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Watch the Skies:
Director Steven Spielberg is a brand name in American cinema. His signature on a motion picture ensures the same wide recognition and fail-safe marquee value as the names of such leading lights as Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, both of whom served as key inspirations for the filmmaker in his formative years. One of the film school generation’s most successful graduates, Spielberg ascended to an enviable plane of celebrity in Hollywood during the mid-1970s, and has since gone on to direct three of the ten most profitable movies of all time: Jaws (1975), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and Jurassic Park (1992). Such impressive box-office receipts indicate that moviegoers know that they’ll be getting their money’s worth at a Spielberg film, and because the information in his pictures is conveyed in a predominantly visual style (with minor emphasis placed on dialogue), his works translate exceptionally well to foreign lands, too. One of Spielberg’s secrets in garnering such large audiences is that he doesn’t hop on bandwagons and rework shopworn formulas, but rather he makes movies that he would like to see. All of his films lead us down a knotty thoroughfare to some variety of thrilling discovery, one that encompasses both the motivation of the characters in his stories, as well as the director himself as he ceaselessly rummages around to find new and creative ways in which to tell his stories. The protagonists in his films often travel far and wide in search of a magical landmark or artifact, such as Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). But just as often his heroes find themselves on a voyage of self-discovery, whether it’s seeking out a healthier sense of worth in The Color Purple (1985) or awakening a long-dormant reserve of humanity in Schindler’s List (1993). Spielberg’s pictures commonly brim over with a heartfelt, seemingly untainted reverence for the medium; you feel as if Spielberg is just as enthralled by the magical elements in his movies as you are. In his earlier, more saleable pictures, Spielberg brilliantly mingled an idiosyncratic worldview with the sweeping requirements of the blockbuster formula, but his unparalleled commercial success unwittingly thwarted any effort from the notoriously fickle critical community to discuss him seriously as an artist throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Spielberg’s decision to direct the saccharine “Kick the Can” episode of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) during that period, as well as the dialogue-heavy costume drama Amistad (1997) years later, smacked of a calculated attempt to appease his detractors (middlebrow Consumer Guide reviewers at best) and court Academy favor, the members of which routinely snubbed his pictures in favor of more “serious” work. (Though who today could still claim with a straight face that Sir Dickie’s bedsore of a bio-pic Gandhi was a more deserving choice for the coveted Oscar gold than Spielberg’s evocatively prosaic fable E.T.?) Though moviegoers always seemed capable of assessing his gifts, it wasn’t until the emotionally wrenching masterpiece Schindler’s List that Spielberg was at long last legitimized as an artist by the press and assigned by his contemporaries the gushing kudos that he had been so richly deserving of all along. Before then, Spielberg’s commercial achievements stirred more than a few contrarians to speak of him as being only an artistically marginal storyteller, and such detraction usually included the quibble that his films were naïve and emotionally manipulative. While earlier Spielbergean efforts on the order of Poltergeist (1982) and E.T. indeed perused a fanciful landscape that was sculpted with a childlike sensibility, those pictures are every bit as loaded with the profound thematic hallmarks as some of Spielberg’s later, more self-consciously high-minded endeavors like Amistad. By dissecting his earlier, more audience-friendly pictures—Duel (1971), The Sugarland Express (1974), Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial—we’re able to bring to light the genesis and subsequent evolution of the thematic and stylistic preoccupations that have thread through Spielberg’s body of work and remain benchmarks in his pictures to the present day, irrespective of the genre and the subsequent positive notices from the press—all of whom should’ve been celebrating this magnificent filmmaker from the get-go. Steven Spielberg was raised in a suburban area in Arizona, a comfy, child-friendly environment that placed him out of harm’s way and permitted his imagination to bloom. At the age of sixteen, though, his sense of childhood security was disrupted when his parents elected to divorce, leaving the young Steven as the only male presence in a house with a working mother and three younger sisters. Both suburbia and the absentee father would eventually play key roles in the thematic structuring of many of Spielberg’s films. In fact, Spielberg’s first full-length movie, the made-for-television thriller Duel, is a compendium of Spielberg’s now famous thematic and stylistic traits. The picture opens with a POV shot of an automobile pulling out of a garage next to a split-level home in a southwestern suburb, a place not dissimilar from Spielberg’s own childhood home, and one that would be revisited countless times in the director’s later works. The vehicle soon motors through the hustle and bustle of the smog-filled city, and finally down an impossibly long and lonely stretch of desert road. (The oppression of the big city or the arid desolation of wide-open spaces lack the reassuring comforts of suburbia, and are therefore areas to fear in Spielberg’s films.) Eventually a cut to the exterior of the car reveals it as a red Mustang and its driver as a bespectacled salesman named David Mann (played by Dennis Weaver). The quintessential “everyman,” the character of Mann (his name speaks volumes about his anonymity) is a template for the roster of unlikely heroes that would follow in Spielberg’s future films. Indeed, Weaver’s character is almost transposable with Chief Brody in Jaws, Roy Neary in Close Encounters or Steve Freeling in Poltergeist—all regular, working-class Joes who find the tranquility of their suburban lifestyles threatened when a supernatural force comes barreling in to test their masculinity. In the earlier moments of Duel, we listen with Mann in his car to a radio talk show that features an irate husband complaining to the blowhard host that he no longer feels like the man of the house. The exchange reflects Mann’s own insecurities as a husband for we eventually learn that his relationship with the missus is becoming increasingly strained. Mann could probably stand in for Spielberg’s own father, and Mann’s long trips away from home are common to many of the fathers in Spielberg’s pictures. Within just a few minutes of the opening titles, Mann passes an oil rig (manned by a homicidal nut case whose face we’re never shown), which in turn proceeds to doggedly pursue the poor fellow for the rest of the film’s running time. Though Mann is diffident and weedy (he makes Larry Linville’s Frank Burns look like John Wayne), his cross-country spar with the implacable semi demands that he starts acting like a man and think up a way to take down his attacker. (He can no longer dodge his responsibilities.) But Mann’s failings as a father and husband (we’re told he refrained from standing up to a drunk that harassed his wife at a company doings) calls into question his masculinity; thus the grueling duel with the relentless rig isn’t only a physical challenge for the protagonist, but also a psychological one. The fact that neither Mann (Spielberg’s reluctant hero to the nth degree) nor the audience ever sees the face of the truck’s driver suggests that the truck may actually be Mann’s doppelganger (or his id), and that perhaps Mann is facing up to darker elements of his psyche that have been suppressed for far too long. Even if we look at it on a less cerebral, more gut level, Spielberg was wise to not reveal the face of the murderous truck driver because he probably knew intuitively that nothing he conjured up could possibly compliment our expectations. Most made-for-television movies lack any sort of directorial flourish (they have an anonymous, by-the-numbers look), but Spielberg’s Duel is kinetic—the director is the film’s real star. (It’s of little wonder then that ABC elected to release the film theatrically overseas.) Duel also provides a vivid (if not protracted) example of how effective Spielberg is at mounting chase scenes, and how varying the landscape (he may have considered Buster Keaton’s The General) is key to making it work. Indeed, Spielberg would go on after Duel to mount some of the most memorable chase scenes in motion picture history, i.e. the show-stopping pursuit through the desert in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). In fact, Duel has become emblematic for Spielberg’s entire career: from this picture on, Spielberg hit the ground running and has yet to slow down. Spielberg’s first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express, remains the director’s least known effort, something of a curious footnote in his otherwise high-profile oeuvre, but it contains more than a few hints of things to come in his later projects. Duel gave us a truck; The Sugarland Express gives us cars. Lotsa cars. Like Duel, the bulk of the action in The Sugarland Express takes place on a lingering expanse of highway road as an escaped convict (William Atherton) and his wife (Goldie Hawn) lead their lawman pursuers on a lengthy trek as the young couple sets out to save their infant son from adoption. Since the chase accounts for the lion’s share of the movie’s running time, Spielberg confronts the same challenge he faced in Duel by having to conjure up a wide variety of tricks to keep the tension up. The chase takes us over bridges, through spectator-filled streets, down precipitous knolls and into heavily wooded areas. The convoy of police cruisers that soon snakes behind the couple’s vehicle winds up growing longer and longer as the movie progresses, and Spielberg seems to take delight in choreographing such complicated scenes of action. Indeed, some of Spielberg’s finest moments occur when he directs the traffic of scenes that contain utter mayhem, such as the terror on the beach in Jaws, the barroom fracas in 1941 (1979), the evacuation sequence in Close Encounters, the jookjoint scuffle in The Color Purple, and the storming of Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan (1998). A born showman, the boxy constraints of the tube probably hemmed in Spielberg’s vision for Duel, but with The Sugarland Express, he switches to the decidedly more panoramic 2.35 X 1 aspect ratio. (Thankfully, every Spielberg film from Sugarland on is available in a letterboxed format on VHS, DVD or laser disc.) Spielberg has a great sense of composition, and he uses the space of the wide screen imaginatively, allowing two disparate planes of action to share the same frame. The distance-flattening long lenses employed in Sugarland allow for many suspenseful (and often funny) moments as police cars withdraw and quickly reappear, not unlike the menacing rig in Duel. Spielberg seldom relies upon pans or jarring cuts to disclose new components into a scene, but rather shifts the material within the frame so that pertinent features are brought into view. Spielberg also likes to play with light, particularly in night scenes when chopper searchlights, car headlights and flashlights render a blue-tinged flare upon the camera’s lens, a visual motif used to even greater effect in Poltergeist and Raiders of the Lost Ark. There are other visual tricks scattered throughout The Sugarland Express that eventually become Spielbergean signatures: the “vertigo effect” used when a police sharpshooter sets his sights on the Goldie Hawn character as her car dives by is revisited in Jaws as an apprehensive Chief Brody keeps vigil on the crowded beach for any signs of the big shark. (The technique is achieved by simultaneously zooming in and tracking out.) The Sugarland Express also marked the first time Spielberg collaborated with music composer John Williams, and both would continue to work together on the large majority of Spielberg’s future projects. As Lou Jean Poplin, the mother intent on reclaiming her child from its foster home in Sugarland, Goldie Hawn plays the first of many Spielbergean mothers to search unremittingly for her baby. She’s very similar to Jilian Guiler in Close Encounters who takes an arduous trip to Devil’s Tower in the hope of retrieving her little boy after he’s abducted by space aliens, or Diane Freeling who must explore the “other side” in order to bring back the daughter that has been seized by ghosts in Poltergeist. Lou Jean is also a kindred spirit with Celie in The Color Purple, the abused black woman who finds her children stolen away during childbirth by her incestuous father. And Lou Jean might even join the Jewish mothers that frantically chase the trucks that haul their children away to certain slaughter in Schindler’s List. Mothers in Spielberg’s films tend to function in the best interest of the child, a trait that their husbands frequently lack. The Atherton character is the typically removed father figure found in Spielberg’s films, representative of the Peter Pan male who refrains from asserting authority. In The Sugarland Express, the father will ultimately be taken away from his child by either rotting in prison or dying in a fusillade of bullets (he chooses the latter), but other Spielbergean morality tales will see the father shirk his responsibilities to his family in a decidedly less horrific fashion by either high-tailing it to another country like Mexico in E.T. or fleeing the planet Earth altogether as in Close Encounters. It wasn’t until Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) that we would bear witness to a mother abandoning her child, albeit the subtle distinction in that picture is that the child was a robot, but the theme of parental desertion remained every bit as distressing. It’s also noteworthy that the caper comedy Catch Me if You Can (2002) featured a young protagonist who’s family was ripped asunder by an adulterous mother, suggesting that Spielberg’s fixation with capricious fathers may be receding. The film features the sweetest relationship between a father and son in any Spielberg film to date, which may indicate the start of a reconciliation of a tempestuous relationship that was brought to a head in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Spielberg’s second theatrical feature, Jaws, resembles Duel perhaps more so than anything else in the director’s canon. A wonderful adventure comedy, Jaws stars Roy Scheider as a police chief of a suburban resort town on the island of Amity who sees the beach’s visitors slowly gobbled up by a great white shark. Both the truck in Duel and the shark in Jaws are efficient killing machines that suddenly appear without explanation to test the limits of the movies’ reluctant heroes. (Brody’s professional obligation to safeguard the island resort is somewhat ironic because he has a grave fear of the water, though the film’s plot doesn’t hinge upon his phobia like Jimmy Stewart’s dread of high altitudes in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.) The truck and shark are equally single-minded of purpose, and when both meet their grisly Waterloos at the end of either picture, Spielberg lingers over the moments with a sense of melancholy, pulling out the expected revelry that usually comes when the hero slays the monster. It seems that Spielberg wants to remind us that in order for one party to win, the other must lose, which results in us feeling a trace sad for the void the monster leaves behind after he’s slain. (This is reminiscent of the vague pangs of loneliness Grant Williams experiences after he kills the attacking spider in Jack Arnold’s The Incredible Shrinking Man.) Though it’s filled with moments of heart-pounding terror, Jaws is an exceptionally funny film. Most of the humor arises from the conflict of personalities between the three men who ride the Orca out to sea: Brody, the self-contained family man; Hooper, the affluent scientist; and Quint, the salty man of the deep. There’s probably a little bit of Spielberg in each of the three characters, but it’s clearly Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper who emerges as the director’s alter-ego, and would reappear as such in Close Encounters and Always (1989). In Jaws, Dreyfuss, with his specs and unkempt whiskers, manages to look a lot like Spielberg, and the character’s penchant for technology, though mercilessly mocked by the old-school sailor Quint, echoes the director’s own obsession with technological marvels. Spielberg was picked on routinely by the bigger kids in grade school, so it’s probably not a coincidence that the egghead Hooper finds his ideas granted validity in Jaws. Those ideas ultimately bring about the shark’s death, while the brawny Quint finds his physical prowess of little defense when he’s finally face to face with the monster. Jaws is filled with Spielberg’s customary skepticism of authority. The mayor of Amity Island will go to just about any length to keep the beach open, regardless of the hazard to life and limb. His greed (or defense of the town’s precarious economic base) is ultimately what raises the shark’s kill tally. This character would resurface in Poltergeist as the developer Teague unwittingly sets off a series of ghostly events by building homes over old burial yards, the dead residents of which were not moved to new lots as he claimed. Forever watchful of the bottom line, Teague and Vaughn both wind up causing great distress for their communities by looking to cut corners in the name of saving a few bucks. A similarly avaricious drive is what ultimately does in the great dinosaur playground in Jurassic Park. It’s chief designer, Hammond, is so smitten with his project that he becomes blind to the variety of safety risks it poses to its visitors. These men, though admittedly thoughtless, are never depicted as one-dimensional moral mutants; they are afforded moments of regret and then an opportunity to make things right. It’s apparent that Spielberg’s skepticism is not fatal—he remains, on many levels, an unabashed optimist. Even the abusive husband Albert in The Color Purple is allowed to redeem himself in the movie’s last reel, and the story of Oscar Schindler is a textbook example of how a once miserly and self-centered man can find the resources within himself to do the right thing. Jaws shows us how Spielberg, like Hitchcock, wants to play his audience like a piano. Spielberg wisely resists from showing us the shark for the first hour or so of Jaws, but when he does, it’s a horrifying shot of the great white with his mouth open wide, ready to swallow the film’s hero. (“I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat” is one of the funniest, most quoted lines in movie history.) Spielberg likes to keep his audiences guessing, but he doesn’t cheat them out of a grand finale by dishing up ambiguities. The climax of Jaws, as well as most of Spielberg’s films, is explosive. Jaws also contains the first use of Spielberg’s most famous signature shot: the shooting star. It’s the little moments like that—as well as Brody’s little boy aping his father’s mannerisms at the dinner table or Hooper crumpling a paper cup in response to Quint’s crushing of a tin can—which we remember most fondly from Jaws. Spielberg’s films are just as memorable for their little moments as they are for their big ones. The phenomenal success of Jaws allowed Spielberg the clout to direct a movie based upon one of his own screenplays. The resulting work was the transcendent sci-fi masterpiece Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which highlights another one of Spielberg’s most regularly recurring themes: the failure to communicate. In what may still be one of his most ambitious pictures to date (second only to Empire of the Sun [1987]), Close Encounters (the working title of which was Watch the Skies) stresses the importance of communication both figuratively and literally, using music as a bridge between Earthlings and creatures from outer space. This may reveal a cynicism in Spielberg in which he seems to propose in both Close Encounters and E.T. that a relationship with extra-terrestrials could be a preferable alternative to fostering one with our fellow man. The film’s “everyman” hero, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), is incapable of getting his wife to understand his compulsion to build little mountains out of shaving cream and mashed potatoes, while the movie’s head scientist, Claude Lacombe (Francois Traffaut), regularly has difficulty conversing with fellow scientists due to his broken English. In the film’s climax, though, the routinely misunderstood men are able to communicate with the spindly, saucer-eyed aliens. Neary and Lacombe are kindred spirits, which predates a similar dichotomy between the head scientist Keys and the boy-hero Elliot in E.T., proving that Spielberg doesn’t necessarily find all figures of authority lacking in compassion. True to form, Spielberg elects to not show the space creatures until the end of the picture, but their presentation as they emerge from the beautiful mother ship delivers far beyond the audience’s expectations. In Spielberg’s sci-fi fantasies, beings from outer space are depicted as heavenly entities, messengers from God. In Close Encounters, E.T. and A.I., celestial beings are angelic, incapable of the trivial-mindedness that defines the lifestyles of so many human beings in Spielberg’s films. Most representative of this recurring idea is one of the closing shots in E.T.: as the title character’s ship departs, it leaves behind a rainbow. The premise of Spielberg’s revved-up, knockabout comedy 1941 revolves around a prolonged misunderstanding, but unlike Close Encounters, the failure to communicate is a theme that’s lost in the movie’s overabundance of one-note characters and interweaving storylines. Spielberg’s next project, the exhilarating Raiders of the Lost Ark, is every bit as kinetic as 1941, but its energy is much more focused. Raiders also gives us back the reluctant “everyman” hero, but this time it’s in the guise of an adventurer/archeologist named Indiana Jones. An adult male who has never really grown up, the character of Peter Pan also figures into the character of Indy, as it does with many of Spielberg’s male heroes, such as Roy Neary in Close Encounters, Pete Sandich in Always and, well, Peter Pan himself in Hook. (This is usually part of the opening passages in a character arch that sees the male hero having to eventually come to terms with adulthood.) As he hops around the world in search of treasure, fighting off his enemies with a mean crack of his bullwhip, Indy’s grave-robbing exploits may seem romantic on the surface, but Harrison Ford’s diverting performance really locks on the character’s weariness: it’s all just one damned perilous journey after another. Unlike, say, James Bond, the character of Indiana Jones isn’t infallible: he’s often shy around the ladies, hates snakes and needs specs to read. (Indy’s stubble separates him even further from the bulk of conventional action heroes.) In the third chapter of the Indiana Jones trilogy, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, we also learn that Indy has a problematic relationship with his father, Dr. Henry Jones (Sean Connery). The theme of miscommunication resurfaces several times as father and son banter back and forth in this installment, and the pain Indy exhibits when failing to reach out to his father seems to approximate Spielberg’s own frustrations about his deficient pop. Spielberg deals with his feelings on that subject more overtly in The Last Crusade than any of his other movies, though the well-wishing embrace between father and son during the latter’s wedding in The Color Purple—a perfunctory gesture that appears halting and awkward—is probably the most anguished visualization of the idea of familial division. But Spielberg’s most personal film to date, E.T., deals with feelings of a son removed from his father in the most expressive, poetic manner. In several ways, E.T. could be the middle chapter in a trilogy that also features the book-ending sci-fi fantasies Close Encounters and A.I. The blinding white light that E.T. disappears into at the film’s finale recalls a similarly brilliant glow that the aliens emerge from in Close Encounters, and predicts the very first shot of the robotic boy in A.I. Alienation is one of the major themes of all three pictures, and it is the divine forces from outer space that offer solace to those that suffer from it. E.T. varies a bit because the human’s cosmic savior is also an alienated entity, left behind on Earth by his extra-terrestrial brethren. Spielberg uses a less-severe photographic aspect ratio in E.T., which creates a more intimate atmosphere. (The film is largely shot from the level of the young boy and his similarly undersized extra-terrestrial companion.) E.T. is as much a lost soul as Elliot, and shares more than a few similarities to other Spielbergean heroes that find themselves adrift in a land they’re unfamiliar with. E.T. is probably one of the most beautifully photographed Spielberg films next to The Color Purple, and Allen Daviau’s camerawork on both films has a conspicuous luster, a dreamy haze reminiscent of classic Disney pictures. In E.T., the story of Peter Pan is once again acknowledged as Elliot’s mother reads aloud to her daughter from the book Peter and Wendy, while E.T., crouched in the closet, listens attentively. The passage that tells us to clap our hands if we believe in fairies isn’t far from what Spielberg asks us to do with E.T.; the title character isn’t unlike an imp or gnome, and we root him on, clapping our hands enthusiastically because we believe in him as a flesh and blood character. The character of Elliot can be seen as a young fatherless and friendless Steven; the figure of E.T. is representative of everything the director yearned for as a kid, but was denied. During much of his childhood, Spielberg would watch the skies, fantasizing about an alien being coming to visit him. Those fantasies were the genesis of many heartfelt pictures, and the guiding force behind a long and distinguished career. Spielberg is still watching the skies, and we are happy to watch right along with him. © Copyright 2007 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.
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