'Steve Jobs' and How to Normalise a Visionary

Everything about this film's opening scene oozes intelligence. A cracking cast - Michaels Fassbender and Stuhlbarg and Kate Winslet - reads an exceptional, mile-a-minute script - Aaron Sorkin - under masterful direction - Danny Boyle - with an exceptional musical score underneath - Daniel Pemberton. If you asked a generative AI bot how to make a film about a revolutionary genius, it wouldn't be able to come up with something so accomplished. The film has a very difficult job: make the audience relate to Steve Jobs, a messianic figure who, I suppose, bears striking resemblances to Elon Musk, though that is a rabbit-hole down which I do not want to go. 

The film portrays Jobs as a genius and, I suppose, I am here to judge the film and not the man himself. The film has been hit by claims it is inaccurate, but I can't speak and won't speak to those. What the film does exceptionally, if not a little painstakingly, is show the viewer that Jobs is a genius. Nothing reflects this more than Sorkin's dialogue.

"You didn't have seconds. You had three weeks. The universe was created in a third of that time" - "Well someday you'll have to tell us how you did it."

Steve Jobs, evidently, is God, the Creator of All Things. This is the kind of pandering I normally despise in films. Don't tell us he's God, show us he's God. The film, rather annoyingly, does both. Showing and not telling would be far more effective. I'm sure any film theorist would tell you that. But this film's power is its words more than anything and its penmanship is sublime. Credit must be given to Sorkin. He wants to have a little fun with this, and give us fans of The West Wing something to chew on. Fair deuce to you, sir, I say! The script is, truly, remarkable. One to be studied.

Everyone who moves around Steve in a professional capacity treats him exactly like he is treated now in a world of Elon Musks and Silicon Valley pseudochrists like Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried. They refuse to play his intellectual games, knowing he will outwit them. Jobs wants the fire exit lights turned off and an attendant tells him she can't because of an inspector and, you know, the law. He insists so she replies "unless we can change the properties of fire, he doesn't care." It shuts Jobs up as he tries to think of a more intellectual way to respond and realises he cannot, apart from changing the properties of fire, something I am sure he pondered momentarily.

The defining image of the film for me - Steve playing the imaginary orchestra.

Andy Hertzfeld similarly says to Jobs, after being told that he had done a poor job in relation to God's work creating the universe, that "someday you'll have to tell us how you did it." The literal deification of these figures is probably the reason why there's such a cult around people like Musk these days. A rueful reason. Are these people visionaries? Sure, I'll give them that. They are highly successful individuals who have introduced products into the world that either are, have been or have the capabilites to be revolutionary. Fair play to them. But are they geniuses? Hmmm. 

As Jobs says in the film, "I play the orchestra" which, as he's told by Steve Wozniak, sounds nice but means nothing. It sounds like something a visionary would say, not a genius. And this is where the film, it must be said, does a tremendous job. It professionally builds Jobs up as this empyrean figure who thinks and acts on a different wavelength to everyone else with whom they share this earth. But an audience wouldn't relate to that because nobody is that good, nobody is that unimpeachable, nobody is that revolutionary.

So Steve is a shit father. An all-time terrible progenitor. He doesn't physically beat Lisa or do anything so dishonourable. He realistically emotionally abuses her by refusing to acknowledge her existence, his paternity status, the computer being named after her. He refused to pay her tuition fees to Harvard despite his billionaire status. Sounds like a shitty father with no moral or ethical conscience. Woz tells him that he "can be decent and gifted at the same time" but that doesn't compute well with the visionary. He lacks the emotional intelligence that most human beings require to function in this world. And most other human beings lack the thought-processes and visions that he has. He is different to other people. He accepts that you can "refuse to love someone" because to him, emotion is a choice. To a computer, that makes logical, algorithmic sense. 

The film takes us on a journey of acceptance with Jobs. He refuses to accept Lisa as his child. We refuse to accept that he can do that. We get little tidbits of Steve's life throughout the film that indicate to us that he's had a tough upbringing, that he's been shanghaied out of Apple, that he could have changed the world if only people had listened to him. And by the end of the film, Steve admits many wrongs to Lisa and accepts how terrible a father he has been to a rather gifted girl. He smiles on stage, looking back at her in the same way any loving father would. We realise that even visionaries can change. Steve is, therefore, human. We can relate to him. Finally.

The film normalises a guy like Steve Jobs because it shows that even game-changers, rule-breakers and billionaires can err. Obviously, in the modern world where billionaires are fallible beings who post memes on social media and hold, realistically, all the power in the world, we know the rich and powerful can be wrong. But they're still the rich and powerful. Jobs may be "like Julius Caesar", but he also was "poorly made". All his own admissions. Steve Jobs isn't a normal man. Nor should we be convinced that he is. But he is, in spite of everything he tries, a human. Just like the rest of us.