For a film about relationship apps, Swiped has surprisingly little to say about trendy relationship. Goldenberg makes liberal use of montages, however solely two contain web relationship. In a single, we spend a number of seconds on two younger males who match with each other, and later present up married—a brief however clear endorsement of relationship apps.
The opposite montage, nevertheless, is a little more ambiguous. In a sequence of shot-reverse-shots, all in wide-angle lens, we see Whitney go on dates with random males, pretending to flirt however in actual fact conducting market analysis. James provides a dedicated, layered efficiency because the go-getter Whitney, so we see how her dates may interpret the questions she launches at them as good-natured flirting. Nonetheless, we additionally see that she’s actually grilling them to determine what males like and dislike in relationship apps. Quickly, she’ll use this info to remodel Sean’s ill-conceived app Match Field into the wildly profitable Tinder.
Swiped doesn’t spend a lot time on the relationship idea as a result of it doesn’t care about something apart from Whitney herself. It’s a myopic hagiography about an govt, simply as hole and self-serving as different current product biopics like Air, Tetris, and Unfrosted. Even Whitney’s unacknowledged racism in direction of a good friend Tisha (Myha’la) will get handled with child gloves, simply one other impediment for her to beat as she turns into successful.
However when Swiped does look at trendy relationship, it doesn’t like what it sees. In a scene designed to exhibit her enterprise acumen, Whitney convinces a bunch of school women to make use of the app as a result of the boys on her campus are utilizing it. Nonetheless, we see by means of crosscutting that the boys are solely utilizing it as a result of Tisha’s signing them up for it on the similar time.
Inadvertently, the sign-up scene suggests that folks join relationship apps underneath false pretenses. That message is echoed by the aforementioned market analysis scene, during which she pretends to have an interest within the males who exit along with her, however she’s really utilizing them for info. She does go house with one man for a one-night stand, however the montage very a lot frames that second of romantic connection as an anomaly inside her enterprise objectives.
Between Whitney’s dissembling and the host of obscene footage that males ship by way of Tinder, Swiped doesn’t make relationship apps look too nice. Whitney might describe her Tinder successor Bumble feminine centered and “intersectional” (with out, crucially, defining that time period for herself or the viewers), however we by no means really see it at work.
