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SPIELBERG, STEVEN (1946– ). American director and producer.
Wrote: "Vanessa in the Garden" (1986), episode of Amazing
Stories.
Produced: Poltergeist (and co-wrote with Mark Grais and Michael Victor,
and uncredited co-director by some accounts) (Tobe HOOPER 1982);
Gremlins (Joe DANTE 1984); Back to the Future
(Robert ZEMECKIS 1985); Goonies
(and story) (Richard Donner 1985); Young Sherlock Holmes
(Barry Levinson 1985); Amazing Stories (tv series) (1985-87);
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (Brian Gibson 1986); An
American Tail (animated) (Don Bluth 1986); Harry and
the Hendersons (William Dear 1987); Innerspace (Dante
1987); *batteries not included* (Matthew Robbins 1987);
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis 1988); The Land
before Time (animated) (Bluth 1988); Back to the Future
Part II (Zemeckis 1989); Back to the Future Part III
(Zemeckis 1989); Gremlins 2: The New Batch (Dante 1990);
Tiny Toon Adventures (tv series; animated) (and provided
voice for one episode) (1990- ); Arachnophobia (Frank
Marshall 1991); An American Tail II: Fievel Goes West
(animated) (1991); Animaniacs (tv series; animated) (1992-
); Tiny Toon Adventures: How I Spent My Vacation (animated;
video) (Rich Arons, Byron Vaughns, Alfred Gimeno, Barry Caldwell,
Ken Boyer, Art Leonardi, and Kent Butterworth 1992); We're
Back! A Dinosaur's Tale (animated) (Dick and Ralph Zondag
1993); SeaQuest DSV (tv series) (1993-95); The Flintstones
(as Steven Spielrock) (Brian Levant 1994); Casper (Brad
Silberling 1995); Balto (animated) (Simon Wells 1995);
Pinky and the Brain (tv series; animated) (1995- ); Freakazoid
(animated; tv series) (1995- ); Twister (Jan de Bont
1996); Men in Black (Barry Sonnenfeld 1997); Deep
Impact (Mimi Leder 1998); Toonsylvania (tv series)
(1998- ); Pinky, Elmyra, and the Brain (tv series) (1998-
); Invasion America (animated; tv series) (1998).
Many, presumably, will take exception to that statement. They will note that
Spielberg's science fiction films are among the most popular films
ever produced, that Spielberg has earned several major awards for
his direction, and that his films have been the subject of innumerable
laudatory reviews and admiring critical analyses. There is an abundance
of evidence to suggest, then, that Spielberg is a major—perhaps
the major—science fiction film director of modern times.
But honest critics cannot meekly echo a critical consensus they regard
as woefully misguided; and I am compelled to report that, with the
exception of the marginally relevant Raiders of the Lost Ark—where the presence of producer George LUCAS
seems to have reined in Spielberg's worst excesses—I despised every
single Spielberg film I have managed to endure until, in the Indian
Summer of his career, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and Minority
Report, his film grew marginally more watchable.
It must be acknowledged, first of all, that Spielberg is a relentlessly
manipulative director. At every moment, he insists on controlling
what the viewers see, and he insists on dictating exactly what the
viewers think and feel about what they see. To be sure, surrendering
to the masterful control of an effective storyteller is one necessary
aspect of watching films; however, confident and respectful directors
will always at some times let viewers decide for themselves what they
want to watch and will let viewers decide for themselves what they
think about what they are watching. Spielberg refuses to do so. To
illustrate Spielberg's limitations, consider the justly famous barroom
scene in George LUCAS's Star Wars,
where the camera rapidly offers a variety of exotic aliens to look
at while the oblivious Obi Wan Kanobi and Luke Skywalker go about
their business. The scene is exhilarating because viewers have many
choices in what to look at and what to think about. But if Spielberg
had directed the scene, the camera would have focused on each alien,
one by one—to tell the audience which alien to look at—with each
image followed by one or two reaction shots—to tell the audience
what to think about that particular alien. (One reason that the concluding
arrival of the massive Mother Ship in Close Encounters of the Third
Kind fails to be awe-inspiring is that, by means of an endless
series of reaction shots of awe-inspired watchers, Spielberg keeps
poking the audience in the ribs and shouting, "Be awe-inspired!")
Spielberg
does not want his audience to think, in part, because his stories collapse if
they are considered rationally. All right, one can attribute the inane
insipidness of his segment of Twilight Zone—The Movie and Always
to poorly chosen source material, but he personally scripted Close
Encounters, and everything about the aliens therein, from their playful
adventures in kidnapping and car-disabling to their inexplicable fondness for
the numb Richard Dreyfuss character, makes no sense whatsoever. E.T.: The
Extra-Terrestrial asks us to believe that secretive aliens advanced enough
to travel to another solar system would go plant-gathering a short distance
away from a highly populated area without equipping all gatherers with
signalling devices in the event that someone was separated from the group.
Spielberg plots are idiot plots, depending on the stupidity of everyone
involved—the carefree swimmers in shark-infested waters of Jaws, the
incredibly short-sighted scientists and bureaucrats who blithely fail to
anticipate the disaster of Jurassic Park, the super-efficient government
officials of Minority Report who take no precautions to prevent the
incursion of a renegade agent. Are these inappropriately adult criticisms of
movies which are, as Spielberg often claims, designed to evoke the essence of
childhood dreams and nightmares? But Spielberg cannot be defended as a
children's director because he will occasionally, as if driven to remind
audiences that he is after all a Serious Film Director, completely violate the
aura of innocence and joy he is purportedly crafting; thus, the pointless
dollop of anti-government paranoia at the end of Raiders, or the
gratuitous slaughter of the Lost Boy Ruffio in Hook (a tedious film
which surely qualifies as the most leaden and ponderous celebration of the
spirit of childhood ever filmed).
Admittedly,
Spielberg can be praised for his unfaltering devotion to superior special
effects—which is why Jurassic Park and The Lost World are worth
watching whenever the dinosaurs are visible and boring beyond belief whenever
they are absent—and he is an expert in executing simple-minded suspense
sequences—as demonstrated by Duel—still his best film—and Jaws;
but excellent special effects and a few thrills in themselves do not
necessarily result in a good science fiction film. The major problem is that
Spielberg's entire approach is utterly opposed to the true purposes of science
fiction. Surely, if science fiction is anything other than stories about
spaceships and aliens, it is designed to remind us that our comforting,
complacent world view is not accurate, that radical changes in everything we
accept as true are possible or even imminent, that the universe is more complex
and challenging than we dare acknowledge. It is a genre designed to unsettle
audiences, to make them question old assumptions. Yet Spielberg is committed to
confirming complacent world views, to asserting that the universe is in fact
just as comforting and cozy as we would like it to be. For Spielberg, aliens
are really cuddly teddy bears, friendly companions, nice people just like you
and me. Thus, Spielberg has encouraged the world to see science fiction films
as "feel-good" movies, and he must be held accountable for the ongoing
proliferation of "heart-warming" films about alien-rejuvenated senior citizens
learning how to break-dance, adorable little aliens, robots striving to become
human, quaintly blundering inventors, and Bigfoot considered as a household
pet. Science fiction film is drowning in a sea of saccharine, and Spielberg
keeps pushing its head down.
The next
time critics feel like praising Steven Spielberg for his science fiction films,
therefore, they should first be required to watch a few examples of the genuine
article—say, The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) La Jetée
(1962), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and The Man Who Fell to Earth
(1976)—so they can be reminded of what science fiction film is supposed to be
doing. Perhaps, then, they will reconsider the critical consensus.
For a while,
after first drafting these remarks, I sensed that Spielberg himself had
recognized some incompatibility with the genre that originally made him famous;
for during the 1990s, except for two joyless excursions to Jurassic Park, he
focused his energies on prestigious mainstream films like Schindler's List
(1993), Amistad (1995), and Saving Private Ryan (1998), where he
could less risibly indulge in sentimentality and overstatement. However,
precisely when he was on the verge of refashioning himself as a latter‑day
William Wyler or Elia Kazan, manufacturing ponderous "message" films to make
Hollywood feel proud of itself, garner fistfuls of awards, and quickly vanish
from public awareness, Spielberg felt the urge to return to science fiction,
first with a project inherited from Stanley KUBRICK, A.I.: Artificial
Intelligence. To give the man some credit, it certainly qualifies as his
most mature and thoughtful science fiction film to date (though perhaps due
only to Kubrick's influence); still, the film remains marred by familiar
Spielbergian lapses in logic and an utterly ineffective conclusion. And while
his Minority Report was significantly better, there remained about the
film an air of uncertainty, with evidence of a renewed and burning desire to
really make a classic science fiction film thwarted by a lingering cluelessness
about what such an effort would entail.
In the meantime, Spielberg has consistently remained active as a producer of
science fiction and fantasy films, where his record can easily be
epitomized: when he employs talented directors like Robert ZEMECKIS
or Joe DANTE, the results are usually good; when he employs less talented
directors, like William Dear or Matthew Robbins, the results are usually
dire. The failures of Spielberg's television series Amazing Stories
and SeaQuest DSV are especially telling: carefully prepared
triteness may succeed in a single film—Spielberg has been quoted
as saying, "Thank God for the fifth draft"—but the furious pace
of episodic television, where there is no time for a fifth draft,
inexorably exposes triteness, so that the inability of Amazing
Stories and SeaQuest DSV to attract audiences—despite
huge budgets, massive publicity, and guaranteed two-season runs—demonstrates just how threadbare Spielberg's vision is when it is
not painstakingly polished.
The
deadening hand of producer Spielberg has also fallen upon the animated film, a
genre that perversely fascinates him and often attracts his personal attention.
However, the experience of working for Spielberg while making An American
Tail and The Land before Time drove Don Bluth away, as he preferred
poverty to Spielberg's intrusive input, and subsequent Spielberg productions,
like We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story and Balto, have been
spectacularly artless. For some reason, he has been rather more successful in
producing television animation: while the lame Tiny Toon Adventures
seldom rose above the level of pale imitations of the classic Warner Brothers
cartoons they referenced, Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain
represented distinct improvements, the latter even clever enough to earn a
berth in prime time television. It is strange that one must descend to the
level of television cartoons in order to discover some genuine wit and
originality emerging from the Spielberg empire—possibly because they have fortuitously
failed to attract his full attention.
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