DREAM BIG

“Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition”. These are Steve Jobs’ actual words, taken from the famous speech he gave at Stanford University in 2005. And this is also jOBS' (Joshua Michael Stern, 2013) central message: chase your dreams, be different, think outside the box, and you will succeed, no matter what. This is what Jobs allegedly did, and he managed to turn a modest garage-based enterprise into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees in ten years. Even though the film is set in the past, covering a time span of several decades from the 70s onwards, jOBS is clearly a product of our times. Once again, here we have a film which is a byproduct of the economic crisis we are living. The angle is different from other films previously mentioned in this post. jOBS tries to be an inspiring movie. It tries to encourage the individual to do their own thing, to start a business and fulfil their (American) dreams on their own. This certainly rings some bells in the Spanish context, in which notions like public service and welfare state are being quickly replaced by private enterprise. One of the public discourses more frequently put forward by the Spanish government nowadays is that the solution to the present crisis lies in private hands: it is entrepeneurism that will get us back on our feet again. In this sense, jOBS could as well be used in the next PP’s political campaign. It actually has more in common with our ruling party than it seems at first sight, as both are profoundly deceiving: just as the Spanish government seems to encourage private enterprise in theory, but not in practice, as they do not really put their money where their mouth is in terms of support policies for young entrepreneurs; jOBS offers a somewhat distorted image of what it takes to build a successful business. Steve Jobs is portrayed as a natural leader (or maybe more accurately, as somebody who yells at people a lot), but we do not get to see him doing much actual work, as he seems to hire employees to do the dirty work from day one. Also, we never get to see him actually acquiring the IT skills necessary to build his computers, or the business managing skills he seems to master throughout the movie. He is depicted in quasi-divine terms professionally speaking, he never makes any mistakes (which he actually did, as he was personally responsible for some of the company’s flops). He is a kind of visionary, the “chosen One”, very much like Neo in The Matrix, who never made anything to merit such title either. So, with hard work and skills out of the equation, what does it take to achieve fame and fortune? Only your dreams. Have a dream and chase it, and everything will work itself out miraculously. This is what the Spanish government seems to think as well.