The art of the pay-off

Aaron Sorkin and the opening scene of 'The Social Network'

PROGRAMMING NOTE: It turns out our subscribers didn’t like us putting paywalls around the Saturday emails once a month. Consider us chastened, and a bit frightened. So from now on, the Saturday emails (including this one!) will be free. 

Instead, we’re going to introduce extra monthly emails for paid subscribers. Initially at least, these are going to be multi-part series that should lend themselves to watchalongs. The first series will look at the screen works of Aaron Sorkin in timeline order, beginning with the 1992 film A Few Good Men, carrying on through The American President, Sports Night, Moneyball and Charlie Wilson’s War, and bringing it up to date with The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Being The Ricardos. We’re not going to include The West Wing though, because honestly, it’s been done to death. (Funny joke! Of course we’ll be doing The West Wing!)

If you’re excited to pedeconference with us, please head to the buttons below to upgrade your subscription in time for the first paywalled email, which should hit in early April. If not, don’t worry: this email – like all our Saturday emails from now on! – is free for everyone.

The Social Network (2010)

At Harvard in 2003, a small group of nerds led by Mark Zuckerberg come up with the idea for a social networking site. Initially called ‘TheFacebook’, the site’s sudden global success exposes Mark’s flaws and opens him up to legal challenges from the people he left behind.

When The Social Network first came out a lot of commentary focused on its opening scene, a five-minute two-hander between the young Mark (Jesse Eisenberg) and his girlfriend Erica (Rooney Mara). It hurls us into the plot, establishes character notes, does some exposition and sets up the movie’s main themes. It uses about three camera angles, and the two actors barely move. It’s just eight pages of dialogue, compressed and heated and polished to a diamond finish. It says a lot about Aaron Sorkin — not all of it entirely positive — that when he wrote the opening scene of a movie about a tech company, he came up with this. 

[VOICEOVER]

MARK
Did you know there are more people with genius IQ scores living in China than there are people of any kind living in the United States?

ERICA
That can’t possibly be true.

MARK
It is.

ERICA
What would account for that?

MARK
Well first of all, a lot of people live in China.
But here’s my question.

These first few lines are heard while the Columbia Studios ident is still on the screen; for a couple of seconds, The Social Network is a radio play. It’s as though Sorkin is so desperate for the talking to start that he crashes the titles. Either that or the director, David Fincher, is visibly admitting defeat.

Then the photography fades up to accompany the dialogue, and the viewer is dropped abruptly into the middle of a conversation in a busy student bar. Mark Zuckerberg, a nineteen-year-old student at Harvard, is talking to his girlfriend Erica. They are talking really fast.

MARK
How do you distinguish yourself in a population of people who all got 1600 on their SATs?

ERICA
I didn’t know they take SATs in China.

MARK
They don’t, I wasn’t talking about China any more. I was talking about me.

ERICA
You got a 1600?

MARK
Yes. I could sing in an a capella group, but...

ERICA
Does that mean that you actually got nothing wrong?

MARK
… or I could row crew or invent a 25-dollar PC.

ERICA
Or you get into a finals club.

MARK
Or I get into a final club. Exactly.

ERICA
You know, from a woman’s perspective, sometimes not singing in an a capella group is a good thing.

It’s become fairly unusual for movie screenwriters to be overwhelmingly famous for their writing alone. Charlie Kaufman aside, the other well-known contemporary screenwriters — Tarantino, Woody Allen, James Cameron, the Coen brothers, Paul Thomas Andersen, Taika Waititi, Wes Anderson, why are these all men? — tend also to direct.

The fact that Sorkin isn’t thought of as a director — despite directing his more recent films — is the inevitable result of his writing: both that his style is so distinctive, and that it doesn’t leave directors much to do. Sorkin himself has copped to this, admitting that he writes for a visual medium but tends to only use it aurally. I don’t care. I’m a very non-visual person, and I actively prefer films that prioritise dialogue. I’ve never understood why film buffs think this is illegitimate. You all wibble on about intensely boring films with two lines of dialogue per hour, and I don’t try to get you chucked out of the multiplex. 

If you like the opening scene of The Social Network you’re going to love the rest. If you don’t like it, switch it off right now and save yourself the irritation. They’re probably doing an Ozu season at the BFI.

MARK
This is serious.

ERICA
On the other hand, I do like guys who row crew.

MARK
Well, I can’t do that.

ERICA
I was kidding!

MARK
Yes. I got nothing wrong on the test.

ERICA
Have you ever tried?

MARK
I’m trying right now.

ERICA
To row crew?

MARK
To get into a final club. To row crew? Are you, like, whatever… delusional?

ERICA
[EXASPERATED]
It’s just sometimes you say two things at once and I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to be aiming at.

This is typical of the dialogue style for which Sorkin has become famous: intense and overlapping, with lines that repeat and splinter until they create polyphonic harmonies, like a jacked-up mediaeval motet.

Because a lot of his dialogue sounds like this, Sorkin’s characters tend to merge into each other. All his major characters are high-functioning oddities with titanic egos. They all have a habit of dropping weird little factoids at will, as though they had memorised the contents of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, including the supplementary index volume. You could take any number of speeches from The West Wing and put them in a different character’s mouth; it would have no impact on the plot at all. (Toby and Josh are exactly the same person; it’s just that one of him is 20 years older than the other.)

Sorkin uses this scene to establish our understanding of Mark Zuckerberg. It tells us that Mark can’t listen to other people, that he is casually boorish, and that his narrow-focus intelligence makes it difficult for him to have functional human relationships. But 90% of these lines are signature Sorkin yak-yak that could work for any of his characters.

Sorkin has got better at delineating personality over the years, and the major characters in The Social Network are at least distinguishable from each other. But fundamentally, the shape and sound of the dialogue is always the same.

Isn’t it fabulous?

---

MARK
But you’ve seen guys who row crew, right?

ERICA
[THINKS]
No.

It would have been a lot more straightforward to have Erica say ‘yes’ here, so Sorkin has her say ‘no’ instead. He uses these little counterintuitive flicks a lot in his dialogue. They trip up the viewer, just a little bit; they feel spontaneous, like a real conversation rather than a script. They also refocus our attention, meaning he can use them to underscore character strokes. Suddenly we understand Erica as someone who speaks honestly as a way of building trusting relationships. Mark uses speech to dominate.

MARK
Okay, well, they’re bigger than me.
[GESTURES SOMEWHERE WAY ABOVE HIS HEAD]
They’re world-class athletes. And a second ago you said you like guys who row crew, so I assumed you had met one.

ERICA
I guess I just meant I like the idea of it. You know, the way a girl likes cowboys.

I want you to consider two possibilities here:

1. Aaron Sorkin has really met young women who fantasise about cowboys, an archetype dating from the first half of the twentieth century; or

2. Aaron Sorkin cannot do pop culture references to save his life.

Sorkin is catastrophically uncool. His signature putty-coloured slacks and boxy shirts make him look like a mid-level executive from 1998 who’s really excited to bring you up to speed on AOL’s new browser functionality. His music taste is straight outta the CD changer on a Vauxhall Corsa. He is probably the only person who could make it uncool to be arrested at Hollywood airport while carrying crack.

I kind of love him for this; it’s a sign that he instinctively resists external pressures. It’s hard to be a good writer if you give a lot of weight to other people’s opinions.

MARK
[CONSIDERS HER ANSWER BEFORE DISMISSING IT]
Okay.

ERICA
[TRYING TO LIGHTEN THE MOOD]
Should we get something to eat?

MARK
Would you like to talk about something else?

ERICA
[SARCASTICALLY]
Noooo! It’s just that since the beginning of the conversation about finals clubs I think I may have missed a birthday. There are really more people in China with genius IQs than…

MARK
The Phoenix is the most diverse. The Fly Club. Roosevelt punched the Porc.

ERICA
Which one?

MARK
The Porcellian? The Porc? It’s the best of the best.

ERICA
Which Roosevelt. 

MARK
Theodore.

We Brits now need to take a short break to explain some things to ourselves. (In an ideal world we would have Donna for this bit.) 

Final clubs are, as far as I can make out, Harvard things; significantly, given the themes of this film, they are described by Harvard itself as ‘social organisations’. They seem to be a bit like the Bullingdon Club at Oxford (another context in which one might use the phrase ‘punch the pork’); highly prized, exclusive, single-sex clubs that revolve around privilege, status, and behaving like a wanker. They are subtly different from fraternities and sororities, but don’t ask me how because I don’t know what those are either. Whatever: in the hypoxic atmosphere of Harvard, final clubs are the deliberately-restricted means by which you distinguish yourself as the toppermost of the poppermost. 

I had to Google all that because Sorkin never really explains it, although later scenes in the film give you the general jist. The refusal to explain the basics is one of his signature moves. Viewers who can follow his insider references are flattered. This is an aspect of what some people perceive as Sorkin’s intellectual self-satisfaction, and it provokes a cellular level of irritation, like the urge to smack a humourless kid who keeps putting their hand up in class. He also stands accused of ponderously explaining that Good things are Good and Bad things are Bad, and expecting to get a medal for it. He is, essentially, the Bono of screenwriting.

If that’s how you experience him, fair enough; horses for courses. But the density of information, and the speed with which it arrives, is why his fans can rewatch Sorkin’s work many times before they exhaust its possibilities. When I first saw this scene I barely noticed that the conversation was about final clubs. All I really gleaned was that Mark got dumped by a smart, pretty girl. I only began to work out the rest of it out on subsequent viewings.

Also: he’s not humourless. That bit is just wrong. He writes good gags. There are lots of them in this film.

ERICA
[GRIMACING]
Is it true that they send a bus around to pick up girls who want to party with the next Fed chairman?

MARK
[PLEASED TO THINK OF A JOKE]
So you can see why it’s so important to get in.

The Social Network was, I think, Sorkin’s first serious attempt to occasionally think about the world from a woman’s point of view. (We’ll discuss this more when we get onto The West Wing.) It’s not a woman-heavy film, to put it mildly, and it thoroughly fails the Bechdel test. But it signals a positional shift in Sorkin’s work, a willingness to let his female characters hold their own mic. The concern that Erica voices here — that the final clubs treat young women like meat — is later explicitly shown to be true. More proximally, as far as Erica is concerned, after this conversation Mark will try to exorcise his feelings by posting misogynist remarks about her online.

Sorkin proposes that Mark’s idea for Facebook is driven by a misogynist pathology, one that sees young women as fleshy symbols of male status, and infuriating sexual gatekeepers. Freshly dumped and furious, Mark spots the Web’s compulsive potential for widening sexual opportunities and exploiting sexual longing; he literally encodes the denaturing of human relationships.

---

ERICA
OK, well, which is the easiest to get into?

MARK
[UPSET]
Why would you ask me that?

ERICA
I was just asking.

MARK
None of them. That’s the point. My friend Eduardo made $300,000 betting on oil futures one summer and Eduardo won’t come close to getting in. The ability to make money doesn’t impress anybody here.

The friendship and fall-out between Mark and Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) is the emotional engine of The Social Network. It’s set up here in a few sentences that you barely notice because they slot so smoothly into the profile of the conversation. The money that Mark is talking about will provide crucial seed capital for Facebook. And (spoiler!) Mark’s assumption that Eduardo won’t be able to get into a final club is going to turn out to be wrong. This will have significant consequences. 

There is a lot of stuff in The Social Network about scarcity, status and value. All through this scene Mark makes explicit connections between scarcity and status, and between status and fulfilment. By initially restricting Facebook to students at the top US universities (and later, in the UK, to Oxbridge) he tries to build Facebook’s value by emphasising status and engineering scarcity. He is trying to render human relationships as algorithms. He recognises that popularity is rare, and tends to confer status; he mistakenly assumes that you must be able to run the equation backwards, and derive status and popularity from exclusivity.

At the same time, he’s continually misjudging value; he keeps dumping the wrong stock. He trashes things — Erica’s interest, Eduardo’s friendship — in ways that turn out to be very costly. Mark thinks that Eduardo is a big dumb lunk attached to a useful bag of cash. He attaches no value to the things that make Eduardo appealing to other people: friendliness, empathy, loyalty, good humour. He thinks of social status as a software engineering problem; he is looking for a way to hack the entry codes. He establishes an epoch-defining business because he thinks it will increase his social desirability. Instead, it chaotically instrumentalises and supercharges dynamics that he is peculiarly unable to comprehend. 

Now: is this a fair characterisation of Zuckerberg? Does it tell us anything genuinely interesting about how Facebook was founded? Probably not. I love Sorkin, but he has all the classic symptoms of a Boomer technophobe who wishes that Tim Berners-Lee had gone into banking, or under a bus. (He hates social media. There’s a dreadful West Wing subplot involving Josh’s abusively unhinged fan website, ‘Lemon Lyman’; it’s telling that Sorkin doesn’t know such a site would have had a much better name.)

Throughout The Social Network Sorkin is pointing at Mark Zuckerberg and shouting ‘Nobody likes you! You’re a weird nerd!’ (Public social shaming, ejection from the in-group, is the punishment that Sorkin reserves for the characters he dislikes most. Given the professed morality of this film, this is ironic.) There is also some really odd stuff in the film about the supposedly notable phenomenon of Asian-American women getting together with Jewish-American men, which is cringy and legitimately insulting to Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, stood up during a private pre-release screening and shouted ‘How can you do this to a kid?’ You kind of know what she means, even though — as Sorkin points out – Zuck was 26 at the time. The actual real-life Zuckerberg doesn’t come off like a sparkling conversationalist, sure, but he seems to have a settled senior team — which is not nothing, in the tech founder world — and a happy and stable marriage. These outcomes make no sense if you believe Sorkin’s account of him.

(If not Zuckerberg, who is Sorkin writing about? Who is this figure at the centre of A Social Network? A highly driven, talented man whose pursues his vision with monomaniacal intent until it goes global. A man who builds a career rooted in human communication while having a reputation for being a little difficult, inter-personally-wise. A man who tries to impose order on meat-space, and occasionally seeks sanctuary from it in intense brainwork, or perhaps mood-altering substances. A man who compulsively displays his own cleverness, but whose self-confidence seems to be brittle; who uses his facility with words to dominate; who has never been invited to the cool kids’ table. A man who is endlessly swatting away criticism from talentless nobodies on the internet (hi!). Whoever this guy is, I hope he’s OK, because Aaron Sorkin sure seems to want to kick him down a long flight of stairs.)

I don’t think The Social Network is literally about Facebook. This is perverse, because everything Sorkin has ever said about it indicates that he wrote it literally about Facebook. I don’t think Sorkin understands Mark Zuckerberg, and I don’t think he understands the internet. But he’s so goddamned talented, and so interested in social dynamics, that he’s written a different film altogether, perhaps by mistake: a fable about human nature and status and misunderstanding and youth and longing and unintended consequences, and the multiple meanings of the phrase ‘social network’.

ERICA
[HEAVILY]
Must be nice. He made $300,000 in a summer?

MARK
He likes meteorology.

ERICA
You said it was oil futures.

MARK
If you can read the weather, you can predict the price of heating oil. I think you asked me that because you think the final club that’s easiest to get into is the one where I’ll have the best chance.

ERICA
I… what? 

MARK
You asked me which one was easiest to get into because you think that that’s the one where I’ll have the best chance.

ERICA
[SLOWLY LOSING HER TEMPER]
The one that’s easiest to get into would be the one where anybody has the best chance.

MARK
You didn’t ask me which one was the best one.
You asked me which one was the easiest one.

ERICA
I was honestly just asking, okay, I was just asking to ask.
Mark, I’m not speaking in code.

MARK
Erica…

ERICA
You’re obsessed with finals clubs! You have finals clubs OCD and you need to see someone about it who will prescribe you medication! I don’t care if the side effects may include blindness!

MARK
Final clubs. Not ‘finals clubs.’ And there’s a difference between being obsessed and being motivated.

ERICA
[SPEAKING SLOWLY]
Yes. There is.

MARK
Well there you go, that was cryptic. So you do speak in code.

ERICA
I didn’t mean to be cryptic.

MARK
I’m just saying, I need to do something substantial in order to get the attention of the clubs. 

ERICA
Why?

MARK
Because they’re exclusive. And fun. And they lead to a better life.

ERICA
Teddy Roosevelt didn’t get elected because he was a member of the Phoenix Club.

MARK
Teddy Roosevelt was a member of the Porcellian. And yes, he did.

ERICA
[WITH SYRUP]
Well, why don’t you just concentrate on just being the best ‘you’ you can be?

MARK
Did you really just say that?

ERICA
I was kidding. Although just because something’s trite doesn’t make it any less true.

‘Just because something’s trite, doesn’t make it any less true’. 

As the New York Times says, ‘Sorkin is a master of big speeches… of earnest mansplaining and liberal wishful thinking.’ (The word ‘earnest’ is important in that sentence.)  His writing is explicitly deployed as advocacy. He brings everything back to the big themes — Patriotism, Morality, Responsibility, Right ‘n’ Wrong, the State of the World and the Culture — and he wholeheartedly valorises liberal democracy.

Some people find this icky and embarrassing. But you know what? Liberal democracy is the only governmental model worth a damn in human history. Given the state of everything <gestures> maybe we need to say this stuff out loud more often. Democracy is good. The rule of law and the predictable operation of encoded restraints? Good. Being clever and competent and hard-working and responsible? Good. Treating other people, including your opponents, with respect? Good (although Mark Zuckerberg would be justified in rolling his eyes at this point.) Serious, consensual, incremental government by intelligent, grown-up people? Sign. Me. Up. 

Sorkin’s style is highly flavoured and not to everyone’s taste. He can be formulaic and syrupy, and inaccurate. Sometimes (see Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) he misfires. You might prefer some of the thousands of writers who problematise liberal democracy and point out its flaws. (I too think that some of them are great, although I can’t resist pointing out that their work is only possible because we live in a liberal democracy.) All cool. And maybe you think liberal democracy doesn’t need a Poet Laureate. But I think maybe it does. And Sorkin is it. 

MARK
I want to be straightforward with you and tell you that I think you might want to be a little more supportive. If I get in I will be taking you to the events and the… gatherings, and you will be meeting a lot of people you wouldn’t normally get to meet.

ERICA
[DANGEROUS SARCASM]
You would do that for me?

MARK
[MISTAKING HER TONE]
We’re dating.

ERICA
Okay. Well, I want to try and be straightforward with you, and let you know that we’re not, anymore.

MARK
What do you mean?

ERICA
We’re not dating anymore. I’m sorry.

MARK
Is this a joke?

ERICA
No. It’s not.

MARK
You’re breaking up with me?

ERICA
You’re going to introduce me to people I wouldn’t normally have the chance to meet? What the f… What is that supposed to mean?

MARK
Settle down!

ERICA
What is that supposed to MEAN?

[FROM THIS POINT ONWARDS ERICA IS THE ANGRIEST PERSON IN THE STATE OF MASSACHUSETTS]

MARK
[SNIGGERING]
The reason we’re able to sit here and drink right now is because you used to sleep with the door guy!

ERICA
‘The door guy’? His name is Bobby. I have not slept with the door guy. The door guy is a friend of mine and he’s a perfectly good class of people. And what part of Long Island are you from? Wimbledon?

MARK
[BELATEDLY REALISING HOW ANGRY SHE IS]
Wait. Wait, wait.

ERICA
I’m going back to my dorm.

MARK
Wait. Is this real?

ERICA
Yes.

MARK
OK, then wait. I apologise OK?

ERICA
I have to study.

MARK
Erica? 

ERICA
Yes?

MARK
I’m sorry. I mean it.

ERICA
I appreciate that, but I have to go study.

MARK
[DESPERATELY]
Come on you don’t have to study, you don’t have to study. Let’s just talk.

ERICA
I can’t.

MARK
Why?

ERICA
[LOSING IT]
Because it’s exhausting! Dating you is like dating a StairMaster!

Rooney Mara is on screen for five minutes in this two-hour film, and she really packs a punch. But also, Sorkin’s decision to put this scene right upfront is, again, counterintuitive. The decision that Erica makes at the end of this scene sets the rest of the plot in motion, but this is (almost) the last time we see her face.

Sorkin’s screenplays orbit around such narrative difficulties, gaps or mysteries, like Welles’s ‘Rosebud’ in Citizen Kane. We’re dropped into The West Wing two years into Barlet’s first term of office, and find out nothing about the epic backstory until the second season. Any number of West Wing episodes turn on withheld pieces of information. There’s a compelling reason why defence attorney William Kunstler refuses to put the nice, clean, jury-friendly Tom Hayden on the stand in The Trial of the Chicago 7, but we don’t find out what it is until the very end. 

Mysteries are fairly standard mechanisms in screenplays, but you usually know there’s a mystery and you’re actively waiting for it to be resolved. Sorkin does something different: he establishes a core of dark matter, a gravitational tug on the viewer’s intuition, and then he waits for his moment. What’s astonishing about Sorkin is the delicacy with which he sets these things up, and the beautiful sudden symmetry that he reveals, almost always right at the end, leaving you pinned in your seat as the credits roll. The pay-offs are deliriously satisfying.

In The Social Network there’s a young lawyer (played by Rashida Jones) who keeps having apparently inane chats with Mark. Is she trying to seduce him? All through the film you think this is a cute little sub-plot. In the closing moments Sorkin uses it to tear the roof off, and take us right back to the beginning. 

MARK
All I meant is that you’re not likely to… currently… I wasn’t making a comment on your appearance. I was just saying that you go to B.U. [Boston University, the Anglia Ruskin to Harvard’s Cambridge]. I was stating a fact, that’s all, and if it seemed rude then of course I apologise.

Wait. Erica is supposed to be of indeterminate attractiveness? This Erica? This young woman with the ballerina bone structure and the glossy hair and the beautiful eyes? Hollywood really is a crazy-making place.

ERICA
I have to go study.

MARK
You don’t have to study.

ERICA
[HISSING]
Why do you keep saying I don’t have to study?

MARK
[SHOUTING]
BECAUSE YOU GO TO B.U.!

[ERICA STARES AT HIM WITH MURDER IN HER EYES]

MARK
[BEAT]
Do you want to go get some food?

ERICA
[INCANDESCENT]
I’m sorry you’re not sufficiently impressed with my education.

MARK
And I’m sorry I don’t have a rowboat, so we’re even.

ERICA
I think we should just be friends.

MARK
I don’t want friends.

ERICA
I was being polite, I have no intention of being friends with you.

MARK
I’m under some pressure right now from my OS class and if we could just order some food I think we should…

ERICA
[GRABS HIS HAND FORCIBLY]
You are probably going to be a very successful computer… person. But you’re going to go through life thinking that girls don’t like you because you’re a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that that won’t be true. It’ll be because you’re an asshole. 

Pay-off.

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For more social networking, why not try our piece on the weird conjunction between secondary fantasy worlds and online communities?