With the release of Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!! and Shane Black’s The Nice Guys (which have been described by their directors as ‘spiritual sequels’ to Dazed And Confused and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang respectively), the Flickering Myth writers take a look back on their favourite ‘spiritual sequels’. First off is Eric Bay-Andersen with The Social Network/Steve Jobs…
Traditionally, a ‘spiritual sequel’ (or a ‘companion piece’, as one could equally describe it) is when a director crafts a film that isn’t a narrative continuation of a previous film, but one that covers similar thematic ground and often features several of the same cast/crew members. The films I’ve chosen to discuss are linked by a screenwriter, rather than a director – The Social Network and Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin (the former adapted from the book The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, and the latter adapted from the autobiography of the same name by Walter Issacson)
Both of these films deal with men who were visionaries in the field of computing and technology, but whose ruthlessness when it came to business alienated them from almost everyone around them. They serve as reminders that the main character in a film doesn’t necessarily have to be likeable as long as they’re fascinating, and Jesse Eisenberg and Michael Fassbender both do an excellent job of making their respective ‘monsters’ fascinating. They are both supported by casts who are at the top of their game – special praise must be reserved for Andrew Garfield and Seth Rogen, who give passionate and sympathetic performances as Eduardo Saverin and Steve Wozniak (Zuckerberg and Jobs’ betrayed friends). Appropriately enough, both films make good use of technology – David Fincher utilised state-of-the-art facial mapping software to enable Armie Hammer to play both of the Winklevoss twins, and Danny Boyle chose to film each section of Jobs’ story using different stock to better capture the look of each time period (film for the 80s scenes, digital for the 90s).
If there’s one thing Aaron Sorkin is renowned for, it’s his dialogue. From the courtroom monologues of A Few Good Men to the rapid-fire walk-and-talks of The West Wing, you just know when you’re watching an adaptation of a Sorkin script. In fact, in modern cinema, when it comes to writing smart, snappy, oh-so-satisfying dialogue, his only real peers are Whedon and Tarantino. Only occasionally does he cross the line from super-smart into too-smart – the marlin/trout metaphor that Justin Timberlake’s Sean Parker uses felt a little contrived, as did Seth Rogen’s comparison of the two Steve’s (Jobs and Wozniak) to John Lennon. But it seems ridiculous to complain when there’s more great dialogue in any given five minute section of either film than most films manage in their entire run-time (Sorkin was rightly awarded an Oscar for his Social Network script, yet his script for Steve Jobs was inexplicably not even nominated).
The biggest difference between the two films is their structures – The Social Network is full of flashbacks, flash-forwards and montages, whereas Steve Jobs is essentially a three-act play, each act consisting of about five scenes/arguments and one flashback each. The different structures both suit their respective stories, as Zuckerberg’s story involved a lot of incidents and details which were important to presented in a semi-truthful way, whereas Sorkin freely admits that the only thing in Steve Jobs that is accurate timeline-wise is that they really did have trouble getting the Mac to say ‘hello’ before the 1984 demonstration. The accuracy of both films has been questioned by people who really knew Zuckerberg and Jobs (and/or who were involved in the incidents portrayed in the film), but for those who value quality writing over accuracy, it’s a moot point.
These two films work separately because both stories are rich in character and drama, and they were brought to the screen by two directors with distinctive (yet very different) visual styles. Fincher has always gravitated towards dark(er) material, so his film is full of back-stabbing, black humour and a typically bleak ending, in which Zuckerberg has become the youngest billionaire in the world but he is literally friendless. Had he directed Steve Jobs, as was originally planned (that version of the film, which would have starred either Leonardo DiCaprio or Christian Bale as Jobs, was a casualty of the famous Sony email hack in 2014), it’s hard to imagine it featuring the same semi-cathartic ending as Boyle’s version. But Danny Boyle’s films are generally about hope and overcoming obstacles, whether it’s winning an Indian game show or escaping from a canyon after getting your arm pinned by a boulder, so he’s a better fit for the material. The fact that Jobs ends the film on better terms with most people (or at least trying to do better by them) is an important part of why it truly feels like a spiritual sequel to The Social Network – it’s as if Zuckerberg is only at the beginning of his road to redemption at the end of his film, and Jobs ends his film at least part of the way there.
Eric Bay-Andersen
. url=”.” . width=”100%” height=”150″ iframe=”true” /]
https://youtu.be/b7Ozs5mj5ao?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng
