4 - The Silicon Valley Biopic

Summary

The final season of Silicon Valley sees the tech entrepreneur Gavin Belson learn that he might lose control of Hooli. In a desperate attempt to stave off his defenestration he offers another trademark, self-aggrandising speech. ‘Look,’ he declares, ‘forget all the bullshit about making the world a better place. The most valuable companies in this valley were built and run by … by savages, who cheat to win. Zuckerberg, and Jobs, and me.’ Here, Belson highlights not only the centrality of Zuckerberg and Jobs to Silicon Valley's mythology but also that their ruthlessness lies at the heart of their legends. Unsurprisingly, Hollywood also cements them as Silicon Valley icons, although unlike Belson, its films offer a less laudatory view of their subjects’ savagery. The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) follows Zuckerberg through his brief studies at Harvard University, where he codes Facebook's predecessor and decides to launch the now ubiquitous social network, before heading to Silicon Valley to follow Facebook's expansion. It presents Zuckerberg as a gifted computer engineer with human failings that ultimately inform his social media behemoth. Steve Jobs (Danny Boyle, 2015) focuses intently on three key moments in Jobs's public life: the presentations of the Apple Macintosh 128k in 1984; the NeXT cube computer four years later; and the iMac in 1998. Jobs (Joshua Michael Stern, 2013), meanwhile, traces Jobs's life from his Reed College days in the early 1970s to his triumphant return as Apple's Chief Executive Officer in 1996. Both exist in dialogue with Pirates of Silicon Valley (Martyn Burke, 1999), a made-for-television movie that acts as a dual biopic of Jobs and Microsoft's Bill Gates, focusing on the tension between the two while tracing their lives from their college dorms to Jobs's 1997 announcement of a collaboration between their two companies. While some of the rickety sets signal Pirates’ low-budget status, the 1999 Emmy Awards recognised the quality of its casting and writing, indicating that we dismiss it at our peril.

As the film scholar Dennis Bingham argues, classical biopics offer a ‘Great Man’ theory of history, presenting their subjects as preternaturally talented visionaries who triumphantly overcome the scepticism of their peers.