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Abe Beame is breaking up with me?
“One valid bit, one modified bit, one reference bit, five permission bits”
-Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network
I hate Aaron Sorkin. It’s not solely for his completely fucked sexual politics, which are nearly impossible to stomach. It’s not his lazy repetition, which takes rote shtick and with repeated tortuous re-exhumations elevates bad ideas to their own shorthand language. It’s because I love dialogue. Good conversation consecrated to film. Snippets of conversation that forward story and strip away the dense mythology of character. I hate Sorkin because he’s arguably our greatest modern dialogist. His conversations mirror the pattern of modern speech assuming you have terrible, brainy, neurotic, unfuckable white, male acquaintances. I hate Sorkin because he peeped game from two of my favorite all time screen writers, Preston Sturgess and Billy Wilder, and largely missed the point.
And yet if you were to ask me what my favorite movies made this century are, two that would be very near the top of my list would be Moneyball and The Social Network. You’d be hard pressed to find a writer shooting his shot and nailing the heat check the way Sorkin did with a best picture frontrunner and a film about sabermetrics that contains the kernel of loss and mortality in its weary core.
Moneyball was co-written with Steve Zeitlan—the guy who wrote my all time favorite script in Schindler’s List—and it has a grown up, restrained feel largely absent from most if not all of Sorkin’s work. It feels more like he did a punch up. But The Social Network was all him, and it’s a great, brilliant film. What’s fascinating is the film succeeds on the grounds so many projects helmed by its writer failed for the exact same reason: The protagonist is a smug, miserable asshole. Sorkin’s brief insight into the unbearable nature of his leads made for one of the all time great villains in film.
What made the work of Sturgess and Wilder brilliant is at its best, the razor sharp wit and verbal dexterity of their characters were armor, an obfuscation diverting attention from their deep American cynicism and emotional scarring. In Sorkin’s hands they are means to an end, the sword and shield wielded by the last good man to appeal to our best natures and win the day with a well crafted argument. It’s a lullaby, American folklore telling us a story about a people and place that never really existed.
What Sorkin seems unable to comprehend time and time again is how deeply shitty, oblivious, and vile his characters are. Sorkin proxies like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, Bradley Whitford in The West Wing, or Michael Douglas in The American President are smarmy douchebags in love with the sound of their voices, so dedicated to an antiquated reverence for institutions and moral certitude that they don’t recognize their own insufferable natures.
But in Zuckerberg Sorkin found a perfect muse, a ruthless, wounded autistic genius nobody likes who wields his intelligence as a deadly weapon, off-putting and alienating in every social exchange. What’s fascinating is how little Sorkin has to change to convert his typical hero to a villain. There’s almost no difference between Sorkin’s Zuckerberg or say, Jeff Daniels in The News Room besides how the audience is instructed to feel about the character.
The pull quote in the header of this piece is delivered by Jesse Eisenberg (created by God in a lab to spew Sorkin dialogue) as he absentmindedly runs out of a programming class. It’s a classic Sorkin gambit, the genius being performatively brilliant, dismantling an antagonist’s assumptions with superior intellect. Only here it’s meant to play as arrogant and off putting, which it does but really is in no way different than say, Rob Lowe taking a stubborn Republican senator to task.
The Social Network also gives us Sorkin’s all time best female character, Rooney Mara as Erica Albright. In her limited screen time she dismantles Zuckerberg at every turn and in her rejection and disdain gives us the clarity Sorkin typically withholds. His female characters are typically projection screens for his men to talk at. They tweak and nudge and flirt and banter and at the bottom of it is attraction and admiration. Whereas Albright completely eviscerates Zuckerberg from the outset and teaches the audience how to feel about him.
In The Social Network Sorkin’s trademark twitchy ping pong dialogue works because we’re supposed to hate all parties involved and we do. The unbearably clever moron god kings at Harvard and corporate lawyers ooze in every scene regardless of which side they’re on. It’s fun to imagine the oblivious shadow version of the film where Sorkin presents Zuckerberg as an iconoclast hero out to revolutionize the way in which people connect online as he uses his brilliance to combat hacks and frauds en route to a well deserved, hard earned empire.
Sorkin would go onto to make what should’ve been another dunk with Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs. The film doesn’t really work, partially because of its structure but more problematically, you can tell Sorkin likes and is drawn in by the magnetism of his subject even as he’s running around doing shitty things. It lacks the teeth of his Facebook takedown (It also isn’t Boyle at his best, and having top of his game Fincher running point on The Social Network definitely helped).
Of course, he then made The Newsroom, probably the most odious of all his projects over the decades because it’s about a vitally important hour long nightly network news show, which would kind of be like a show about a Model T changing NASCAR. With Molly’s Game, he set himself up for failure with a female protagonist who predictably just runs around getting owned throughout most of the film’s running time but still could’ve been good if he wasn’t directing it.
The Social Network was a once in a lifetime moment for Aaron Sorkin. He was able to cut through the noise of a career built on bullshit and utilize his talents to their full extent. He was finally able to look in the mirror and assess his stock male protagonist for what he’s always been. It’s an instructive case study in how minor shifts of tone and perspective can lend clarity.
If I was Sorkin’s agent I’d be pushing him to move in this vein, to revisit his greatest hits and remake them in new light, perhaps an Eisenberg DC vehicle featuring his coked up Silicon Valley take on Lex Luthor, or Armie Hammer as a mercurial soulless scumbag operating in Trump’s White House. But if his output of the last few years is any indication, Sorkin has learned little to nothing from that shining moment of success.
