Aaron Sorkin's Script For The Social Network Was Smarter Than You Thought

The Social Network was controversial--among nerds, mostly--when it was released, for its, let's say assholish, portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Nolo contendere there, but amid all the bluster and blog posts, I don't think a lot of people noticed that the movie was perfectly aware what it was doing. What I mean to say is: Not only is the negative portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network deliberate, but so is the suggestion that the negative portrayal might be too harsh. Rather than attempt to be objective, The Social Network makes a Rashomon-esque joke about the very idea of objectivity. After all: Mark is not telling his own story. That's more important than many seemed to think. Bear with me for a second here.

The movie opens with that long, weirdly compelling scene in the bar. Jesse Eisenberg and Lisbeth Salander break up. Then The Zuck walks back to his dorm, and we're put in geographical and chronological context for the first (and, significantly, the only!) time--Harvard 2003 or whenever. The story goes on from there for a good long while--including the world's first (and, significantly, the only!) realistic blogging and coding montage. And suddenly we jump ahead to a courtroom. Zuckerberg's Facebook isn't a fledgling idea now, suddenly, it's the billion-dollar enterprise we know and loathe. It's a rather jarring flashforward, right? That's not all it is.

Now, Aaron Sorkin frequently plays around with chronology in his scripts, usually for fairly simple storytelling purpose: President Bartlet takes a bite of a madeline and remembers the last time he took a bite of a madeline, during his campaign. So now we get to see some campaign scenes! And for a few viewings I took the structural complexity of The Social Network at that basic face-value. 20 minutes is as long as Aaron Sorkin can stand going without a courtroom scene, that's all. But after the fourth viewing or so, I picked up on a key moment: There in the courtroom, when everyone else is talking about Mark crashing Harvard's network, Mark instead is referencing his conversation with Erica at the bar--that very first scene of the movie. Here's how it looks in Sorkin's original screenplay:

What we're meant to understand, therefore, is that everything we've seen leading up to this moment is testimony from one or both of Mark's ongoing legal proceedings. The court scene isn't a flashforward, it is the only objective reality of the movie. Everything else we see is just a visualization of what people are saying.

This may seem like just an overcomplicated phrasing of the way you already understood the time-shifting. But what I'm saying is there are two different kinds of capital-T Truths at play in the movie. The Truth of whatever moment you happen to be in (Mark and Eduardo in the dorm, the Winkelvoss twins in England) and then the Overall Truth perspective of the movie (every non-courtroom scene is the depiction of various folks' depositions). And most of the criticism I've read of the movie acknowledges the former and not the latter.

And the confirmation of the film's overall perspective happens in the final scene, when Mark talks to Rashida Jones's character. She tells him that she assumes most testimony is, in so many words, hearsay and bullshit. That is what we have been watching for the last two hours: the unreliable, emotional bullshit being pushed by the Winkelvi, Eduardo and their associated council. It doesn't vindicate Mark so much as admit that we--you, me, Aaron Sorkin, David Fincher, Justin Timberlake--don't know the truth about anything that happened. All we have is the public record, which is no more true than anything else.

That's the same idea behind Akira Kurosawa's film Rashomon, which I suggest you seek out immediately if you haven't already seen it. But while Rashomon takes the lack of true objectivity as cause for despair, The Social Network seems to revel in it, a little. So what if this is all hearsay and bullshit? It's fun, right?