While I have some criticisms of the role Steven Spielberg has taken within the film community over the last decade, I have nothing but admiration for his artistic process and resulting films of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s.
Forever young at heart, I think the Spielberg of those three decades captured the ineffable sense of awe and magic that the cinema evokes, particularly from a child’s point of view. At their best, Spielberg’s films function as unadulterated manifestations of this gut-reaction that people with a predisposition to fantasy often have. The terror and excitement of the shark attacks in Jaws (1975), for example, equate to pure cinematic ecstasy. In that classic thriller, the breakdown of events that emulates both Alfred Hitchcock and the essence of Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation, John Williams’ brooding score, the performances, and the overall composition mesh perfectly together to create genuine thrills. No heavy-handed allusions are made to what dishonest, pompous academics would classify as “higher-minded” art. And so Jaws accomplishes what it wants to do. For a little over two hours, it subjects the audience to a series of extreme-but-always-genuine scenarios designed to draw out equally authentic emotional responses. From this perspective, the establishment-branded “low brow” goals of Jaws are actually more artful than the establishment-branded “high brow” intentions of “arthouse” directors.
For example, I would argue that many European directors lauded for their intellectualism, like Bernardo Bertolucci, have muddled-at-best intentions. Take his Oscar-winning The Last Emperor (1987), which chronicles the turbulent reign of China’s final monarch Pu Yi through several revolutions and wars, as well as boyhood and manhood. It has truly stunning cinematography by Vittorio Storaro, but the characters seem to be lost in a very different movie. In other words, Bertolucci cannot get his visuals to complement the performances of his actors. Nor can he come up with his own philosophical views on the subject matter (in that regard, was 1970’s The Conformist authored by Bertolucci or Plato?). Spielberg, on the other hand, gets all of the cinematic components working in unison to sculpt a richer, multilayered mise-en-scene. His Empire of the Sun came out the same year as The Last Emperor, and deals with similar themes of a child’s coming-of-age during wartime. Empire’s main character, Jim Graham, is the equivalent of Emperor’s Pu Yi. However, Spielberg’s masterpiece effortlessly works as a cohesive whole, capturing a poetic, expressionistic child POV that Bertolucci strains to evoke (especially in his characters’ more intimate moments, which unfortunately become dominated by the travel brochure-style imagery).
So, how does Spielberg manage to beat out a more overtly artsy – at least, in the eyes of the critics – director like Bertolucci? Because Spielberg knows what he is doing, choosing to rely more heavily on his emotions rather than ideologies. And while it would be ideally best to work on emotional and cerebral impulses simultaneously, artists who cater to emotions always have the upper hand because emotions don’t lie the way abstract thoughts so often do. Emotions, like Jim’s desperation after being separated from his parents in Empire of the Sun, are ineffable feelings that do not need to be intellectualized to be fully experienced. Therefore, when one tries to comprehend Jim’s emotions by channelling one’s own, there are simply less layers of abstractions to delve through before arriving at the essence of the experience in question.
Do I think that Spielberg is as great as filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, and Jean Renoir? Maybe not, but he’s right at their heels. The aforementioned filmmakers operate more evenly on both emotional and cerebral terms. But Spielberg is just as honest an artist as those greats from yesteryear. And honesty, or authenticity, is the rarest quality among artists today; not just within the realm of film, but all artistic mediums. That is why a great Spielberg popcorn movie like Jurassic Park (1993) that captures the wonderment of dinosaurs can be a better achievement overall than a misguided “art film” like Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008), which preaches the ludicrous message that people should not do any work to become successful and instead wait for money to fall into their laps. I like movies that have something to say and know what they want to do, which explains why sometimes great entertainments can surpass serious works of art (of course, Spielberg has also succeeded in making prestige pictures like Empire of the Sun, 1993’s Schindler’s List, and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan). It all depends on how well the film in question accomplishes what it sets out to do.
It also seems to me that many of Spielberg’s harshest critics, like David Thomson, are far less honest at their respective roles within the film community. Because while Spielberg has miraculously maintained the instinctual wisdom of imagination that comes from childhood innocence, many of the critics writing for corporate-minded publications have long-since surrendered their integrity and personal autonomy to the harsh whims of the Company Man. By growing up so thoroughly, critics like Thomson have lost some of childhood’s purity in favour of the superficiality required to mindlessly fulfill a 9 to 5 job. Thomson’s recurring criticism of Spielberg – and I’m succinctly paraphrasing – is his need to dramatize. I, for one, appreciate a filmmaker who finds his inner poet and captures the truth of the world through exaggerated metaphor; essentially, creating an alternate world in order to explore or critique the essence of the “real” world.
In this way, I consider Spielberg to be a more upbeat version of Nicholas Ray, who also sided with his childish rebels. Spielberg, like Ray, understands that “childish” is not strictly a negative quality, as the capitalist machine that is modern society wants us to believe. To be childish is to see the external world the way it registers emotionally, which is, as I’ve mentioned before, often more true than false. The negative aspect of being childish is the occasional lapse in judgment that comes from an underdeveloped sense of self-consciousness. It is this later quality that seems to have turned “Spielberg The Artist” into “Spielberg The Packager Of Expensive, Glossy Products Posing As Art” (however, I don’t think it has ever affected the quality of his art).
How could the Spielberg who directed Schindler’s List (1993) produce the Transformers movies? How could the Spielberg who produced Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) produce Eagle Eye (2008)? My proposed answer is rather tragic. The same childishness that gave Spielberg The Artist and his fans pleasure, made the studios megabucks. When the studios started to become systematically taken over by non-art-related businesses, the art of Spielberg’s eternal youth was exploited to reduce his genuine emotions into the lowest common denominator of emotional manipulation. For shame. This corporate greed triggered the negative qualities of Spielberg The Boy, who now unconsciously lives for the thrill of raking in large quantities of dough. He has forgotten the magic of those wonderful moving images up there on the giant theater screen. And so, the artist who was once so authentic in the creation of his own work, now promotes the grossly artificial drivel of untalented hacks like Michael Bay.
As a young man who has always felt old, I miss feasting on genuine Spielberg productions (and art in general).
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