Steven Spielberg (100 page)

In an interview with the British newspaper
The Observer
, Spielberg said with “a note of irritation” in his voice, “I find it kind of astonishing that people who don't like this movie are saying that I'm trying to humanize terrorists, as if it was ever acceptable for me to dehumanize anyone in any of my pictures. Some political critics would like to see these people dehumanized because when you take away someone's humanity you can do anything to them, you're not committing a crime because they're not human. This film clearly states that the Black September of the Munich murders were terrorists. These were unforgivable actions, but until we begin to ask questions about who these terrorists are and why terrorism happens, we're never going to get to the truth of why 9/11 happened, for instance.”

Calling
Munich
“the most European film I have ever made,” Spielberg drew stylistic inspiration from Costa-Gavras's quintessential political thriller Z (1969) as well as from such 1970s films as
The Day of the Jackal, The Parallax View, The French Connection
, and
Three Days of the Condor
. He and Kaminski filmed
Munich
with a semi-documentary feel in natural locations (Malta, Hungary, France, and New York, with high security in place), employing the long lenses and zooms typical of the period. But
Munich
largely avoids the jazzy, propulsive rhythms of Z and devotes much of its running time to philosophical discussions among the characters. Spielberg's understandable attempt to treat the issues dispassionately rather than to stir the viewer melodramatically renders the film somewhat emotionally distant.

Variety
reviewer Todd McCarthy pinpointed one of the film's principal flaws: “Avner is not an especially empathy-inducing character. This is partly due to the script, and partly because Bana doesn't suggest much about Avner's inner life. To really succeed,
Munich
would need to have gotten in deep with Avner so that the viewer would be implicated in his growing conflict. The film provides a resolutely exterior experience.” Steven Bauer's more passionate performance in
Sword of Gideon
is arguably superior to Bana's, and the other members of the hit team in
Munich
are also not especially rounded characters, defined largely by their operational behavior.
Munich
follows Spielberg's obsessive fixation on dysfunctional family issues, with Golda Meir and Ephraim coming under critical scrutiny as the film's symbolic mother and father figures. Avner's own mother (Gila Almagor) is an emotionally distant fanatic, and he feels compelled to undertake his self-destructive mission to emulate his estranged (and unseen) father, a military hero in the war for independence. There's yet another dubious father figure in the French crime lord
called “Papa” (Michael Lonsdale), whose amoral traffic in information enables Avner to locate his targets. Avner himself becomes an irresponsible Spielbergian father by neglecting his wife and newborn daughter for the sake of his mission, before reawakening to his family responsibilities.

The thinness of the characterizations tends to make
Munich
seem more schematic than dramatic, unlike
Schindler's List
, which conveys its historical themes with overwhelming emotional immediacy.
Munich
is more of an illustrated intellectual debate. Contrary to its critics, it is a thoughtful, provocative, honorable, and illuminating one. But the $70 million film, made for Universal, DreamWorks, and Amblin, failed to reach a wide audience in the United States, grossing only $47 million; the total worldwide box office, on the other hand, was a respectable $130 million, helping prove Spielberg correct in his belief that the film would be “understood more easily and better” abroad.
Munich
was nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, director, and screenplay, but won none.

Tony Kushner offered the most eloquent retort to the controversy surrounding the film, writing in the Los Angeles
Times
, “Violence exacts a psychic toll, unless you're a sociopath, and who wants to watch a movie about sociopaths?
Munich
dramatizes the toll violence takes. This bothers a few people at both ends of the political spectrum. I understand why those who think Israeli agents are villainous, unfeeling killing machines disparage our conscienceridden characters. I'm confused by those who think that a depiction of the agents as conscienceless would make them more impressive and heroic…. I think it's the refusal of the film to reduce the Mideast controversy, and the problematics of terrorism and counterterrorism, to sound bites and spin that has brought forth charges of ‘moral equivalence' from people whose politics are best served by simple morality tales.”

D
ESPITE
(or because of) his increasing level of social engagement in recent years, Spielberg has often been attacked for what some consider his deleterious cultural and economic influence on the world of filmmaking. The widespread charge that Spielberg and George Lucas ruined the film medium with their unprecedented level of commercial success, by inspiring the industry's obsession with the “blockbuster mentality” or “blockbuster syndrome,” ignores the prior influence of
The Godfather
and
The Exorcist
(not to mention
The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind
) and the wider context of changes in film marketing, financing, and demographics from the 1970s onward. Blaming Spielberg for the impact of
Jaws
not only oversimplifies a situation largely beyond his control but also indicts him for his perseverance and brilliance in turning what could have been a potboiler into a classic thriller. By the standards of today's graphic spectacles,
Jaws
looks positively classical, restrained, and character-driven. But Spielberg's supposedly malign influence on popular tastes has been lamented by, among many others, Pauline Kael,
who made the oft-quoted comment, “It's not so much what Spielberg has done, but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilization of the culture.”

Spielberg's blockbuster films, especially
Jurassic Park
, have also been criticized for dominating international screens at the expense of other countries' own films, leading to charges that Spielberg is in the forefront of American cultural hegemony. French director Jean-Luc Godard has been a particularly vociferous Spielberg detractor, even devoting parts of his 2001 film
In Praise of Love
to attacking the American filmmaker (“Steven Spielberg Associates and Incorporated”) for allegedly trying to own the cinematic rights to the Holocaust. For some diehard critics and his many fierce opponents in academia, Spielberg has yet to be absolved of his sins against the cinematic medium, real or imaginary. Lester D. Friedman's 2006 critical study
Citizen Spielberg
quotes an anonymous academic who accused him of writing a book about “the antichrist.” Friedman feels compelled to engage in some anxiously defensive maneuvers in the initial pages, recounting some of the mockery he received for undertaking such a déclassé project: “When I told my colleagues at a Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference that I intended to write a book examining Spielberg's entire film output, one friend laughingly suggested that doing so was the academic equivalent of appearing in a porn movie: how would I ever regain scholarly legitimacy?”

This kind of attitude baffled the late British author J. G. Ballard, whose autobiographical novel
Empire of the Sun
was filmed by Spielberg in 1987. Ballard writes in his 2008 autobiography,
Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton
, that when he made an American book tour the year after the film's release, “Americans were unfailingly friendly and helpful, though I noticed an almost universal hostility to Steven Spielberg. One journalist asked me: ‘Why did you allow Spielberg to make a film of your novel?' When I replied that he was the greatest film director in America, he promptly corrected me: ‘Not the greatest, the most successful.' This was the only time that I've heard success downplayed in America.” The heated attacks Spielberg continues to engender this late in his career, however bizarre they often seem (a familiar rhetorical ploy is to libel him as a Nazi), are a sign of his continued centrality in modern film history, whether or not observers regard him as a positive or negative force. Fellow director Baz Luhrmann has called him the “president of cinema,” and George Lucas has said, “People like Steven don't come along every day, and when they do, it's an amazing thing. It's like talking about Einstein or Babe Ruth or Tiger Woods. He's not in a group of filmmakers his age; he's far, far away.”

The director's sixtieth year saw a landmark in the ongoing process of his acceptance as a major film artist: the first academic conference on his work. That November 2007 event at the University of Lincoln in England, “Spielberg at Sixty,” brought forth a remarkably wide range of presentations by international scholars, including the authors of several books on Spielberg (including this one) and many younger academics. The conference was
commemorated 
in a special issue of the British journal
New Review of Film and Television Studies
, which includes my essay “A Reputation: Steven Spielberg and the Eyes of the World” (from which some of these comments are drawn). The tone of the proceedings was overwhelmingly positive and largely lacked the defensiveness that only a few years earlier might have colored any such undertaking. The younger academics seemed to take Spielberg's artistic stature as a given; some even had the
chutzpah
to offer thoughtful exegeses of such previously maligned Spielberg works as
The Sugarland Express, 1941, Always, Amistad
, and
A.I.
For a scholar of Spielberg's generation who had written a biography of the filmmaker in 1993–97 in order to argue the controversial case that he was worthy of serious consideration, this was a most refreshing and somewhat unexpected experience.

In that same period, the field of Spielberg studies entered what could be termed its full maturity with elaborately mounted, subtly argued critical studies by Friedman, Nigel Morris (
The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light
), Warren Buckland (
Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster
), and Andrew M. Gordon (
Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg
). This impressive array of scholarship, covering Spielberg from a multitude of critical perspectives, signaled Spielberg's acceptance by at least some of the more freethinking segments of academia. David Bordwell, perhaps the foremost figure in American film studies and the leading author of film textbooks, wrote after seeing
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
, “I was taken, as usual, by Spielberg's brisk direction. In the last decade he's had a remarkably hot hand.
Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal
(much underrated, I think),
War of the Worlds
, and
Munich
are very strong movies. For all their faults (sometimes those slippery endings), they would be enough to establish a younger director at the very top.” The future of Spielberg studies, once so uncertain, now seems in good hands, critical debates about his films have become more nuanced, and the remaining Spielberg haters seem increasingly passé.

Even some former Spielberg detractors began coming around in this period. John Powers, who once wrote, “He can't make an honest film if he tries,” amended his views in an
L.A. Weekly
review of
Minority Report:
“Spielberg has been around for so long that it has become easy to take his brilliance for granted…. Talk about stamina. Film history is littered with great directors who've run out of gas or lost their way—Sturges, Welles, Godard, Bertolucci, Coppola…. Yet for nearly 30 years, Spielberg has managed to sustain an extraordinarily high level of ambition and skill. (
A.I.
may have been a failure, but it wasn't lazy.) Where all those easy riders and raging bulls of the '70s raged against Hollywood—frittering away their talents with sex, drugs and self-indulgent belief in their own genius—Spielberg has always felt at home in the industry whose big-budget machinery is necessary to his success. He's kept his nose clean and held it to the grindstone, turning out movies with admirable regularity…. This disciplined work ethic has produced one of the
great runs in screen history, one worthy of such fabled marathoners as Ford, Hawks and Hitchcock.”

Why did it ever take so long? To borrow a phrase from the great American baseball player and philosopher Yogi Berra, this lengthy saga of critical neglect and disdain seems a case of “déjà vu all over again.” It recalls the state of film scholarship that existed in the 1960s when we critics of the auteurist school began the contentious process of trying to get people to take the
classical
Hollywood directors seriously. Led by François Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, Robin Wood, and others, we went to work mounting cases for such filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Allan Dwan, and other great Hollywood directors who had committed the crimes of which Spielberg has been accused—being popular, versatile, and entertaining, as well as having strong personal visions. It took a number of years to swing the recalcitrant critical establishment around to seeing that American cinema itself was worth studying. Eventually, we prevailed beyond our wildest expectations, even if auteurism itself turned into a knee-jerk methodology and became unfashionable in the world of academic theory. Although, ironically, an auteurist approach still pervades many curricula in practice, the newer disciplines of film study have tended to favor only certain Hollywood directors, those whose work can be fitted, however tenuously, into acceptable ideological frameworks, usually Marxist in orientation.