JONATHAN CHAIT SEPTEMBER 18, 2010
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[Guest post by Isaac Chotiner]
It feels silly to give more publicity to the new Facebook movie, The Social Network, which hardly anyone has seen, but which has received lengthy write-ups in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and now New York magazine. The New York piece, written by Mark Harris, is basically an excellent profile of Aaron Sorkin, who wrote the movie, and is well known for creating The West Wing and A Few Good Men. While it is painful to say anything negative about the man who wrote the latter, Sorkin's approach to this movie, as captured by Harris, is simply absurd.
Much of the controversy over The Social Network focuses on the accuracy of the portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, and the various claims of his former friends and classmates, who believe Zuckerberg stole their ideas. Sorkin is intent on letting everyone know that the movie is not supposed to be entirely fact-based. Sorkin created a personality for Zuckerberg that is (by design) not particularly accurate, for example. And then there is this:
When Sorkin and [David] Fincher [the director] disagreed, it was usually over a minor visual or textual detail—with Sorkin arguing for the dramatist’s prerogative to make some things up, and Fincher countering that whenever they knew the facts, they should stick to them...“I was mostly picking a fight with David,” says Sorkin, “because I wanted to have it out with him on the question, what is the big deal about accuracy purely for accuracy’s sake, and can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?”
Well, okay. But Sorkin then goes on the rant to Harris about how the internet is an evil tool spreading misinformation!
As he revs up, we coast over the statistic that one in four Americans still believes Barack Obama was not born in the United States (“There’s just too much bad information getting out there, and I have to believe that’s mostly the fault of the Internet, which isn’t held to any standards of accuracy”)
This could be defensible, rather then hypocritical. After all, real events must always be somewhat fictionalized for the sake of art. But Sorkin seems unable to hold true to his vision. The piece ends with Sorkin talking:
"This isn’t the movie that’s going to tell you ‘Mark Zuckerberg stole Facebook,’ or that he didn’t. But,” he says, “we would sure love for those arguments to happen in the parking lot.”
In other words, come see our movie, which I have intentionally fictionalized in various ways, and then when you are done, engage in debate about what really happened, even though you don't have the real facts.
5 comments
This is patently absurd.
- liberal reformer
September 18, 2010 at 1:36pm
I've never been a fan of Aaron Sorkin's work. (Ironically enough, according to the NYer profile, Mark Zuckerberg was a keen fan of West Wing--at least until he figured out that its creator was now his nemesis.) I have friends who are as crazy about West Wing on dvd as I have been about The Sopranos and The Wire, but whenever I had a taste, the dialogue just seemed way too snappy and all those long, steadycam shots of White House staffers hashing out critical decisions while they walked between meetings seemed all too ripe for parody. In 2006 I was living back in the States (I don't now) and somewhat to my embarrassment I must admit that I was thoroughly sold by all the pre-premiere hype surrounding Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and I watched the show from the beginning. I liked it at first. Maybe the snappy dialogue seemed more plausible coming from people whose job it is to come up with zingers, night after night, and maybe my suspension of disbelief could go a little farther than with WW given that with Studio 60 I knew that Sorkin was picturing a world he himself knew intimately. Before too many episodes, though, I figured out that Studio 60 was just as bogus as his other stuff. Moreover it was self-servingly fraudulent, portraying the act of creating throwaway tv comedy as this valiant struggle to advance civic virtue. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Social Network is false. Aaron Sorkin has never written anything true. There have been moments when he has written entertainingly--hacks like him are often good at entertainment--but whenever he takes aim at truth or art, as all too often and all too publicly he does do, he shanks it into the woods.
- AaronW
September 18, 2010 at 5:31pm
"Can we not have the true be the enemy of the good?” No good has ever come of a statement like that.
- WillPastor
September 18, 2010 at 8:23pm
"In other words, come see our movie, which I have intentionally fictionalized in various ways, and then when you are done, engage in debate about what really happened, even though you don't have the real facts." But that's not, I think, what Sorkin means. Rather, he wants the debate to center on the nature of the internet, information, and social networking, rather than the particulars of Facebook's creation. In other words, this is not Oliver Stone creating a "counter-myth" about JFK, but Sorkin using a pseudo-biography to force a debate about something bigger than Zuckerberg. Whether or not using a pseudo-boigraphy for that purpose is another question. Me, I think it's dumb.
- timteeter
September 19, 2010 at 10:15am
Maybe, tim, but the take-away message sure seems to be what Isaac wrote.
- liberal reformer
September 19, 2010 at 11:02am