The Films of Aaron Sorkin: Steve Jobs
Sorkin Laid Bare The Truth of a Tech Legend — And No One Wanted To Hear It
When Scott Rudin’s company greenlit Steve Jobs, the last film Aaron Sorkin has written to date that he has not directed (Danny Boyle helmed the picture) and it bombed at box office and received mix critical reception, the studio head who greenlit was fired. There is a wide-held belief by Hollywood observers that the box office failure of this ‘serious’ film had led to the inexorable decline of studio backed Oscar worthy movies. To paraphrase Kate Winslet’s character near the end of the film, this perception shows how firmly you can believe in something and still be absolutely wrong about it.
Before the release of this movie, studio backed serious films were already going out of style. As I’ve mentioned in my own series of film reviews devoted to 2012 studios were increasingly more devoted to comic book movies and blockbusters and the smaller independent films were increasingly becoming Oscar bait. Ironically, even if Steve Jobs had been a success there is a very real possibility that his own company would become one of the sources for Oscar worthy films. In 2017 Amazon would release its first film Manchester by the Sea; the next year Netflix would debut Roma almost exclusively on streaming and by the end of the decade, that would be one of the major sources for Oscar worthy films. Apple TV+ was responsible for CODA the Best Picture winner in 2021. The tide for these kinds of movies were already turning.
But even if that had not been the case, I don’t think there’s any world in which Steve Jobs could have been a box-office hit, certainly not the way Aaron Sorkin chooses to tell his story. When Jobs himself died suddenly in 2011, he had been the icon of so many people across the globe, more than should have loved a man whose main presence was known for his presentations of revolutionary new devices at press conferences for Apple which became legendary. I can understand the demand for a movie about Jobs to know what made him tick and to know who he really was. In an earlier era Jobs would have been presented as a hero, someone who was a good person as well as a great man, who overcame many obstacles to become the greatest technological revolutionary of all time, whose computers were every house in the world, whose devices increasingly revolutionized every aspect of our lives. Anyone who knows the kind of movies and TV that Sorkin writes knows that those kinds of stories are fundamentally uninteresting to him. He wanted to tell the story of a man who was at the center of the such perfect technological revolutions but who seemed utterly detached from any human contact at all, who was more than capable of being cruel to anyone who did not perform at the same parameters he did, who treated everyone around him contemptibly, including the mother of his own child.
Of course, the viewing public was repulsed by this and refused to see it. This movie takes place just prior to three of those much beloved press conferences: the first in 1984, when the Macintosh is about to be introduced, the second in 1986 when he is about to introduce NeXT Computer, the third in 1998 when he is about to introduce the iMac. And in none of those segment does Jobs come off as either remotely pleasant, warm or seem to have a nice bone in his body. In the final one, he actually seems annoyed that he has to give one of them in the first place. Why would people want to see that the man that they came out to see as if he was a rock star performance was just performing and didn’t care about them either? How would they feel the fact that when he made the Macintosh say ‘Hello’ in front of a stunned audience that he’d engaged in a huge slight of hand and it wasn’t real?
Michael Fassbender is perfect in the title role, playing a man who is annoyed that no one can do everything he demands of them, has no interest in anyone’s opinions including the man who co-founded the company with him Steve Wozniak. He treats everybody, the people who work their fingers to the bone for him, the reporters who come to tell his story, even his own seven year old daughter as if they are barely in the room with him at the time. I think it is very telling of Sorkin that he chooses to have all three conferences take place before three products that while they did revolutionize the tech industry, they were huge financial failures. Jobs continuously makes it clear that he does not care if the products he introduces are huge sellers or if the public even likes them. As far as he is concerned, they are his products alone and at the end of the day, the business seems to bore him.
In this sense Sorkin’s version of Jobs is closer to the version of Mark Zuckerberg he had shown the world in The Social Network. Why was the former film such a huge critical and financial success, dominating the awards circuit and the favorite for Best Picture and Steve Jobs a financial bomb that only received two Oscar nominations, none for Best Picture or Sorkin? I think the likely explanation is, at the time, Zuckerberg was far less of a public figure that Jobs had been, and perhaps more importantly Jobs was dead and Zuckerberg was alive? There’s an old Hollywood adage that says the town has respect for the dead, and none for the living. I have a feeling that is fundamentally true for so many of today’s public figures and it certainly was the case for the people that so many viewed as a hero.
Jobs’ tenure throughout the movie is one that he alone knows best and as a result he is free to treat everyone else with not-even concealed contempt. In his last line in the movie Wozniak (a brilliant Seth Rogen) tells him: “It’s not binary, Steve. You can be gifted and decent.” There is no inclination that Jobs even hears his own co-partner when he says this is, any more than he hears anything anyone else says.
Only two people seem capable of talking to him throughout the film. The first is Adam Sculley, the CEO of Apple well played by Jeff Daniels. Daniels seems to be a father figure when the Macintosh is being introduced, in the next segment the two of them have turned on each other. Jobs has decided to blame his being fired on Scully, won’t even listen to him when he reminds that Scully was responsible for getting the famous ‘1984 AD’ on the air. It’s pretty clear in the aftermath that Jobs did this because he wanted to be free of the constrictions of the board and decided to turn on his friend. The two make amends in the final segment of the movie but there’s no sign that Jobs shows any remorse for what he has put his friend or the company he left through. Indeed, given Jobs attitude towards Wozniak he sees no connection between his actions.
The other person who herds him is Joanna Hoffman, played by Kate Winslet in one of her best roles. She spends much of the movie telling everybody that Steve has to get to something or trying to clear the room; it’s pretty clear that she knows her boss well and knows that he’s looking for fights and she wants to avoid them. Every so often she will try to hint and some deeper flaw in Steve’s character: in the opening segment when his daughter Lisa shows up, he is still trying to deny that she’s his daughter. “You do see that she looks like you?” she gently points out. Joanna accepts the fact that Steve will never take anyone as an equal, barely acknowledges her presence. It is perhaps why near the end of the film when she points out a truth about something he has borne a grudge for more than fifteen years — something so obvious he should have seen it — that he pauses for the first time and realizes that he is flawed.
Many will look at the final segment of the movie, when Steve has a fight with his now nineteen year old Lisa and his admission near the end to her that he’s ‘poorly made’ as something redemptive. I have come to think of it differently. Jobs famously said in an article that it was possible that 26 percent of the male population could be Lisa’s father, had no problem lying that LISA, the new part of his technology was an acronym, treats her mother with total contempt. He has not given any money to her or her mother over the years, but when he learns that a friend of his has been supporting her and encouraging her to see a therapist is pissed that someone else cares about his daughter’s wellbeing. He sees that as a reflection on him, even though he will not talk to her.
Then Lisa comes in before the press conference to confront him and is furious about his attitude towards her and her mother. He offers nothing resembling an apology. Then she berates him about the slogan he’s chosen and tells him that his iMac ‘looks like Judy Jetson’s Eas-I-Bake Oven.” (I remember it, and I agree with Lisa.)
Then she storms out. I honestly think Steve follows her because he’s more upset that his daughter doesn’t approve of what a genius he is than because he cares about her feelings. In the last sequence, he does not apologize to her even when it comes to the article (“You were never supposed to read it” is his pathetic defense.) The closest he comes to an apology is by telling him of course LISA was named for her, as if admitting it fifteen years after the fact is consolation. Then he looks at her Walkman and tells her that he’s going to find a way ‘to put a thousand songs in her pocket’ , which was we know is the slogan for the iPod. You could say this was his apology. I’d tell you that he just used his daughter for another genius idea and will make sure she never gets credit for it. Then he goes back into the auditorium and goes through the presentation with all of the people he’s spent the last thirty minutes berating and yelling at. How are we to know that what we just saw in front of his daughter was not another performance?
I am not entirely shocked that Steve Jobs was not nominated for Best Picture; in addition to the other strikes against it, there were several genuinely superb movies nomination, a good mix of well made blockbusters (The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road) some well-done independent films (Room, Spotlight) and even a well-done serious Oscar film that did do well at the box office (Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies). The bigger shock was the fact that Sorkin was not nominated for Best Screenplay, despite his winning the Golden Globe that year. Of the five films that he either wrote or directed in the 2010s, Steve Jobs is the only one where Sorkin was not nominated for anything. Admittedly, there was heavy competition in 2015: in addition to The Martian and Room, the other nominations included The Big Short, Carol and Brooklyn, all of which have their own merits in telling complicated stories. In particular, Adam McKay’s The Big Short had managed to do something that Sorkin himself mastered in his two previous adaptations: tell a story that seemed impossible to tell in an entertaining way.
Yet I still feel that Steve Jobs stands up well among Sorkin’s canon. Not only because it tells a story that fits in oeuvre when it comes to his triad of tales of toxic masculinity (which, as I indicated previously, he completed in Molly’s Game) but because it’s a story that I think the world needed to hear, even if it didn’t want to. When Jobs died in 2011, he was celebrated by the world and many Americans still idolize him. It was brave of Sorkin to have Steve Wozniak, late in the film, say that the key difference between the two of them is that “Steve (Jobs) an asshole” and by the time he says it, we think that Wozniak has been understating the case.