'The Fabelmans' and fables about film
Spielberg was pointing the camera at himself all this time
With The Fabelmans Steven Spielberg has joined a current with Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Alejandro Iñarritu’s Bardo, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance of Reality in making a film inspired by his own life, an autobiopic, tied into a personal story of a young man getting into the art-form. There’s its superhero-style title, referring to those fable men called storytellers (I wanna see the list of rejected titles, The Playbergs, The Dreamweavermans). Then there’s the plot, about a Jewish kid growing up in suburbia making home movies. Perhaps then the film will at last give us a peek behind the curtain of Spielberg’s subconscious, like surrealist Ballard gave us with his sober yet graphic semi-autobiography Empire of the Sun.
Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun was one of the serious films with which he’s staggered his career (see The Colour Purple, Amistad, Lincoln). Still, his reputation rests more on his blockbusters, with even his fans rating him for his technical wizardry, his smooth storytelling, for being a great populist artist. (To his detractors he’s either too populist, or, when he tries not to be, pretentious; one hard cineaste blog of the 2000s complained that the kid hiding in the latrine in Schindler’s List was far too well lit.)
He’s rarely, though, considered a filmmaker’s filmmaker, as someone who makes films about films, whether direct send-ups of being a director like 8½ and Stardust Memories or more obliquely like the thrillers Blow-Up and Blow Out. This is odd, since Spielberg’s always followed the adage of his sometime star François Truffaut, that “all films must say something about reality and something about cinema.” The Fabelmans is far from the first time Spielberg’s looked inwards and at what he works with. That’s been the case since the start.
A suburban family dinner. The dad becomes fixated with his mashed potato. He starts sculpting it with his fork then fingers. His wife and kids watch in confused anguish.
An earlier example of this scene has Richard Dreyfus playing the dad, Roy Neary. To justify his disturbing table manners, Neary says a line he’ll repeat throughout Close Encounters of the Third Kind: “This means something. This is important.”
In plot terms, he’s talking about the obscure obsession he’s been left with since his close encounter with UFOs. But the deeper meaning of the line alludes to what the film is about: not just aliens but filmmaking.
Before the mashed potatoes dinner is another family scene, where Neary announces, “Tomorrow night you can either play Goofy Golf, which means a lot of waiting and shoving and pushing and probably getting a zero, or you can see Pinocchio, which is a lot of furry animals and magic and you’ll have a wonderful time.” As well as putting a thumb on the scale, he’s gesturing with the other at his creator’s own preference. After all, magic and wonder are Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s selling point.
Maybe you might concede here that Spielberg was foregrounding the film medium but only at the shallow level of a pop culture reference. Or at most he was declaring his allegiance with the filmmaking style of Walt Disney. This would explain why the film has an insert of Jiminy Cricket towards the beginning, and towards the end why John Williams makes a cheeky quotation of ‘When you wish upon a star’.
But then watch this clip:
Spielberg had a computer scientist dad and a musician mum who separated. The climax of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is computers and music coming together to achieve a communication breakthrough. Which scene itself is a symbol of cinema: people in the gloom staring up in wonder at a medley of sounds and lights like the audience at a movie theatre:
Watch closer, and all of Close Encounters is about being a filmmaker and more generally about being an artist. Jillian (Melinda Dillon) takes a quick series of snapshots of the aliens like a film montage. Neary, like others touched by UFOs, is driven to distraction by an idea he’s gotten out of the blue. Trying to capture the idea, he blunders his way through failed sculptures and studies, leading to the creative doldrums, where he has his inspirational breakthrough:
Drawn to the Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, Neary meets others who’ve been similarly inspired, who made their own attempts to watercolour or paint or otherwise capture their vision; that is, they all stand for artists.
Strengthening this theme is the film’s family plot line, and Neary’s Gaugin-like treatment of his wife and kids. The latter don’t like the films he likes (they vote for Goofy Golf) and his wife nags him for his Tinkertoy hobbies. His UFO one is a step too far: she leaves him, at least temporarily, for her mother’s, only for him to leave her and the kids permanently, for a mothership where he’ll achieve his dream of aliens.
Then there’s that repeated dialogue: “This means something... This is important.” If every application of artistic technique could have a subtitle, it would be those words. Technique, devices, are like invisible italics; artists, instead of spelling out what their work means, use them as emphasis, to tip off the viewer that this means something, this is important. There are dots here for you to connect, they say, so it’ll pay to pay attention: see the pattern, work out the overall design. Each use of technique is a ‘Geddit?’ to which a good viewer (or reader or listener) will assent. Watching a film, reading a book, listening to an album is like walking the flow chart of the creator’s decisions, often - and this isn’t being pernickety but realistic - frame by frame, note by note, mark by punctuation mark, and assessing each one. A great film (great book, great album) is where, with each decision, you think, “I get why you decided to do that, and see how it was spot on.”
That doesn’t mean the audience is always hijacked by technique; cliché technique doesn’t inspire assent but blank recognition or even repulsion. And of course, not every film deserves or was made to be ‘read’; but others, even summer blockbusters like Close Encounters, invite it. The film is about what art means and why it’s important. And with Spielberg’s A.I Artificial Intelligence we’ll discover this isn’t the smarmy life-affirming line it seems, but something much lonelier.
Before that, it’s worth noting how even in his slickest popcorn movies like Jurassic Park, Spielberg is self-reflexive, even self-critical. David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest cussed the film and its (at that point potential) sequels as those “celluloid dinosaur movies” and in his essay F/X Porn bemoaned how they weren’t:
really ‘movies’ in the standard sense at all. What they really are is half a dozen or so isolated, spectacular scenes - scenes comprising maybe twenty or thirty minutes of riveting, sensuous payoff - strung together via another sixty to ninety minutes of flat, dead, and often hilariously insipid narrative.
It’s as though to him films like Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park were the death of good genre cinema that Jaws was of New Hollywood, à la the thesis of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. He went on:
There is no quicker or more efficient way to kill what is interesting and original about an interesting, original young director than to give that director a huge budget and lavish F/X resource.
But, according to the Disney corporate video / docuseries Light and Magic, Spielberg wasn’t unaware of what was being killed. The exchange between Sam Neill’s Dr Grant and Jeff Goldblum’s Dr Malcolm, “We’re out of a job.” / “Don’t you mean extinct?” originally was said by practical effects wizard Phil Tippett after the test-screening of the new CGI T-Rex. He’d intuited how this revolutionary tech was going to supersede his model work. Not that Spielberg, also present at the screening, was anything less than enthused by the revolution, and all-in for it; but, by using Tippett’s line, he also wasn’t unaware of the cost. And it’s not a coincidence the film’s ersatz dinosaurs - those expensive and convincing fakes - are the bad guys. As Dr Malcolm says in the sequel, “Ooh! aah!—that’s how it always starts. Then there’s the running and the screaming.” And the lay-offs.
Some stupid critical opinions never die. ‘Good dialogue = a good script.’ ‘I didn’t care for the characters.’ ‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence should’ve ended 20 minutes sooner.’
I was an early adopter of A.I., which, despite some misgivings, I always thought had a misunderstood ending. (Chicago Reader’s film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum thought so too). Back then, though, I was still more an apologist; now I think the film’s even better than I realised. And the critical consensus on the film has similarly shifted. Indiewire’s David Ehrlich wrote a glowing 20-year retrospective while the BBC’s Mark Kermode says he apologised to Spielberg in person. “The critics… myself in particular, were pretty sniffy about [the film].” Now he thinks it’s the director’s, “enduring masterpiece.”
And his most self-critical one. Taking the baton from Stanley Kubrick, Spielberg returns in the film to the Pinocchio motif, most obviously with the parallel of its robot boy, David (Haley Joel Osment) wishing to be real. From there it gets darker, as if Spielberg has changed his stance on fairytales, including the ones he made, or changed focus from Jiminy Cricket and ‘When you wish upon a star’ to the darkness already there in the story.
Take Pinocchio’s conman and child/donkey wrangler, whom Spielberg parallels with Brendan Gleeson’s carnival lyncher of robots, almost including a child one:
The conman steals Pinocchio and other boys away to Pleasure Island, where they infamously get into “drinking, smoking, playing pool!” (unless you’re watching the censored version on Disney+). In A.I. Artificial Intelligence, David and Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) get a lift with some frat boys to the even more decadent Rouge City:
Both films have an underwater sequence where their artificial boy is bounced around by sea life. Both have a whale: the cartoon’s terrifyingly human-toothed sperm whale, and the film’s fairground sculpture of a whale in a future submerged Coney Island. There David finds the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio, first as another sculpture then as a recreation who grants him his wish in the film’s once much-maligned climax.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a reversal too of Spielberg’s hitherto most feel-sad and characteristic film, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Both E.T. and A.I. have a scene where a parent reads a fairytale:
In the older film, Elliot (Henry Thomas) hides with E.T. who watches Elliot’s mother read her daughter, Gertie, Peter Pan (about a boy who never grows up, like A.I.’s David). In the newer film, David is usurped by the human boy he’d himself usurped, the once-comatose Martin. ‘Their’ mother Monica reads Martin Pinocchio in bed while David watches with Oedipal envy.
Their father is called Henry—who knows, maybe after the kid who played Elliot, as if Peter Pan did grow up, like in Hook, and became a realist, like the Spielberg of old age who grew out of his undying boyish optimism. Elliot has to say a teary goodbye to his alien pal (read: father), but David gets no such bittersweet ending, even with the film’s so-called happy ending. Having reached the factory where he was manufactured, David sees the other units in his production line. When one talks to him he has a psychotic breakdown like the similarly confronted Pris in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? He smashes its face in.
He’s stopped by Dr. Hobby (William Hurt), a man with a hurt hobby. Like the inventor in the manga, Astro Boy, he’s a ‘sad scientist’ who modelled a robot child on his dead son.
Following that pseudo-resurrection of one boy comes another. In the far future, other robots (or ‘mechas’) find a frozen David and switch him back on. Note that they are robots, not aliens as Jonathan Rosenbaum thought back then and as James Clarke at ‘Little White Lies’ thinks now. It’s not spelled out but neither is it one of those situations of ‘well it’s ambiguous, it’s for the audience to interpret.’ If so the pattern of imagery wouldn’t make sense. The logo of the company that built David and his fellow mechas is shaped like the entities at the end, as is David’s silhouette when we first meet him:
The development of the film’s ‘sad creator’ theme wouldn’t make sense either. In Rouge City, David thought he’d spotted the Blue Fairy; Gigolo Joe explained she was really the Virgin Mary, an example of humans’ longing for their own creator. The entities in the future talk of David being one of the “originals” who “knew living people!” It’d be jarring and arbitrary if they themselves weren’t descendants of those originals but aliens, who for some reason had flown down in the last 20 minutes to find out about old Earth robots and who made them.
The far-future robots read David’s wishes and, via the Blue Fairy, ‘turn him into a real boy’, then reunite him with ‘his’ mother, whom they claim they cloned from a fragment of DNA (like those other fakes, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park). On the surface this is your typical Spielberg ending (which tends to be a term of abuse). The hero gets what he wants, John Williams scores it with a sweet sad piano track, the lighting is soft, the narrator’s last words are reassuring.
But reconsider the creepy details of David’s perfect last day, the way he’s so glad he’s got mummy all to himself - “There was no Martin, no Henry, there was no grief, there was only David”- the way that, after David has felt perfect love with his mother, they cuddle in bed and she dies. Then David also goes to “that place where dreams come from”, i.e. the unconscious, in this case death.
As Rosenbaum pointed out, this so-called sentimental ending has no real people in it, only simulations: a confused mayfly of a single-use clone and a robot boy that thinks it’s human. These are the relics of our species, after we’ve all died and our civilisation has gone to waste but for our A.I. superseders. The two simulations play out a scene of mother/child love which hasn’t been seen for millennia and will never be seen again. All history has led to Oedipal consummation then annihilation. (That the only thing that’ll survive the human race is the Oedipal complex is also a pretty good joke.) And people say there’s not enough Kubrick in the film! If he’d lived to make this very film himself, it’d be deemed an anti-Spielberg one. In fact, it’s Spielberg subverting himself and his ‘typical’ endings. Not by lampooning them but by showing us the dark obverse that was always there.
For what is the closing mother/son sequence of the film but an example of a film? A wish fulfilment fantasy, fed by primal infant narcissism, around which hangs darkness and emptiness forever. And people say Spielberg’s sentimental! For all The Fabelmans might be a heartwarming story about boys and mums and movies, he’s already covered that ground and given you his statement. Art doesn’t redeem an unhappy life. It’s barely a candle in the dark. But what else is there?
