Language: English
WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn joins the growing list of American documentaries that narrate a sensational piece of history under the guise of uncovering it. If you close your eyes and simply listen to the voiceovers, the visuals and talking heads, the general structure sounds all the same. Ex-participants speak glowingly of a new visionary, happy times are described, reporters become the voice of reason, the media turns, the bubble bursts, the mask is off. These are by no means investigative films. The moment has already passed. The news is already old. But the trick is to construct a picture in a way that provides an illusion of the story breaking without actually breaking it. The trick is to trust the anatomy of hindsight.
Oscar-nominated filmmaker Jed Rothstein’s WeWork, much like The Inventor and Fyre Fraud, focuses on the dubious figure at the centre of corporate disillusionment. It opens with the images of Israeli entrepreneur Adam Neumann, a name notorious to anyone tuned into financial affairs, and the ex-CEO of WeWork, a Manhattan-based shared workspace company that floated itself as the “world’s first physical social network”. The two terms repeated extensively for the next 103 minutes are “charismatic” and “persuasive”. Given that the narrative arc of the documentary mirrors the journey of the company, we see plenty of footage selling these two traits of Adam’s personality. The opening shots – of him playfully struggling to get a promotional video right – established a sort of Stockholm-syndrome-like link with the viewer. It’s impossible to dislike him. His charm is palpable, we know he’s trouble, and yet we yearn to look closer to see if his ambition was simply misinterpreted as corruption. At various points, we see Adam smiling, bantering and inspiring his colleagues in behind-the-scenes footage. Maybe he genuinely wanted to change the world, we think. Maybe he really wanted to build something, we hope.
Midway through, the documentary starts to reveal the red flags. “We want to elevate the consciousness of the world,” Adam wookily declares on live television. Things get murky. The eyes of the millennial victims go glassy-eyed. The technicalities are unclear and unimportant – it all culminates in a failed IPO attempt and a ten-year-old WeWork’s bankruptcy in two weeks – but the template is all too familiar. The problem with WeWork – and other streaming documentaries of its ilk – is that we live in a post-Wild Wild Country era. That’s the gold standard of this genre, and everything that follows feels like a weak approximation of its beats. Those six episodes found the sweet spot between history and mythmaking, reportage and dramatisation.
Uncannily, WeWork directly evokes Wild Wild Country in two ways. First, early on it’s revealed in passing that the co-founder of WeWork – who, just like Adam, might have declined to participate in the film – grew up in an Oregon commune. (I could almost hear Ma Anand Sheela’s voice instructing his parents to ‘worship’ a lilting Osho). Secondly, an entire chunk of the documentary is devoted to the cult-like atmosphere of the company’s annual Summer Camps – where chanting, free-living, physical activities and other bodily awakenings were encouraged. Words like “wellness” and “happiness quotient” emerge like sinister little reptiles, reminiscent of the smokescreen employed by all of history’s biggest community movements.
Once these portions pass, we begin to see Adam – and his unsettlingly creepy SoHo wife Rebekah – in the light of a spiritual leader. WeWork extends to WeLive and WeGrow, radical housing and education systems that attract the investment of an iffy Japanese tech billionaire. The few hints of dissent – like an alert product manager and young reporter – are dismissed by the documentary, almost as though it were attempting to express Adam’s own attitude towards any minor roadblocks. Sly scenes from movies like Eyes Wide Shut are interwoven into the narrative, suggesting the nutty shamanic prophet hiding within the long-haired quasi-Valley founder.
The overall result, however, is less than compelling. The tale is far more fascinating than its telling. For once, I found myself wishing to witness a corny fictionalisation of the WeWork implosion – starring Ashton Kutcher as his friend Adam Neumann and Gwyneth Paltrow as her cousin Rebekah Neumann – rather than this by-the-books documentary. The one thing it does get right, though, is a think-piece-like ending – where melancholic ex-believers place the social identity of WeWork in the context of a lonely pandemic-hit world. Humans crave to be seen and heard, and yet the one start-up that understood this instinct became the biggest bust story of the decade. This is when we realise that “We” was never the opposite of “I” – it was merely an extension. If the I-based Apple products enabled a culture of isolation, the We-based product simply monetised the fear of it. The filmmaking may not convey this subtext. But new-age capitalism – fuelled by post-recession paranoia – is forever the winner. The art of the scam is almost aspirational in an age of guileless commerce.
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