The night Steve Jobs died, I had more notifications, missed calls, and messages on my iPhone than ever before. Just then I knew the death of a character like him was going to go beyond the world of technology: Most of the advertisements I had on my mobile came from people or media that did not talk about Apple.
All fans of the brand have our story these days, as does any event that impacts our lives – no matter how big. And something similar has also happened all over the world these days, beyond the small world: people, even those who didn’t know all about it, wanted to know the story behind it all.
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Getting to know (parts of) Steve Jobs
With the arrival of SkyShowtime in USA, we have the opportunity to watch one of the most controversial documentaries on the figure of Jobs that has been filmed so far. The director, Alex Gibney is a well-known filmmaker who also produced well-known documentaries such as “Going Clear” dedicated to the Church of Scientology.
Alex Gibney has made documentaries on controversial or current topics: his next work will focus on Elon Musk
Gibney has also worked on other projects on Wikileaks leaks, the Lance Armstrong cyclist scandal, and the popular “The Inventor” on Elizabeth Holmes’ fraud as CEO of Theranos, among others. A few days ago he announced that his next documentary will be neither more nor less than on Elon Musk. In his works, as you can see, he always deals with current controversial issues, thanking him for the harshness of the stories but also criticizing the excess of sensationalism on occasion.
With “Steve Jobs, the man in the machine”, the director takes us on a stealthy walk through the life of the famous Apple CEO, from almost his birth to his death – through conversations and statements from people who worked or lived with him those crazy years
A nervous Jobs, an enlightened Jobs
The sequence begins with Steve Jobs preparing for an interview in the Macintosh era. An atypical Jobs now: nervous, awkward, want to go to the toilet to vomit because of live nerves. Years later, scenarios would be their natural environment. Gibney tries to answer an interesting question with the tape: “It wasn’t Lennon, or Marin Luther King. Who was the man who turned the world into a planetary wake?
To do this, it is a question of deconstructing the myth down to its most elementary personal elements: in my opinion, focusing only perhaps on the most controversial part, the clashes, the problems. Jobs was probably a guy horrible to work with, but very little is said in the documentary of what he had in a hostile environmentflat and dominated by large corporations.
All this is explained in one of the most interesting parts of the documentary: the statements of his mentor, a monje llamado Kobun Chino Otogawawho Jobs walked and drank late morning tea with in Los Altos, California. “Me being enlightened to do something great. I want you to make me a monk” – the most selfish Jobs confessed perhaps the most humble person in the whole valley.
“If you consider yourself so high, bring me proof.”
“If you consider yourself so high, bring me proof” Kobun replied And Jobs brought it to him: one of the main motherboards of the Lisa project. “With this, I will change the world”. Is very curious about these conversations from the mouths of those who were so close to him: he was profiled as crazy, eccentric, but with him everything seemed possible. Chrisann Brennan, the mother of his first daughter – Lisa – describes him very well on the tape: “He was confident and goofy at the same time.”
Traveling to the end of the world to find the soul of the product
Bob Belleville, Director of Engineering at Macintosh he traveled to Japan with Jobs himself to find inspiration in the beauty of Japanese minimalism and its logical and simple way of creating forms. Belleville’s life was changed by the Macintosh: he lost his wife and his lifestyle at the time, but he still remembers those times fondly: “These three years have been so incredible that I learned as if they were ten. The fact is that Steve Jobs seemed to have learned centuries more.”
The documentary It falls short because in two hours he does not seek to talk about Jobs through what he has achieved, but rather about his problems. Missing more moments from the creation of the Macintosh, the interaction at the Homebrew club where he fought to bring computing into everyday life, the battles over technology that no one thought was worthwhile and ended up with build a viable product.
He also makes the mistake of comparing Apple to a traditional company and its procedures in the mid-1980s. Its most recent team in the last years of its life also has no voice, the management. its clear and concise vision of the futurethe DNA with which he knew how to imbue this new Apple almost as a redemption for his past mistakes and which is still valid in the company today.
Gibney’s work is also wrongly subtitledwith sentences that often don’t make the slightest sense and disconnect us from the story: I advise you to focus on the original audio comments even if you don’t know much English – it can be understood perfectly even from of the context.
However, if you are a new SkyShowtime subscriber, I recommend you to try and feed something else from what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important figures in the world of technology in recent years. The documentary is very well filmed and the plot has very good audio-visual support of the time. If you are passionate about technology, you will surely appreciate the trip to California – and for everything that happened there.
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