“The Social Reckoning” Shows How It All Went Wrong

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Naomi Fry (1:35)

This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Naomi Fry.

Vinson Cunningham (1:39)

I'm Vinson Cunningham.

Alexandra Schwartz (1:41)

I'm Alex Schwartz.

Each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. Well, welcome back everyone to Movie Month on Critics at Large.

Vinson Cunningham (1:51)

Yeah.

Naomi Fry (1:52)

Grab the popcorn.

Alexandra Schwartz (1:53)

Please do and take a comfortable seat. And think back with me, if you would, to 2010

Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4

Naomi Fry (2:04)

Were we ever so young?

Alexandra Schwartz (2:05)

That's what I'm wondering.

SPEAKER_7 (2:07)

Four? Wow.

Alexandra Schwartz (2:08)

Time Magazine's Person of the Year was not a celebrity or influential political leader. It was Mark Zuckerberg.

Naomi Fry (2:15)

Which seemed hopeful at the time.

Alexandra Schwartz (2:16)

Yeah.

Naomi Fry (2:16)

Is the point.

Alexandra Schwartz (2:17)

The Arab Spring Movement was about to start, setting off a new wave of optimism about the Internet. And almost exactly 16 years ago to this day, the Social Network opened in theaters.

SPEAKER_9 (2:29)

People want to go on the Internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that friends, pictures, profiles. I'm talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online. The site got 2,200 hits.

Alexandra Schwartz (2:41)

The Social Network was about a young Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg, who wound up creating one of the most influential websites of all time.

And for us in this room and widely out of this room, it has become an iconic text. Why do you think, guys?

Naomi Fry (2:57)

First of all, it's just a really good movie.

Alexandra Schwartz (2:59)

It's the best.

Naomi Fry (3:00)

It's the best. It's like a great script, great performances, just like snappy as fuck, but also like propulsive, but also just like rings really true, even though of course it does have that, it's obviously written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by David Fincher, has that thing of like people don't talk like this exactly, you know what I mean? It's a sort of like snappy, fast, you know, back and forth. But rings true enough that it like really grabs you by the lapel, so to speak, and shakes you.

Vinson Cunningham (3:37)

Yeah. And I think just like given its setting and the sort of handling of that setting largely Harvard, it reaches kind of beyond itself and becomes a kind of parable about like the leadership class in this country, what it means to have merit, what it means to innovate all these great things that I think it seemed at the time like a kind of generational portrait, not just a forensics of Mark Zuckerberg.

Alexandra Schwartz (4:03)

I totally agree, Vincent. And yeah, it inaugurated a new genre of founder movie where people became really interested in founders as a psychological profile, as a kind of hero to follow. Of course, and we'll talk more about this, the Zuckerberg of The Social Network is a fascinating figure, more anti-hero than hero, but unstoppable and Jesse Eisenberg in that role is one of the best performances I think of this century. So today we've got a follow-up, The Social Reckoning, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, and it finds Facebook and Zuck himself in a much darker era.