Why Luca Guadagnino's 'Artificial' Works and Aaron Sorkin's 'The Social Reckoning' Doesn’t

I enlisted Vanity Fair’s features editor and expert on all things Hollywood, Hillary Busis, for a dialogue about which tech CEO impersonations worked, scenes that felt like major scoops, and Aaron Sorkin’s inexplicable loathing of the journalism profession.

JULIA: So off the bat, how would you rate Artificial vs. The Social Reckoning?

HILLARY: Artificial is a “like.” The Social Reckoning...I forget, do Facebook posts have a thumbs-down option?

JULIA: Yes, and it’s worth five times a “like,” a quarter as much as a repost, and a tenth as much as Aaron Sorkin patting himself on the back. Anyway, I agree completely. In a funny way, I think the elements that worked well for me in Artificial are the very same things that tanked TSR. Both felt pretty true to life. But in the case of a film about OpenAI, which remains such a black box to the public, that felt revelatory and shocking. In the case of a film about Meta, it was like, “Yes, and…?”

HILLARY: The real problem, to me, is that both of these movies consciously (or subconsciously) follow the same blueprint as an undisputed modern-day masterpiece: The Social Network, which Sorkin (famously) wrote but also (famously) did not direct. Neither movie gets even close to the heights of that one, in my opinion, and both suffer by comparison—but TSR suffers a lot more. You’re also right that it feels instantly dated. You’re telling me, Aaron Sorkin, that the January 6 rioters were radicalized by spending too much time online?! Brand new information!

JULIA: When the trailer for The Altruists (Netflix’s forthcoming FTX series) dropped, I saw a tweet that said, “One of the facts of the universe is that no writer can create a character substantially smarter than themselves.” Sorkin, meanwhile, should not be allowed to write characters he believes are dumber than him. I’ll be the first to admit it can be hard to keep up with technical reporting as a journalist without a comp sci degree, but Jesus, we are not that stupid.

HILLARY: Julia, I’m old enough to remember when Sorkin was doing press for The Newsroom and got so mad at a (young, female) Canadian journalist that he ended their conversation by saying, “Listen here, internet girl. It wouldn’t kill you to watch a film or pick up a newspaper once in a while.” PS: She was writing her story for a newspaper!

JULIA: “Listen here, internet girl” will be entering my vocabulary immediately.

HILLARY: The only journalists who know what they’re doing, of course, are the journalists Sorkin imagines when he’s feeling generous. But seriously, this is the big issue with the movie: Sorkin needs to invent a bunch of ridiculous baloney in order to inflate the stakes of this story’s central conflict—an investigation into Facebook’s shady ethics—either because he thinks there isn’t enough to pin a screenplay on without it, or because he simply can’t help himself. In his version of events, Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jeff Horwitz does not know how to use Google Maps. In the year 2019. On what planet!

JULIA: I’m trying to decide how annoyed to be about the naïveté of Frances Haugen’s character, who somehow still believes in Facebook’s democratizing vision in the year 2021, given that she did testify to that effect in real life.

HILLARY: The optimism part, I guess, is defensible. But her weird hostility toward Jeff—she’s always insulting his intelligence and how he works, and even gets mad at him for watching a basketball game for some reason?—seems to stem entirely from Sorkin’s love of writing hot women who are mean to Aaron Sorkin surrogate characters.

JULIA: Oh God, that “mansplaining” line… Which leads us to the age-old acting question: to impersonate or not to impersonate?

HILLARY: Well, Jeremy Strong is known for going hard. But given how little screen time he has, I have to wonder whether the method-acting approach he took for this movie was really worthwhile. In The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg made Mark Zuckerberg feel like a real person: a butthurt nerd, sure, but a recognizable human being. Strong’s Zuck has gone full automaton, which is I guess the point? But he also makes much less of an impression than Eisenberg did, while doing a more direct impression. Were you convinced by Strong in this role?

JULIA: Yeah, I do think he nailed it. But it’s so much more compelling to watch power corrupt in real time—as in the case of most of the characters in Artificial—than to watch the shell of a human that remains after their soul has rotted beyond repair.

HILLARY: Carapace-core.

JULIA: Actually, my unpopular Artificial opinion is that Andrew Garfield should’ve committed more to his physical transformation. I found it really distracting how little he looked like Sam Altman, even if he mastered the gait flawlessly. Meanwhile, I loved the decision to frame Ilya Sutskever as the tragic hero. Had you heard of him before seeing the film?

HILLARY: Embarrassingly, I had not! I’ve been walking around all this time thinking that Sam Altman was not just the salesman behind OpenAI, but the actual engineer who created ChatGPT. I feel as dumb as a journalist written by Aaron Sorkin. As someone who covers this stuff for a living, were there revelations in Artificial that actually surprised you? Or were you mostly just taken with the way the movie dramatized information you already knew?

JULIA: There are scenes that—if even remotely based in truth—constitute pretty significant scoops. I will say, I’ve learned a bit about how the film came together with primary sources, and I’m pretty impressed with the granular level of detail. Not to show off, but my name even shows up on a whiteboard in the background of one scene—presumably because I’ve reached out to so many sources at OpenAI over the years. That’s a deep cut!

HILLARY: Luca Guadagnino did not let ChatGPT do his homework for him!

JULIA: There are so many tech films and shows coming out right now, and I’m very curious how much mainstream appetite there will be for these stories. How much do you (and everyone else you know outside of the Silicon Valley bubble) really care about this stuff?

HILLARY: All of these tech projects have clear dramatic arcs and high stakes. I think like any other movie or TV show, whether people want to watch them might come down to the way they’re told rather than their subject matter. If anything, the glut of similarly themed projects could be a rising tide that lifts all boats, because regular people will be curious about the ways in which different artists interpret similar-seeming material. (Is that so naive that I sound like Frances Haugen?)

JULIA: That’s exciting to hear! I always worry people will get bored of my beat.

HILLARY: We don’t have the luxury of getting bored with it!

JULIA: I do think it’s important to bring more awareness to these issues, so at the end of the day I'm glad that even the bad projects about tech are getting made. But to address again why I think it's bad, I'll turn to one of my favorite quotes about art, which coincidentally came from André Aciman, author of the source material of Luca Guadagnino’s other masterpiece Call Me by Your Name. He once said: “A story with an agenda is like an antique vase with a price sticker on the front.” While both of these films undeniably have an agenda, only in Sorkin’s case was the activism so bald-faced that it cheapened the art.

HILLARY: I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that TSR ends on a note of triumph that feels weirdly false. Yes, Frances Haugen testified before Congress and other governments, revealing that Facebook knew about the dangers of its products but did hardly anything to rein them in. But in the years since, it’s not like Meta’s products have gotten any less dangerous or addictive. Artificial, though, ends with a scene that convincingly conveys the extent to which AI will ruin all our lives. That rang pretty true to me.