As a film music fan, this is the release that made me say "of course" this week. Aaron Sorkin's new film The Social Reckoning, which he wrote and directed, opened across the U.S. on October 9 (local time), and on the same day Sony Classical released Alexandre Desplat's original score, 17 tracks in all, digitally. Yes, this is the film that picks up where The Social Network left off.

What It Means for Desplat to Score the Sequel to Reznor & Ross

The 2010 film The Social Network (written by Sorkin) brought Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross their first Academy Award for Original Score. With cold synths and distorted piano, that score captured the startup fever that began in a Harvard dorm, and it is still talked about as one of the albums that changed film scoring in the 2010s.

The sequel's score went not to Reznor & Ross but to Desplat, a two-time Academy Award winner for The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water. He is known for the delicate orchestral touch of The King's Speech and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and more recently Jurassic World Rebirth and Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein. From a predecessor defined by electronics to a master craftsman of the orchestra: this change of composer sounds like a statement of tone in itself.

The story is set 17 years after the first film. Based on true events, it follows Facebook engineer turned whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) as she teams up with Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) to expose what goes on inside the social media company. Mark Zuckerberg is now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg. Where the first film was the story of a young founder, this one is about a company grown enormous, and the people who question it from the outside. It makes sense that the music would change its subject too.

Reading the 17 Tracks and About 46 Minutes Through Their Titles

Just looking over the tracklist is a lot of fun.

  • It opens with the title track "The Social Reckoning" (3:17), followed by "Tomorrow's Headlines," "Online," "Likes," and "Published," a run of the vocabulary of journalism and social media
  • Titles like "Jeff" and "Frances Goes Home" seem to stay close to the two leads
  • "Unplug," "Sleepless," "Psych Damage," and "Chaos" suggest the toll on a whistleblower, and the longest track is "Waiting Room" (4:31)
  • Near the end, "The Lament" (3:46) is jointly credited to Desplat and soprano Renée Fleming, and the album closes with "72 Hours" (3:55)

All 17 tracks add up to about 45 minutes 49 seconds. Five cues run under two minutes, and short fragments alternate with longer pieces of around four minutes. Under the rapid-fire dialogue typical of a Sorkin film, the music cuts its cues finely and lets them breathe at length at key moments. You can sense that design just from the track lengths.

Why Renée Fleming's Voice Is There

The track I'm most curious about is "The Lament." Desplat and Fleming have worked together before: she sang "You'll Never Know" in The Shape of Water, and further back they teamed up on a song for DreamWorks' Rise of the Guardians. Placing an opera singer's living voice inside a tech-company whistleblower drama is a deliberate choice. Near the end of a tracklist full of digital vocabulary comes the most analog instrument of all, the human voice. That contrast feels like typical Desplat irony, and maybe like the film's conclusion itself.

If Reznor & Ross's earlier score was the sound of heat inside the circuit, Desplat may be trying to capture the body warmth of the people outside it. I haven't been able to confirm any Japanese release yet, but the score is already streaming. Play it back to back with the first film's soundtrack and you should hear how the sound of portraying social media has changed in a little over 15 years. Be sure to listen all the way through to "The Lament."