Steven Spielberg On the Couch

Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, a gritty vision of Southern African-American women doubly oppressed by racism and sexism, was new territory indeed for Steven Spielberg. It did have an uplifting emotional quality to it that suited the director's gifts; but it took place in a world he had never shown the slightest interest in or even awareness of. Little surprise, then, that the finished film came off as Tobacco Road meets Song of the South.

In Spielberg's The Color Purple, the audience's sense of outrage over the brutal lash of Mister's tongue and fist on Miss Celie's spirit is undermined by the director's panicky lyricism, the luscious sweep of his impossibly pretty visuals. One gets the eerie sense that Spielberg has unconsciously imposed the pleasures of his bourgeois childhood Eden upon the harsh realities of subsistence farming. Celie is just another Spielbergian abandoned waif; her lesbian love for Shug is softened to the vanishing point.

Spielberg made no great leap forward to auteur status with The Color Purple, but he didn't embarrass himself either--the film made money (not, however, blockbuster bucks), and it received Oscar nominations, though it didn't win for Best Picture, and Spielberg wasn't even nominated for Best Director.

The director next made Empire of the Sun (1987), based on J.G. Ballard's novel about an English colonial preteen swept from doting parents and wealthy surroundings by the tides of war and launched on a perilous struggle for survival. All of Spielberg's familiar themes were there for him to work with, but he wisely relied upon Tom Stoppard's supple screenplay and avoided any of his own habitual sweetening up of childhood. The resulting absolutely unsentimental take on the young hero's shifting loyalties in the winds of circumstance combines Spielberg's touching idealism with an appreciation of the child's cold pragmatism and fascination with adult sex. The boy's courage and compassion are tempered with the realities of greed and terror. Empire of the Sun is Spielberg's best film to my mind, one of the truest accounts of adolescent character forged in the press of desperate events.

But for this accomplishment, this genuine artistic growing-up, Spielberg received neither his usual reward (that is, box-office success), nor the Oscar he aspired to and deserved. (A separate article could be written about the psychology of Spielberg's Hollywood judges, analyzing their jealously of his gifts and cynicism about his purposes.)

He then embarked on his long-planned pet project Always (1989), which turned out to be a major failure on every count. Always is Spielberg's most private--and oddest--picture. His father served on B-25s during World War II, and that war, one of his most fertile nostalgic sources, appears in four of his films (including his only other box-office disaster, 1941). Spielberg had been enchanted by Victor Fleming's WWII tearjerker A Guy Named Joe since adolescence. He decided to remake it with contemporary forest fire fighters flying planes like his father's.

Spielberg worked out virtually none of the challenges involved in updating this material, if indeed it was updatable at all. Fleming's original was a slim, workmanlike piece of business about a dead airman resurrected as a ghostly teacher to a new pilot who falls in love with the hero's girlfriend. But A Guy Named Joe did have a strong propaganda mission based on the concerns of its day (stressing the value of teamwork, denying the fear of combat, calming the guilt of women who found new lovers after old ones were killed). Spielberg's version has nothing more on its mind than the love story (feelings over thoughts again), which is undermined by Spielberg's own oddly juvenile idea of sensuality. It also suffers from dialogue that features New Age chatter about commitment, your thing, my thing. And, quite apart from those problems, compared with the powerful star chemistry of the original foe's Spencer Tracy and Irene Dunne, Richard Dreyfuss and Holly Hunter have the sexual spark of Peanuts kids.

Always is further crippled by the surprisingly competitive spirit of the director's "homage." Spielberg's borrowing from earlier movies in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark was warmly unobtrusive. But he and his writers tamper clumsily with Fleming's story in an unnecessary effort to pump it up with a near-bombastic soundtrack and overwrought visuals. Remember the director's childhood story of taking his father's camera away to make better home movies? Perhaps in Spielberg's psyche there was a similar competition with Fleming, a favorite studio director of his, to "make it better." A guilt-ridden oedipal struggle for "ownership" of a Hollywood classic with a filmmaker he wanted both to honor and eclipse may be part of the explanation for Spielberg's astonishing bungling of his own gifts, his sinking to the level of Raider of the Lost Text. Intriguingly, the film's main theme is the struggle in its dead hero's heart with a live rival over the same girl.

Though Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade renewed Spielberg's credibility at the box office during his unsuccessful adult film period, signs of creative fatigue can be found even in this blockbuster. Beneath his boyish facade, Indy is far more insensitive--and violent--than a generation before. But perhaps more important, a hollow, fragmented gigantism pervades the film. In trying to exceed the thrills and spills of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg seems to be competing with himself to once again "make it better," by piling one impossible cliffhanger upon another. It's action-porn, too many chocolate chips. And, more grating than before, there's the same juvenile flight from sexuality and intellect we've seen so much of ("Nazis? I hate those guys!" is Indy's political analysis of his enemies).

Reaching his mid-forties in the turbulent setting of having his best recent work cruelly neglected and his most recent work cruelly scorned, Steven Spielberg has now undertaken his own version of James M. Barrie's (and Walt Disney's) Peter Pan.

Hook's premise, at least in the early script I read, is that our ageless fairy flyboy has joined the mortal world, forgotten his origins, and become an uptight married-with-children middle-aged Manhattan investment banker. Business pressure combined with the strain of repressing his fabulous background have diminished him to a distant shadow of his former self. Estrangement from his son troubles him. Then his wicked piratical persecutor resurfaces to kidnap his children. Peter returns to his Neverland roots, sheds paunch and mid-life blahs (but not his '90s garb), and rescues his kids with the help of Tinkerbell and his other old pals. Getting in touch with your inner child is hammered home with the relentlessness of a Bradshaw codependency rap. I foresee enough F/X to keep ILM types in lasers and golf shoes into the next century.

All the important--and tried-and-true--Spielbergian psychological themes are folded into Hook: childhood as paradise, heart over head, the middle-class family menaced from without and within, a father who has to rise above his failings to save the day. One wonders if Spielberg identifies with his hero (perhaps with Pan Junior as well), if he's trying to rescue himself from mid-life stall, to deal with being a one-time whiz kid who wants recognition for trying to grow up and can't get it. I speculate that the director views Hook somewhere in his mind as his most significant return to childhood yet, to his familiar wellsprings of creativity and conflict, his golden youth and later family breakup. In artistic terms, Hook may have represented to Spielberg an opportunity to work through childhood trauma, as well as to heal wounds caused by the failure of Always--by making another pop blockbuster.

Then again, Hook could be a sign of the failure of inspiration that has stricken many other artists at Spielberg's vulnerable age. Certainly, the project grants Spielberg every opportunity to indulge in the sentimental shtick and roaring, mindless spectacle that have tainted his work before. Amblin does sound like some kind of Neverland off the Universal Studios tour, a magic hideaway filled with scripts and Nintendo games instead of pirates and Indians and populated by Lost Boys who may too closely share their leader's enthusiasm and be unable to help him see potential problems.

On the other hand (analysts like playing their other hand; it dances you out of trouble), how mafy times in Hollywood history has sentimental material been transformed into terrific filmmaking (think of Casablanca)? It can happen here--the director rising out of his own whiz-kid ashes, transcending his mid-life slump to make E.T. for the '90s.

But what about afterward? Will Steven Spielberg's phenomenal talent remain persistently wedded to juvenile themes, or bogged down in juvenile treatment of adult themes? I would like to think not. He's been struggling to find a new artistic maturity since 1985. His serious films reflect that struggle, from honorable failure (The Color Purple), to triumph (Empire of the Sun), to turkey (Always). Success or failure, Hook may ultimately turn out to embody his farewell to this difficult creative period.

Some boys just take a long time to grow up.

Harvey R. Greenberg, M.D., author of The Movies on Your Mind, has a private practice in psychiatry and psychoanalysis in New York.

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