Are Effective Satires Possible in the Social Media Age?

Can movies make compelling narratives out of a world molded by social media?
Attachment 56020

Movies always want to comment on the era in which they were made. Dating back to the days of The Great Dictator being a rebuke of Adolf Hitler’s evil or even how pre-Hays Code movies often reflected the excesses of the Roaring ‘20s, it’s only natural for films to reflect the world around them. This makes it extremely reasonable to believe that many modern motion pictures want to comment on the ubiquity of social media and other technological advances (like podcasts) that play a critical part in people’s everyday lives. Recent releases like Not Okay and Vengeance are just two of countless examples of this phenomenon.

But not every movie that tries to be about social media ends up being good. So many of these types of films have ended up being tone-deaf and terrible that it begs the question…can we make good movies about the era of social media?

To understand the answer to that question, it’s important to note that movies struggling to realize stories about the internet are nothing new. In fact, for as long as the world wide web has been a part of people’s lives, films have struggled to figure out how to incorporate it into their narratives. In the 1990s, a slew of hacker movies were comical in how little they seemed to understand how the online world seemed to function. As late as 2008, the Diane Lane thriller The Net still seemed charmingly out of step with the realities of the interweb.

Meanwhile, the sight of someone just sitting at a computer and typing isn’t super “cinematic”, so movies tend to overcompensate by often depicting anyone using the internet with a barrage of quick cuts and a zoom in to the interior of wires to show information traveling across the globe. Unless you’re the opening sequence of Three Colours: Red, these visual traits rarely work and just symbolize how much Hollywood has struggled with realizing the internet on film.

These problems have been compounded as it’s become clear that people tapping away at keyboards is not a temporary fad. It’s now a part of reality and, for many jobs, reality itself. Social media has exacerbated this by translating many social situations to the virtual space. So how do you confront that in movies? Some have opted to go the fearmongering route, like Jason Reitman’s 2014 film Men, Women, and Children. That ensemble movie depicted a wide variety of characters, particularly teenagers, whose real-world lives are incalculably harmed by their online activities. Reitman intended to make the movie a cautionary tale about living in the era of Facebook.

Going this route makes some sense conceptually since it doesn’t require filmmakers to break the mold of their storytelling or visual style to accommodate how people utilize the internet. They can just take the narrative mold of any story about people getting addicted to something (drugs, sex, violence, etc.), plop people staring at their phones into the space where a “bad thing” goes, and move on.

Unfortunately, titles like Men, Women, and Children end up getting critically savaged because, among other flaws, of their generic approach to the age of social media. There are countless complaints to be had with companies like Facebook or Twitter. However, focusing almost exclusively on “kids these days” when commenting on the ubiquity of social media isn’t insightful or, even more pressingly, new. It’s not the kind of take that makes people rush to the theater to see your movie nor does it say anything fresh about the world we inhabit. Men, Women, and Children is not an anomaly, with many Hollywood productions taking this easy way out of depicting the age of social media.

With this route, one can easily believe there’s just no way to properly depict the world of social media in film. It doesn’t help that these landscapes are changing constantly, just in technology let alone also in things like slang or in-jokes that people communicate in. By the time a movie goes from being an idea to a finished project, it could be commenting on a facet of social media that no longer exists. That concern is a weighty one and could, understandably, ward off people from even considering making movies that are about social media. Why make something that’s destined to become yesterday’s news before it’s even put in theaters?

Still, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to make movies that directly comment on the 21st-century fascination with social media. Just look at Janicza Bravo’s 2021 feature Zola, which was based on an absolutely wild Twitter thread about a woman Zola (Taylour Paige) recalling her unpredictable weekend with “pal” Stefani (Riley Keough). Its source material alone meant that Zola was always going to be intertwined with the world of the internet and Bravo doesn’t downplay that. This is especially notable when the movie pauses for a digression in which Stefani breaks the fourth wall and tells the audience her version of the movie’s story, which stems from a post by the actual lady on Reddit.

In this anecdote, we see a vividly different portrait of Zola’s events, complete with Stefani always being a blameless victim and Zola depicted as a racial caricature. In this segment, Bravo is ingeniously contrasting how Twitter allowed the real Zola to get her story out with this skewed tale from Stefani to make a broad point. Specifically, she and screenwriter Jeremy O. Harrisare commenting on how social media offers just as much of an opportunity for the truth to get warped as it does for providing access to wells of information. Other movies see social media as an inherent evil, but Zola is taking a more nuanced approach. Meanwhile, Stefani’s portrayal of Zola is a depiction of how white people will use Earth-shattering technology, like social media, that seems like it’s from the future to reinforce age-old stereotypes.

The use of modern social media to emphasize eternally harmful human behaviors is also apparent in the 2010 masterpiece The Social Network. When it first came out, it was understandable to be concerned that The Social Network would quickly age poorly. But more than a decade after it debuted, this story of the origins of Facebook has only gotten more and more timely. For one thing, Rooney Mara declaring to Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg that he’s “an asshole” cuts to the very core of the kind of human beings that run the social media apps that run the world. These people who turn a blind eye to bigotry and intolerance flourishing on social media so long as it lines their pockets, certainly live up to Mara’s descriptive word.

But as for the film as a whole, Aaron Sorkin’s Social Network screenplay doesn’t lean on just name-dropped Facebook and Napster and hope that brings substance to the table. Instead, Sorkin, leaning on the feature’s source material, weaves a compelling story about friendships crumbling to dust and constant betrayals, all so Zuckerberg can make Facebook as big as possible. These are the dramatic qualities that informed the richest William Shakespeare plays and they’re all playing out against a backdrop of computers, servers, and people fixated on a social media app. The Social Network’s devotion to fleshing out its characters, their psyche, and how they’re impacted by the rise of Facebook gives it such immense dramatic power. It’s not a movie about social media…yet it totally is.

The Social Network and Zola provide a fine blueprint for how we can make great movies in the age of rampant social media. It’s too easy to just say that kids being on their phones is lame or rely on the outdated hallmarks of classic movies about the web. You must be willing to go deeper and examine what kind of behaviors the age of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are exacerbating, and, most importantly, how those behaviors didn’t just get created once MySpace dropped. People like Zuckerberg and Stefani are nothing new in this world, the social media age just makes their shortcomings more apparent than ever. That’s just one of the many complexities of the social media age lesser movies never even acknowledge in cinematic narratives…but it can be done in this medium.

Remembering to keep the human element front and center, rather than just dismissing all technology or straining to be “hip”, that’s how modern movies can properly satirize, comment, and exist on a world molded by social media.