Silicon Valley Cinema

Silicon Valley corporations now dominate our daily lives to the extent that many of us now question their ability to determine the direction of human life in the twenty-first century. The 2010s saw Hollywood filmmakers engaging in this very debate. Through a sequence of films ranging from biopics of key Silicon Valley leaders to science fiction action films and whimsical workplace comedies, Hollywood films probed Silicon Valley’s impact on our past, present, and future. Silicon Valley Cinema argues that these films seek to encourage scepticism about our Silicon Valley overlords and have us step back from our immersion in Silicon Valley’s world. It examines a sequence of biopics of two key Silicon Valley figures, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Apple founder Steve Jobs; a pair of films that reveal the seductively toxic working environment for tech workers; and a series of science fiction extravaganzas that present Silicon Valley tech leaders as existential threats to humanity thanks to their fidelity to a form of turbo capitalism that dismisses ethics and morals in search of profit. It concludes with an interrogation of a whimsical Silicon Valley-set comedy that encompasses Hollywood’s approach to the upstarts from upstate which reveals that Hollywood’s critique is necessarily hindered by its own position within American capitalism.