Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Steve Jobs
2015 · Danny Boyle · Steve Jobs on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the picture texture change from grain to clean digital. (camera)
Boyle shot 1984 on 16mm, 1988 on 35mm, and 1998 on an Arri Alexa. The image gets smoother and brighter as the acts proceed, and the palette warms with Jobs's fortunes.
Payoff: You can date the act by the grain. The film about digitizing the world records its own move to digital. In the reading: chronosign. The reading calls this a chronosign: time stamped directly onto the image, with the medium itself acting as the clock.
Count how much of each product launch you actually see. (structure)
Three acts run in near-real time in the minutes before a keynote. The crowd roars behind a door at the end of a corridor. The film keeps you in the corridor.
Payoff: The deed is always offstage. What you get instead is people arguing about the deed. In the reading: the Figure (reflection-image). The reading calls this the Figure: an act turned into ceremony and talk instead of being performed in front of you.
Watch people arrive one at a time to confront him. (staging)
Hertzfeld, Wozniak, Sculley, Brennan, Lisa. The same faces turn up backstage before all three launches, which no actual backstage would arrange. Boyle stages entrances and exits like a play.
Payoff: The film flaunts its artificiality rather than hiding it. Repetition turns the backstage into a ritual.
Watch who is allowed to talk back to Jobs. (performance)
Fassbender plays charm and cruelty in the same breath and rarely yields. Winslet's Hoffman, in a Polish-Armenian accent, is the one person who pushes back and stays in the room.
Payoff: Who may argue and who must beg is the film's real organization chart. Hoffman is its conscience.
Listen for the crowd noise under every backstage conversation. (sound)
Daniel Pemberton's score moves from analog and textural to electronic and driving across the acts. Beneath it, the muffled roar of a waiting audience presses on every private exchange.
Payoff: The clock is audible. Every argument happens against a countdown you can hear through a wall.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch the doors. The deed is always on the far side, and the film keeps you in the corridor.