SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for “The Social Reckoning,” now playing in theaters. Aaron Sorkin’s new film “The Social Reckoning” begins with a vignette about the impact of social media that’s as chilling as any statistic about the dangers of social media. And Portia Doubleday sits at its center, portraying the human toll of Facebook.
In the first chapter of the new film, entitled “White Girl Wasted,” we see Doubleday’s character, Kaylee, standing by her stalled car on the side of the road. When two police officers (Sierra Capri and Michael Braugher) pull over and approach her, she tells them that AAA is on their way to assist her; she’s also visibly impaired, slurring her speech and combating them at every turn, even as her face is buried in her phone. Even as it seems the cops have nothing to go on — as she’s within her rights under California law to refuse to cooperate with their requests, they tell her they’re going to let her slide — Kaylee insists on intensifying the interaction, spewing racist and misogynistic invective at the cops and then capturing the consequences on video, declaring in a screeching monologue that she is “being treated like a fucking immigrant” and broadcasting it to subscribers of the “Voice of Reason” channel online.
This interaction, one that will feel unfortunately familiar to any viewer who’s spent time online this decade, sits at the heart of “The Social Reckoning.” Sorkin’s follow-up to “The Social Network,” the 2010 film he wrote about the earliest days of Facebook, “Reckoning” confronts the world Mark Zuckerberg has brought into being. Kaylee is a person whose particular brand of rage could only exist in a post-social media world. After all, we learn she’s something of a changeling: Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) knew Kaylee as a bleeding-heart leftist.
By the film’s end, Frances has been so moved by Kaylee’s trajectory that she decides to spill the secrets of Facebook’s indifference to the harm it causes. Kaylee, meanwhile, joins the Jan. 6 insurrection. Doubleday may be best known for her work on USA’s Emmy-winning drama “Mr.
Robot,” in which she played a conflicted employee at the series’ central villainous tech concern, E Corp. As she tells Variety, on the week of “The Social Reckoning’s” release, the way technology affects our cognition is a live concern for her, and has had direct consequences in her own life. I live in Los Angeles, and I know what’s going on in the world.
And I actually have known a couple of people who were radicalized, and they actually came to mind. During COVID, I was actually pre-med for like three seconds. Yeah, there was nothing to do.
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