So Who’s Ogling Mikey Madison More: Sean Baker in ‘Anora’ or Aaron Sorkin in ‘The Social Network’?

By Jesse Hassenger

When Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) ventures out into the night to visit Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) at a hotel to inform him about the inner workings of Facebook’s supposedly civics-based content moderation, she gets dressed up. In the Facebook offices as depicted in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning, Frances is nerdy and introverted, often clad in gloves and legwarmers to address a circulation problem. Paranoid that she’ll be spotted by her Silicon Valley coworkers, Frances opts for a disguise rather than outright concealment; suddenly, the nerdy programmer who believes in the mission of Mark Zuckberg’s sprawling social network is wearing a low-cut black dress, and there’s some confusion from Jeff about what precisely she means when she says she wants to look like she’s on a “date.” Wink, wink.

The outfit isn’t quite as body-forward as anything Madison wears as the sex-worker title character in Anora, the mega-break-out that won her an-early career Best Actress Oscar. But it’s still enough to prompt the question: Who, exactly, is getting hornier about Madison in sex-worker garb? Transgressive and occasionally-accused perv Sean Baker, or high-minded smart-aleck Aaron Sorkin?

Though they’re both Oscar-winning screenwriters, it’s hard to think of two filmmakers with seemingly less common ground. The Social Reckoning finds a little more, almost entirely to do with the subject of Madison, who seems to bewitch the pair of them. They both even zero in on a kind of nouveau-screwball potential in their leading lady, albeit from drastically different angles. Anora’s quickie marriage, slapstick sorta-kidnapping, and sweet-and-sour dialogue gave screwball a bawdier update, while Sorkin is madly, deeply in love with rat-a-tat banter regardless of what he’s plotting; in his writer brain, there’s no situation that can’t be improved by it. And so in The Social Reckoning, Madison, playing a tech-idealist who slowly backs into the role of whistleblower, banters with White, who is forced to play Horwitz as a Sorkinesque straight man, cartoonishly at odds with technology (circa 2020, he’s never been on the site), “cutely” demeaning to his interns (he calls one “girl intern”! Oh, the whimsy!), and fond, as all Sorkin characters are, of correcting people. Frances, of course, likes correcting people too — in a funny early scene, she dismantles the carelessly mixed metaphor of a superior calling her Cassandra, the Boy Who Cried Wolf, and Chicken Little all at once.

In almost any Sorkin screenplay, stage play, or TV show, some of these moments land, as that one does. And in Frances, it sometimes — briefly — seems as if he’s found a screwball heroine who can’t be sunk into a grim will-they-or-won’t-they-without-ever-asking-why opposite the male lead. Sorkin probably detects a little bit of chemistry between Frances and Jeff, but as much as he likes to inject his same old bullshit into supposedly new characters in a way that many would consider shameless — wouldn’t you know it, Jeff is a fan of Show Boat and its place in American musical theater history! — he seems to sense that adding any more spice to this relationship would be a writerly seasoning too far. Besides, any student of screwball will know that it’s the pre-romantic stuff, all that adorable banter, that can be really sexy.

But hold on: Is The Social Reckoning really supposed to be sexy? Genuinely, I’m not sure. Madison donning mildly risqué eveningwear isn’t a one-off gag; her cleavage gets plenty of screentime, and, hey, Madison is a grown woman who chose this specific project to follow up her Oscar win (and reportedly turned down some more traditionally franchise-y sequels in the process). Maybe Sorkin intends it as a wink to her previous and much-discussed role. Certainly the brazen sexuality of Anora was a welcome respite from the sexlessness of so many modern movies. The fact that Baker’s movies make some portions of the audience uncomfortable is one of their great strengths; a version of Anora that kept the sex-worker character’s clothes on would be a weaker, more risk-averse film. Part of the risk is Baker appearing like he’s getting off on Madison’s frequently unclothed body, and maybe he is. He’s certainly no clinician; he can’t help but find Anora sexy just as he can’t help but find a different Mikey — the character Simon Rex plays in Red Rocket — at least as funny as he is reprehensible.

But in a movie that wants to be a lofty companion piece to The Social Network (which Sorkin wrote but notably, obviously, and blessedly did not direct), the ogling of Madison feels, at best, awkwardly integrated. Of course, the same could be said for the appearance of Mark Zuckberger, now played with even more rigid automaton unlikability by Jeremy Strong, rather than Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg, come to think of it, is well-suited to screwball, and might be fun to see bounce off of Madison in another movie. Strong has no real scenes opposite Madison, but he sounds like a bizarre hybrid of the younger, quippier version of Zuckerberg devised for the previous movie and the genuinely off-putting power-monger that is the real life Zuck. He’s sequestered in a separate story and sometimes separate timeline, as he prepares for congressional hearings only to be interrupted by news of the Wall Street Journal series that results from the information Frances feeds Jeff. Mostly, it’s a way for Sorkin to create faux-continuity between this and the previous film, and to layer in some additional grandstanding that Madison and White’s characters and performance styles tend to resist.

That grandstanding hints at what makes Sorkin an odd fit to direct Madison, an idea that seems designed to infuriate such a champion of experience, credentials, and faux-expertise, one who even has White’s character sidebar about the uselessness of the coinage “mansplain.” Sorkin would probably note the rejoinder he provides to Frances in turn, but then, he’s also the one putting that word in her mouth almost entirely so Jeff can object to it. But that’s why sexuality makes such a weird fit in Sorkin’s world: It’s all constructed around the arguments he wants to make and stack in one direction or another, overwhelming the give-and-take of equalized banter.

The brazenness Madison brings to Anora has no real place here; only her body does. That’s not to say Madison can’t play a nerdy introvert; she’s quite charming in The Social Reckoning, the character that’s most purely interesting and enjoyable to spend time with. But Sorkin only cares about his version of Frances so far as she can make the (quite reasonable) argument that Facebook has Gone Too Far. (Naturally, her examples of this tend to come in patrician terms.) Baker’s movie allowed Anora’s wants and desire to appear, at times, contradictory either with each other or with what we expect from the plucky heroine she resembles. He ultimately looked at her with sensitivity and understanding. Sorkin often seems like he’s just plain staring.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.