Steven Spielberg On the Couch

The next best thing to being a child in Spielberg's universe is being a young adolescent--specifically, a boy who has not yet been hit by the hormone riot that forces you to get tangled up with those darn girls who only get in the way of buddy bonding. Indiana Jones may be interpreted as a disguised adolescent--brash, bold, forever testing the limits, secretly ashamed of his fears and gun-shy of women. My guess is that Spielberg's awkward, "outsider" adolescent spirit found a special comfort in identifying with square-jawed, white-bread serial heroes who usually contended with stereotyped villains for weird scientific/supernatural gizmos that would save Western culture. I read Indy as an updated repository of the teen Spielberg's dream-of-glory fantasies. Indy has his whip; Spielberg has his camera. And everywhere Indy goes on his quest to put the treasures of the Third World where they rightfully belong (in American museums), so goes his creator.

But Spielberg's nostalgia does not always stand his cinema in good stead. Perhaps the most significant negative fallout from the director's unreflective child worship stems from his failure to grasp--or at least film-- a child's less appetizing features--selfishness, insensitivity, scapegoating, and so forth. In denying the shadow side of his kid (and adult-kid) heroes, Spielberg resorts unwittingly to the classic defense mechanism of reaction formation (we have a name for everything). With this strategy, "bad" feelings or impulses residing in the psyche are denied by being unconsciously converted into their opposite feelings. Thus, the occasional "bad" you expect to see in kids you don't see in Spielberg kids, while what you do see is uncompromised "good." I suspect Spielberg's reaction formations are responsible for the cloying sweetness that often taints his movies.

Spielberg is never better than when he's sensitively capturing a child's native intuitiveness. But the wholesale recommendation of intuition over rational thinking sometimes lends even his more ambitious projects a strange shallowness. And all too often in Spielberg films, gut-wrenching spectacle exists solely for its own sake. I wonder if this no-brainer tendency originates in Spielberg's personal suspiciousness of the head compared with the heart, a vague counterculturish preference for "feelings"--wah, wah, wah--over intellect that is shared by many of his generation. He admits he's not much of a reader,- nor has he otherwise shown any great interest in the life of the mind, beyond solving cinematic technical problems. At his ditsiest, Spielberg seems to tap into the simpleminded me-ism that's been abroad in the culture for some time.

Spielberg's young protagonists often exist within fragmented families that reflect their creator's concerns as much as they themselves do. Although Spielberg has never talked about the reasons for his parents' divorce (he seems to fault neither of them), from as early on as The Sugarland Express he has shown an imagination specifically haunted by the specter of paternal inadequacy or loss, and the resulting destruction of intact family life. The Indiana Jones cycle eventually turns upon Indy's quest for reunion with the scholar father whose criticism and neglect drove him away during his teens. Roy Neary destroys his own family to travel to the stars in Close Encounters. Elliott of E.T. and little Barry in Close Encounters both bear the scars of a father's abandonment. (For both boys, help is provided by supremely benevolent alien substitutes.) And for that matter, E.T. has much of the lost child about him as well.

In another take on the debate over paternal presence or strength, Spielberg films depict "ordinary" fathers rising above weakness, doubt or fear to protect their families. Significantly, they always combat a savage outside threat to the middle-class hearth, rather than internal family discord. Chief Brody struggles against hydrophobia to kill the giant shark of Jaws-, the skeptical real estate salesman of Poltergeist snatches his family from the jaws of supernatural evil; Duel's timid businessman protects his loved ones at home against the trauma of his death by successfully vanquishing the killer truck.

Even Bob Zemeckis's Back to the Future (a film Spielberg executive-produced, and one that shows how powerfully Spielberg's concerns influence colleagues and proteges) reads as a screwball essay on failed fatherhood. Marty McFly journeys into the past to help his ultranerd dad woo his own mother, dodging the lure of incest so he and his siblings can be born. He's guided by Christopher Lloyd's wacky but competent Doc, another good father substitute.

While the father's role in making or breaking the unity of the family is the more pervasive theme in Spielberg's films, another intriguing motif possibly connected to Spielberg's relationship with his own father surfaces in many of his movies. The director's childhood anecdote about scarfing down the transistor that his father put before him as "the future" makes one wonder if Spielberg's enormous love and admiration for his father may have been tinged with stubborn resistance and latent competitiveness. If so, perhaps these mixed emotions later found expression in the pervasive ambivalence about high technology one finds in Spielberg's films. Thus, Spielberg's camera dwells lovingly on man-made and alien machines in Close Encounters, and on Lacombe, the luminous scientist/director of the secret mountain project; but then, the officers who try to keep Neary and his fellow visionaries back from the stars are painted as impersonal authoritarian oppressors. Likewise, in E.T. the government scientists dispatched to apprehend Elliott's "visitor" at first seem like a gang of cold-hearted fascists, but as the tale unfolds, their leader becomes increasingly sympathetic. The cineanalyst interprets these various "split" characters, and the "splitting" within the same character, as bad or good father substitutions.

By his mid-thirties, Spielberg had established his fortune as an immensely successful director and producer. Befitting the creative restlessness that often comes as an artist bellies up to middle age, he now turned from kid-oriented blockbusters to make three films presumably pitched to more mature audiences. In attempting to appeal to more adult sensibilities, Spielberg was, I believe, also attempting to gain critical recognition as a major auteur rather than merely as a gifted rejuvenator of pop genres. But the post-prodigy director's desire for recognition as a mature artist called for psychological and creative resources quite different from the ones that had earned him his reputation.

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