For a movie about dating apps, Swiped has surprisingly little to say about modern dating. Goldenberg makes liberal use of montages, but only two involve internet dating. In one, we spend a few seconds on two young men who match with one another, and later show up married—a short but clear endorsement of dating apps.
The other montage, however, is a bit more ambiguous. In a series of shot-reverse-shots, all in wide-angle lens, we see Whitney go on dates with random men, pretending to flirt but in fact conducting market research. James gives a committed, layered performance as the go-getter Whitney, so we see how her dates could interpret the questions she launches at them as good-natured flirting. However, we also see that she’s really grilling them to figure out what men like and dislike in dating apps. Soon, she’ll use this information to transform Sean’s ill-conceived app Match Box into the wildly successful Tinder.
Swiped doesn’t spend much time on the dating concept because it doesn’t care about anything other than Whitney herself. It’s a myopic hagiography about an executive, just as hollow and self-serving as other recent product biopics like Air, Tetris, and Unfrosted. Even Whitney’s unacknowledged racism towards a friend Tisha (Myha’la) gets treated with kid gloves, just another obstacle for her to overcome as she becomes a success.
But when Swiped does glance at modern dating, it doesn’t like what it sees. In a scene designed to demonstrate her business acumen, Whitney convinces a group of college girls to use the app because the boys on her campus are using it. However, we see through crosscutting that the boys are only using it because Tisha’s signing them up for it at the same time.
Inadvertently, the sign-up scene suggests that people sign up for dating apps under false pretenses. That message is echoed by the aforementioned market research scene, in which she pretends to be interested in the men who go out with her, but she’s actually using them for information. She does go home with one guy for a one-night stand, but the montage very much frames that moment of romantic connection as an anomaly within her business goals.
Between Whitney’s dissembling and the host of obscene pictures that men send via Tinder, Swiped doesn’t make dating apps look too great. Whitney may describe her Tinder successor Bumble female focused and “intersectional” (without, crucially, defining that term for herself or the audience), but we never actually see it at work.
