Sonya Saraiya on David Fincher's The Social Network

A decade after its release Sonya Saraiya revisited David Fincher's The Social Network in a lengthy piece in Vanity Fair. As it happened her remarks about the film were less interesting than her remarks about Facebook in the real world--a thing that I suppose can't be helped given the profound limitations of the film.

There was, for example, her remarks about just how "toxic" her experience of the site was as she found herself subject to the post-graduation bragging of acquaintances about their new gigs, turning it into "a platform of envy--a poisonous, insidious sort that turned all of that anger and frustration inward, corroding my self-esteem and sending me into a sustained depression." Indeed, Saraiya initially thought Fincher's "Facebook" movie would be about what it was actually like to be a Facebook user, and what they felt during it--"that peculiar sense of isolation in the midst of purported connectedness," "the mingled pride and disappointment of seeing your life laid out in blue and black type," "the minor agonies of wanting people to like you on the internet."

Of course, the film had nothing to do with that, the movie not "Facebook: The Movie" but a much more personal story about Mark Zuckerberg becoming a tech billionaire. Saraiya reads it as a morality tale about ambition and money coming in ahead of principle and loyalty and friendship, but it is undeniable that the movie, in spite of the rather pathetic whining of some of Silicon Valley's courtiers in the press, is fundamentally a hyperbolic glorification of Zuckerberg. And indeed, referencing a piece the film's screenwriter Sorkin wrote for the New York Times some years later Ms. Saraiya suggests that "Sorkin is still too dazzled by the skills of a tech genius . . . to really blame Zuckerberg for what Facebook has become."

Why, precisely, is that the case? Reading that I find myself thinking about what Upton Sinclair had to say about artists, and what makes so many of them so obsequious to the rich and powerful and those in authority in Mammonart--their "sensitivity," their "impressionability," such that so many an artist "feels a real awe for authority," and sure "his sovereign is bigger in spirit . . . making him bigger in body," even when they are not in any direct way necessarily being paid to glorify them, the way they so often are.

So it would seem with Sorkin in relation to Zuckerberg--to his discredit.

I wonder: can Mr. Sorkin handle that truth?