Did You Catch All the Sorkinisms in The Social Reckoning?

Commentators had already called out Sorkin's trouble writing female characters before he joked about it in a 2011 episode of 30 Rock, mansplaining writing to Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon in a cameo as himself.

But acknowledging the issue did not cure Sorkin of this deficiency. In The Social Reckoning’s prologue, the hokey “White Girl Wasted,” we meet Kaylee (Portia Doubleday), who’s standing next to an overheated car, telling the cops she doesn't need their help. Things escalate until Kaylee starts shooting a phone video bigotedly confronting them for "coming at" her and is finally arrested when she threatens to kill one of their colleagues.

We later find out from Facebook staffer Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) that Kaylee volunteered for progressive causes and supported a Democratic nominee against whom she came to believe the DNC rigged the process. This candidate isn't named, but the implication seems to be that her preferred non-establishment candidate was Bernie Sanders (and, based on Sorkin's 2024 suggestion that Joe Biden drop out of the presidential race to clear the way for the Democrats to nominate Mitt Romney, we can assume Sorkin does not align with Kaylee's 2016-era politics). Regardless, whistleblower Frances believes Facebook's algorithm pushed Kaylee, a disgruntled leftist Democrat who spent over nine hours a day on the platform, toward extremist right-wing groups. But it’s not only women who are portrayed as credulous marks for the algorithm—for instance, Frances goes on a date with a guy who thinks ingesting chlorophyll will act as a natural deodorant because "it's all over Facebook." Later on, when Sorkin stages the Capitol insurrection, whose actual rioters were overwhelmingly male, Kaylee is our only touchstone character.

Elsewhere in the movie, we see Jeremy Allen White’s Jeff, a Wall Street Journal reporter, addressing a male intern by name and a female one (Kelley Pereira's Evelyn) as "Girl Intern"; Later, Frances fails to catch a towel Jeff throws at her because women can't sport (see also: her disbelief that a basketball player Jeff's watching on TV would be air-punchingly happy about tying the score). When Jeff refers to Woodward and Bernstein having been Metro reporters at the Washington Post, Frances thinks he’s calling them metrosexuals. Even after Frances explains to Jeff that she's moving to Puerto Rico for the warm weather because her celiac disease has caused her to suffer from neuropathy, Jeff snits that he's going to have to start from scratch with a new source "because of gluten."

When we're not with Frances, we're flashing forward to Mark Zuckerberg’s (Jeremy Strong) preparation for his Senate testimony. While crisis PR pro Raya Akinola (Wunmi Mosaku) teaches Mark to address Senators respectfully and nod less robotically, a young blonde staffer named Blair repeatedly interrupts to suggest various neckties. And though this is a significant decision for an event that's going to be photographed and aired around the world, the script renders her interventions superficial. At least we can say Sorkin doesn't play favorites when it comes to the girls and women he's ready to mock: Blair is played by Roxy Sophie Sorkin, his daughter.

Those of us who had tracked Sorkin's disdain for online culture (and…maybe the existence of the internet itself) since the mid-2000s were gratified by Porter's 2014 three-quel “Sorkinisms III - Aaron Sorkin on the Internet.”

As this compilation proves, the internet has fascinated and bedeviled Sorkin since at least the early aughts. Back then, when I moderated the message boards on Television Without Pity, the TV recap site I co-founded, Sorkin occasionally posted about The West Wing. After visiting during a period when our posters were starting to weary of his writing, he defended himself volubly before proceeding to write "The U.S. Poet Laureate," a West Wing episode with a subplot in which Bradley Whitford’s Josh spars on an online message board run by "this dictatorial leader, who I'm sure wears a muumuu and chain-smokes Parliaments." Dismissing a Canadian reporter as "Internet Girl" a decade later suggested that Sorkin's attitude toward both the internet and "girls" hadn't changed.

Sorkin might counter my "Metro" example above by saying Jeff has blind spots too: he is introduced to the audience arriving late for his Journal job interview because he couldn't operate the GPS in his car and later relies on Girl Intern to explain to him, a professional investigative journalist in the year 2019, how ProtonMail (launched in 2014) works. But where Frances, seen wearing fingerless gloves and leg warmers with short-sleeved T-shirts and boxer shorts, is coded girlishly, Jeff is portrayed as an absent-minded professor type, too serious to have even started a Facebook account before coming to the Bay Area to cover the company (and too focused on his Important Job to have bothered finding himself an apartment).

Frances delivers multiple speeches about how much she believes in Facebook's mission, maintaining that she's only participating in Jeff's investigation to improve the company because her attempts to do so from the inside have failed. But the only times we see characters who use the internet, it's because doing so has ruined their lives: an unmasked supermarket customer yelling to a cashier who won't serve her to "do your research"; parents in the restaurant booth next to Frances's discussing how their daughter's been cyberbullied on Facebook's sister site, Instagram. Jeff probably wouldn't suffer abuse from other users if he knew how to work Waze, but isn't it safer if he just never finds out and exclusively navigates via paper maps? (That's a joke: the movie's postscript assures us that the real Horwitz did eventually learn how to use GPS. Phew!)

The Pirates Of Penzance misquote "never, ever sick at sea," as heard in the Sorkin-scripted Malice and Charlie Wilson's War, makes it into "Sorkinisms II," but Sorkin's love for classic musicals is well-represented elsewhere in his work.

In Reckoning, the first time we see Jeff, he lectures Girl Intern about the importance of Show Boat in American musical theatre. Jeff is surprised when Frances offhandedly name-checks Frank Capra’s heroes surprises, cuing him to rattle off the Capra films she should see beyond It's A Wonderful Life and Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. That this exchange takes place in the middle of a conversation about Frances's suspicion that Facebook higher-ups have found out she's been feeding him documents in violation of her NDA is barely acknowledged. "I'm sorry you had a scare" is the most Jeff can muster for Frances's terror about Facebook suing her into oblivion.

The flashforward scenes are not immune: when Mark asserts that Facebook shouldn't fact-check political ads because "most people know when they're being lied to," a Facebook executive repeats the story about viewers calling the U.S. Coast Guard after the 1964 series premiere of Gilligan's Island to go rescue the castaways they'd just watched. Why this example would be top of mind for a tech professional in the year 2021 (or why he'd volunteer it in the moment to prove a Facebook detractor's point) is never explained.

It does, however, underline the kind of misapprehensions that a TV producer, one whose greatest successes came in the age of a monoculture, might still hold. Maybe Sorkin still wonders whether anyone on the S.S. Minnow was ever ever sick at sea.