Screenwriting Lessons: “The Social Network” — Part 3: Theme

A five-part series exploring lessons we can glean from Aaron Sorkin’s script.

The Social Network won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2011. It is an audacious script which breaks many so-called screenwriting ‘rules’ and thus is worth analyzing.

Today: The Social Network — Theme.

I was sitting in a movie theater experiencing The Social Network for the first time when I whispered to my oldest son, “This feels like a Shakespeare play.” I was referring to themes in the story — the mad ‘king,’ lust for power, betrayal. Later I read this interview with Sorkin in which he said the following:

“My feelings about the internet are actually irrelevant to anyone’s enjoyment of the movie. But what made me overcome it was that I didn’t think it was a movie about Facebook. I thought it was a movie that has themes as old as storytelling itself… Themes of friendship and loyalty, and of class and jealously and power. These things that Shakespeare would write about it, or Paddy Chayefsky would write about. But luckily for me, none of those people were available so I got to write about it.”

Themes are critically important to the success of a movie and yet I find this is one of the most confused and confusing aspects of the screenwriting craft. To start with, there doesn’t seem to be any consensus on what theme means. After much thought, here’s how I look at it: Theme is the emotional meaning of a movie. And as any good movie traffics in numerous emotions, it stands to reason a movie may have many themes. Consider Sorkin’s list above:

• Friendship: That theme is in play primarily between Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, but also Zuckerberg and Erica (albeit a friendship with an abrupt end), Zuckerberg and Sean Parker (however Zuckerberg discovers he’s bonded with a Trickster), and the general camaraderie of that initial Facebook team.
• Loyalty: Most prominently with Zuckerberg and Saverin, but also Zuckerberg and Erica, Parker and his relationship with Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins. Essentially Zuckerberg demonstrates loyalty to development and growth of Facebook, but none to any person other than Parker who in the end commits an act of disloyalty by getting busted and generating negative press for Facebook.
• Class: Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss twins, Zuckerberg and the Harvard administration, Zuckerberg and the Harvard elite, Zuckerberg (buoyed by his success with Facebook) and all his legal inquisitors. Arguably it is Zuckerberg’s sense of second-class status (in part) that fuels his desire to succeed.
• Jealousy: Zuckerberg vs. Harvard elite (Mr. Outside looking In), the Winklevoss twins vs. Zuckerberg (for his success with Facebook), Zuckerberg vs. the world (his sense that everyone basically is jealous of what he has created with Facebook).
• Power: Every major character in the movie is either in power, wanting to gain more power, out of power and wanting in, or using whatever power they have to impact someone else (e.g., Erica uses her emotional power to dump Zuckerberg, so he responds by using his intellectual power to create a blog and demean Erica publicly).

But in my view the most important theme and central emotional meaning of the movie is this: Zuckerberg becomes a billionaire by creating a social network platform based on the premise of people wanting to make connections… while he himself is unable to make any sort of genuine human connection. This point is driven home by the movie’s brilliant final scene:

Here is Zuckerberg, stripped of all the noise, all the people, all the fury, revealed for what he is: The Tragic King. He has built a mighty kingdom. And yet has no real friends, reduced to reaching out to a girl we’ve seen all of four times in the movie. Indeed this theme was so important to Sorkin, you have to figure that was one of, if not the primary reason why he erased Zuckerberg’s real-life girlfriend of several years from the movie. If the cinematic Zuckerberg had a girlfriend like the real Zuckerberg, it would have eviscerated this central story theme.

For more on this, you can read my more detailed analysis of The Social Network, including character archetypes breakdown, here.

How about you? What do you think of themes? What is your definition? How important are themes to you when writing your script? Can you identify key themes at work in the current story you’re writing? Can you articulate them?

Part 1: Compelling Protagonist

Part 2: Narrative Framework

Tomorrow: Subplots.

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