The new movie, Steve
Jobs, contains scenes describing events that didn’t happen, such as a
meeting Jobs had with John Sculley, the man who fired him from Apple. This imagined
encounter occurs years after the firing, and allows Jobs, who has now made it
big with his new company, to achieve what every audience insists on: closure.
The film’s writer, Aaron Sorkin, defends this and other purely
imagined scenes by saying the movie is “a
painting instead of a photograph.”
Unapologetic tinkering with history is something of a recent
trend in film. For example, Selma director
Ava Duvernay and Zero Dark Thirty director
Kathryn Bigelow recast the past in order to create more emotionally satisfying
cinema.
The folks in Hollywood know what they’re doing. The fact
that Jobs never got to personally thumb his nose at Sculley is frustrating, a
circle left unclosed. Audiences hate that.
By inventing a meeting, Sorkin certainly makes a better
story. And he asserts it’s actually a good thing if a film about the past isn’t
accurate.
This is
the difference between...journalism and art," Sorkin said.
Journalists "have an obligation to be objective. I have an obligation to
be subjective. There are stories there that should be written about.
In passing, I’ll observe that one event Mr. Sorkin will want
to creatively reimagine is how Jobs would have reacted to his film.
