"I don't want my fidelity to be to the truth," Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter for "The Social Network," recently told a reporter. "I want it to be to storytelling." Fair enough. But how much of the movie is truth, and how much of it is storytelling? In an article published on Slate, journalist Luke O'Brien says that at least as far as the history of Facebook goes, "The Social Network" might as well be fiction.
Sorkin, O'Brien writes, "bends truth to narrative. He adds anachronistic references to MySpace. He invents a scene in which early Facebook investor Sean Parker happens upon Zuckerberg's rental house in Palo Alto, Calif., only after a zip line tears off the chimney. And Sorkin creates a climactic, computer-smashing confrontation between Saverin and Zuckerberg that I've been unable to find any reference to in the various Facebook lawsuits."
"Let's accept petty deceptions like these as a necessary ingredient in a dramatized story," O'Brien concludes. "The problem is that Sorkin doesn't gloss over facts to get at any truths about Facebook's founding. He is trafficking in dramaturgy."
