Thursday, November 26, 2015

Think Different

                 Much Madness is divinest Sense—
                 To a discerning Eye—
                 Much Sense—the starkest Madness—
                 ’Tis the Majority
                 In this, as all, prevail—
                 Assent—and you are sane—
                 Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—
                 And handled with a Chain—

A few weeks ago, I assigned this Emily Dickinson poem for my literature students to read. In our textbook, the poem appears in a section entitled “Conformity and Rebellion.” One student, familiar with Dickinson’s unique style and enigmatic works, liked the poem “because it reflects the poet’s slantwise mind.” Another student noted that Dickinson herself might have been “straightway dangerous” to “the Majority”: she did not assent; she demurred. She was an innovator, a rebel, a rocker of the boat. That idea opened the floodgates to a naming off of other innovators and rebels, a list that included Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, John Lennon and Jay Z. “What about Steve Jobs?” I asked. The class responded with oh-yeahs and uh-huhs.

A while earlier, David had shown Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs in the Dick Clark Productions Screening Room. I’d been excited about the film, mainly because of Danny Boyle’s direction and Aaron Sorkin’s writing. Those two heavy-hitters are consistently knocking the ball out of the park. I wanted to see what they could pull off together. As far as I’m concerned, it’s another home run.

First off, there’s the structure. Whereas the 2013 biopic Jobs (starring Ashton Kutcher) follows a more typical formula, unfolding chronologically (except for the opening hook) and hitting the big points in Jobs’ life, Steve Jobs (starring Michael Fassbender) is structured around three major product launches: the first for Apple Macintosh (1984); the second, for NeXT Computer (1988); the third, for the iMac (1998). The film opens with Jobs putting out (or adding fuel to) fires as the clock ticks down to the first launch. That sequence’s frenetic and claustrophobic feeling works for the film, keeping viewers riveted. With five minutes before Jobs must take the stage, Boyle seems to stretch time. Then the act ends, and we viewers can breathe before the lead-in to the second launch.

During the messiness that goes on behind the scenes—the complications and distractions that pull Jobs in a dozen different directions—there is also Sorkin’s dialogue, sometimes slick, sometimes tumbling out, always crafted. If I’m flipping through channels and hear characters speaking Sorkinese, I will stop and watch, transfixed. Take, for example, The Social Network, another story about a real person—an often difficult-to-work-with person, according to the film—who changed life as we know it. Through his words, Sorkin sculpts out Zuckerberg’s character, and he does the same here with Jobs’ character.

Then Fassbender takes those words and brings the character to life. Fassbender is as engaging as ever; he is Steve Jobs. The rest of the cast is solid, as well: Kate Winslet as marketing executive Joanna Hoffman; Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple; Jeff Daniels as John Sculley, the CEO of Apple, 1983-1993. Three different actors play Lisa Brennan, one for each launch, and Jobs’ changing relationship with his daughter reflects his character’s maturity.

The father-daughter dynamic is one of the film’s nice touches. Others include the witty repartee and one-liners (Sculley ribbing Jobs about the actual skinheads that appear in his “1984” commercial; Jobs, after one of his many heated discussions, saying, “It’s like, five minutes before a launch, everyone goes to a bar and gets drunk and tells me what they really think”); the giant image of a great white shark projected on the screen behind Jobs, as he tears into Wozniak; Lisa’s Sony Walkman and the scene on the parking garage, in which Jobs tells her, “I’m gonna put music in your pocket.”

That line reminds me of my dad, a civil engineer with an inventor's brain. I remember a conversation we had way back in 1983, when I was a big eighth-grader, and when compact discs had just come out. I was talking up the CD, amazed at that new technology. "How can it get any better?" I asked. "It will," my dad said. And then he described a small device—much smaller than a Walkmanthat held hundreds of songs. "All people will have one," he said, "listening to music wherever they go." I just scoffed, still thinking, What can be better than a CD? I couldn't know then that he was predicting the future.

"Much Madness is divinest Sense," Dickinson wrote. "Here's to the crazy ones," Jobs said. Those words begin his 1997 "Think Different" commercial, and they, too, have a sense of the poetic. I'll leave you with Jobs' message in his own words.