Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
—
Just before the credits roll on Swiped, a title card appears, informing us, “Whitney Wolfe Herd did not participate in the making of this film. She remains under a non-disclosure agreement.”
That a biopic could be such servile hagiography as to have to clarify that its subject was not involved in its production speaks volumes. And it’s not as if this format has conditioned us to expect veracity or even-handedness. It’s already given us two essentially fraudulent hero’s journeys, in Nyad and Flamin’ Hot, about a fabulist long-distance swimmer and the fake inventor of the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, respectively, alongside countless image-management-exercises-disguised-as-tales-of-derring-do, about everyone from the guy who invented the Air Jordan to Serena Williams’ dad. Give it up, son! Ain’t no [inventing the Blackberry] gonna put no food on no table!
In his 2003 review of A Million Little Pieces, John Dolan once wrote of its author, “the rich have decided to steal it all, even the tears of the losers.”
At the time he called James Frey’s book that he was reviewing, and the genre from which it sprang—the rehab memoir—“a fitting literary metonymy for the Bush era.”
It seems there’s something similar happening in the current crop of phony biopics about business geniuses in the Trump1-Trump2 period. The rich have bulldozed the Horatio Alger tale to build their beach houses there, dead set on proving that once you have enough money, you can buy your own origin story right off the rack. Maybe it was inevitable that Silicon Valley’s “myth of the founder” (Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg) would eventually spawn a related Disputed Founder cottage industry. Elon Musk allegedly took his PayPal money (after being pushed out of that company because his coworkers didn’t like him and thought his ideas were bad) and bought into Tesla early enough that he could bully anyone who didn’t describe him as “Tesla co-founder.”
Somewhere further on down that line comes Swiped’s “youngest female self-made billionaire” protagonist Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the Bumble app. Perhaps, as the title card claims, Wolfe Herd really didn’t participate in the production of Swiped in any way. I don’t know, I wasn’t there. All I can say is that if she actually wasn’t involved, that would make Swiped one of the most wormiest acts of involuntary glazing in all the annals of bootlicking on spec. That someone who isn’t Whitney Wolfe Herd could be this invested in turning Whitney Wolfe Herd into a girlboss superhero seems hard to fathom. But it’s not impossible. The second Gilded Age is minting new kinds of toadies and flim-flammers every day, at an unprecedented rate.
Lily James, who was weirdly great as Pam Anderson in Pam & Tommy, plays Whitney Wolfe. Director Rachel Lee Goldenberg made James wear distracting green contact lenses because presumably it was very important that we know that Whitney Wolfe’s eyes are green and not brown. Swiped follows Wolfe’s journey from aspiring non-profit founder to the unlikely inventor of Bumble, the Tinder-style app in which women message first. It was a good app! Whether we need biopics about the inventors of every useful thing—the door knob, the toaster, the oscillating space heater—is a matter up for debate. Is every useful invention also a good story?
However you come down on that, this movie is very obviously full of shit. How full of shit? Well, when Whitney Wolfe meets her future husband, Michael Herd, in an Austin cowboy bar, he looks like this:
Which is to say, he’s giving “love interest in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation about a once-promising cellist who leaves a Juilliard scholarship behind to take care of her sick aunt and then falls in love with the local hottie who runs a shelter for disabled steers.”
Yes, that is a denim jacket with a corduroy collar, that this floppy-haired cowboy man is supposedly wearing inside a bar in Austin, Texas in a scene set in the late 20-teens. In their first scene together, Wolfe lays her cards on the table, showing Herd an article about her sexual harassment settlement with the Tinder founders before they start flirting, just so he knows what he’s getting himself into. Salt-of-the-Earth Texan that he is, Herd jokes, “This says the settlement was for a million dollars. Maybe you should be the one buying the beer for me.”
What a guy! He knows how to let the women go first. They hit it off, and basically ride off into the sunset together in his beat-up pick-up truck with no roof and a roll bar.
In real life, Michael Herd is an oil heir. Here’s an article in Cottages & Gardens about his $28 million estate that he “spent more than eight years expanding with the help of his grandfather, Bob L. Herd.”
Five structures await behind the two sets of gates that enclose the property, and together they all make up almost 20,000-square-feet. The cabana alone boasts 4,000-square-feet and is an upscale zone of pure fun. It has a chef’s kitchen, glycol beer taps, and is flanked by the pool, spa, outdoor kitchen, tennis courts, and putting green. Then down by the docks, there’s plenty to do on the water from boating to fishing to simply floating.
Dang, I would’ve never pegged ol’ corduroy collar here to be such fiend for glycol.
Point being, if a movie plays this fast and loose with a minor character who shows up 87 minutes into the film, and solely as a prop for the protagonist’s development, imagine what it does with the people it’s actually about.
Maybe characterizing Swiped as a premeditated image management exercise by Wolf-Herd is unfair. Maybe Swiped truly was the work of some entertainment industry dreamers, who saw a news bit about Wolfe Herd, a close friend of the Duchess Megan Markle and the first guest on the latter’s podcast series, and saw in Wolfe Herd’s story only the broadest of corny clichés. The Nicholas Sparks love interest, the plucky Girlboss heroine, the theme of female solidarity overcoming a toxic boy’s club pulled straight from Bombshell (Charlize Theron played Megyn Kelly, remember that???).
Again, I don’t know, I wasn’t there. Whatever the circumstances, the two possible development stories have arrived in the same place: a hackneyed hero’s journey that drapes itself in the kind of smug corporate progressivism that I imagined went out of fashion years before Mark Zuckerberg’s hypebeast rebrand. The glib script rings false at almost every turn, even if you haven’t read anything about the real people it purports to depict.
When we first meet the Whitney Wolfe of Swiped, she’s shopping around an idea for an app that would better connect Thai orphanages to Western donors. She’s a do-gooder, see, but also ambitious. A former SMU sorority girl from Utah fresh off six months volunteering in Thailand, she wants to combine her knack for organizing with her penchant for charity. She’s also a realist. She points out that whereas only a single-digit percentage of tech CEOs are women, the number in non-profits is closer to half (if you ask me to fact-check this I will call the police).
Only, no one in the tech biz is buying the altruism act. Sean Rad (white-washed as Ben Schnetzer), who runs the Hatch Labs incubator, tells Wolfe “Bill Gates cured polio or malaria or something. But you know what he did first? He made a hundred billion dollars.”
This idea, of “become disgustingly rich first, then help people” was famously promoted by Silicon Valley’s “effective altruists,” before Sam Bankman-Fried, one of EA’s most prominent proponents, accidentally poison-pilled it by losing $8 billion of his investors’ money and got thrown in prison. One would hope that we’d be able to see this “probably I’ll help people later” act with a more jaundiced eye in 2025, but since Swiped feels like it was filmed entirely during Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean-In book tour, it’s delivered not as a comment on Silicon Valley’s faux altruistic moral rot, but as actual wisdom. Yes, movie-Whitney things, I should get preposterously rich before I help these freeloadin’ orphans!
Source link