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There is more than a touch
of sour grapes implicit in critical attitudes to the
films of Steven Spielberg. The middlebrow film press
have generally come to terms with his phenomenal
success by acknowledging Spielberg as a skilful
manipulator of the audience's emotions, but have
denounced his films at the same time as being
sentimental, calculated and devoid of ideas. The
response to his films has highlighted a prevailing
critical resentment of movies that work largely on a
visceral or emotional level; that such films must
necessarily be intellectually vacuous is taken for
granted. But the most vitriolic and frequently
hysterical, indictments of Spielberg’s output have
come from elements of film criticism's intellectual
left, who have seen his movies as insidious
endorsements of prevalent ideologies and of Reaganite
American values. The assumption underlying these
critical attitudes is that th e enormous popular
appeal of these films rules out the possibility of
their being a) good, or b) ideologically challenging.
We suggest that these are grossly over-simplified ways
of looking at Spielberg's work, and that such
approaches need to be re-assessed before they are
irrevocably enshrined as an impregnable critical
orthodoxy.
The groundwork for a critical re-evaluation of Spielberg's films has, to some extent, been laid within the pages of Sight and Sound by the autuerist readings of Gilbert Adair and Chris Auty, but the arguments have not nearly been won yet. This discussion will deal exclusively with Spielberg the director, rather than the producer, and will focus on his films prior to 1985's The Color Purple, because the latter seems to fall into a category of its own, as does Empire of the Sun (1987). Both show their liberal sentiments on their sleeves, whilst it is the issues surrounding Spielberg's less self-consciously 'serious' films we wish to deal with here.
Perhaps the most commonly asserted judgement of Spielberg's work is that he is the 'poet of suburbia', a director whose style glorifies and celebrates the culture of Middle American suburbia - the implication usually being that he does so in a fatuous and completely and uncritical way. This notion has been advanced so often that many critics now seem content to repeat it ad infinitum without ever stopping to questions its validity. It is true that Spielberg's narratives are frequently based around the intrusion of the supernormal or extra-rational into the safe existence of American suburbia (primarily Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T., but the theme also runs through Duel, Jaws and 1941), but what seems to have eluded most critics is the fact that suburbia hardly comes off best from the contrast.
Hence, whilst the first half of Close Encounters is profoundly disturbing because it details the invasion by an alien force of a familiar suburban environment, whose icons are clearly earmarked, the resolution sees the electrical engineer Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) escaping to new horizons from a world of domestic quarrels, TV commercials, middle American Walter Cronkite ideology, and troublesome children who prefer the crassness of Goofy Golf to the magic of Disney's Pinocchio. In E.T., suburbia's destructive qualities are elucidated even more clearly. Here, the human hero Elliot (Henry Thomas) is a young boy who has been so alienated from real familial affection by the pressures of suburban adolescence that he is, in Spielberg's words, "on the verge of becoming not a very nice kid." E.T. himself is literally choked by the suburban environment, and can only be revived by the arrival of his own race to take him back to a far-off world where love and nature have free reign. Significantly, it is only through the arrival of an alien creature into his suburban existence that Elliot can learn to give vent to real emotions; hence his line;
"I know you must be dead, because I don't know how to feel anymore."
Another criticism that
has been made against Spielberg's vision of suburban
America is that it is a sexist, male- dominated
world in which women are marginalized as irrelevant
and/or insensitive to cosmic issues. In fact, one
can easily argue quite the reverse. The women in
Spielberg's films are frequently presented as less
emotionally repressed than the men, less obsessively
rational, and consequently more receptive to the
forces of the supernatural. Perhaps the first
articulation of this theme occurs in his TV movie Something
Evil, in which Marjorie Worden (Sandy Dennis)
is aware of the operation of malevolent paranormal
forces which her advertising executive husband Paul
(Darren McGavin) cannot appreciate. As in
Poltergeist, scripted and produced by Spielberg ten
years later, it is only the mystical bond between
mother and child which exists because of the woman's
emotional non- repressiveness that enables the child
to be rescued from the invading spirits. In E.T.,
the mother figure is again associated with children,
not through any reactionary equation of womanhood
with domesticity, but because both are receptive to
the emotionality of the extra-terrestrial, since,
unlike the scientists representing male adulthood,
they are not straightjacketed by over-rationality.
Hence the associative editing of the film's final
scene, cutting from Elliot's face to the rainbow
left behind by the alien spaceship, and then to the
transformation of his mother's face into a
child-like smile.
It would be foolish to
suggest that Spielberg uses his knowledge of
suburban detail to posit a totally damning critique
of middle America. One has only to look at, say, the
scenes in E.T. in which the alien learns to
talk by watching Sesame Street and thrills
to a screening of The Quiet Man, to see that
Spielberg does indeed revere certain aspects of
suburban culture. The films' interest lies in their
elaboration of the contradictions within suburban
life - the co-existence of the exhilarating and the
limiting, the inspiring and the alienating. This
aspect of Spielberg s work has been usefully
identified by Chris Auty (in his Monthly Film
Bulletin review of Poltergeist, September
1982):
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Suburbia for Spielberg
is like the libido - a lake of contradictory wishes
and impulses which can be expressed in forms either
beatific or horrific.
Another prevalent
criticism of Spielberg's films - and a much harder
one to substantiate - has been that they show a
fatuous faith in authority and in the ability of the
dominant ideology to solve any possible intrusions
into the structure of the status quo.
That such a view has become accepted as fact seems particularly unaccountable, since virtually all of Spielberg's films seem to present a rather paranoid view of inhuman, conspiratorial authority. A glance at their narratives at even the most superficial of levels seems to bear this out; Jaws displays a post-Watergate view of the powers that be, embodied by the figure of Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who orders the public beaches to be kept open whilst the marauding shark lurks in the water; in Close Encounters the military concoct an elaborate ruse to terrify the public into fleeing from the area where high-level government research into UFOs is taking place; in Raiders, the U.S. government's intelligence experts have the awesomely powerful Lost Ark packaged among thousands of obscure secret artefacts; in E.T., the authorities pursue the alien for their own ends and callously allow him to die in their hands. The most explicit delineation of Spielberg's paranoia around authority figures is 1941, in which a cross-section of the American military from the dangerously incompetent to the mentally deranged prove themselves to be more lethal than the enemy forces. In The Sugarland Express, a harmless young pair of fugitives are pursued and destroyed by the forces of law and order. In this case, Spielberg's attitude towards the individual lawmen is generally one of compassion and humanism - Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson) is depicted as being forced into the wrong moral choices by the pressures brought to bear upon him, and the narrative's tragic resolution is presented as the result of inexorable social forces. Whether lampooning it, or holding it responsible for life's injustices and tragedies, Spielberg's films articulate a profound distrust of anonymous, yet powerful, authority.
A slightly different set of critical issues have surrounded Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which, for want of a less lofty term, can be categorised as Spielberg's most explicitly post-modernist films. The two movies play none too seriously upon the generic conventions of the Saturday morning serials of the 1930s. They offer no greatly disapproving view of these serials, because above all Spielberg likes the movies he alludes to. But to argue, as a number of theorists have, that the films simply offer the audience a set of fantasies around male domination, anti-feminism, jingoism and anti-Third World racism, is not only to completely overlook the sense of irony which Spielberg casts across the whole project, but to conveniently ignore a whole set of meanings which militate against such interpretations.
To tackle the issue of the Raiders films' gender attitudes first, the most obvious aspect of the films which certain critics (e.g. Patricia Zimmermann, 'Soldiers of Fortune' in Wide Angle Vol. 6 No. 2) have overlooked is the succession of incidents whose humour derives from the demolition of conventional notions of the assertive male hero. Certainly, Indiana Jones expresses a range of characteristics handed down from the likes of John Wayne or Buster Crabbe - but there is much within the films to problematise the whole myth of the, male superhero. Indy's snake phobia is a key case in point - one could hardly imagine Crabbe or Johnny Weismuller squirming at the sight of the reptile pit; neither could one visualise James Bond being so badly bruised and exhausted from his adventures as to fall asleep when required to enact the obligatory romantic scene. Importantly, Indy's daring-do seems frequently to arise from desperation rather than from coolness and calculation. In Indiana Jones, the progression of cliffhangers depends largely on a sense of Indy's vaguely deranged clutching at straws in the face of adversity. As a result, he is seen groping across a crowded dance floor for an antidote to a poison he has just drunk; left screaming for help in a dungeon whose spiked roof is moving down upon him; forced to stop a speeding mine car by using his foot as a brake; and left devoid of inspiration when surrounded by marauding swordsmen on a narrow rope bridge.
The charge of racism is
even more unwarranted. Granted, Spielberg's
intentions may have backfired somewhat in that a
genuine desire to express a fascination with the
civilization and folkloric traditions of other
cultures has been interpreted as a rendering of
those cultures as exotic and/or marginal. But, as
far as these Third World cultures are seen to be in
conflict with the West, it is the rationality of the
western point of view which comes off worst. In Raiders,
Indy's pursuit of the Ark of the Covenant is based
on a rational, university- educated scientific
curiosity, and on a mercenary thirst for glory, but
the film's climax affirms the status of the Ark as a
source of phenomenal holy power with which the
over-rational approach of the West cannot deal. In
Indiana Jones, the starving Indian villagers'
apparently superstitious belief in the mystical
Sankara stones is validated by the film's closure,
and the centre of villainy is seen to be the Prime
Minister Chattar Lal - the one character who has
assimilated rational, 'civilised' Western values.
The final exchange between Indy and the village
Chieftain (who says "Now you see the magic of the
stone you return to us"; Indy replies, "Yes, I
understand its power now.") hardly bears out
accusations made against the film that the
superiority of white civilisation is seen to save
the day. (Also see: A Fear of Foreigners (As Well As
Snakes): Xenophobic Undercurrents in Raiders
of the Lost Ark by Jeff Jarot.)
It is not our contention that Spielberg is an overtly radical director (in fact, it would be easier to situate the implicit political standpoint of his work in terms of the liberal humanist tradition in American cinema). But he is an intelligent, if not (perhaps thankfully) an intellectual filmmaker whose films display the operation of a host of recurrent thematic ideas. To argue that his films are mindless reactionary entertainments for right-wing audiences is not only to display an offensively elitist attitude to the mass audience, but also to ignore the somewhat anti-establishment concerns which Spielberg's films have consistently elaborated. Having attempted to answer these criticisms, discussion around Spielberg can move on to the question of a study of the films' aesthetic virtues in their own right.
References
This unofficial site
contains up-to-date news about Spielberg's films and
productions. Contains essays and information about
most of his output and aims to be a complete
database.
http://www.braindumps.com/700-505.htm
http://www.actualtests.com/exam-VCP550.htm
http://www.pass4sure.org/SAP/C_TFIN52_66.html
http://www.test-king.com/cert-PMI-RMP.htm
http://www.ibm.com/us/en/
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