Review of The Internship (2013) by Clarisesamuels — 07 Dec 2013

Two over-40 salesmen (Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn) experience a business setback and manage to land themselves an internship at Google corporate headquarters in the San Francisco area. This is highly irregular, since the word “internship” usually implies a training program for a university student who is seeking a career. The interns should not be much older than 22, so the characters of Nick and Billy are like fish out of water when they arrive at the Google corporate campus that looks like a nursery school for grown-ups. (There is a sliding pond to get from one floor to another, a spacecraft suspended from the ceiling, and the entire decor is done in the garish colors that are found on the Google trademark.).

The film is meant to be comical in a charming, goofy kind of way, but it is also a 2-hour aggrandizement of corporate life at Google. There’s not a lot of plot to fill in two hours as the interns form teams and have to compete against each other in a series of events that are called “challenges.” They have a sports challenge (which, strangely enough, is a game of Quidditch), a program coding challenge to find a subtle bug, a helpline challenge to answer every kind of user question, a challenge to invent a new app, and a sales challenge. The winning team will receive the ultimate prize, which is full-time employment at Google.

After watching this film, you might not want to work there. Interns wear Google beanie caps and t-shirts, employees cheerfully eat at outdoor tables that make every lunch hour look like the Annual Employee Picnic, and employees are judged not just by their skills but by how “googley” they are. Being googley means the employee is a cross between a boy scout and a saint. After searching the Internet (notice I did not say that I “googled it,” which is not English), I found that being googley includes the following traits: doing what’s right; being goal-oriented; being proactive, friendly, and highly motivated; valuing customers and coworkers; being concerned with excellent quality; and being honest, transparent, and fair with a good sense of humor. Oh, yes, last but not least—being humble. According to the film, there are other unwritten rules such as dating among interns being frowned upon ("Google is not match.com"), a policy which clearly does not apply to corporate officers, such as Google cofounder and multibillionaire, Sergey Brin. (Brin makes a brief uncredited appearance at the end of the film, which one can presume was a nod of approval from those on high.).

Google has taken corporate paternalism to such absurd heights (including free food in the cafeteria), that young people may not even be able to develop character or a sense of identity if they spend too many years working for the firm. And no union steward will ever see the inside of those hallowed halls. Yet, in spite of the high ideals that are lauded in the name of googliness, the film depicted a rivalry between the intern teams that was so fierce, it was positively nasty and mean-spirited. At least for the purposes of the film, cheating at the sports challenge was openly accepted as fair play, as was physical assault. Google employees who were successful and held in high managerial esteem were portrayed as being so workaholic that they had no personal life and were extremely limited in their range of interests (other than fitness, sports, and a few other pastimes that might meet with corporate approval).

Although this would appear to be the Garden of Eden for employment, a closer inspection might welcome a more pragmatic view of ace employees who work hard, know their stuff, have families, hobbies and interests, complain bitterly about the food in the employee cafeteria, and in general have a bad attitude toward their bosses.