Steve Jobs

The problem with Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs, based on the Walter Isaacson bio, is that it’s one long product lunch. There’s a claustrophobia which derives from the setting, a kind of ur convention center in which the Apple Macintosh is presented in 1984, followed by the NeXT and then finally the iMac in l998. The latter finally lives up to its potential. Originally the bar had been set too high with Apple Macintosh failing to sell 1,000,000 computers to start and 20,000 a month thereafter, precisely the figures the iMac would ultimately achieve. The film is curiously talky by Hollywood standards, consisting of a series of conversations between Jobs (Michael Fassbender), his daughter Lisa, (played at age 9 by Ripley Sobo and l9 by Perla Haney-Jardin), his marketing guru and advisor Joanna Hoffman (Kate Winslet), tech wiz Steve Wozniak (Seth Rogen), with whom he worked on the Apple II and two other associates John Sculley (Jeff Daniels) and Andy Herzfeld (Michael Stuhlberg). The sturm and drang of Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay underscores Jobs’s misanthropy and bingo locates the cause. He was an adopted child who had been returned after one month. Nevertheless the portrait of Jobs terrorizing any and everyone who comes in his path gives the film the quality of one of those art house movies where tormented characters grow hoarse from their primal screaming. To say that nothing really happens in the film is unfair. After all the subject is ultimately the birth of a tech giant that may not have changed the way human beings think, but certainly modified the vessel in which they did it. However with the exception of a moment in the end where Jobs has a rapproachement with his daughter, the film is sedentary. At the end Wozniak tells Jobs that it’s not binary. You don’t have to choose between being a good or successful person. And the same might be said about this excursion into Silicon valley which ends up telling a rather old and tired story about how the very traits that make for success mitigate against the kind of humane attributes we associate with good character.

The Fountainhead

The recent Times piece about the explosion in the iPad plant in Chengdu (“In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad,” NYT, 1/25/12) included the following statement, “In the last decade Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers—as well as dozens of other American industries—have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history. However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves.” Was the Apple miracle too good to be true? Is it a little bit like Erica Jong’s “zipless fuck?” Is the Apple Store with its genius bar staffed by tattooed MIT grads on loan from Utopia, missionaries preaching the iCloud gospel rather than paid employees of an enterprise that marches to the beat of the Wall Street drummer, merely a mirage? The cover of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs is almost as ubiquitous as the Apple logo, but who really reads what’s inside. Perhaps the messiah has come or maybe not. The Dickensian conditions that prevail in China’s factories are the dark side of a technology revolution propelled in part by Moore’s Law, which states that microprocessors will double in capacity on an approximately 18 months basis (new microprocessors beget new machines), in part by China’s desire for economic hegemony and in part America’s need to recapture the glory days of its own economic hegemony (Manifest Destiny in technology). Jobs was the Ubermensch, the Howard Roark of Ayn Rand’s Fountain Head, the one hope amidst the carnage of foreclosures, shut down automobile plants and the dying Detroit. An aluminum dust explosion, which could have  been avoided by something as simple as adequate ventilation killed two workers in Chengdu? Will it take another Triangle Shirt Company fire to finally halt the juggernaut we call progress? 

The Broken Contract

Gregory Peck went undercover playing the part of a Jew in Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) to understand prejudice. But racism may no longer be the most profound inequity faced by Americans. As George Packer points out in "The Broken Contract: Inequality and American Decline” (Foreign Affairs, November-December 2011), “Between 1979 and 2006, middle-class Americans saw their annual incomes after taxes increase by 21 percent (adjusted for inflation).  The poorest Americans saw their incomes rise by only ll per cent. The top one percent, meanwhile, saw their incomes increase by 256 percent.” In the Preston Sturges classic Sullivan’s Travels Joel McCrea plays a Hollywood director who dresses up like a hobo to learn how the poor live. But who to cast as a poor person attempting to penetrate the precincts of the ultra rich? We are familiar with the face of Bill Gates. The face of the recently deceased Steve Jobs is ubiquitous (around the world) due to Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography and we all remember the kindly Oracle of Omaha who once commented about derivatives “it’s not just whom you are sleeping with, but also whom they are sleeping with.” And then there are Trump, Icahn, Blankfein, Paulson, Schwarzman and Flowers. If it’s hard to imagine someone coming from nothing in the current landscape of exponentially increasing wealth, it’s even harder to bring a onetime portrayer of superheroes out of retirement to fill the part. OK Michael Fassbender, the heart throb du jour, exudes a protean mixture of grit and elegance. Packer goes on to say, “Inequality creates a lopsided economy, which leaves the rich with so much money that they can binge on speculation, and leaves the middle class without enough money to buy the things they think they deserve, which leads them to borrow and go into debt.”