Steven Spielberg (101 page)

A younger filmmaker who conspicuously displayed the stylistic skills of Hitchcock or Ford and the cinematic versatility of Hawks or Curtiz might have seemed eminently acceptable as their successor in scholarly esteem, yet Spielberg's extreme level of contemporary popularity not only made him an object of thinly disguised envy for many critics and academics but also made him seem like the cultural enemy to those who habitually look down on mass-market tastes. His thematic concentrations on suburbia, nuclear families, father figures, children, spiritual escape, and cartoonish adventure made him even more anathema to the keepers of the keys of academic scholarship. The battleground over Spielberg was familiar because it was much the same argument about popular culture we had fought over with those who
condescended
to Hitchcock or Hawks as mere entertainers unworthy of serious study. Today there's no director more widely studied in university film courses than Hitchcock, and the same fate no doubt will befall Spielberg once he's safely dead.

Aside from his popularity, why has Spielberg been so reviled? Although he has generally been a liberal in his personal politics, his fascination with suburbia in his earlier work was not calculated to win favor from left-wing intellectuals, many of whom were in angry flight from middle-class suburban values. Spielberg's concentration on common-man (or -woman) protagonists, another element in his work that has prompted critical hostility, is a trait he shares with Hitchcock. Both filmmakers suffered at the height of their popular favor from their detractors' inability or unwillingness to engage sympathetically
with such characters. Those who dismiss Spielberg out of hand often exhibit a lack of understanding of how complex and critical his portraits of ordinary life actually are. Spielberg's view of suburbia is far from the rosy picture his detractors paint it as being. It is, instead, a perspective that demonstrates his profound ambivalence toward the milieu from which he emerged. His characters in any settings, while yearning for stable family lives, seldom manage to achieve that sense of security, and they usually struggle desperately to escape from the constriction, narrow-mindedness, and stultification of middle-class existence.

For many Spielberg detractors, the case against him seems to come down to emotional attacks on his view of family life and his supposed adherence to that worst of traits in the academic lexicon, patriarchy. Their usual tack is to accuse him of propagating “the ideal of the nuclear family, a social and historical construction constantly sold in terms of its supposedly ‘natural' basis,” as Geoff King writes of
Jurassic Park
's “most sustained work as a cultural product.” The filmmaker's obsessive, career-long concentration on broken families, flawed father and mother figures, children under duress, and attempts by people to recuperate nuclear families seems to make many critics acutely uncomfortable, even if they often displace that discomfort by attacking the dubious notion of Spielberg's supposed idealization of families. It is obvious enough that some of his detractors may have unresolved issues with their own families and childhoods that have left a lingering anger and bitterness they project onto Spielberg's screen, which, as Nigel Morris observes, serves as “a
tabula rasa
on which to etch scorn for popular culture and what, for some, it represents.”

Morris notes that the “extraordinary vindictiveness” of Spielberg's enemies may be a symptom of “a need to project the critic's contradictions onto the text and other spectators. Critics sometimes appear less than honest about their responses and define themselves contemptuously against mainstream audiences characterized as passive dupes.” One of the most sustained and serious attacks on Spielberg and what, to some, he represents is Andrew Britton's 1986 Marxist critique in
Movie
, “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reagan Entertainment,” which discusses Spielberg as the foremost exemplar of that era's “intensely reactionary” promotion of imperialistic and patriarchal ideology through the use of genre conventions to distance complacent spectators from experiencing reality. Morris quotes a 1989 response to Britton by Peter Benson in that same journal: “Psychoanalysis is compelled to acknowledge that extreme revulsion is
always
the sign of an equal unconscious attraction. The energy needed to denigrate a film has to be expended in order to prevent oneself falling in love with it; or, rather, to deny that one has already fallen in love with it.” Benson suggests that the language Britton uses to criticize
E.T.
—such as describing how its “intensities of feeling and involvement” invite the audience to “bawl our eyes out” over “the ultimate Reaganite movie about patriarchy”—actually conveys enjoyment and as such is a mask for the fact that the film “has, after all, caught his desire, his passion and his pen.”

Although Spielberg's attitudes toward patriarchy are far more complex than his critics would admit, his yearning for recuperation of nuclear family life and for reconciliation with parental figures forms a poignantly persistent strain in his work from his youth to the present. There is no disputing that Spielberg's films strongly wish for more responsible and caring parental figures. Some critics consider this tendency a dangerous nostalgia for paternalism (if not maternalism) and all that implies socially and politically. Susan Aronstein, in a 1995
Cinema Journal
essay on the Indiana Jones films, criticizes Spielberg's “nostalgic desire for authority, the return of the father, and an ideological support of the agenda of the New Right that reinstated the privileged position of the white male hero.” However, the sustained critique of flawed male authority figures throughout much of Spielberg's work seems to count for little in such a stubbornly one-sided analysis. Spielberg's yearning for the ideal of the nuclear family may well be characterized as “conservative,” but it is hardly a symptom of an authoritarian personality, as some Spielberg critics suggest (often extending the charge to claims that he is a right-wing apologist for American imperialism). Unless one is an implacable opponent of the very existence of nuclear families, a position that would seem to preclude any sympathy for Spielberg's work, it should be recognized that Spielberg harbors an intense nostalgia for the kind of imagined family happiness that he never actually knew, an ideal he recognizes rarely exists in reality, and a psychological Lost Eden he remains emotionally committed to mourning in his work. Critics who would refuse him the right to do so, the freedom to examine his deepest traumas and obsessions, are rejecting his artistic individualism. Perhaps they do so with such vehemence because they recognize that he speaks with emotional power for millions of people who share similar feelings.

Spielberg's vaunted tendency toward optimistic uplift, which, as Henry Sheehan has suggested, is largely a cover for a more pervasive anxiety, is also a common ground for attacking the filmmaker. This criticism is largely based on serious oversimplification of his films. The deeply moving ending of
E.T.
, for example, is far more bitter than sweet, with the child being faced with the loss of his best friend and father figure, a painful step in his maturation process (as E.T. puts it with eloquent simplicity, “
Ouch
”). Critics who fault
Schindler's List
for focusing on the rescue of eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust while allegedly neglecting the fate of the six million Jews who were exterminated overlook a constant stream of references in the film to the larger, grimmer situation. It is the
rarity
of Oskar Schindler's actions and of the survival of eleven hundred people in the midst of the Holocaust that is the major emphasis of the film, whose limited sense of optimism toward human nature is a powerful and politically charged statement refuting the commonly heard lies “I was just following orders” and “No one could have done anything about it.” The emotional and intellectual complexities of the positions Spielberg takes in his best work, when carefully examined, demonstrate the falsity of the caricatured portrait offered by his detractors.

In a 1999 article in
GQ
analyzing why so many critics hate “one of the half dozen greatest pure filmmakers in the medium's history,” Terrence
Rafferty
suggests that Spielberg's multidimensional talents threaten those who disdain the idea that film can be emotional and popular and at the same time deal seriously with such disturbing subjects as the Holocaust and slavery. “It's hard to avoid the suspicion that intellectuals would be more comfortable with Spielberg if he'd stuck to the formal pyrotechnics of
Duel
or
Jaws
and hadn't dared to venture further, into that putative ‘no man's land between entertainment and art.' They would be better able to accept him as an artist, of a minor, formalist variety, if he'd had the decency to stay in his place, like Hitchcock. He wouldn't be such a threat…. Any artist who can so unhinge large numbers of late-twentieth-century literati is clearly onto something. By that standard, Steven Spielberg is the most radical filmmaker of his
generation
.”

But does that snobbery fully account for the vitriol, the sheer level of irrational hatred directed at Spielberg, often in highly personal terms? The rabbi who taught Spielberg in Hebrew school as a child, the late Albert L. Lewis, who served as vice president of the World Council of Synagogues and president of the International Rabbinical Assembly, told me in the 1990s that he was convinced that anti-Semitism was at the root of many of the attacks on Spielberg. This might seem an exaggeration were it not for such a slur as “the antichrist” being regarded as acceptable rhetoric from an academic in the anti-Spielberg camp. Spielberg's more vociferous detractors focus on what they consider his inordinate success but also tend to focus obsessively on such supposed traits as his greed, his pernicious and “manipulative” influence on American culture, his emotionalism and vulgarity, his power as a propagandist, his subversive collusion with other minority groups, children, and fellow outsiders—all familiar tropes of anti-Semitic rhetoric. Left-wing attacks that accuse Spielberg of being a malign cinematic propagandist for patriotism and patriarchy are also frequently marked by an exaggerated fear of his cultural and political influence on the supposedly ignorant and malleable masses.

In his 1906 book
Charles Dickens
, G. K. Chesterton eloquently states the case for the popular artist in terms that also apply to Spielberg. Writing of “a man whose public success was a marvel and almost a monstrosity,” Chesterton disagrees with the “purely artistic critic” who would contend, “The people like bad literature. If your object is to show that Dickens was good literature, you should rather apologize for his popularity, and try to explain it away. You should seek to show that Dickens's work was good literature, although it was popular.”

To that argument Chesterton responds, “The public does not like bad
literature
. The public likes a certain kind of literature and likes that kind of literature even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good…. Ordinary people dislike the delicate modern work, not because it is good or because it is bad, but because it is not the thing that they asked for…. Dickens stands first as a defiant monument of what happens when
a great literary genius has a literary taste akin to that of the community. For this kinship was deep and spiritual. Dickens was not like our ordinary demagogues and journalists. Dickens did not write what the people wanted. Dickens wanted what the people wanted…. Hence there was this vital point in his popularism, that there was no condescension in it…. Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people. He approached the people like a deity and poured out his riches and his blood. This is what makes the immortal bond between him and the masses of men. He had not merely produced something they could understand, but he took it seriously, and toiled and agonized to produce it.”

Spielberg's common bond with his audience has weakened in recent years as he has ventured into increasingly difficult and controversial subject areas. As a result of the thematic seriousness of his later works, and because of a certain dryness and coldness in his late style that refuses to sugarcoat his messages with the kind of leavening warmth and humor he previously was known for, Spielberg has, in effect, left much of his audience behind. That he is comfortable in doing so demonstrates that he has put to rest some of his former drive for acceptance, fueled by his insecurities over his ethnicity, or perhaps that he has achieved a level of acceptance that gives him the security not to need to please all of the people all the time. Making another Indiana Jones movie in 2007–08 seemed an exception that proved the recent rule for Spielberg, partly a way to buttress his uneven popularity and also something of an escapist respite from the political intensity of his recent work.

It's probably no coincidence that as Spielberg has become a less consistently popular artist, he has become more acceptable to those who distrust popularity in an artist. I suppose we Spielberg scholars should be content to welcome anyone into our camp, but we should guard against a tendency to praise Spielberg for the wrong reasons and to undervalue his gifts as a popular artist. I am pleased that he still alternates his “entertainments” with more “serious” works and that some of the former (e.g.,
Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal
) can prove superior to some of the latter. The emotional and intellectual complexities of the positions Spielberg takes in his best work, when carefully examined, demonstrate the falsity of the caricatured portrait offered by his detractors. Perhaps if some of those critics would engage in a reevaluation of Spielberg, under the influence of the new wave of critical studies, they would find that he not only is a finer artist than they have acknowledged but also is far more sympathetic with their concerns than they have previously recognized.