Sorkin as an Adjective: A View of The Social Network

I watched The Social Network for the third time recently.

Firstly and most pertinently, that movie is beautiful. I feel as though I understand its purpose more with each subsequent viewing. The first time I saw the movie, I enjoyed it, thought it was funny and poignant and scathing and engaging, but I was ultimately unsure why it was written. To paint Mark Zuckerberg as a douche? To expose the kind of seedy aspects of Facebook's creation?

The latter seems more likely. Aaron Sorkin's writing history has been one of exposure. A Few Good Men exposed dark military secrets. Sportsnight and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip were startling views behind the scenes of struggling television programs. The West Wing was the closed doors inner workings of politics. Considered in that vein, The Social Network becomes a movie about the man-behind-the-curtain of Facebook.

Still, despite that, I don't know if that's the purpose of The Social Network.

Hit the break for more.


The word "friend" and its derivatives appear a lot in the movie. That's partly because the film itself is about friends, but it gains a certain depth-slash-profundity when you consider it in the context of Facebook. Friends in the context of Facebook doesn't necessarily refer only to the people you know, hang out with, drink beers with, interact with.

Your friends on Facebook are just as often a girl you don't really like but you made out with at a party and she friended you immediately and you accepted because you felt guilty, or a coworker who friended you after the first day and then you both realized you actually hated each other, or a person you went to high school with who inexplicably friended you and then never has seemed to use Facebook again.

When Eduardo Saverin says to Mark Zuckerberg, "I was your only friend. You had one friend," it's sad because-- in the context of the movie-- it's true, but there's a bizarre ironic poignancy; after all, as the tagline for The Social Network alluded to, Zuckerberg's company gives him 500 million "friends."

Ultimately, the purpose of The Social Network is to use the story of Facebook's idea of connectivity to show just how fractured we've become as social beings. Zuckerberg created the greatest bridge between people of the world, but in The Social Network, he struggles to keep from burning every one of those bridges from his own island.

I think The Social Network is in my opinion Sorkin's finest work, and it's probably because it's the piece of Sorkin writing that you see the least of Sorkin himself in.

Let me explain that. Watching Sorkin's TV shows (Sportsnight, Studio 60, West Wing), Sorkin's own opinions and worldviews show up coming out of almost every character's mouth. Or, opposing intelligent viewpoints that show up are obviously Sorkin coming up with his own arguments. But, in short, you see a lot of Sorkin when you watch things written by Sorkin.

That's fine. Sorkin is an intelligent man, who considers all of his opinions thoughtfully and with great care. But, after five seasons of The West Wing, at some point you can predict where these ideas are going to go. This isn't a knock, but there's that idea that familiarity breeds contempt. I'm not necessarily contemptuous of Sorkin, but it's hard to watch another episode of Sportsnight, because I understand Sorkin's view of the issues.

That's part of what made The Social Network so surprising and engaging; I didn't see as much of Sorkin in it. Instead, I saw Sorkin doing what he does best: pulling back the curtain from something we didn't know we wanted to see. And because this issue is so far from that which is near and dear to Sorkin, it allowed him to instead create a story that spoke more universally.