The Aaron Sorkin trick

When we talk about great dialogue in movies and television, one of the first names that always comes up is that of Aaron Sorkin. And it isn’t without reason. Sorkin isn’t a perfect writer, and I’ve noted before that it’s his sheer technical facility—all that crackling talk and offhand eloquence—that allows deeper flaws to persist in a series like The Newsroom. But when a show like House of Cards tries and fails to replicate that music, it reminds us how difficult Sorkin’s brand of persuasive chatter really is. It’s a dialect of distinctly narrow scope: Sorkin has rarely been comfortable writing for characters who weren’t smart, articulate, and white. But like the singer Judy London, who moved so beautifully within the range that nature afforded, he’s done wonderful things in that one particular register. As I’ve said elsewhere, one of the reasons that the optimism of The West Wing resonates so deeply is that Sorkin was always at his best when writing for characters who represent how we’d like to see ourselves. And even when he tackles less admirable personalities, like the fictionalized Mark Zuckerberg of The Social Network, we’re inclined to forgive their flaws just because it’s so much fun to hear them speak.

What makes Sorkin especially interesting to other writers is the fine line he walks between earnestness and trickery. As he once said to Terry Gross: “I phonetically create the sound of smart people talking to each other.” It’s a knack, once you’ve developed it, that can go very far, and Sorkin is particularly good at drawing attention to his own contrivances even as he uses them to generate emotion. The famous YouTube supercut of Sorkinisms—the phrases, lines, and even entire monologues that he repurposes from one project to the next—testifies both to his instinctive ability and to the artificiality of so much “great” dialogue itself. If a line can be transferred intact from one character, scene, or story to another, it implies that it had less to do with the needs of the situation than with the tingle it inspires in the listener. Sorkin produces such lines as easily as a magician adapts a piece of sleight of hand when asked to improvise in unfamiliar surroundings. Half of drama, from Shakespeare to Mamet, consists of such good tricks, and even if the more crucial half revolves around applying them to worthy material, you can still learn a lot from the moments in which the machinery comes into view.

There’s a specific Sorkin trick that fascinates me, and I recently devoted the better part of a day to unpacking exactly how it works. For convenience, I’ll stick with examples from The Social Network, in which it recurs repeatedly. In the opening scene between Mark and Erica, Mark mentions that he got a perfect score on the SAT. Erica asks: “Does that mean you actually got nothing wrong?” Mark ignores the question, and for the next eight lines, they talk about the different ways he could distinguish himself at Harvard. Then, in the middle of an unrelated exchange, Mark interrupts: “Yes, it means I got nothing wrong on the test.” Later, Erica asks him which final club would be the easiest to get into, and Mark says testily: “Why would you ask me that?” They shift to a different subject for a while, and then Mark circles back, as if he’d been mulling it over: “I think you asked me that because you think the final club that’s easiest to get into is the one where I’ll have the best chance.” An even showier example occurs in a later scene, in which Divya briefs the Winklevoss twins on Mark’s work with Facebook: “He’s expanding to Yale, Columbia, and Stanford.” The conversation continues for two full screenplay pages before Cameron says: “Why Stanford?” Divya replies: “Why do you think?” And the scene ends there.

Each instance leaves us with the impression of characters who are talking past each other, or following their own trains of thought, only for the conversation to double back around on itself once the inner monologue catches up with what’s being said. If most dialogue is basically linear, Sorkin introduces a second dimension, so that the exchange becomes less a straight line than a surface in which statements are stuck like pins. It’s a nice effect in itself, and it’s no surprise that Sorkin returns to it so frequently. What I really like about it, though, is that it’s a technical trick that results in a simulation of a character’s inner life. Sorkin takes one side of the conversation and shifts it a little bit forward or backward, while keeping the other half where it is, so it feels like one character is responding to a statement from three lines earlier. He probably does it instinctively, but it could also be done mechanically: I’ll sometimes write out a conversation and see how it reads if I move a statement and its response further apart. At its best, it generates a second, unspoken dialogue in parallel to the one we hear with our ears—we’re being asked, in essence, to listen to one of the characters thinking. Creating the illusion of real thought, rather than a rote recitation of lines in a script, is one of the greatest challenges any writer faces, and Sorkin, consciously or otherwise, has hit on a reproducible way of making it happen. It doesn’t work every time. But it works often enough that it belongs in every writer’s bag of tricks.

The white piece of paper

“Why is this so hard?”
“‘Cause it’s a white piece of paper.”
“How high are the stakes?”
“How high can you count?”
“So what do you do?”
“Whatever it takes to get started. And we read new memos, and we try new themes, and we hear new slogans, and we test new lines, and after a few weeks of that…we’ve still got a white piece of paper.”

—The West Wing, “100,000 Airplanes”

The first three seasons of The West Wing have a lot of virtues—along with some equally obvious flaws—but what I like about it the most is that it’s fundamentally a show about writing. When you’re an author entering an unfamiliar world or profession, even one that you’ve meticulously researched and explored, you naturally look for a hook that allows you to relate it to your own experience. A show called The West Wing could have focused on any element of the executive branch, but it’s no accident that Aaron Sorkin ended up centering so much of it on a speechwriter, a communications director, and a press secretary, all of whom spend most of their time dealing with words.

I’ve been hard on Sorkin in the past, mostly due to my disappointment in the first season of The Newsroom, but there’s no denying that he’s as adept as anyone alive at filling that blank piece of paper. Sometimes, his facility can be a problem in itself: he has a way of falling back on old tricks, bombast, straw men, and a lovingly crafted simulation of the way intelligent people talk. Yet even the worst of his vices go hand in hand with tremendous strengths, and we only need to compare Sorkin to other writers who have tried and failed to write smart characters—as in every line of dialogue in Dan Brown’s novels—to remember how talented he really is. It’s impossible to watch an extended run of The West Wing, as my wife and I have been doing over the last few weeks, and not emerge wanting to sound smarter and more capable. And when I feel the need to punch up the dialogue in my own work, I’ll often go back to reread a few old West Wing transcripts in hopes of picking up some of that magic.

Of course, The West Wing works because it takes place in a world that can sustain a heightened conversational register. Everyone is blindingly smart, as well as on the right side of history, and you can sometimes sense Sorkin straining when called upon to write characters of different backgrounds or opinions. If the show has one glaring weakness, it’s that enormous chunks of dialogue could easily be transposed from one player to another without much in the way of revision: everyone shares the same values, and if the characters stay distinct in our minds, it’s thanks more to performance and delivery than writing. Compare it to a show like The Wire, which adeptly handles so many different voices, and The West Wing can start to seem limited. In some ways, it’s an expression of the different ways in which Sorkin and David Simon—a veteran reporter for the Baltimore Sun—came to television: instead of will and craft rising to create a simulation of experience, it’s experience straining to bend craft to accommodate all the things it needs to say.

And what fascinates me the most about The West Wing, when viewed from a distance of so many years, is how fully its politics are an expression of a shrewd narrative strategy. Many of us catch ourselves wishing that our real policymakers were as articulate and principled as the ones here, but it’s a fantasy created less by a coherent vision of politics than by a writing style. The show’s idealism, which everyone agrees was its most striking characteristic, isn’t a political or philosophical stance, but a set of tactics that allowed Sorkin to maneuver so gracefully within a narrow range. (You can say much the same thing about the cynicism of House of Cards: it’s easier to write a television show when everyone breathes the same air, whether it’s tainted or pure.) The West Wing came to mean so much to so many people because it happened to be written by a man whose talents were best exercised within a show that gave us our best versions of ourselves. It’s as happy a marriage between talent and subject as television has ever provided. But it all emerged from those small daily choices and compromises demanded by a white piece of paper.

The treacherous craft of Aaron Sorkin

When I consider Aaron Sorkin and the weirdly watchable train wreck that is The Newsroom, I’m reminded of something that Norman Mailer once said about craft: “I think of it as being like a Saint Bernard with that little bottle of brandy under his neck. Whenever you get into trouble, craft can keep you warm long enough to be rescued. Of course, this is exactly what keeps good novelists from becoming great novelists.” Craft, in other words, becomes a kind of intellectual sleight of hand, a way of disguising bad thinking or more fundamental narrative problems, when a writer of lesser facility might have been forced to deal more honestly with the true implications of his material. Mailer cites Robert Penn Warren as an example:

Robert Penn Warren might have written a major novel if he hadn’t just that little extra bit of craft to get him out of all the trouble in All the King’s Men…And his plot degenerated into a slam-bang mix of exits and entrances, confrontations, tragedies, quick wits and woe. But he was really forcing an escape from the problem.

Which, if you think about it, sounds a lot like the The Newsroom, which so often confuses manic action and the rapid-fire exchange of factoids with drama and witty repartee. It’s a frustrating, often outright terrible show, and yet I find myself watching it with increasing fascination, because it achieves the level of badness that can only be attained with the aid of remarkable craft. Sorkin is a man of enormous talent, but in his best work, he’s been aided and restrained by other strong creative voices. The Newsroom gives us Sorkin uncut, without the guiding hand he needs to hold him back from his worst impulses, and the result tells us a lot not just about Sorkin, but about the nature and limitations of a certain kind of drama. Because watching this show forces us to confront what David Thomson, speaking about David Mamet, has called “the time-killing aridness in brilliant situations, crackling talk, and magnificent acting.”

That sort of “crackling talk” is a skill that can be learned over time, and Sorkin, who has written hundreds of hours of television, theater, and film, has had more practice doing it than just about anyone else. As a recent supercut made clear, he also tends to return repeatedly to the same verbal tics and phrases (“Well, that was predictable”). Yet this only reflects how good he really is. Sorkin is a machine for creating great dialogue, and like all insanely productive creative professionals, he likes to fall back on the same tricks, which he generates almost unconsciously. If he’d slaved over a line to make it work, he wouldn’t have used it again, but the fact that these lines reappear so often implies that they came easily. As Nicholson Baker says in U and I of John Updike’s reuse of certain images in his novels: “He liked it enough to consent to it when it appeared in a street scene the first time, and yet he didn’t like it well enough for his memory to warn him off a second placement.” And that’s the mark of a writer of almost supernatural felicity.

Yet it also conceals deeper problems of substance, as well as a disturbing lack of real ideas. As Sorkin recently said to Terry Gross: “I phonetically create the sound of smart people talking to each other.” And what The Newsroom demonstrates is that Sorkin’s blessed ability with dialogue has left him underdeveloped along other parameters, a shortcoming that seems especially visible now. If you write wonderful words for actors to say, this can conceal any number of other limitations, sometimes for years, but eventually the mask starts to slip. Sorkin is a verbal genius, with the Oscar and Emmys to show for it, but without good collaborators, his gift tends to ripen and rot. What Sorkin needs, clearly, is a strong creative force to push against, which David Fincher provided with The Social Network and Thomas Schlamme and John Wells did on The West Wing—although his recent purge of many members of his writing staff makes it doubtful if this will happen soon. But I hope it does. Because otherwise, the show will continue to waste its great potential, and a legion of viewers can only say: “Well, that was predictable.”

Tomorrow’s news today

There’s a memorable moment in the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, set during the closing years of World War II, in which a Japanese naval officer named Ensign Morituri—one of the more effective of Pynchon’s deliberately bad character puns—strikes up a friendly conversation with Tyrone Slothrop, the novel’s ineffectual hero. Morituri says:

“I want to see the war over in the Pacific so that I can go home. Since you ask. It’s the season of the plum rains now, the Bai-u, when all the plums are ripening. I want only to be with Michiko and our girls, and once I’m there, never to leave Hiroshima again. I think you’d like it there. It’s a city on Honshu, on the Inland Sea, very pretty, a perfect size, big enough for city excitement, small enough for the serenity a man needs…”

The scene takes place in the summer of 1945. While this is a fairly obvious example, it isn’t the only time in which Pynchon uses the historical setting of his novel to create a fierce sort of irony for a reader who knows what comes next. And the trick of setting a novel or other work of art in the recent past, so the author can shape his narrative to look forward to future events, is a powerful tool indeed—although it needs to be treated with caution.

It’s also a very old device. Right now I’m reading Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools, which takes place on a passenger ship crossing the Atlantic several years before World War II, allowing the author to indulge in such moments as when a German passenger, speaking of the travelers in steerage, says: “I would put them all in a big oven and turn on the gas.” On a much higher level, we see the same strategy in The Magic Mountain, whose characters debate the future of Europe in the years leading up to the Great War. The device allows the author to set up certain characters as insightful or naive, measured simply by their sense of what we know is coming, and it also gives the writer’s own pronouncements about the future more authority, since we know that at least some of them will come true. (In fact, the critic Edward Mendelson identifies this as one of the characteristics of the encyclopedic novel, which is nearly always set in the recent past. On a humbler plane, it’s also true of The Icon Thief and its sequels.)

The trouble is that a trick like this can easily be misused. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s tempting to feel smarter than characters who ignore the rise of Nazi Germany or the threat of Stalinist Russia, for instance, which conveniently overlooks the fact that much of the world made the same mistake. It also leads to books like The Help, which allows us to admire certain characters and dislike others simply by transferring today’s social attitudes to characters in the past. And a work of art like this can go either way. When I first heard the premise of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, I thought it was very clever: a television series about a cable news program set in the recent past, allowing us to watch characters work their way through actual breaking news events—the Gulf oil spill, the death of Osama Bin Laden—in real time. Such a structure yields countless opportunities for irony and suspense, which often boil down to the same thing: the viewer knows something that the characters do not. And when done properly, it could provide enough stories to fuel a series forever.

After watching the pilot, however, I’m a little skeptical about Sorkin’s approach. The show’s first episode centers on the disaster at the Deepwater Horizon, but instead of giving us characters who are scrambling to catch up with events, it shows them jumping ahead of them almost immediately. Within minutes of hearing the news, it seems, the protagonists have already foreseen the environmental consequences and have predicted, with incredible accuracy, how events will unfold over the following months—which makes them seem much smarter than the characters around them, yes, but only because Aaron Sorkin knows what did happen. This takes the easy way out (it isn’t hard to seem smart today when you have access to tomorrow’s newspaper) and it ignores a lot of potential drama. A show like The Newsroom works best when the audience knows more than the characters, not when the characters know more than everyone else. There’s a lot of promise here, and I hope the show improves, although I can’t say for sure. Because unlike Sorkin’s characters, I don’t know what will come next.