San Francisco Opera: The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs

Postponed when the pandemic hit, the Mason Bates (music) & Mark Campbell (libretto) opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs recently had its Bay Area premiere at the San Francisco Opera; I saw the second-to-the-last performance. The cast is very good & the music is appealing, but the opera as a whole I found a repetitive, trite, & frankly dull hagiography. It's possible you need to have more interest in, & probably also sympathy for, the titular asshole than I do in order for the opera to hold your interest. But I have never been a fan of either Richard Nixon or the Chinese Communist Party, yet I love Nixon in China, so it's possible to create an absorbing, thought-provoking, & memorable work out of people one doesn't, outside of their aesthetic representation, like or respect.

The opera gestures towards criticism of Jobs, but nothing really sticks or runs deep. For one thing, the entire bent of the piece is towards showing us, in 18 time-jumping scenes (plus a prologue & epilogue), that between his Zen spiritual guide & his second wife Jobs evolved into . . . more of a decent person, I guess? Less of a relentless piece of shit? It's as if A Christmas Carol were told entirely through the eyes of the post-Ghosts Scrooge. The stage Jobs sees moments of his past jerkdom & lowers his head appealingly, shakes his head a bit, & smiles ruefully. (This action, like pretty much everything else in the opera, gets repeated. A lot.) It is suggested that growing business pressures, rather than anything internal, had changed him into a ruthless executive, that's he's lost his way, rather than that the business & his growing reputation have enabled him to flower into the manipulative, condescending tyrant he always was inside.

There is a scene set in his office in which he berates people over & over with "wrong, wrong, wrong" no matter what they've done. This is presented as his need for perfection, a search for an elusive, difficult to attain goal. It reminds me of those standard job interview answers that were popular a few years ago: "What do you see as your faults?" "I guess I'd say my major fault is that I care too much because of my passion for excellence." It is physically impossible for me to roll my eyes hard enough at this sort of thing. I have worked for people like this, though they didn't have Jobs's wealth or reputation, so it was easier for people to call them, accurately, horrible. They often truly were the outstanding employees, but that's because everyone else was so debilitated from dealing with them, or so desperately searching for a new job, that there really was no competition. For the record, if everyone who works for you is doing things "wrong, wrong, wrong", then the problem is you. You're not hiring the right people, or not explaining things well, or changing your mind without communicating that adequately. . .  One of the few useful sayings I've ever heard about leadership is that you can get pretty much anything done if you don't care who gets the credit. I think Jobs cared very much that he get all the credit.

The opera is not strictly factual, though the basics seems accurate enough. The names of products & companies are not explicitly mentioned; we hear about "the device" & "the company". The opera opens & closes with a sentimental little scene of Jobs's father, who has made him a table so he (Steve) can "make things"; the father kept singing this over & over. Every scene is like that. A point is made, then repeated, then said again. Right from the start, this work buys into that Silicon Valley nonsense about the wonders wrought by plucky outsiders in their garages. (You won't hear anything about government contracts or the Defense Department or even venture capitalists here. & you most definitely will not hear about the "device" being produced by child/non-Union labor in poor countries, or about the mountains of toxic waste generated by the "devices" & their frequent & costly upgrades.)

Jobs & Wozniak figure out a way to hack the phone company. They dance around, in a way both endearingly & embarrassingly clumsy, celebrating how rebellious they are, bringing Ma Bell down. What's unspoken, & ignored, though the audience knows this, as it's the only reason we're sitting there in the opera house, is that they will end up building another powerful entity themselves (& the phone company, by the way, is still very much standing). Yet we're supposed to accept their view that they actually are, & will always remain, outsiders & rebels. When Wozniak confronts Jobs after all the "wrong, wrong, wrong" snapping, it's framed as "you've changed, you've become what you hated": but of course he has, You can't stay a start-up forever, nor should you. It's naïve to think otherwise. But everything here is presented through the lens of Jobs, so the point isn't that as a company grows, it needs to be run differently; it's that Our Steve has lost his earlier . . . what, exactly? Rebellious spirit, I guess? He never seemed particularly kind or considerate, or even like an average good person. There is an interesting story to be told about how Jobs commodified & sold conformity under the guise of "rebellion" & "independent thought" (his "think different" slogan still makes me cringe). That story will not be told in this work.

Even the computers are seen through the lens of Jobs; the point is made that his machines are smooth & elegant on the outside, but sealed off, inaccessible to outsiders . . . could this be a metaphor for Jobs himself?!? You will have many, many opportunities to ponder that question (spoiler!: yes, it is!) I recall a long profile in The New Yorker a few years ago about a designer at Apple who pretty much came up with the look; here the famous design style of "the devices" seems to be purely Jobs-driven. I will say the opera made me think that Jobs did actually have an abiding interest in Japanese culture, or at least in the Zen Buddhist side of it; dubious comments are made about the "simplicity" of all Japanese design – I take it he never saw Kabuki theater – & of course no mention is made of Wabi-Sabi or Kintsugi; you can't justify your abusive behavior as part of your "quest for perfection" unless you are, in fact, questing for (what you deem) perfection.

Jobs could have gotten his "simplify, simplify" ethos from Thoreau or the Desert Fathers, but they also have inconvenient things to say about the dangers of having too much money. Perhaps Zen Buddhism does as well, in which case not knowing that is purely my ignorance, but I doubt it would be mentioned in this opera anyway; aside from a couple of remarks from his wife (affectionately, gently sarcastic little asides in the vein of "sure, because we need more money", such as you might say to any moderately well-off executive who was working too hard), the truly obscene amounts of money that Jobs accumulated are not mentioned at all (when we see his house, it is bare, except for an Ansel Adams print that, for all we know, is a poster & not an original).

The money should be mentioned because it does make a difference (for one thing, it's the main reason people take Jobs seriously). Actions that are understandable under less gilded circumstances are inexcusable when God is asking you for payday loans. One example: he refuses to give money (according to the program synopsis, a pension – but aren't those controlled by laws? Can a tycoon really just arbitrarily strip an employee of the pension he earned?) to an employee who is leaving. That's one thing if you're part of a struggling company, it's another (a selfish, mean-spirited other thing) if the company has plentiful profits.

Of course the major issue with money is Jobs's steady refusal for a very long time to acknowledge his daughter by Chrisann, his first partner. Despite his repeated & insulting statements that this child, Lisa, could have been fathered by some sizable portion of the male population, he also names one of his operating systems LISA. I think this is meant to make him seem "interesting" & "complex" instead of merely horrible. Again, if he's struggling to make ends meet, you can understand why he'd have, you know, feelings about sending child support her way (though I believe that's a legal, as well as moral, obligation). But when the spare change from your couch could set someone up for life . . . why even try to excuse this behavior? As with Trump, Jobs's selfishness & cruelty are a prime source of his appeal to the cult; there are, to some degrees, attempts to pretend it isn't so, but – & the mountains of money also enter into this – I think it's central to the appeal: here is a man lifted above our mundane, inconvenient realities, untrammeled by convention, & such petty concerns as decency or the law or other people – you know, a visionary! If you had a dollar for every time Jobs was called that, you'd have, if not a mountain, at least a hill of money yourself. Of course the label is ridiculous. Isaiah & Ezekiel are visionaries. William Blake & Rimbaud are visionaries. Steve Jobs was a skilled marketing executive whose most successful product was his own image. There are extended attempts (again, a softening of his image) to give him aesthetic cred, both on & off acid, by comparing what he's trying to do to music, specifically Bach. Yes, I'm sure the Saint Matthew Passion is behind the electronic leash that is the iPhone (excuse me, I mean "the device").

Back to the opera: it's difficult to tell if Jobs is justified in his anger at Chrisann, because she has basically no personality. Everything she says is about him, or in relation to him. First we see her taking acid with him, telling him that he "might be a genius" (it is unclear why she thinks this) & that she "thinks she's falling in love with him"; then we hear that he's "shutting her out" (that gets said a lot, &, once again, it is the mildest, most favorable interpretation possible of his emotionally manipulative & self-centered behavior). Then she's gone. She is replaced by Laurene, who also has no personality except to be generally good. She too tells him that he's "shutting her out" but this time he listens to her &, in some unspecified way, lets her in. Since the two women, as portrayed here, seem interchangeable, I don't really know why one woman is effective when the other isn't, except we're given to understand that The Love of a Good Woman can save even the troubled genius who occupies center stage. &, you know, maybe it can! I for one will not speak ill of the Love of a Good Woman. I will just point out that the possibility of it doesn't make it any less trite as a dramatic device. You also should probably dramatize rather than merely mentioning the goodness. We do get a eulogy for Jobs (he attends his own funeral, like Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn) delivered by Laurene in which she gently suggests that we put down our "devices" & look up at the world around us. Lady Bountiful from the Big House is certainly gracious! &, of course, when you have the amount of money that makes many people think you're wise, you're always at least one step ahead of the sheeple, aren't you?

(That's an amount of money that also, needless to say, provides plenty of high-powered legal representation if you don't like how you're being portrayed. But if you do, maybe a donation could come forth? There was a lot of mockery about pandering when the Opera staged Gordon Getty's Fall of the House of Usher – I saw it, it was solid & respectable, & yes, those words are also meant to convey "very dull" – but at least Getty had a track record of being extremely generous to local arts institutions; what have Jobs & his ilk, & that includes his cult, ever done for the arts?)

Besides the Good Woman, there is a Good Guru: Kōbun Chino Otogawa from the Zen Center. I don't know why he doesn't simply tell Jobs, "Look, you're wasting my time: just stop being an egregious asshole." Instead he mostly stands around delivering the sort of wryly wise bromides you would expect. As I mentioned above, the opera made me realize Jobs did have a serious interest in Zen; otherwise, as with being saved by the love of a Good Woman, the presence of the guru would just be another tired trope (you know, "kooky Californians get fancy spiritual talk from their gaseous gurus, straight from the Mysterious Orient!"). We are told, in a passing line, that Otogawa died before Jobs, in an accident while trying to rescue his (Otogawa's) child from drowning. The whole opera is so Jobs-centered that I was stunned to hear about something that happened to someone who wasn't Steve Jobs – it was as if a window had been flung open. Why doesn't someone write an opera about Otogawa?

Any personality Laurene Powell Jobs has in this opera is thanks to the reliably radiant Sasha Cooke. It is a tribute to her skill & artistry that she really does manage to come across as a genuinely good & appealing person – sort of a tech world Billy Budd. This is not the first time at the War Memorial Opera House that Cooke has brought life to a plaster saint; she's very good at it, but I wish someone would write her a role that is worthier of her talents.  Wei Wu is immensely appealing & authoritative as Otogowa, & Olivia Smith as Chrisann & Bille Bruley as Wozniak also bring what they can to their tissue-thin characters. John Moore as Jobs is almost heroic; he is on stage for almost all of the one hour & 40 intermissionless minutes (I've been to Ring Cycles that didn't seem to last as long). Like the others, he does what he can. & the music is often quite pretty (maybe too much so). I was relieved there wasn't as much electronica as I had feared. But the whole subject needs much deeper treatment than it gets here.

In the program, as always when the subject is Jobs, there are acolytes explaining away his abusive behavior by saying they felt they were "changing the world" (or that they actually did "change the world"). This raises questions (besides You're kidding, right?): What world has been changed, & how has it changed? What do you mean by "change" anyway? You do realize "change" & "improve" are not the same thing, right? In retrospect, do you (O Acolyte) regret having your youthful optimism & energy co-opted to make an elite (possibly including you yourself) obscenely wealthy? I mean, how long do you cling to the Syndrome after you've left Stockholm? The major criticism of Jobs in the opera, the moral crux of the drama, seems to be that he turned away from his daughter. But the real problem there is that we have created a society in which a plutocrat's whim can condemn a child to the bitter, frustrating struggle of average American life, or elevate her to a serene & graceful level. What about the many who didn't win when the genetic/financial lottery wheel was spun? Did Jobs & his "devices" & his minions do anything to change that situation? Billionaires should not exist, & they mostly don't warrant the level of adulation given in this work; why not give everyone, or at least a greater portion of the population, just some of the opportunities the Jobs family has because of his money? Do something to change that situation before you yap at me about how you "changed the world".