A brazen test of the line between film and feature-length commercial, Swiped frames as a feminist triumph: one woman’s climb from marginalised tech worker to CEO of a dating app in Blackstone Inc’s vast portfolio of assets. Just, you know... don’t read anything under the “controversies” heading of Blackstone’s Wikipedia page.
For the most part, you can look at Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s biopic of Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd as a light, pleasant bit of empowerment. It’s serious about the entrenched, hydra-headed misogyny of the tech industry and its depiction of Wolfe Herd’s co-founding of Tinder – she resigned and, in 2014, filed a lawsuit against the company for sexual harassment (it was later settled out of court). Under the encouragement of Andrey Andreev, the co-founder of Russian dating app Badoo, she founded Bumble as an alternative dating app that placed control in women’s hands by having them initiate the conversation.
Wolfe Herd is played by Lily James with maximum luminosity. She’s close to perfect, but – don’t worry! – not totally perfect. In Goldenberg’s script, co-written with Bill Parker and Kim Caramele, she’s called out on her ignorance of her own white privilege by friend and co-worker Tisha (Industry’s Myha’la, who was able to explore all of this in much more depth in, well, Industry). “Once you climbed up the ladder, you never reached back down,” she argues. Did it make her feel special, in fact, to be the only woman in the room?
Yet the film can’t get Tisha to even say the word “privilege” – she stumbles over the precursor “inherent” a couple of times and then gives up – and then treats what could be a compelling chink in our hero’s armour as something to namecheck and solve immediately with an apology and a hug.
There’s a deliberate unseriousness to Swiped, from Dan Stevens’s vaguely absurd Russian accent and indie boy fringe as Andreev (and these days you don’t cast Stevens in a role unless you want him to get a little silly with it), to the depiction of 2010s culture as all playground slides in the office and black tights with sneakers. It’s a film where obscene amounts of money are being made in a Zooey Deschanel-coded wonderland.
We’re certainly meant to take Wolfe Herd’s experiences seriously. At the same time, Swiped wants her story to sit at the very border of feminist fairytale, because there it can get away with a blatant PR montage that exists only to list Bumble’s progressive credentials: we move from the phrase “the safest place on the internet for women” to the phrase “BIPOC women founders”, spoken essentially without context; then we move to a courtroom to briefly depict Wolfe Herd and Bumble’s involvement in anti-cyberflashing legislation.
These are all materially good things for a company to do. But that’s the problem – Swiped is far more interested in convincing us that Bumble’s earned its feminist credentials than in exploring what being a “feminist company” actually means when there are billions of dollars on the table. And that feeds directly into the criticisms that the company has faced over the years. Teen Vogue’s executive editor Samhita Mukhopadhyay, for example, once termed the app “the girlboss-ification of dating”. Swiped, then, might be called “the girlboss-ification of biopics”.
Dir: Rachel Lee Goldenberg. Starring: Lily James, Dan Stevens, Myha’la, Jackson White, Ben Schnetzer, Pierson Fodé, Clea DuVall. 16+, 110 minutes
‘Swiped’ streams on Disney+ from 19 September
