‘Steve Jobs’ and Why Movies Can’t Capture Genius
Early in Steve Jobs, the Aaron Sorkin-scripted, Danny Boyle-directed biopic about the mercurial Apple co-founder, the hero does something so right yet so peculiar that you understand why a cult sprung up around him. It’s 1984, a few weeks after the legendary SuperBowl commercial heralding the arrival of the Apple Macintosh. The official public unveiling is minutes away. The crowd, which has been kept waiting as its creator dithers and tinkers backstage, has begun muttering and stomping its feet. Jobs is a serenely confident pill of a man, micromanaging everything, making colossal demands at the last possible second, in such a tight timeframe that even a minor failure could mean catastrophe. Even though his staff is already close to cracking under the strain of making the computer say “hello” — the speech software just isn’t working, for some reason — he adds one more impossible request, a sudden improvisation: He realizes that an employee’s blue dress shirt has a pocket exactly the right size to fit a floppy disk, and decides that he wants to stride out onstage in an identical shirt, only white and the right size for Jobs’ torso, with a disc in the breast pocket, subtly reinforcing the idea that Apple makes computer tech that’s both beautiful and sensible.
So somebody needs to go and find someone somewhere in the building with exactly that kind of shirt within the next few minutes. Jobs gets his wish, along with his request to have the computer say “Hello,” and at no point do you question the rightness of these and other demands, because Jobs is a genius — everyone around him knows this — and putting up with infuriating behavior is part of the price of having a brainiac touched by the hand of God in your life.
In this moment, Steve Jobs joins a growing subgenre of dramas revolving around the mystery and necessity of genius. These two elements are intertwined: We know on some level that we need people like Jobs around, despite what colossal pains in the ass they can be, because they drive all sorts of innovation — technical, financial, artistic, even personal. At no point do we ever really understand what makes the man tick, despite the razor-focus of star Michael Fassbender’s nimble and defiantly unsentimental performance. Some of his history is filled in via expository backstory, mainly via brief flashbacks and extended conversations between Jobs and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), his right-hand woman Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), his mentor John Scully (Jeff Daniels), his daughter Lisa (played as a teenager by Perla Haney-Jardine) and her mother Chrisann Brennan (Katherine Waterston of Inherent Vice).
Yet Jobs himself remains a brooding question mark, because films about geniuses almost never give us any practical insight into what makes them geniuses. Mainly they practice what you might call a heliocentric model of drama: The genius is the sun, nourishing yet forbidding and always unfathomably distant, and all of the lesser mortals orbit around them, getting as close as they can without getting burned.