Steven Spielberg (2 page)

T
HE
child's eyes were wide with awe as he was borne from the surrounding darkness toward the red light burning before the Ark of the Torah. Framed in a colonnaded marble arch inlaid with gold and blue, the Ark's wooden doors were hidden by a curtain that glistened in the candlelight with an alluring, unfathomable aura of mystery. Under the domed skylight with a bronze chandelier hanging from a Star of David, the child in his stroller was pushed down the
blue-carpeted
aisle. From all around he could hear the chanting of elders in beards and black hats, swaying rhythmically to the Hebrew prayers. “The old men were handing me little crackers,” Steven Spielberg recalled. “My parents said later I must have been about six months old at the time.”

This was the earliest memory of the child who would grow up to make
Schindler's
List.
The year was 1947, and the place was the Adath Israel synagogue in Cincinnati, Ohio, across the street from the first home where Steven Spielberg lived during his peripatetic boyhood.

No other filmmaker has mined his childhood more obsessively or
profitably
than Spielberg, who has said that he “can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood.” Indeed, the roots of his distinctive visual style can
be seen, embryonically, in those images of the synagogue: the hypnotic tracking shots mingling a sense of wonderment with fear of the unknown, the dazzling light flooding his characters' field of vision (“God light,” he calls it), the intensely emotional employment of subjective viewpoints, and the omnipresent delight in surprising apparitions and visual magic. He always has been fascinated by “what I think is there but cannot see.” From
Jaws,
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind,
and
E.T.
The
Extra-Terrestrial
to
The
Color
Purple,
Empire
of
the
Sun,
and
Schindler
'
s
List,
Spielberg has shown a rare gift for making audiences throughout the world share his own primal fears and fantasies.

He describes his favored protagonist as “Mr. Everyday Regular Fella.” That common touch is one of the keys to Spielberg's unprecedented level of success with the mass audience. It also helps explain the disdain of elitists who fail to recognize that the ordinariness of his protagonists encompasses a wide range of archetypal human conflicts. Spielberg's protagonist typically is either a child whose troubled life has caused him to evolve into a
precocious
maturity, or a childlike adult whose attempts to escape a grown-up's responsibilities are viewed by the director with deep ambivalence. Despite the relatively limited thematic range and intellectual scope of much of his body of work so far, Spielberg, like any major popular artist, has an
instinctive
awareness of shared contemporary psychological concerns and an uncanny ability to express those concerns with directness and simplicity. Perhaps his greatest artistic strength is his seemingly innate ability to conjure up visual images that evoke archetypal emotions and are nonetheless
complex
for being nonverbal.

When asked in 1991 to select a single “master image” that sums up his work, Spielberg chose one with powerful echoes of his first childhood memory: the shot of the little boy in
Close
Encounters
of
the
Third
Kind
opening his
living-room
door to see the blazing orange light from the UFO, “that beautiful but awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. And he's very small, and it's a very large door, and there's a lot of promise or danger outside that door.”

P
ROMISE
or
danger.
Spielberg gives the words equal weight, but for many years most American critics condescendingly regarded Spielberg as a child-man fixated on the toys of moviemaking and incapable of dealing maturely with the darker side of life. Pauline Kael, who praised
Close
En
counters
in
The
New
Yorker
as “a kids' movie in the best sense,” later
complained
, “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 public statements did little to
discourage
such belittling assessments of his life and work. He said in 1982 that he was “still a kid…. Why? I guess because I'm probably socially
irresponsible
and way down deep I don't want to look the world in the eye. Actually,
I don't mind looking the world in the eye, as long as there's a movie camera between us.”

There was truth in that
mea
culpa,
enough to make even his admirers uneasy about Spielberg's potential for growth and development. Would he continue to resist the responsibilities of full maturity as a man and as a filmmaker, indulging his boyish fondness for pulp adventure (the Indiana Jones movies), infantile humor and overblown production values
(1941,
Hook),
and special-effects fantasy extravaganzas
(Poltergeist,
Jurassic
Park)
while becoming self-consciously skittish when he ventured into mature
sexual
territory
(The
Color
Purple,
Always)
? Would he overcome his anxieties about confronting his audience—and himself—with the kind of socially conscious, controversial subject matter he has touched upon only
intermittently
throughout his career?

In his
annus
mirabilis
(1993) that saw
Jurassic
Park
break
E.T.'s
world-wide
box-office record by grossing nearly a billion dollars, Spielberg finally silenced many of his detractors with
Schindler's
List,
his masterful film
version
of Thomas Keneally's book about a gentile businessman who saved eleven hundred Jews from the Holocaust. The film was hailed as “a giant bar mitzvah, a rite of passage … his cinematic initiation into emotional
manhood
.” Such praise was double-edged, for it implied that in his first
twenty-five
years as a professional filmmaker, Spielberg had never before made a serious, mature, adult film, an assumption that unfairly denigrated the best of his earlier work, from his landmark TV movie
Duel
to the timeless
fantasies
Close
Encounters
and
E.T.
and the flawed but deeply moving dramas
The
Color
Purple
and
Empire
of
the
Sun.
After Spielberg started winning awards for
Schindler's
List,
his grade-school teacher Patricia Scott Rodney, one of the first people to encourage his filmmaking talents, commented, “I've heard him say, ‘Finally I've made a serious film.' I recognize that as Spielberg humor.”

“The critics in awe of how much I've stretched just don't know me,” Spielberg said. “This is no stretch at all.
Schindler's
List
is the most natural experience for me. I
had
to tell the story. I've lived on its outer edges.”

But few people, least of all Spielberg himself, questioned that
Schindler's
List
marked both a profound enrichment of his art and a triumphant midlife point of personal maturation. “I feel a very strong pull to go back to
traditions
,” he said at the time. The film was the culmination of a long personal struggle with his Jewish identity, a struggle that had helped determine his choice of a career and his orientation as a popular, mass-market filmmaker. He spoke of that struggle in interviews at the time of
Schindler's
List:

“I never felt comfortable with myself,” he admitted, “because I was never part of the majority…. I felt like an alien…. I wanted to be like everybody else…. I wanted to be a gentile with the same intensity that I wanted to be a filmmaker.

“I was so ashamed of being a Jew, and now I'm filled with pride…. This film has kind of come along with me on this journey from shame to honor.
My mother said to me one day, ‘I really want people to see a movie that you make someday that's about us and about who we are, not as
a
people but as people.' So this is it. This is for her.”

Spielberg's early rejection of his Jewish roots, and his gradual return to them, was an experience he shared with many Jews in his post-World War II, post-Holocaust generation of baby boomers. He was a child of
second-generation
American Jews who broke away from their roots and for whom assimilation was part of the price of social acceptance and professional
advancement
. As a result, Spielberg, like many others in his generation, grew up questioning the relevance of his old-world heritage and the faith of his parents and grandparents.
*
In the white-bread culture of the Eisenhower era, Jewish baby boomers such as Spielberg became increasingly Americanized as they drifted from their cultural identity and became, in large part, a
generation
of outwardly assimilated but inwardly alienated suburb-dwellers.
Spielberg
and his movies came to typify the suburban experience, as he himself became, in Vincent Canby's phrase, “the poet of suburbia,” a designation hardly suited to win honor with cultural elitists who scorned the
middle-American
ethos that suburbia had come to represent in the 1950s.

Spielberg once defined his approach to filmmaking by declaring, “I am the audience”; it was as if his own personality, through a self-abnegating act of will, had become indistinguishable from that of the majority. His
prodigious
popularity was a sign of how thoroughly assimilated he had become. Though his films sometimes engaged in social criticism, his refusal before
Schindler's
List
to assume all the responsibilities of a socially conscious filmmaker—he once called himself an “atheist” on serious subjects—was bound up with his refusal to define himself as a Jew. He was in danger of losing touch with an essential part of himself, the part that stemmed from being part of a minority.

While associating himself with Jewish charities and liberal political causes, Spielberg tended to aim for the broadest mass appeal as a filmmaker, largely avoiding Jewish subject matter and not asserting his ethnic identity as overtly as such directors as Woody Allen and Paul Mazursky. Still, Spielberg chose Richard Dreyfuss (“my alter ego”) as his protagonist in
Jaws,
Close
Encoun
ters
,
and
Always,
when other directors might have cast a WASP leading man in those roles, although Spielberg did not direct attention to the characters' ethnic backgrounds. The unleashing of the magical powers of the Ark of the Covenant to destroy its Nazi captors in
Raiders
of
the
Lost
Ark
reflected Spielberg's affinities with Jewish mysticism, but in the context of a frivolously escapist storyline; after making
Schindler's
List,
Spielberg said he could no longer stomach the use of Nazis as figures of mere entertainment.

A more revealing exception to the rule of Spielberg's general avoidance of specifically Jewish themes was the 1986 animated film
An
American
Tail,
on which he was an executive producer. It tells the story of a Jewish
immigrant
mouse named Fievel Mousekewitz, who comes to America to flee persecution (by Cossack-like-cats) at home in Russia. Fievel, whose
adventures
continued in 
An American Tail: Fievel Goes West
(1991), was named by Spielberg after his beloved maternal grandfather, Philip Posner, an
impoverished
Russian immigrant whose Yiddish name was Fievel.

T
HE
Spielberg family history reflects the archetypal Jewish-American journey of the last hundred years, from persecution in Russian cities and
shtetlach
(small towns) to religious freedom in the New World, and in
succeeding
generations from the comforts and limitations of a traditional midwestern Jewish-American community to the hazardous opportunities offered by the largely WASPish suburbs.

Spielberg's not atypical rejection of the values of his devoutly Orthodox maternal grandparents was in large part a defense mechanism against his feeling of growing up an “alien” in a predominantly Christian society. That feeling grew increasingly stronger in him as his college-educated parents moved the family up the socioeconomic ladder from Cincinnati to Camden and Haddon Township, New Jersey, and then westward to Phoenix, Arizona, and Saratoga, California.