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The Fabelmans
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Meet
the Feeblemans
I
have long held a theory that Steven Spielberg’s work is driven by an
unconscious impulse that he shows no real signs of recognising, although he
lets it drive him to some of his best work. It’s simply this: within all the
treacly, all-American, light-drenched, self-consciously iconic depictions of
home and family, vocational destiny and heroic obligation, life-journeys and
epiphanic illuminations, Spielberg sometimes gives vent – and very dramatically
so – to a profoundly anti-social drive: something in him wants to tear
it all down, smash it all up, kill everybody. The alibi can be revenge (as in Tarantino), but not even that is strictly necessary
for Spielberg’s anti-social thrill.
This
drive expresses itself in the spectacular action scenes of devastation in the Jurassic Park films
(1993-2022) and War of the Worlds (2005). It is also everywhere in the
splendid A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001),
which originated as a project with Stanley Kubrick. More generally, I would
observe that when the director hires writers to produce an overtly
“Spielbergian” script for him, we get the sentimental redemption angle
(as Meaghan Morris once encapsulated it) played up to the hilt; whereas if
it’s, for example, the Coens providing the screenplay for Bridge of Spies (2015), the result is more astringent – and dramatically more complex and interesting.
The
Fabelmans is Spielberg’s worked-over autobiography (he co-wrote it with playwright Tony
Kushner, who served that role also on Lincoln [2012] and the abominable Munich [2005]). Out
of the gate, it tackles a foundational, formative primal scene: his
big-screen viewing, as a kid, of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on
Earth (1952). But what sticks in the boy’s mind is not the circus animals
and acrobatic stuff that his parents promised him as an enticement (and still
less his Dad’s rapid-fire explanation of the phenomenon of persistence of
vision); it’s the spectacular scene of a train piling first into a car (driving
headlong into it on the tracks) and then, once that obstacle is flipped away,
destroying all the other carriages of a train. My interest, as analyst, was
immediately piqued.
Let’s
note something in passing: the scene is about destruction. It is also,
logically, about human death – and plenty of it, presumably – but this
is something that goes under the radar of perception in the way that Spielberg
(and perhaps also DeMille, I haven’t gone back to check) intercuts the scene
with this own. This evasion of death is something we will frequently find in
the grown-up’s subsequent action-adventure epics. The curious 1941 (1979) is, in its cartoonish style, the closest analogue to the pure,
artificial, smash-‘em-up thrills of that ‘50s Greatest Show. It ranks (for
whatever this estimation is worth) among his least well-regarded efforts.
Back to the primal
scene, and its after-effects. Little Sammy (Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord), alter ego of Steven, begs
for a model train set, complete with sound effects (an echo of the adult
toy-train enthusiasts in Jean-Pierre Gorin’s Routine Pleasures [1986]!).
He arranges it all with the help of that science-expert father, Burt (Paul
Dano); but, once running the show alone, he craves only one thing: to see
the crash, all over. Over and over!
Why does he crave
the crash? This is the question to which Sammy’s mother, Mitzi (Michelle
Williams), devotes approximately 30 screen-seconds of deep thought. She does
not head for the Freudian textbook of psychic drives (as I did). Her answer is,
to me, almost entirely illogical, irrational and counter-intuitive; it may just
be plain wrong! She comes to the (swift) conclusion that Sammy needs to control things. Not anarchically smash them to Hell. And so she acquires a movie camera
to film the only-once-again train-crash event, and – seemingly magically edited
(we’ll see plenty of this unstated magic later on) – that reel, projected in a
closet, appeases the child. I am convinced neither by Mitzi’s pop-psychological
analysis, nor its therapeutic outcome (the kid becomes one of the most
successful and lauded filmmakers of all time on Planet Earth, blablabla).
Let’s be fair.
The theme of the child begging for control has a wider justification in the
overall schema of The Fabelmans, because the family unit itself will, in
time, fly apart – a major catalyst in this situation being the constant
presence of Burt’s work colleague and faithful family friend, Bennie (Seth
Rogen). The prospect of divorce – and the looming spectre of a mother’s active
sexuality – are bitter pills for children or adolescents to swallow in the
Spielbergian Universe; the filmmaker, in the tradition of many artists, still
seems to be struggling to come to terms with these facts of life in adulthood
(Spielberg is now 76). But at least he’s trying, and the actors help him out
enormously. (Obvious aside: despite the 10-second disclaimer written into the
mouth of one of Sammy’s three sisters, the experiences of the women in this
family still don’t get much of a look-in.)
The theme of the
closet – as in secrecy, not homosexuality – is another evident motif of the
film. In what seems to be a highly ambivalent moment, Sammy (now played by
Gabriel LaBelle), decides to suppress the evidence of his Mom’s
(potential) infidelity that hits his eyes when editing family-holiday Super-8
footage. But he broods over it, turns sulky and nasty, and eventually submits
Mitzi to the assembled Hidden Reel of off-cuts. At that point, it becomes their
shared secret, a pact of complicity. A strange vocation, this filmmaking bug:
so much repression is generated and necessitated by it. All part of the ethos
of control, one assumes.
And yet we will
hear, several times, how alike Mother and Son are deemed to be. Alike in
which ways, exactly? (Because they run away from their problems? Everybody runs
away from everything in this film!) I find the answer to this prime question
elusive. Because – to attempt a superimposition of the main thematic lines so
far identified – Sammy’s pursuit of control in all things, including the
expression of emotion, separates him decisively (as a guy) from the Woman
Under the Influence-type drunken, transparent-skirt pirouettes of his
idealised-mother-archetype, not to mention her bouts of depression (one of
several affinities, alongside Jewishness and a gregarious Uncle or Grandfather
figure, between The Fabelmans and James Gray’s better Armageddon Time [2022]).
Yes, Sam
(ex-Sammy) does give up his Cinema Dream for a while in a depressive funk; yes,
he does suffer the teen-movie trial of bullying (cueing a minor revenge motive).
But there’s something that never, ultimately, bursts forth from this
character, as any kind of real self-revelation or probing self-analysis.
The Fabelmans shares a certain debilitating,
conceptual circularity with Agnès Varda’s Jacquot de Nantes (1991): we
learn there that Jacques Demy’s films draw on the events of his life – he
worked in a garage, staged and projected images on his bedroom wall, and all
that – but those events are interesting only insofar as they have been already
transmuted into the grand cinema of his films! Ray Davies of the Kinks probably
speaks for many artists when he writes in his unusual autobiography X-Ray:
“Maybe my real life has existed as a sub-plot to my songs” – or films, as the
case may be.
Tellingly, the
emotional release that Sam does ultimately get to experience is granted a
last-minute, displacing shunt (prepared for by the youthful viewing of The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962]) – from only murkily resolved family
issues to his fortuitous encounter with cranky, cigar-chomping, smoke-puffing, elderly
John Ford (David Lynch, stealing the show): advice about camera angles is what
sends this lad dancing off down the studio lot (with a jolt of Spielberg’s
camera framing the scene as a farewell wink to the audience). (Useless Aside: I
would rather that Spielberg had given us a vignette of his weeks as an
assistant on John Cassavetes’ Faces [1968]. Ah, well.)
So, Dad is a super-rational
scientist and Mom is a sensitive (if unfulfilled) artist, and little Sam/Steven
is the sum of these opposites? Rather than the eternally contradictory non-fit
between them, as the garrulous Granduncle Boris (Judd Hirsch, who co-stars with
Williams in Showing Up [2022]) helpfully prophesises? (Double-bill idea: The
Fabelmans and James Toback’s Fingers [1978].) The affirmative option is clearly the self-congratulatory, Bildungsroman lesson that Spielberg wants us to take away. (Gray, to his credit, avoided
almost all such direct ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’ conceits in his
autobiographical tale.)
Fantasy touch-ups
and work-arounds, small and large, abound here, as in virtually all attempts at
autobiography; they are par for the auto-(portrait)-course, and part &
parcel of Spielberg’s aesthetic, for sure. But they also clash oddly with the
moment when Sam damningly judges considers some of his film-work to be “fake”
and “phony” – whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean in this context. At the
level of movie-magic short-cuts, for instance, it’s intriguing to see Spielberg
join the queue with productions like the TV series Fosse/Verdon (Michelle Williams again!) and merrily suture
together these pristine projections in which Sam’s silent movies sync exactly
to the flows and pauses of whatever classical music album he’s whacked onto the
record player …
I am not
convinced by The Fabelmans (or Meet the Feeblemans, as my
unconscious prefers to call it). Spielberg gives us a limited, superficial
understanding of his life, times and roots. And, for me, this Fabergé egg
cracks apart in what is supposedly the big, resolving, turning-point scene: Sam
screening his beach-fun film to assembled classmates. As they begin to
ecstatically whoop it up, Sam awakes from his depressive slumber, looks around
and (silently) realises that, by god, he can actually affect people with
his work (both positive and negative affects, as he will learn and we shall
see).
I detect a
suspicious allegory here: this fun-film is, after all, a commission that
Sam only reluctantly accepts. With this smash-hit premiere, Spielberg seems to
be justifying all the ‘commercial’ assignments he has ever taken on. Commercialism
and industry, that is, on the royal road to the ‘personal’ apotheosis of The
Fabelmans. (I recall the director’s confused public statement, at Awards
time for Schindler’s List [1993], about
the need to draw upon ‘real life’ and his new-found success at depicting ‘a
life’ – just not yet his own one!) Since the film has made it to the cover –
complete with dossier treatment – in so many cinema publications, from Caimán in Spain to Cahiers du cinéma in France (the latter’s editorial: “a true
event … without doubt the most important and singular film of his career”),
this reach for the Big Brass Ring has evidently succeeded. Yet I nurse my
doubts …
The
scene that follows on from the Big Show makes the least sense of all, at least
to me. Logan (Sam Rechner), a dopey, sporty hunk, is somehow disconcerted by
the heroic presentation of himself in Sam’s film as … well, exactly what he is,
a sporty hunk, cheered on and worshipped by his spectatorial admirers
(including the girlfriend he had previously lost). This leads, surprisingly, to
a split-second identity crisis in Logan. He pours his heart out to Sam (lurking
in the locker-filled school corridor – classic teen setting) about how he will
never be that ideal image. Why would he think this, if he’s so stupid
and un-self-aware to begin with? I have no clue.
In
the meantime, Logan bashes his former companion-bully, the sycophantic Chad
(Oakes Fegley) in Sam’s defense (and on his behalf) – it’s a typical piece of
Hollywood moral calculus, with the raving anti-Semite Chad positioned on a
sliding scale as same-but-worse than the manipulable Logan, and hence deserving
of the righteous fist and a fast exit. Logan then appears to come to an instant
broad-mindedness about religious and ethnic Otherness. Movies can do so much
for the world!
Let’s
return to John Ford’s lesson. Although I couldn’t detect (or just couldn’t be
bothered to search for) allusions to past Spielberg films in The Fabelmans,
I do see him replaying all his well-worn craft tricks: for example, his skill
in inventing iterative scenes that jump-flip through the years on the
basis of a habitual action; or the notorious push-ins on ‘the Spielberg face’
(especially in the dancing-before-headlights scene).
But
now I will venture to say something mildly controversial (if I haven’t managed
to do so already): Spielberg is just not terribly good at mise en scène.
His approach is relentlessly pictorial (as in the remembered-imagined
Ford’s advice), in the sense that every scene is schematically plotted around a
specific ‘key image’: a dramatic angle, a static configuration of bodies
(bathed by light, etc.), a stark play-off of foreground and background. But
when it comes to the mobile, flowing interplay of characters in relation to
their environment – bodies in space, as the classic mise en scène motto
goes (and the real Ford was an absolute master at this) – there’s almost never
anything interesting happening in Spielberg. The only moves in a scene
are those that allow him to get, as quickly and painlessly as he can, to his
key image (and then back out of it, if he doesn’t conclude the scene on that
high note).
It
is, in my view, a dreary, repetitive, bloodless formula for filmmaking, and it
effectively dampens down on anything that else that might break out of the set
mold. Control! Sammy longs for it; Spielberg’s cinema would be better if he
longed to smash it, and truly pursued that longing. That, at any rate, is my
dream.
MORE Spielberg: Catch Me If You Can, The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan, Hook, The Terminal © Adrian Martin 4 February 2023 |
