In early June 2013, Edward Snowden went on video to explain to millions of people that tech companies like Google were sharing the data of both U.S. citizens and foreigners with the NSA. That same weekend, another video emerged which painted a radically different vision of the search giant: The Internship, starring Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as adults who become — get this — Google interns.
In a sense, the duo’s buddy comedy follow-up to Wedding Crashers is the story of two men in search of lost time: Vaughn and Wilson play watch salesmen made redundant by the digital age. “Nobody wears a watch anymore, they just check their goddamn phones,” their boss, played by John Goodman, complains as he lays them off early in the movie. Vince Vaughn returns home to find foreclosure notices on his house and his girlfriend packing, as people who want to break up are always doing. Owen Wilson’s character is made to look even more pathetic: he’s still single. They are aging aimlessly and wracked with regrets about not having carpe’d diem.
Defeated, Vince Vaughn drinks a Miller Lite and goes online to look for a new career. First he Googles “jobs for people with few skills,” to no avail. Then, as music swells, he eyes the Google logo and has an epiphany. He Googles “Google.” In the next scene he has improbable news for Owen: he has gotten the two of them interviews for an internship. Owen is hesitant about becoming an intern — they are grown-ups, after all — but is eventually persuaded. At their interview, which is conducted via Google Hangouts, on a computer they accessed in a library, they flub every question. Most of the hiring board wants to pass, on account of them being obvious buffoons without any computer know-how. But, in a prescient (in a bad way) foreshadowing of the James Damore memo, one nerdy white guy cites diversity of opinion as a reason to give them a shot. It is at Google that these two men find a haven, an unorthodox work environment for people to “help make people’s lives a little bit better,” as one character puts it.
For the rest of the movie, Vince and Owen team up with a group of misfit interns to compete against 19 other intern teams for guaranteed jobs. For some reason, we’re never introduced to characters from any team except one: a tech version of the rich baseball jerks from Bad News Bears led by a posh British dude. There is also a subplot in which Owen Wilson easily woos a Google staffer played by Rose Byrne, who is… not related to David Byrne.
Not to be the guy from the 30 Rock joke about a guy who found Hot Tub Time Machine unrealistic because the jacuzzi’s water got hot too fast, but The Internship has some serious believability problems. For example, it is implied that Vince and Owen have to share a bed in the Google dorm. Since it seems that Google provides accommodations for the interns, presumably they’d supply enough beds, too? Also, there is an extended scene featuring gratuitous nudity in which the team visits an upscale strip club and consumes excessive amounts of liquor and lap dances. (In one montage, the nerdiest member of the team is shown using a hand dryer to air out his ejaculated-in pants, three times in quick succession — another questionable feat.) What I’m wondering is, how did they pay for this? In real life Google pays its interns, but the movie implies — both through Owen’s hesitance to take an internship and through its failure to mention salary — that this internship is unpaid. And even if it were paid, it would be unlikely to pay for a night at an exotic nightclub of this caliber. Also, when they ultimately win the competition, all 18 other teams cheer for them, whereas I imagine these teams would have been disappointed by their own failure to secure jobs.
There’s a scene in the 1995 movie Tommy Boy that I thought was very funny when I saw it as a kid: David Spade and Chris Farley are driving in a convertible, fighting over the radio. One of them will put something on, the other will move the dial, and so forth. Then “Superstar” by the Carpenters comes on. “Talk about lame,” Spade says, and they both encourage the other to change it. Cut to them screaming, “Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby?” with Spade on the verge of tears.
It’s a solid gag, but times have changed. The idea that grown men might like a song by a girl is not quite the comedic goldmine it once was. So when the film The Internship opens with a nearly identical scene (the guys in a convertible, Owen first scoffing at Vince’s use of Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic” on their “get psyched mix,” then vigorously dancing along), it does not speak well for the health of the buddy comedy. It’s clear this is no Tommy Boy, or even The Hangover 2. The film’s humor is essentially a split between nerd culture on the skids — 80s references, a quidditch game where the player has to grab the fake hanging testicles off a man in a gold skin suit — and endless, plot-stalling banter like, when bemoaning their bad situation, Owen asks,“is it me or does life feel a lot like those hillbillies from Deliverance?”
Still, Owen Wilson has that Texas slacker charm, and Vince Vaughn seems like he’d be a fun cousin. I wouldn’t want to see him every month, but he’d probably be fun through his first few beers on Thanksgiving. Because of their presence alone, The Internship cannot be unwatchable — it’s just sort of lame. And though it has not aged well, it was never particularly good to begin with: A bottle of Yellow Tail is not meant for the cellar, you know? What’s more striking is how poorly the film’s glowing portrayal of Google has fared.
In 2013, Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto was already a punchline among tech journalists and San Francisco housing activists, and in the years that followed, it quickly started to seem insidious to even the ordinary people. The next half-decade has only hastened this barrage of bad press. The tech industry went from being seen as, in the words of one fictional Google employee, “an engine for change,” to a greedy haven for misogynist incompetents and at least partially responsible for the election of the man who still may destroy the world. More relevant to this movie is what the Google has done to employment. It’s just one company, sure, but it’s also sort of not — in a lot of ways, the tech industry would not be possible without Google. In 2013, for example, they invested $361 million in Uber. In 2017, they invested in 103 startups — more than any other corporate investor, according to TechCrunch. Google is a synecdoche, the quintessential business in an industry that pledges to disrupt the idea of employment and turn everyone — save the people snacking and napping at its Silicon Valley campus — into subsistence-level freelancers dependent on (and paying tithes to) the very apps that made stability a thing of the past.
The Internship interns’ final challenge requires teams to convince a business to advertise on Google. Vince and Owen win by getting a sale from a beloved local pizza joint after convincing the reluctant owner that advertising wouldn’t compromise their value to the community. Google is posited of the savior of the American dream, a way to help mom-and-pop companies keep up in the digital age. To paraphrase the head of the internship program, played by Aasif Mandvi, this is not just one small business’s ad, but rather a way for the pizza place to expand and potentially create an empire. In the film’s universe, the idea that some people would prefer a world of local pizza places to one in which people use their phones to find a chain with a 4.8–star average Google review is unthinkable.
While The Internship isn’t literally a commercial for Google in that the company neither paid into its $58 million budget nor had final say over the content of the movie, Google did “have approval over how its products and culture were represented in the film,” according to the Los Angeles Times and didn’t charge the production location or branding fees — The Internship actually ends with Vince and Owen walking across the company’s campus and nodding hello to Sergey Brin.
Clearly, Google saw The Internship as a major PR win, and why wouldn’t it? The notion that aging workers should remake themselves in Google’s image was presented as a way to save the America, rather than a short-cut to the bland nightmare that is modern life. There’s no reason to think that the portrayal of the company as a private school with hegemonic aspirations was off. As the film’s Wikipedia page points out: “Many former Google interns and Google employees noted the accuracy of the company environment depicted in the movie, but also pointed out that the internship process is nothing like that shown in the movie.”
