Silicon Valley billionaires, with their boundless digital dreams, have lately turned their attention to the ultimate challenge: the disruption of death. They want to live forever. Peter Thiel, PayPal’s founder, Larry Page of Google and Larry Ellison of Oracle have each poured some of their millions into projects that scour evolutionary history for the secrets of longevity, that aim to improve the DNA they were born with, or that explore ways to copy and save the circuits of a human brain – notably their own consciousness – to survive digitally long after their physical shutdown. Like moguls and megalomaniacs through the ages, they refuse to believe the timing and nature of their ending might be beyond their compass.
Immortality takes many forms, however. Old-fashioned myth and legend remain an option. Much of the tragedy of Steve Jobs’s truncated life – he died in October 2011 at 56, eight years after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – lies in the fact that for all his ungrammatical ability to “think different”, even he had no answer to the rogue cells that killed him. Indeed, it seems the Apple co-founder’s stubborn hubris itself helped to dictate his last act. When he received the initial diagnosis of his cancer, he put off recommended surgery for nine months in his obsessive search for alternative cures on the internet, including contacting a psychic, by which time it was too late.
Jobs was, throughout his life, restless for alternative truths. Not surprisingly for an advocate of the eternal upgrade, he believed death, nature’s built-in obsolescence, to be “life’s greatest invention”. He was well aware that his own contribution to the fast-forward evolution of technology would necessarily be superseded by others.
However, although he never specifically embraced the idea of trying to incorporate his own consciousness into a digital circuit, he did the next best thing and made products that seemed to embody his singular philosophy. Not for nothing after he died did some of the legions of worldwide mourners, real and virtual, with their all-night vigils at Apple stores and to-camera eulogies, reimagine logos that revealed their creator’s image, or hold aloft iPads picturing candles burning bright. Jobs was, or seemed to be, the eternal soul of their machines.
“Sometimes I believe in God, sometimes I don’t,” Jobs said to his chosen biographer, Walter Isaacson. “I think it’s 50/50 maybe. But ever since I’ve had cancer, I’ve been thinking about Him more and I find myself believing a bit more. Maybe it’s because I want to believe in an afterlife, that when you die, it doesn’t just all disappear… the wisdom you’ve accumulated, somehow it lives on.” Then, Isaacson recalled, Jobs paused for a second and said: “Yeah, but sometimes I think it’s just like an on/off switch. Click and you’re gone. And that’s why I don’t like putting on/off switches on Apple devices.”
One of the uncanny traits of the intimate machines that Jobs pioneered – iPods and iPads and iPhones – is their illusion of vitality. Like us, they sleep, and then they wake, all systems go, with all their – and our – memory intact. Even those defunct Apple models, the moribund iMacs and chunky MacBooks that went from box-fresh to antique in a few short years and now clutter attics and landfill, could theoretically be tweaked back to life and with them the traces and dreams of users who lived with and through them.
Jobs had plenty of time to think about his own legacy and, inevitably, control freak that he was, he left as little of it as possible to chance. Nothing he did in life seemed unconnected to his sense of his – and Apple’s – brand and death would be no different. His choice of Isaacson as biographer no doubt was in part due to the fact that the writer had previously published an acclaimed life of Einstein, one of those “think different” people with whom Jobs claimed affinity. (Isaacson had also written a biography of Henry Kissinger, perhaps a more useful apprenticeship for approaching his Machiavellian subject.) Jobs stage-managed all he could of the life story that would be published in the event of his death – giving Isaacson extensive interviews, making those who knew him best available – right down to choosing the gnomic cover image for the book.
Afterlives are not so easily choreographed, however, and four years on from Jobs’s death two films are about to appear that stray significantly from his prepared brief. The first, Steve Jobs, a drama directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin (whose pedigree on The West Wing, and the Zuckerberg biopic The Social Network could hardly be more apt) is loosely based on the first half of Isaacson’s book, up to 1998 and the launch of the iMac, and has Michael Fassbender as its flawed tragic hero. The second, Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine, a wonderful documentary by Alex Gibney (who recently got under the skin of that other pervasive cult, Scientology, in Going Clear), is a film that seeks to answer a single question: why were people so affected by Steve Jobs’s death?
Some of the answers to that latter question, one that goes somewhere near the heart of our love affair with digital technology, have been supplied by the initial reactions to the release of the films in the States. Jobs inspired and demanded fierce loyalty in his friends and acolytes.
Apple’s head of design and Jobs’s close friend, Sir Jonathan Ive, hadn’t seen Sorkin’s film when he spoke to the Wall Street Journal about it, but reports from friends were enough to convince him of his “primal fear” that it depicted a man “I don’t recognise at all”. His response mirrored that of John Travolta to Alex Gibney’s Scientology exposure. “I don’t like it. I haven’t seen it and I don’t want to.”
One of the telling aspects of watching the Jobs films back to back is the possibility of objectively comparing Fassbender’s portrayal with the reality in the footage assembled in Gibney’s documentary. Both films dwell extensively on Jobs’s much-mythologised early years: the emotional scars he carried as a child not only given up for adoption, but rejected in turn by his original adoptive parents, who decided they wanted a girl; his flirtation with California’s hippy culture that came to something of a halt when he fathered a child with girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, (a child, Lisa, he both tried for years to disown in the courts and after whom he named one of Apple’s first personal computers); his ability from the start to inspire and discard those close to him with equal ease; and his ruthless, often impossible, demands for perfection. Fassbender captures all of the dramatic nuances of the conflicted reality you see in real life in Gibney’s film. In neither movie does Jobs come across as a particularly likable young man, but in both you feel the pull of his irresistible charisma.
Responding to suggestions that Jobs appeared to be tyrannical in the films, Ive admitted that Jobs was an uncompromising boss, but said: “That doesn’t mean you’re an a-hole. You could’ve had somebody who didn’t ever argue, but you wouldn’t have the phones you have… There are sons and daughters and widows and very close friends that are completely bemused and completely upset [by the films]. We’re remembering and celebrating Steve Jobs’s life and at the same time there is this movie and I don’t recognise this person.”
Tim Cook not only took over as chief executive of Apple two weeks before Jobs died, he also offered his mentor half of his liver to keep him alive. In an interview with Stephen Colbert, he described the films as “opportunistic” and again, though he hadn’t seen either, said he “hated” them because he knew that they misrepresented Jobs, who “was an amazing human being… someone that you wanted to do your best work for”.
Aaron Sorkin, in response to this, suggested that Cook should perhaps see his film before judging it, and noted: “If you’ve got a factory full of children in China assembling phones for 17 cents an hour, you’ve got a lot of nerve calling someone else opportunistic”, a comment for which he later apologised.
It is a curious world where it is apparently considered off-limits or opportunistic to make a drama or a documentary about a figure as visible and central to our global culture as Jobs, but among more zealous technophiles, that appears to be received wisdom. Jeff Jarvis, former professor of digital journalism at City University, New York, and creator of the blog BuzzMachine, compared Sorkin’s film in particular to a kind of heresy, an envious piece of work that peddled the myth that new media were not to be trusted. Jarvis’s most recent book likened Jobs to Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, and found both “accomplished greatness through trial and error, vision and determination”.
In trashing Sorkin’s films about Zuckerberg and Jobs as acts of spite, he wrote: “Sorkin is Salieri to their Mozart. They are greater artists than he will ever be. They and their impact will be remembered for generations – and not because of Sorkin’s films about them, which will be soon forgotten. They have changed the world more than Sorkin or his beloved, imaginary president or journalists could ever hope to. Yet Sorkin is doomed to make movies about these damned, fucking geeks. Pity.”
It is hard to read such comments or watch either film about Jobs and not think of the parallels in the genesis of Apple with the birth of a religion. Sorkin structures his script around three product launches, first that of the original Macintosh, second the launch of the ill-fated NeXT computer made by Jobs after he had been kicked out of the company he created and was in the wilderness, and lastly his triumphant return as saviour of Apple in the launch of Ive’s colourful iMac.
These launches, as Gibney’s film also makes clear, were above all acts of evangelism. By the time the iPad comes along, Jobs has created a singular spectacle by bringing tablets down into the valley and demonstrating their miracles to the faithful. And of course, from the beginning, as in all cultish movements you either believed and were enlightened or you did not and were not.
As with any long-term Apple user – I’ve never had any other PC or phone since I first was enthralled by a Macintosh desktop in 1991 – these emotions are both familiar and curious. The simple magic, the intuitive quality of the technology, the sense of rebellion against soulless mainframes and impenetrable software it appeared to represent, was always hard to resist. You can detect that fact not only in the clips that Gibney has assembled of the #iSad millions weeping for Jobs’s loss – “Steve Jobs invented everything!” says one young boy – but also in the technical homage employed by Danny Boyle, who directed Sorkin’s film.
Boyle shoots the first act, the first product launch, on 16mm film, to give a homemade hacker feeling to Jobs’s early efforts – based in his parents’ garage with co-founder Steve Wozniak – to change the world. He moves on to 35mm for the second operatic act of wilderness and revenge, and for the final launch shoots in pin-sharp HD digital. Much is improved in the progression, but something of the original innocent, human-scale ambition seems to have been lost: a metaphor which looks like a useful way to examine the shiny-happy corporate world domination that Apple came to embody.
With some of this in mind, I spoke to Boyle – and later to Gibney – about how they had approached the myths around their subject, and how close they felt they got to the truth. I wondered first of Boyle if he had, despite everything, learned to love Jobs in the months of making his epic?
“I certainly got obsessed with him,” he said. “One of the reasons I agreed to do the film was that I felt for him, on an emotional level. The father and daughter stuff with Lisa, which was at the heart of the script, is something I really recognise. I hope I wasn’t quite as extreme as him in his relationship with his daughter but I’m not sure that I am faultless either in my relationship with my kids. I felt for him in that respect. But in other respects, he is not someone I would call a hero, no. What was great about the script was that it didn’t pull any punches. It wasn’t a glorification of him really, and he’s not particularly likable, but especially in Michael’s performance you do get drawn to him, to his way of seeing the world. I think that is how he was. I mean people remain in orbit around him even four years after his death. But no, my heroes are people like Woz [Steve Wozniak]. Or people like Tim Berners-Lee, who give all this power away for free. Cost should not be put upon this knowledge. Jobs certainly wouldn’t agree with that… ”
In some ways it seems that Boyle’s and Sorkin’s film is the gospel according to Woz, who was in many ways the genius behind Apple’s original revolutionary personal computing concept, and whose hacker mentality Jobs marketed so successfully. How much, I asked Boyle, did Wozniak help with the film?
“He was certainly a key source for Sorkin,” he said. “He came in and talked to the actors. He has been very complimentary about the film. Fortunately he really liked it. If he didn’t he would have been equally clear about that.”
Wozniak is played by Seth Rogen and the pair of them apparently became close. Wozniak is something of an amateur magician and he and Rogen spent a lot of time bonding at the Magic Castle, a magicians’ club in LA. Boyle suggests he was the conscience of the movie. “Seth doesn’t look anything like him really,” Boyle says, “but there is something about him that is very decent, along with him being a comic genius. In that his decency and genius are inseparable he is perfect for the role. As Woz gets to say to Jobs at one point, ‘Being decent and gifted is not a binary opposition… ’”
Given that the film is a drama, and born out of much disputed territory, in particular Jobs’s perversely cruel treatment of Brennan and his daughter, I wonder how much responsibility Boyle felt to the truth?
“There are a lot of omissions. But it felt very truthful, I believed. It is very difficult to justify it, speaking drily about it. How can you say it is or is not? Everything that is in there is true, we think, but of course it is not the whole story. We used to say it was a bit like Shakespeare – you took some key facts and then you explored your own obsessions about him through that.”
In that sense, it seems that Fassbender, who is currently also starring on screen as Macbeth, found a properly Shakespearean tragic hero in Silicon Valley. A genius undone by his megalomania – had Boyle come across other men like that in his time?
“Yes,” he says, “I have come across people like him. Scott Rudin, the producer, sent this to us. On set, we used to say that the film was the sound of his mind. By this of course we meant Jobs but we also meant Sorkin and I also meant Rudin; it becomes the sound of Michael Fassbender’s mind as well, and maybe mine, too. But yes, I have worked with a couple of people like Jobs. They just will not compromise, and if they do, beware, because there is something bad hidden behind the compromise that you can’t quite perceive yet. We always used to say the second part, Jobs in exile as it were, was a subterranean river of intention that no one except him could perceive. ”
I asked Boyle if he had been an Apple user over the years and of course he said he had: “Creative people have been the gateway for Apple, the Trojan horse,” he said. “Jobs had this notion that he worked at the intersection of fine art and technology and we, those of us in the arts, media world, amplified that for him.”
We have all been complicit, I suggest, in the rise of Apple to be world’s most valuable company, in the journey that Jobs engineered from rebellion to ubiquity and all that it entails. Did Boyle want the film to comment on that complicity?
“I think so. Ultimately it is about his character, and a father and a daughter. But you do want it to try and be part of the big story of our relationship with these giant corporations. All the companies that were easy to criticise, banks, oil companies, pharmaceutical companies, they have been replaced by tech guys. And yet the atmosphere around them remains fairly benign. Governments are not powerful enough any more to resist them and the law is not quick enough. One of the reasons I wanted to do this is that sense that we have to constantly bring these people to account. I mean, they have emasculated journalism for one thing. They have robbed it of its income. If you want to look at that malignly you certainly could do: they have made it so nobody can afford to write stories about them. Their tentacles are so far reaching in the way the world is structured that there is a danger they become author and critic at the same time. Exactly what Jobs used to accuse IBM of.”
And obviously, I suggest, those tentacles go very deep into the film world. Steve Jobs was originally to be made by Sony Pictures and be directed by David Fincher, who worked with Sorkin on The Social Network. It was to star either Christian Bale or Leonardo DiCaprio. In the event, however, of Fincher opting out and financiers, including Megan Ellison, daughter of Larry Ellison, chief executive of computer firm Oracle and Jobs’s old friend, refusing support, Scott Rudin was forced to take the film to Universal. All of this heated internal drama became public when Sony’s emails were hacked by North Korean spies (in protest over Rogen’s film The Interview). Boyle was caught in the fallout of all that.
“It was a tough film to make for many reasons,” Boyle says with a laugh. “After Sony pulled out we had a day where we went around Hollywood, literally with hour-long slots to pitch the film to try and find a home for it. And we were trying to sell it to people who had known Jobs or had been in business with him and were coloured by that. We eventually got a couple of offers, which was great, and we were delighted to go with Universal. They have been exemplary in the support that they have given us in difficult circumstances, which I can’t talk too much about right now though I hope to one day. Let’s just say they have been very supportive.”
The tentacles that Boyle described, which tried to squeeze the life out of the film, were also felt by Gibney, who made his documentary with the support of CNN. Even for someone who has dealt with the Scientology movement and lived to tell the tale, Gibney admits his experience was “extremely hard”. His first phone call was to Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve’s widow, and initially he was confident that she would engage with the film.
“But then,” he says, “a phone appointment was cancelled and I never heard from her again. I learned along the way as I began to approach former executives at Apple that she was forbidding everyone to speak to me. She cast a long shadow. It was tough. I was aided in a sense, in that I wasn’t trying to be definitive, I could go on a kind of road trip and try to make sense of it along the way. I stole that idea from Citizen Kane: you structure the thing according to who you find.”
Most of the interviewees Gibney finds are therefore people who were either betrayed by Jobs or escaped from Apple. He punctuates his film with the impressions of Chrisann Brennan, mother of Lisa, and with the memories of Daniel Kottke, Jobs’s closest friend as a young man, with whom he travelled in India and who was Apple’s first employee (and to whom he infamously granted zero stock options). Both seemed still bemused by Jobs’s cruelties. Most telling perhaps, though, is Bob Belleville, who was seduced by Jobs to lead the project team on the first Macintosh and who was subsequently ostracised. Thirty years on, the gentle-seeming engineer is still traumatised by the events, not only the betrayal, but in the love he still clearly feels for Jobs. Talking about those years, he begins to sob uncontrollably.
“Bob Belleville is the heart and soul of the film really,” Gibney says. “It was hard to understand. I asked him why he was crying and he couldn’t really tell me. He was so deeply conflicted about Steve, which is what I found to be so interesting, and by the way it was not something I suspected. I expected to get from him some factual detail about the early Macs. I knew that Bob had gone to Japan with Steve and Japan was interesting to me, but I had no idea he had this deep well of emotion.”
**
Gibney frames the answer to the question of why consumers were so affected by Jobs’s death in the same contradictory terms. He dwells in particular on the importance of Jobs’s understanding of Zen Buddhism in the development of Apple. His journey to billionaire, he had convinced himself, was a spiritual one. (In the memorial service his family designed to Jobs’s wishes at Stanford University, at which Al Gore spoke and Bono and YoYo Ma played, each of the congregation was given a present in a small brown box that turned out to be the Autobiography of a Yogi, by Paramahansa Yogananda).
“I don’t think Walter Isaacson was very interested in the Zen Buddhist thing,” Gibney says. “I think he thought that Steve got some design ideas from it, end of story. But it was interesting to me. The fact is he did have this long-term spiritual adviser, Kobun Chino. That makes him pretty different from Lloyd Blankfein [boss of Goldman Sachs].”
There is a memorable moment in the film where Gibney has unearthed footage of the Zen monk recalling how Jobs first came to him aged 18 and confessed to him that he felt chosen, enlightened. Koben Chino asked Jobs for proof of this revelation and he came back with the first Apple circuit board.
In his self-mythology, his veganism, his apparent asceticism channelling Gandhi in his round specs, his devotion to minimal design, to the godhead in a silicon chip, it often seemed that Jobs never lost his aspiration to be a monk. It was not a humble life, however. As Gibney’s film makes clear – in tracing the tax-avoidance schemes, in dwelling on the terrible working conditions of those low-paid workers in China putting iPhones together, in allowing illegal backdated share options – Jobs and Apple were always as much about money as spirituality.
“There are a lot of people who said Steve didn’t care about money,” Gibney says, “and I think in some ways they are probably right in that he didn’t care about buying himself a lot of fancy things, but he certainly cared about how money allowed you to keep score with other people and it was very much tied up with how he felt appreciated or not appreciated. It was a way of validating himself emotionally and God knows he got a lot of it.
“He could have given some of it away, but the fact is he hardly gave a dime of it away. There was a famous story I wasn’t able to get into the film. When he returned to the company he said, ‘I want the company to buy me a jet.’ I don’t know how much it was, maybe $45m. Somebody said, ‘Look Steve, if we buy you the jet we will also have to pay the taxes due on it, so it’s going to cost us almost double. How about the company buys the jet and you have it for your exclusive use?’ He said, ‘No, buy me the jet.’”
Along the way in the film Gibney confesses to have been as much in thrall to Apple products as anyone. Has making the film cured him of that devotion?
“It has, I think,” he says. “I look on my phone just as a tool now. Steve was extraordinarily clever in suggesting somehow by using an Apple product you were taking on the man. It was like the elves of Rivendell giving you some ancient elven blade that was good and allowing you to vanquish the orcs. It was like it was a device born of the counterculture. That remains a problem in how we understand these companies. Jobs’s genius was in erasing that boundary between the human being and the tool: if you criticise Apple you are criticising everyone that uses them. ‘Hold on, you are criticising me, I have my family’s photos on this thing!’ Part of why I made the film was not to do a simple exposé, or say this is good and this is bad so go and boycott this product, it was to point out these contradiction and to ask these questions.”
And that overarching question, why did so many people care so much when Steve Jobs died, that instant beatification of a billionaire? Did Gibney answer that to his satisfaction as well?
“I think it ends up still a question,” he says. “I answered parts of it in my own mind but if I had the definitive answer I would have put it in at the end instead of superimposing Jobs’s face over my own. But I think that part of it is: he was Daddy, and I say that knowing all of the issues Steve Jobs had with paternity. He was there for this journey we have taken with the computer. He was such a convincing storyteller in persuading us that his machines were really part of us that when he died there was something about us dying at the same time. He was Daddy.”
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