Television film series have more impact on society compared to standalone films and one-off documentaries. Therefore, any theme covered by popular television series ends up having an immense impact on society. Numerous television shows have changed national and global perspectives and brought new solutions, approaches, and ideologies to particular thematic issues. HBO (Home Box Office, Incorporated) is an American pay television company with a film production branch. The film production produced the television drama series Silicon Valley. The series ran for six seasons running from April 2014 to December 2019.
Film Synopsis
The comedy series followed the life of a nerd who develops an innovative algorithm with limitless problem-solving capabilities. He realizes that the business world is rough and faces stiff competition from established tech-entrepreneurs who are willing to buy his technology or invest in it. He opts for entrepreneurship and invites his four millennial friends, and they incorporate a company. The five make many mistakes on the way, including choosing the wrong investors, fraud, hiring wrongly, extravagance, reluctance to mentorship, and several other errors young un-mentored tech-entrepreneurs potentially make.
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Functionalist Analysis and Discussion
The Functionalist theory is one the oldest forms because it was used by filmmakers in the Soviet Union as early as the early 1920s. In the 1920s, filmmaking was still a budding art form, but the filmmakers realized that they would push the Marxist ideologies much more efficiently with the use of film. The most notable filmmaker using the Functionalist theory was Sergei Eisenstein, who discovered that spreading doctrines through visual props was much more desirable than using voice (such as radio). Additional work in the film using the Marxist theory include the works conducted in the Kuleshov experiment and the Hegelian dialectic. The two works are still the basis of the modern-day film, and as this writer will discuss later, these approaches are extensively applied in HBO's Silicon Valley. Movies are first developed as a story on paper. The directors later find the best way for the story to be committed into action by painting a mental picture closest to the concept. The best films always paint a picture that would come to a person's mind when they go through the storyline on paper. In the filmmaking process, the videographers record the film's action, but the editors take the raw film bits and determine their sequence and interdependence in telling the story. In that case, the directors take a lot of time weaving out a visual novel by predetermining the audience's response through a series of mixes, cuts on the videographers’ bits, and pieces recorded from the film-shooting site.
Numerous approaches are used in film editing, but the most common and the oldest is the Hegelian dialectic. Heinrich Chalybaus argued that every writing (in extension film) uses three distinct dialectical stages to develop it. The piece starts with a thesis, then an antithesis, which negates the theory and ends with a synthesis. Silicon Valley uses this Hegelian dialectic process in its development, which results in a straightforward learning process for the audience. For instance, in the first season of the series, Richard and his friends start as unemployed programmers living in an incubator (a condominium in Silicon Valley). The group of coders is struggling financially, and each has a mobile application they hope will rake in big money through investor funding. Luckily, Richard's mobile application catches the coders' eyes at Hooli, and the lead business lead informs the CEO, Garvin Belson, of its great potential. Garvin is not very keen about it, but when he hears that his rival CEO at Raviga will fund the mobile application, the two get into a bidding war. Richard later participates in TechCrunch and wins a US $50,000, defeating Garvin Bolson’s Nucleus app and all other participants. The season closes with the winning celebrations.
Conflict Analysis and Discussion
In this season alone, the director has set the tech-entrepreneurs thesis up for some education about investing in the technology sector. First, the millennial entrepreneur learns that in Silicon Valley, most tech-entrepreneurs start at rock bottom. The programmers' problems trying to hunt for funding and the numerous disappointments they face is a good thesis for a budding entrepreneur. The audience learns that not all budding entrepreneurs struggle to finance the antithesis because characters like Sanjay land a multi-million deal with a venture fund. As part of the synthesis, the director attempts to show the audience that success in acquiring tech venture funding requires consistency but may sometimes be down to sheer luck. The events imply that good film editing is critical in story development and audience capture, especially for educative and motivational films.
According to Farago et al. (2019), this film content, proper decoding enhances better approaches in building a new business based on the screenplay of the film. In the film content deduction, Farago et al. (2019) note that entrepreneurship is purely anchored on sensing, seizing, and transforming opportunities and turning them into a business. From this television series alone, the entrepreneur realizes that they must come up with the ideas first and then think of making the ideas feasible. In addition, entrepreneurs must make decisions about resource deployment and allow for the enterprise. Lastly, the entrepreneur must strive and adapt to new business ways because that is the best way of transforming the industry and reconfiguring the market. Henceforth, HBO's Silicon Valley prepares the millennial entrepreneurs for entrepreneurship but notifies them of the possible pitfalls and stepping stones ahead based on the Hegelian dialectical basis.
Symbolic Interactionist Analysis and Discussion
All work in filmmaking must be geared towards ensuring the audience gets absorbed into the film. The story must be very catchy to withstand the radical critique that film often goes through. For instance, for Silicon Valley, a film that focuses on studying entrepreneurship, the directors must show that their film adds that missing aspect of believability because learners follow the entrepreneurs' journeys and see the challenges and solutions. Here, the approach can be ideal if it is strengthened to boost the audience's imagination and critics (Farago et al., 2019). The only way of doing this is if these two demographics allow themselves to link the audio-visual content on the film with the principles they intend on learning. Silicon Valley is television that scores very highly in improving social entrepreneurship because there is already a very big gap in class teaching and theory. As earlier stated, there is a shortage of people that can offer ideal real-life examples because mentors are primarily unavailable, and learners rarely have access to active business environments. In this case, one can correctly assume that the closest thing to a real-life entrepreneur is a film character playing the part of an entrepreneur (Wang, Lin & Ke, 2015). The solution does not entirely rule out an entrepreneur's need, but it covers a large chunk of social entrepreneurship study.
On the other hand, radical critique is a very pertinent thing in film development, and every director always assesses ways in which the audience and critics respond. For instance, in most cases, a television series such as Silicon Valley must look at numerous thematic issues that affect the case study area, which is in – Silicon Valley. In this case, the viewers and audience that understand Silicon Valley attest to most of the television series’ facts. The show covers the challenges in technology, looks at the relationship between the techies and the venture capitalist, and addresses a critical emerging thematic issue about the negative and positive relationship between China and Silicon Valley.
According to Wang, Lin & Ke (2015), there exist some potential psychological or social effects in film media, and they mainly come live when it comes to the more captivating shows. Wang, Lin & Ke (2015) systematically and expansively look into the psychological and social effects that TV series have on the selected respondents sampled from the Chinese population. The devoted viewers of a particular show gain some intrigue, and it keeps them coming back and following up the TV shows, which ends up improving the ratings of a show in the end. The increased numbers imply an increase in popularity, and this is good motivation to the directors. After a while, the series may affect their behavior both positively or negatively. In Silicon Valley, the viewers adopt a particular set of skills and perspectives when investing and handling venture capital in Silicon Valley.
Conclusion
HBO's Silicon Valley as a television series prepares millennial tech investors because it is well articulated and planned according to the Functionalist theory. The series deals with the research question and its focus is deducing the storyline from the television series and pitting against the real-life approaches in modern-day entrepreneurship. The directors have found the best way for the story to be committed into action by painting a mental picture closest to the concept. Next, the series also offers an individual protagonist elimination because they realize that it does not act as a proper educative prop and may cause action, which lacks audience satisfaction. Again, the directors have avoided the formalist error because, unlike Eisenstein, they have only portrayed the Silicon Valley life for a budding tech investor, and they let the audience decide on the implications of that journey. Finally, the series can pass a rigorous education value of radical critique because, unlike other films, the show prepares a millennial entrepreneur for Silicon Valley.
References
Farago, et.al. (2019). Dynamic Capabilities, New Business Creation and the Entrepreneur: An Analysis about the La La Land Film. International Journal of Entrepreneurship .
Waghid, Z., & Oliver, H. (2017). Cultivating social entrepreneurial capacities in students through film: Implications for social entrepreneurship education. Educational Research for Social Change , 6 (2), 76–100.
Wang F, Lin S, Ke X. (2015) Just entertainment: effects of TV series about intrigue on young adults. Front Psychol . 2015; 6:529. Published 2015 Apr 29. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00529.
Williamson, B. (2018). Silicon startup schools: Technocracy, algorithmic imaginaries and venture philanthropy in corporate education reform. Critical Studies in Education , 59 (2), 218–236.
