Wax museums and Steve Jobs have this much in common: they both kind of creep me out.
In the case of the former, my wariness owes to an unshakeable feeling that someone has gone through the premises and employed on a bunch of famous people a vacuum that sucks out souls. My discomfort with Steve Jobs owes as well to a lingering sense of soullessness, though in this case one could argue that it’s self-imposed.
During his lifetime, Jobs built one of the most successful companies the world has ever known. He was also a rampant and unapologetic dick. Since his 2011 death, a clutch of dissenting voices have questioned whether a man who made life a living hell for everyone around him and went a good ways towards depleting our global supply of rare-earth minerals deserves such fawning praise. However, since Bangkok is pulling out the stops to celebrate the arrival of his waxen facsimile, it seems that the former camp has won out. Since I took the pictures for this article using an iPhone, it is perhaps even fairer to say that the whole debate is null.
For its unveiling of the Steve Jobs statue, which has previously done time in Hong Kong and Shanghai, Madame Tussauds Bangkok enlisted the help of C – Chatpawee Trichachawanwong, Thee Wanichnunthatada, and Fan Pan Tae “Steve Jobs” Max Sunart – television personalities and devotees of Jobs’s work.
Tussauds has chosen to house the Steve Jobs statue in its “Celebrity Party” room. This chamber, occupied by effigies of actors such as Will Smith, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, looks like a press conference for an ensemble comedy that was paid a surprise visit by a Gorgon.
Jobs’s inclusion in this pantheon borders on subversion. When juxtaposed against the watery dresses and sharp suits of his fellows, the Apple founder’s baggy Levis and New Balance trainers make him seem defiantly underdressed. Of all the statues in Tussauds, only that of Chairman Mao rivals Jobs’s in terms of its brutally accurate depiction of male pattern baldness.
Having never had the opportunity to study the real Jobs, I will nonetheless venture the opinion that this statue looks like the genuine article. It’s rumpled, needs a shave and stares straight ahead with an expression that’s somewhere on the border between intense concentration and naked wrath.
Much has been made of Tussauds double-pricing policy with respect to Thai citizens versus farangs. The promotions surrounding the Steve Jobs statue almost guarantee an escalation of this debate, as Thai citizens (and Thai citizens alone) will have access to discounted admission to the museum through June 15, if they present their Apple products at the front desk.
Putting aside national pride for the moment, its seems that if nothing else, Tussauds could have learned from its newest resident that success lies in making things as easy for your customers as possible.
