Spielberg the Serious - Steven, overview of director's work

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Sept, 2001 by Christopher Sharrett

FOR MANY FILM FANS, Steven Spielberg is to the commercial motion picture industry what Bill Gates is to computers. The analogy may seem cruel and exaggerated, but it's not without foundation. Spielberg's name is becoming synonymous with the contemporary cinema, at least as much because of his numerous enterprises and business affiliations as his actual filmmaking. His name seems to be everywhere. On the DVD reissue of David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia," an interview with Spielberg replaces one with director Martin Scorsese that accompanied its 1993 rerelease on VHS home video. Spielberg is looked to for an imprimatur to all sorts of film endeavors, indeed to tell moviegoers if a particular work is worth their time or deserving of a place in motion picture history.

With his latest effort, "A.I.," a science fiction project he inherited from the late Stanley Kubrick, one of the few remaining symbols of high seriousness of the American cinema, Spielberg is enhancing further his furrowed-brow bona fides. Of course, all of this is a fairly new wrinkle to Spielberg's career, but the trajectory of his work tells us much about the new Hollywood.

Spielberg's beginnings were fairly respectable. The TV movie "Duel" and his first feature "Sugarland Express" introduced the director as an important, if not formidable, representative of the Movie Brat generation. His early work was steeped in genre conventions, but prepared to push the envelope a little--"Sugarland Express" was among the first pictures to offer a critique of the media. All this would change within a couple of years. His breakthrough "Jaws," together with George Lucas' "Star Wars," established the modern Hollywood blockbuster--films based on special effects and a few easy emotions that would guarantee a big draw, many spin-offs, and lots of merchandise. The idea was a real boon to the industry, as the old studio system crumbled and was gradually absorbed by transnational corporations. It caught on to the extent that little Hollywood fare today is produced outside of the blockbuster ethic. Indeed, "theme park movies" is the common adage associated with what goes on at the multiplex.

Spielberg films like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and especially "E.T." solidified the formula, as the director pilfered old matinee serials, pumping up tried-and-true formulas with state-of-the-art movie technology, and, above all, going for the emotional jugular with the goal of leaving not a dry eye in the house. The recipe has been so successful, with audience expectations appropriately lowered to imbibe it routinely with steady repetition, that it could be said Spielberg was the new Hollywood's golden boy, his instructions becoming almost a manual for any director hoping to get his work marketed by one of the big media outfits. With all of this accomplished, Spielberg had other fish to fry.

A crucial turning point came with "Schindler's List," the picture that forced everyone to acknowledge Spielberg, the ultimate commercial schlockmeister, as not just serious artist, but committed citizen and activist. "Schindler's List," released around the time of the completion of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, rode the wave of new Holocaust scholarship. Spielberg then became involved with a string of Holocaust-related projects, including a series of interviews with survivors. Critics fell over each other praising "Schindler's List" as the public's introduction to the Holocaust via cinema. This may be very true, although the troublesome assumption, not unfounded, is that people know of historical events only if they stumble on them at the movies.

"Saving Private Ryan" was the cinematic preamble to the entire cultural hubbub flowing from Tom Brokaw's book, The Greatest Generation. Spielberg's film as much as Brokaw's book looks back nostalgically to the period of the 1940s, a time when the nation supposedly had a stable moral center and everybody agreed about what was good in America. "Saving Private Ryan" became part of a cultural project begun in the Reagan years to have the nation forget Vietnam and Watergate. The Greatest Generation's greatest asset was that it was not the 1960s generation--the generation of the counterculture and youth revolt that reminded the Greatest of its bigotry and knee-jerk reaction that sent its children to die for the holy war against communism.

As for "Saving Private Ryan" as a film, there is nothing about it, including its much-discussed bloody prologue at Omaha Beach, that can't be found in other movies, and often with better moral and aesthetic complexion. The tradition of the anti-war film, the sense of war's horror and absurdity, is meaningless to Spielberg's project. Here, war is glorious, if costly, able to consecrate the national project, remix the melting pot, and mend the social fabric. But no one dared say a word on this score as the movie was lauded at the award shows and in the columns.

In "A.I.," a doom-laden film about a world where robots are replacing people as cities drown under the greenhouse effect, he tries for a new level of seriousness by melding the cynical nihilism of Kubrick's icy visual style with his own trademark mawkish sentimentality. A child robot named David (Haley Joel Osmet) is purchased by a yuppie couple (in Spielberg, as in so much of the new Hollywood, the middle class survives even the apocalypse) bereaved by the loss of their boy. When doctors find the medical miracle to revive the boy, David is quietly consigned to a suburban scrapheap. What follows is a prolonged retelling of "Pinocchio," complete with incessant postmodern citations of the fairytale. David, it seems, is programmed to feel emotions, and he is distraught at his abandonment by Mommy, determined for two and a half hours to find the secret that will transform him into a real boy so Mommy will take him back.