Steve Jobs · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands in a corridor with a door at the end of it. Behind that door, a few thousand people have become a single low roar, waiting for him to walk out and change their lives. He will not walk through it for forty minutes. In those forty minutes the people he has wounded arrive one at a time — an engineer, a co-founder, an ex-lover, a daughter, a CEO — and each corners him to relitigate love, credit, and paternity. Three times the film does this. Three launches, three corridors, the same faces showing up like motifs in a score. The keynote itself, the thing everyone is waiting for, the deed — we almost never see it.

That withholding is the whole movie, and it's where Deleuze becomes useful.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image — most movies — a character takes in a situation and acts to change it; the world is a problem the hero's body solves, and the cutting chains perception to action to result. Steve Jobs looks like it belongs here. It's all forward motion, all want, Sorkin's dialogue propelling bodies down hallways. But watch what the want is attached to. Jobs never acts on a milieu in front of us. He argues. The launch — the actual transformation of the world, the deed that would close the circuit — is pushed offscreen, behind the door, into that roar. What we get instead is the deed converted into talk about the deed.

Deleuze has a name for this conversion: the reflection-image, or the Figure. It's what happens when an action, rather than being performed, is transposed into spectacle, ceremony, discourse. Boyle and Sorkin build a literal architecture for it — corridors, orchestra pits, loading docks, light booths, the backstage of a life lived entirely as public performance. Jobs doesn't do things; he stages himself doing them, and the film stages him staging. The recurring cast that no real backstage could produce isn't a flaw the film hides. It flaunts it. Same people, same forty minutes, three times over: this is ritual, not reportage.

Once action becomes figure, meaning has to come from somewhere else — from relation. This is Deleuze's mental-image, the relation-image: a cinema where sense is built not from what a body does but from the links a watching mind holds together. Sorkin's exposition-as-accusation is pure relation-image. Nobody explains the Apple II team's stock options for our benefit; Wozniak hurls them at Jobs as a grievance, and we assemble the history from the shape of the fight. The audience is enlisted as a knowing third party, cross-referencing this launch against the last one, this betrayal against that apology. You are not watching events. You are adjudicating a case.

And the case never closes — which is the third concept. Deleuze calls an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve a discourse-image. Steve Jobs is built never to deliver a verdict on Steve Jobs. Each act cross-examines him from a new angle; each witness has standing; the film hands you the contradictions and declines to settle them. "Less concerned with what he did than who he was" is precisely a discourse that won't resolve. The closing reach for sentiment with his daughter doesn't answer the question. It admits the question can't be answered by argument alone.

Two more, because they're doing real work. The bodies here are what Deleuze called gests — postures that expose a social relation rather than advance a plot. Every entrance, every cornering in the wings, is a gest: the choreography of who gets to talk back (only Hoffman) and who must grovel for credit is the film's actual content. And time itself is made visible by the three-format scheme — 16mm for 1984, 35mm for 1988, the Arri Alexa for 1998. That escalation isn't decoration. It's a chronosign, a direct stamp of time onto the image: the grain of the celluloid ages in step with the man and with imaging technology itself, so the medium becomes the clock. The film about the person who digitized the world records its own passage from film to digital.

Now place it. Sorkin had already built this machine once, in The Social Network — the abrasive founder cross-examined by the people he hurt, history delivered as deposition. Steve Jobs is that template pushed to its formal limit, and behind it stands a longer line: the verbal escalation toward one staged confrontation in A Few Good Men; Mamet's wall-to-wall cornered-men music in Glengarry Glen Ross; the corporation-as-coliseum oratory of Network; the whole-film-as-single-duel of Frost/Nixon; and underneath everything, Rope — real time, classical unities, the camera held inside the minutes before an event.

What did it do to film? It took the most action-bound genre we have, the great-man biopic, and removed the action. Boyle keeps the ticking clock of the old last-minute-rescue montage — the countdown to launch, the roar building behind the door — but at the end of the countdown there is no rescue, no deed, only another conversation. He showed you could run a movie on the engine of the movement-image while quietly draining the movement out of it, leaving pure relation, pure figure, pure discourse. A biopic with no biography. A launch film where the rocket never leaves the wings.

Watch it again for the doors. Every one has the deed on its far side, and the film keeps you in the corridor on purpose. That corridor — talk instead of act, figure instead of deed, the case that won't close — is the film's real subject, and it's the most honest thing anyone has made about a man who sold the world the idea that a product launch was an event in history.