It’s hard to recall that The Social Network hasn’t even been out for four months. In that short period of time, it’s racked up more than $200 million in its theatrical global release, it’s already started winning awards (and is considered a top contender for the Oscars) and it’s become a top-selling DVD, (while still in the theaters).
But early on, people online got very wound up about how inaccurate the movie was.
Nathan Heller at Slate described all the ways that the movie got Harvard wrong; a separate Slate article by Luke O’Brien tackled the mistakes about Facebook and Zuckerberg. At Jezebel, Irin Carmon attacked the movie for how it portrayed women.
Even at this late date, Richard Rushfield at The Awl has another polemic: ‘The Social Network’ Is a Pack of Lies That Conveys Nothing About Our Time. (Ironically, when I looked at that page, there was another link which was promoted with the headline: “Entire Internet Appalled About Something.”)
The piece (also promoted by Mickey Kaus) begins with a ridiculous comparison to a made-up movie about the Vietnam War that isn’t in any way comparable to the accuracy of The Social Network (The way screenwriter Sorkin portrayed Zuckerberg was like showing a young Lyndon Johnson serving in the Army in the Fifties; does Rushfield realize that the real LBJ was serving in the Senate and in his Forties at the time?).
His main point is:
…[we expect that] when a film purports to be a telling of actual events and the lives of real-life people, it gets the basic facts of those events and people right. Or at the very least tries!
Well, that’s true. I think movies based on actual events ought to try to get it right and if they’re not interested in that, they ought to just change all the names and call it fiction.
So how can I completely agree with Rushfield and yet feel that this post is one of the stupidest things I’ve read this week?
The answer lies in why I didn’t write 1,318 words to make that argument: Because the motion picture has gotten history wrong from the very start.
Movies don’t care about showing what happened; they’re only interested in raw material. Not even every documentary filmmaker is interested in accurately showing how something went down; even a documentary has to have some structure – a beginning, middle and end.
In 1915, Birth of a Nation told an outrageous series of lies about the Reconstruction and the Klan in order to glamorize the Confederate South. But this is part of a grand tradition that includes a lot of inaccurate movies.
- The Battleship Potemkin (1925)
- Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
- Sergeant York (1941)
- They Died with Their Boots On (1941)
- Battle of the Bulge (1965)
- Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
- Amadeus (1984)
- JFK (1991)
- In the Name of the Father (1993)
- Titanic (1997)
- The Hurricane (1999)
- The Insider (1999)
- 300 (2007)
Mel Gibson gets props for two inaccurate movies: Braveheart (1995) and The Patriot (2000). Last year’s film Green Zone (2010) feels very emotionally true about the falsehoods that took us into Iraq, but it’s very factually inaccurate.
This isn’t even close to a complete list; it’s just the movies I could think of off the top of my head (Here’s a typical fact-checking article). But the point is that filmmakers have always taken historical events and portrayed them with an agenda. Sometimes it’s to make a political point; sometimes it’s to sum up the zeitgeist of the times; sometimes it just to entertain.
In interviews (like this one), Aaron Sorkin has made it clear that he saw this as a story of “friendship, loyalty, power, betrayal, class, jealousy…” Remember that he read this in a manuscript by Ben Mezrich, who was accused of fictionalizing events in his “non-fiction” book Bringing Down the House. (See here and here for details about the accuracy of Mezrich’s portrayal of Facebook’s birth.)
Is it fair to say that Sorkin and director David Fincher made a “bad” movie? Sure. I disagree, but you could make that argument. Can you argue against people who claimed The Social Network summed up something about our time? Again, yes. I also don’t believe it did, but I’m not sure that’s what Sorkin was trying to do.
Is it true that the movie gets facts wrong? Yes. Should we point that out? Who cares. Hey, did you know some politician in D.C. said something this week that was an exaggeration? Can you believe that? Isn’t that outrageous?
I’m not entirely sure why The Social Network seemed to strike a nerve in this way. It might be because this is, essentially, a movie about the Internet, so people who use the Internet a lot have an interest. It might be because Sorkin has a history of antipathy towards online discussions. Some people have felt that Sorkin doesn’t treat his female characters well.
I’m a big Sorkin fan. At the same time, he has his flaws and foibles. it’s totally fair to fling darts at him. My beef is with people who became totally infuriated at how inaccurate the movie was.
Have I made my point? Have I been sufficiently clumsily blunt here? Have I repeated myself over and over until you’re sick of reading this?
Movies Lie All the Time. That’s what they do. If this comes as a surprise to you, I have shocking details about the nature of reality television…
UPDATE: This issue continues to resonate. For example, here’s Christopher Hitchens complaining about the accuracy of The King’s Speech. His complaints are valid for audience members who might be tempted to take their sense of history from the movies.
And then Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch complains about both the inaccuracy and the misogyny in The Social Network. I would agree that any attempts by Sorkin to claim that his script is based on reality (and so he can’t be held responsible for what’s shown) is ridiculous. But I don’t think he’s alone in this. Take a look at the list of inaccurate movies above; I bet if you went to the creators, they’d tell you how they drew such-and-such element from the historical record, even if they had to compress events or dramatize things a little. History is more malleable than people realize; it’s really hard to get completely objective renderings.
UPDATE 2: I stumbled across this discussion on the radio show On the Media about fictionalization in non-fiction books. Professor Lawrence Weschler makes a compelling argument that all depictions of past events, including journalistic reporting and non-fiction books, include editing for brevity and clarity, selective arranging and other elements of storytelling. Instead, we should aim for fairness and accuracy as best we can, avoid making up things out of whole cloth and try to create a work that reflects a sense of what happened.