If you ask me, there is no more damning artistic statement on Mark Zuckerberg than in the final scene of David Fincher’s The Social Network. The Facebook CEO, having acquired all the power and status he could hope for, sits alone hitting refresh on a friend request to the girl who dumped him. It’s a moment of poetic licence (Zuckerberg was already dating his now-wife, Priscilla Chan, at the time) that provides the punchline to today’s tech autocracy at large. Charmless in life, these men have found a way to game the world and hoard social capital for themselves. They were after the cheat code for the popularity contest.
The Social Reckoning, Aaron Sorkin’s quasi-sequel to Fincher’s original, never attempts an equivalent scene with Zuckerberg, now played by Jeremy Strong. (Jesse Eisenberg, who declined to reprise his Oscar-nominated role, couldn’t stomach how fans would come up and ask him to sign something with, as Zuckerberg writes on his business card, “I’m CEO, bitch”.) Now in total control as director, too – having only written The Social Network – Sorkin has made a quintessential “Aaron Sorkin journalism film”, a sibling to his didactic series The Newsroom. It strips out the basics of the Wall Street Journal’s “The Facebook Files” series by Jeff Horwitz, alongside Zuckerberg’s subsequent testimony to Congress, and repeats them to the audience without any real additional insight.
