I was bored.
My wife works late translating for a Canadian company in a way different time zone, so I was on my own.
I could have done something productive or interesting.
Instead, I opened Netflix.
A 2013 movie I had never heard of, and which I wish still hadn’t, “The Internship,” caught my attention because it starred Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, the co-stars of arguably one of the best comedy films of all time, “Wedding Crashers.”
I’m a simple man; I see Vince Vaugh and Owen Wilson headlining a movie, and I’m in.
So I hit play.
Unfortunately, it turned out to be basically an infomercial for Google masquerading as art — so soul-sucking that I don’t know if I’ll ever fully recover the naïve faith in humanity that some things might be off-limits to corrosive corporate influence.
Related: Supercomputer Given Authority to Decide Whether to Block Out Sun For Climate Change
Everything about this movie sucked from start to finish. Even the lighthearted, alchemical, endearing banter that’s so smooth it’s hard to believe it isn’t all ad-libbed between Wilson and Vaughn couldn’t salvage it.
It turns out, apart from the generic plotline, the reason for its mediocrity is because Google effectively hijacked Hollywood to produce propaganda as a public relations stunt to improve its image and promote its “Don’t Be Evil” image.
Via CNN (emphasis added):
The comedy, which hits theaters Friday, is about two middle-age watch salesmen who overcome career obsolescence and a complete lack of tech savvy to join Google’s internship program in hopes of scoring a job at the giant tech company.
Based on early reports, the movie is also a valentine of sorts to Google, which cooperated with the filmmakers to portray the company in an accurate and flattering light onscreen.
Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, is shown as an idyllic place where employees blow off steam playing volleyball (true), riding bikes (true) and enjoying delicious free food (also true). Google products appear frequently and favorably throughout the movie, co-founder Sergey Brin makes a cameo appearance, and the company’s mission is unquestioningly depicted as doing good in the world.
“I think the reason why we got involved in that is that computer science has a marketing problem,” explained Google co-founder Larry Page at a Google conference last month. “We’re the nerdy curmudgeons.”
The filmmakers approached Google about making the movie after Vaughn was inspired by a “60 Minutes” segment on the Google campus, director Shawn Levy told Reuters. A Google spokesperson told CNN that the company saw the movie as a good way to expose people to the company’s “do no evil” culture and get more students interested in technology and computers – a field that faces a shortage of qualified workers…
Google also gave feedback on the script, including a request to remove a scene in which a Google self-driving car crashes. Google says it didn’t mind the car being in the movie, but thought that scene wasn’t appropriate because “the product hadn’t launched yet.” The filmmakers complied.
(Five years after “The Internship,” for the record, Google gave up the ghost and quietly nixed its “Don’t Be Evil” mantra from its corporate documents and went on to literally rig elections.)
Related: Quantitative Analysis Shows Google Steered 6 Million Votes to Biden in 2020
Why would Vince Vaughn or Owen Wilson take the gig?
Was the money really that good?
Losing your soul working in media, whatever the genre, sometimes seems like par for the course.
Sometimes I wonder if I have, to some degree.
Or maybe sometimes a movie’s just a movie, to paraphrase Freud, and I’m easily triggered by brazen corporate propaganda laundered through the Hollywood pop culture machine.
I still love Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson, but man, what a travesty that dumpster fire was.
