Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine

There is something wrong with Alex Gibney's new documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine. It is an vague and almost inexpressible quality that sneaks up on you over the course of the film's runtime, gathering form and substance as it goes until that movie is over and you think to yourself "wait...what?"

Gibney is a competent filmmaker. I really enjoyed his last feature length documentary Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief. But a documentary, any documentary, rises or falls on the strength of its central thesis, or, failing an actual thesis, its central question. Gibney's belief that David Miscavige is the devil incarnate animated Going Clear, his barely constrained fury at the abuses of the Catholic Church supercharged Mea Maxima Culpa, and Taxi to the Dark Side (for which Gibney won the Academy Award for Best Feature Length Documentary) which leveled its gaze at the arrest, imprisonment, torture, and murder of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar in an extrajudicial detention facility peeled back layer after layer of the hypocrisy of the notion of American exceptionalism. But the central thesis of The Man in the Machine is that Steve Jobs was a cipher, and the result is an impossible paradox for a filmmaker.

The film doesn't know what to make of Jobs, and so instead of positing any kind of argument Gibney contents himself with asking rhetorical questions and offering no answers. I don't really care that Gibney isn't sure who Jobs was. That's part of being human. Dickens argues, in the third chapter of A Tale of Two Cities that the inexpressible core of human subjectivity is like the silence of death. What matters to me is that Gibney never bothers to stake any claim at all. You leave the film uncertain what Gibney thinks of Jobs, which is always what is at stake in such a documentary. Which, to my mind, is a cardinal crime.

Rating: 1.5/4