Steven Spielberg

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Joshua Hirsch

Considering their authorship by a variety of screenwriters and their mass appeal, Spielberg's films display a striking degree of thematic and stylistic unity. In Spielberg's world, the highest ideal is childlike innocence--embodied by children themselves, endangered by monsters and villains, defended by heroes, reclaimed by grown men, and symbolized by flying. Human relationships in the films are based on the model of the family broken and mended. Emotions tend to the extremes of terror and wonder. Stylistically, Spielberg's talent for visual composition is unsurpassed. With his embrace of high technology, his blending of genre and art cinema traditions, his prodigious quotation of other films, and his increasing concern with themes of vision and artifice, Spielberg is a consummate postmodernist. During the 1990s, his thematics and stylistics have tended to become unified under the banner of excessive, if sometimes historically justified, violence.

While Spielberg's directorial career alone would guarantee him a place in the history of mass culture, he has also made his mark as a film producer, studio mogul, and civic personality. He formed the highly successful production company, Amblin Entertainment, in 1984, producing or executive producing such films as Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), An American Tail (1986), and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and such television series as Tiny Toon Adventures and ER.

In 1994, Spielberg launched both DreamWorks and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. DreamWorks SKG, co-founded with film executive Jeffrey Katzenberg and music mogul David Geffen as the first new major Hollywood studio since the 1930s, produces film, television, music, and computer-based entertainment. With Schindler's List, Spielberg publicly reclaimed his Jewish heritage and proclaimed his civic ideals. Seeded with $6 million from his Schindler's List earnings, the Shoah Foundation set out to videotape 50,000 testimonies by Holocaust survivors around the world, to catalogue them, and to make them available for research and education via a sophisticated interactive computer system.

Thematically, economically, and ideologically, Spielberg's truest predecessor was Walt Disney. For many, he represents Hollywood at its best. For some, he represents it at its worst. His films have been criticized as both infantile and manipulative--essentially as theme park thrill rides. His adherence to a liberal political agenda has been accused of masking a retrograde paternalism in both his films and his business dealings. The new Hollywood he helped create has been viewed as the embodiment of the most greedy and destructive tendencies of capitalism. Even his Shoah Foundation has been criticized for Hollywood-izing history. A genius without, as Kael put it, "a mind," Spielberg embodies the contradictions of late twentieth-century American mass culture.