Post-Documentary and the Art of Truth: Steve Jobs as Icon(bio)graphy

Theoretically reconsidering the biographical film as prototypical of post-documentary, this paper insists that “biography” despite being the minor subgenre has become the conceptual premise upon which the “documental” rests. Attending to the notional hybridity between historie and discours, this creative approach to life-writing reworks “documenting” by examining the temporal treatment of the stated biographical film creators. This paper also asserts that the genealogical approach of Danny Boyle’s filmic biography of Jobs’s life not only auto-reflects the converged space that contemporary documentary must inhabit; what is more crucial is the performative dimension that necessarily underpins any writing on the life of the Apple co-founder. Thus, analytical attention endows these filmic biographies not merely as “truthful” representations of an icon but also the illuminating acme of a new type of documentary that is non-exclusive, bringing to life the figurally converged Steve Jobs with Michael Fassbender (the actor playing the titular character for Danny Boyle’s critically acclaimed 2015 Steve Jobs) and Jobs with Ashton Kutcher (Joshua Michael Stern’s 2013 Jobs) with an elaboration on how the aforementioned biographical films aesthetically and visually interpellated the individual whose life is on display. I engage with Bill Nichols’s, Carl Plantinga’s and Noel Carroll’s concepts on documentary to address the hybrid characteristic found within these biographical films with the following research questions. First, what ideas can one draw from biography’s accommodation of death (Jobs’s unfortunate demise in 2011 arguably prompt these two biographical films) in its sense of “life-writing”? Second, how does the genealogically inclined films address the discursive and the historiographical grounds upon which life-writing is itself based? Most importantly, how does the biographical film interpellatively rework the concept of the performative found within Nichols’s modes of documentary, especially noting that the performative mode rests within the observational during his 1991 publication, Representing Reality, whereas his 2001 publication rightly gives this mode its own space? An address of the puissance of iconography of which Jobs is arguably a symbol gives this writer opportunity to write on the robust visual writing of his life.