Anti-'Social Network': Aaron Sorkin's Suggestive Web Past!

Richard Rushfield picks a non-Hollywoodish outlet—The Awl—for a needed corrective to Social Network Oscar hype:

What Aaron Sorkin has done in the screenplay of The Social Network is to say, essentially, if I'm allowed to invent the dialogue, I should be allowed to invent the rest of the facts as well. Because, the screenplay’s liberties suggest, the facts of Facebook's invention are not important in themselves. They are only relevant so far as they serve larger points Sorkin wants to make about the times in which we live. (Apparently, according to Sorkin, who despises the Internet and does not much use it, virtual identity has replaced actual identity. Oh dear!)

Actually, Sorkin does use the Internet. Or he did, back in 2001. Maybe it wasn't a pleasant experience ... In fact, there's a certain, er, resonance between that incident (in which Sorkin recklessly slags a fellow writer) and the opening incident of the film in which the fictive Sorkinized Zuckerberg is immaturely nasty in a blog post ... Was Sorkin projecting? ... Newscat has the sordid details from 2001, and elaborates:

"[T]he basic point is that Sorkin thought he could comment on the internet where no one was looking. I think you can see the beginnings of his curmudgeonly attitude about the internet starting right here. So to everyone: Sorkin loved the internet before he figured out it was a printing press and not a telephone with conference calling abilities (with a mute button)."

You shudder to think what he'll do if he projects himself into the John Edwards story ... P.S.: Rushfield needs to come up with a label for the phenomenon he's describing. We have "docudrama" and "mockudrama." How about "crockudrama"? ... 9:03 p.m.

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I'm not sure I agree with Mike Kinsley that President Obama missed an opportunity when he wasn't able to "suggest there might be any connection between the voices on right-wing talk radio and the voices in Jared Lee Loughner’s head." But this Kinsley graf was kind of great:

Republicans generally praised Obama’s speech at the memorial service in which he took care to absolve conservatives and Republicans of any special responsibility for the tone of the political debate. It is, he said, “a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do.” This sounds like a noble sentiment. But who is to blame for what ails the world if not those who think differently? If those who think the same as you are responsible, it’s time to start thinking differently yourself.

9:11 p.m.

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At a Los Angeles magazine event last week, Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, acknowledged that "comprehensive" immigration reform had failed to pass Congress, but said, "[S]trategies are being developed to have it succeed." ... I wonder what he meant by that. (He didn't mean "Enforcement First"—that much seemed clear.) ... 9:29 p.m.

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