Introduction

Summary

In 2015, Google's co-founder Larry Page saw the Disney science-fiction film Tomorrowland (Brad Bird, 2015). According to the New York Times, ‘he didn't like it’, feeling that its vision of a future led by genius inventors and the technological wonders they develop was, if anything, ‘too utopian’. The Times's reporter went on to conclude that Page ‘hit on a central problem with attempts to imagine the future in the sunny way that many in Silicon Valley see it: a perfect future makes for a boring story’. Page's comments reveal some central assumptions of what might be termed a Silicon Valley perspective: that its corporations hope to develop a perfect future for humanity; that these corporations’ founders have opinions that matter; and that old Hollywood cannot fully capture or represent the future these seers envisage. In a similar vein, two Hollywood films about Silicon Valley corporations have key characters opining on their role in forging our human future. Both are fictional, but one bases itself on real-life events and the other traces events that are far from inconceivable. The fictional Google intern Billy McMahon gasps in The Internship (Shawn Levy, 2013), ‘I’ve seen the future and it's beautiful … Google. The place is amazing’, while Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015) has its titular character protesting to a group of bureaucrats, ‘I sat in a fucking garage with [Steve] Wozniak and invented the future!’

These films are but two in a 2010s trend in Hollywood cinema which sees various filmmakers question Silicon Valley's role in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century culture, revealing Hollywood's proprietorial investment in curating the popular understanding of Silicon Valley and its visions of the human future. At first glance, they might appear to have little in common beyond their shared use of real locations in the San Francisco Bay Area. Steve Jobs is a prestige biopic directed by a major filmmaker, while The Internship is a light-hearted comedy. They are joined by yet another chapter in Arnold Schwarzenegger's killer robot franchise, Terminator: Genisys (Alan Taylor, 2015), and The Circle (James Ponsoldt, 2017), a dystopian thriller, while other Silicon Valley-related films range from biopics to superhero action blockbusters.