the talking-while-walking TV series about Oval Office intrigues, reviewers have considered him a new Tocqueville and stood ready to salute his latest pseudo-political whimsy. This time it’s The Social Reckoning, which picks up where The Social Network (2010) left off, introducing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (then played by fast-talking Jesse Eisenberg, now by Jeremy Strong) as a remorseless Big Tech visionary. It was a slick celebrity hagiography that couldn’t get past Sorkin’s fascination with power, or director David Fincher’s love of crime, so it presented Zuckerberg as the smartest man in the room — terrifying yet awesome.
Now Sorkin shows his Crusader Rabbit side, shrewdly revisiting The Social Network in a sequel that, instead, glorifies the press as guardians of the free speech that Zuckerberg endangered. (“I’m a free-speech absolutist!” he bellows.) Sorkin’s heroes are Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White), both concerned about the threat of social media’s influence.
This is Sorkin’s entry into the misinformation/disinformation wars, depicting Haugen and Horwitz as if they’re a disillusioned yet committed Gen X Woodward and Bernstein. Predictably, liberal Sorkin comes out on the side of censorship (“guardrails” in wonk parlance) as long as it’s controlled by media “experts” who share his passion.
Sorkin’s passion doesn’t extend to filmmaking. He impresses those who are similarly impressed by his fascination with moguls. The Social Reckoning illustrates his delusion of insider knowledge as Sorkin parallels babes-in-the-woods Haugen and Horwitz with Zuckerberg himself preparing to speak before Congress by having mock hearings that reveal his dark egotism. This is the key gimmick of Sorkin’s sequel. Haugen’s girlish dithering (Madison’s Anora specialty) caters to feminist sympathies but is less significant than the calf-eyed sincerity of Sorkin’s stand-in character: Horwitz.
There’s uncanny similarity between White and Jeremy Strong’s impersonation of Zuckerberg. Sorkin doesn’t use typage — the practice of casting actors on the basis of their appearance and resemblance to a social type — in a way that’s crucial to cinematic storytelling. This is second-rate TV-caliber typage. The sad-eyed countenance of both actors recalls the dread that Zuckerberg inspired during his 2024 congressional testimony when his newly short-cropped hairstyle lent him an alien-like or reptilian appearance.
Sorkin pays subliminal homage to Horwitz, as he does to Zuckerberg, admiring the power of their influence, setting up Zuckerberg’s congressional hearing without honestly depicting what it revealed morally. Sorkin seems ignorant of the ideological subversion that takes place in the command of culture by either Big Tech or mainstream media. Harvard gave Zuckerberg bourgeois elitist privilege, which Sorkin is incapable of recognizing or analyzing (proven in his insipid The American President and A Few Good Men). Zuckerberg’s face is not drawn like Strong’s, yet it’s still the what-me-worry countenance of an aged boyish sociopath. That the tech titan is as hangdog as the muckraking reporter shows that Sorkin is not an artist who can make meaning of their resemblance, their moral blur.
Sorkin inserts footage of the January 6 Capitol riot, yet Haugen and Horwitz ignore Facebook’s suppression of conservatives and Zuckerberg’s massive financial contribution to Democrats, which all preceded troubling and still unresolved election irregularities. Sinister Fincher might at least have included an aside on the diabolical suppression of content by Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival, Jack Dorsey. “We’re the public square!” Zuckerberg defends his company. But the revelation that he needed to be coached when Congress wasn’t going to arrest him anyway defies reality. Sorkin doesn’t realize that Zuckerberg’s reckoning has not yet come — if it ever will.
The Social Reckoning is a piece of disingenuous mythmaking that pretends to give Zuckerberg the comeuppance many have desired for the Facebook founder who censored President Trump, donated millions to help the Democratic Party win the 2020 election, and then stonewalled during several congressional hearings. However, the movie seems awestruck, owing to Sorkin’s pint-sized obsequiousness. Sorkin’s not an artist; he’s a toady.
