Anne Hathaway, left, and Jared Leto in the limited series WeCrashed, premiering globally March 18 on Apple TV+.Peter Kramer/Apple TV+
Credit where it’s due: The eight hours of Apple’s new limited series WeCrashed may be an overlong slog, but at least the show occasionally goes for it.
A prosthetics-modified Jared Leto and an awkwardly bassy-voiced Anne Hathaway – arguably two of Hollywood’s soapiest A-listers – strut around New York as Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the couple that co-founded the co-working “consciousness-elevating” company WeWork. They get together when Adam strides into her yogi’s office, declares “I’m an entrepreneur, and I live for disruption,” and puts on his sunglasses, which is enough to sweep Rebekah off her feet. They then embark on get-rich schemes under the guise of new-age consciousness, press their iPhones to their foreheads to send each other energy and whisper cutesy if questionable nothings and pet names (“shalom, Baba Ghanoush”).
The writer Susan Sontag had a word for this deliciously cringey earnestness: camp.
As she wrote in her 1964 treatise on the topic, “camp” is a slippery term. It is defined by “its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” It is not quite serious, not quite ironic and not quite winking. It is tied to queerness, but not inherently; it is offensive, yet also alluring. And that may be the most interesting commonality shared by WeCrashed, Showtime’s Super Pumped and Hulu’s The Dropout, three shows about high-profile Silicon Valley flame-outs that all came out within a month of each other: These stories about making obscene wealth have taken on the language, theatricality and sensibility of camp.
WeCrashed may lack the exaggerated flamboyance (or even full-on drag) of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, or the cult-favourite, so-outlandish-it’s-hilarious quality of Mommie Dearest. Certainly, by portraying the excesses of an industry that is dominated by straight white machismo, the series appear to be in direct opposition to the theatricality that often ties high camp with queer culture. But this spate of comedic dramas involving Big Tech and bigger money – stories of Silicon Icaruses gliding on waxen wings of privilege – are campy because of how unnatural their depicted worlds are. The Uber offices in Super Pumped and the Manhattan of WeCrashed may be spaces that viewers recognize, especially since they showcase such recent history, but they are also deeply inaccessible. The shows let us peek into the grotesque lifestyles of the blithely wealthy, and it’s awful – but it’s all you can do but gawk and laugh.
Therein lies the pleasure. With global wealth inequality deepening – the world’s billionaires increased their total net worth by about US$5-trillion in this past pandemic-stricken year – the gap between the predatory and advantaged haves and the labour-class have-nots has become an uncrossable canyon. Where once we may have looked to TV for comforting representations of ourselves, it seems that we now crave takedowns of people we couldn’t imagine ourselves as: the increasingly popular caricature of the ignorant uberrich. If, as Sontag writes, “the whole point of camp is to dethrone the serious,” then the joy we take in lampooning the wealthy makes perfect sense: The money that flies around in the tech industry is monstrous, and it has become so uncanny to watch it play out on film and television that parody is the only palatable approach. This is what Sontag calls “the excruciating” – and it’s what makes these shows so campy.
And we watch, cringing in relief. That’s what happens in Super Pumped, when Joseph Gordon Levitt, as Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, stomps around San Francisco vowing revenge on simplistic cartoon enemies, howling tech-bro bromides at fellow testosterone travellers, or when his inner circle surrounds a new hire courtesy of his venture-capitalist minders, and it seems certain that a musical number is about to break out. It happens every time someone on one of these shows inevitably hits the Bingo-card centre square by mentioning Jeff Bezos with ludicrous reverence. All three shows (but especially The Dropout, with the various impressions of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes) reveal how real-world startup founders are merely performing drag versions of their favourite stars, to various degrees of snatched – black-turtlenecked Steve Jobs, garage-officed Sergey Brin and Larry Page – but it’s not obvious if the shows are in on that joke.
This Big Tech/small screen trend also highlights our decade-long transition in how writers treat these stories. As recently as 2010, when David Fincher’s The Social Network came out, the stories of Silicon Valley founders were still being told with a kind of solemn veneration – that these entrepreneurs were still crusading iconoclasts, albeit human ones with attendant foibles. But Martin Scorsese’s 2013 The Wolf of Wall Street – that campy ode to orgiastic nineties-era decadence and the pinstriped, chest-beating, cocaine-blitzed chauvinism that fuelled it – marked a shift in how audiences were meant to see the uberrich: as objects of parody. Wolf may not have been about Big Tech, but it could well have been. And Billions – the popular 2016 Showtime series in which a prosecutor peacock and a finance-bro gorilla face off in a series of wildly dramatic, medium-stakes battles – showed how pop culture has been able to turn the moneyed and powerful into campy caricature. The strains of both run deep in the three newest shows (indeed, Super Pumped comes from Billions creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien).
But there’s a problem with choosing to campify Big Tech tales: The events themselves are serious, with enormous consequences to real people, and when storytellers and viewers prioritize their deliciousness, they could be mistaken for frivolous. Uber has long taken advantage of its drivers by tightening margins, while making users addicted to its services with artificially lowered pricing; WeWork sold young workers a false bill of goods and, after wringing them dry, laid them off while its layabout founder received a golden parachute; patients had their lives upturned by Theranos’s bogus test results. Watching these shows for a bit of Schadenfreude fun risks letting the actual people off easy for what they’ve done, and portraying them as laughable caricatures risks sanding off the edges of their real-life misdeeds.
It also threatens to shadow how the events that inspired these stories are still playing out – in ways that may be even more unnatural, in the Sontag-ian sense.
In November, the real Adam Neumann returned to the spotlight, tackling his first interview since his WeWork ouster with the easy charisma that made his thin sales pitches such catnip to his board of directors and venture-capital investors. But he seemed to nearly crack when he was asked about Apple’s WeCrashed. “What happened in the world,” Neumann lamented, “that we can take a person, look exactly like them, put on prosthetics, put their wife and kids in a show, and then do a show and narrative that is … not factually true, a lot of the things, and then actually do a show of that, and profit money off that? … I wish we were able to create entertainment that was different.”
A snake-oil salesman on a redemption tour, getting away with bemoaning how people at another major tech company are making their money? Maybe there’s more cringing we need to be doing – not at the shows that tell these stories of the recent past and, in some cases, about companies that still exist, but at the uncanny Valley of the tech industry as it is.
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