"In 2012, a plucky, headstrong young entrepreneur crashes a startup mixer in Los Angeles, desperately trying to get their big idea off the ground. Naive and ruthlessly ambitious, they brave the skeptics, the losers, the people too good to talk to them and the people who don't take them seriously. Eventually, inevitably, their genius obvious, unsinkable, perhaps diabolical collides with opportunity. Voila! An origin story is born."
"Swap out the date and the city, and this would describe a pivotal scene in any number of recent movies and TV shows that take cinematic interest in the self-mythology of entrepreneurs. The dramatic logic and iconography of the origin story, basically true but always highly glossed, is by now so recognizable it almost writes itself: initial rejection, dogged persistence, chance meeting, lightbulb moment, big break. We've seen it in a wave of brand backstory movies Flamin' Hot, Air, BlackBerry and Tetris to name a few as well as the recent boomlet of shows depicting 2010s hustle culture."
Swiped follows Whitney Wolfe Herd's trajectory from an eager entrepreneur to the founder linked to Tinder and Bumble, highlighting how her path confronts persistent misogyny. The film casts Lily James as Whitney and Ben Schnetzer as Sean Rad, and moves between acknowledging tech and internet sexism and offering a conventional capitalist success narrative. Scenes deploy familiar startup language, slogans and origin-story tropes, and the plot emphasizes how sexism manifests as office discrimination, sexual harassment and online slander. The portrayal frames a female founder's ascent as markedly rougher than male peers', amid the mythmaking of Silicon Valley.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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