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February 16, 2007
February 11, 2007
The Tyranny of Beauty
"Pirates of Silicon Valley" Tells An Old Tale
This really fun made for TV movie about the lives of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates adopts a traditional story line to relate the origins of the personal computer.
In the film, we meet Jobs as a handsome young college radical, a descendant of the Beat Generation, who seeks spiritual enlightenment, psychological transformation, and creative revolution through primal scream therapy, a carefully considered and artistic strategy of sandal wearing, and high-tone tripping on what appears to be blotter LSD.
We meet Gates, meanwhile, as a sweaty-palmed, adolescent card shark destined by his very smallness to bud into a hustler and thief of gargantuan proportions, sort of the Shrimp Who Ate Seattle.
Jobs' is a Cinderella Story, in a way, He's an orphan with John-Lennon-like issues about family and commitment. He is the vision guy who crafts Wozniak's playful engineering genious into an utterly new idea - a computer for ordinary people. He tries unsuccessfully to interest the business class in developing the personal computer as an idea and finally succeeds when he learns to clothe his hippie beauty in a wrapper of stuffed shirt drag.
Gates is a Babbit of the worst order. Or, the rat Templeton, except that Gates is never revealed to have a heart after all. Just like his dorm room Playboy collection, Gates is a clammy, rumpled, musky stink of a guy, more hot for computer coding than chicks, uninterested in and clumsy with chicks, a guy who considers a date to see the same movie in different town as a species of consummation. Gates gets off on racing bull dozers and on the industrial Altair, the blinking box that he animates with an swindled operating system, the swindle on which the world's greatest fortune is built.
The collision of these two careers is dramatic and in some respects eternal. It takes on the quality of a fable, the tortoise and the hare. Jobs' impetuousness and epic nature eventually burns itself out, while Gates' sneaky perserverance and reptillian hording pays off in the end.
By means foul and foul, Micrsoft wins out over Apple, and the viewing audience may easily surmise that this is due equally to the flaws of both men. Jobs is a hot-house beauty and Gates is a clinging kudzu vine.
The film makers take the cheap way out by emphasixing that Jobs was beautiful and Gates was ugly. Jobs is like JFK in this movie and Gates is Nixon. Jobs is the flawed purity of passion and desire. Gates is the ugly, malformed and sweat-stained avatar of greed and calculation.
Jobs in the hare and Gates is the (bull-dozier driving) tortoise. In our day and age, of course, the tortoise still wins. But the hare makes a beautiful corpse. A beautiful corpse is one of the great monuments to the ashes of desire in our decadent and effed up postmodern popular culture.
The film is, in short, a tour de force of inventive story telling. Fresh, original, and above all, fair to the brilliant people of the world who may happen to be ugly.
