The Man Whose Name was Story

In some jobs, it's hard to draw a line between personal and professional life. But for the artist, the distinction is hopelessly blurred, even for Steven Spielberg, as seen in 2022's The Fabelmans. This fascinating, loose autobiography not only explores Spielberg's motives and perspective on filmmaking, it raises questions about the tension between the communicative and the creative aspects of art itself.

There were a few things I already knew, just from being a film nerd. I knew The Greatest Show on Earth was the first movie to have a big impact on Spielberg as a child, and I'd long ago heard about his meeting with John Ford and Ford's advice about the placement of the horizon in a shot. Casting David Lynch as John Ford was a stroke of genius.

Those are two events that bookend the film and in between is a family drama and a teen drama. The teen drama, about Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), Steven's stand-in, attending high school in California is by itself like an exceptional John Hughes film. These teenagers have a lot more life in them than the ones in Spielberg's West Side Story.

The family drama preceding the high school section reminded me of Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, another fictionalised autobiography by a famous director. Bergman, too, used an ensemble cast to show how a complicated and tormented family influenced the young filmmaker. Bergman portrayed two father figures--one passionately committed to creating art and the other committed to abusive, puritanical austerity--to show a contrast between someone who valued art and someone who valued stiff moral discipline. A somewhat similar dynamic is portrayed between Sammy's parents, Burt and Mitzi, played by Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, respectively. Their relationship is much gentler, though, and although Burt dismisses filmmaking as an impractical hobby throughout the film, he never becomes a tyrant about it and Sammy's creative talents are allowed to grow.

Where the contrast becomes a dramatic issue is in Mitzi and Burt's relationship to each other. Sammy's sister, Anne (Julia Butters), at one point explains to her brother that Mitzi has always had to suffer for never being able to equal the genius of her husband--Burt is a pioneering engineer in computer technology (Spielberg's real life father, Arnold Spielberg, co-designed one of the first family computers in 1959). But perhaps what Anne actually reveals to Sammy is that she doesn't consider her mother to be as brilliant as her father. Is Mitzi's problem that she's not as talented as Burt or that no-one can see that she is? That's a little ambiguity that could torment someone throughout their lives and knowing this does a lot to explain Mitzi's erratic personality.

Mitzi was a concert pianist and, at one point, Sammy's uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch) explains that she had the talent to be one of the greats.

Boris makes only a brief appearance in the film but it's one of the most memorable I've seen in years. Spielberg sets it up by having Mitzi dream about her dead mother warning her of Boris' visit. It turns out he's worked in the film industry and was a lion tamer, a made-to-order idol for young Sammy, still a fan of The Greatest Show on Earth. But Boris scares the crap out of the kid and praise should go to Hirsch's weirdly aggressive performance. Spielberg keeps cutting to him at the start of some sudden, violent gesture. He tears his shirt and we're as bewildered as Sammy is, unless you know, as Boris explains, this is a Jewish custom for grieving ("Kriah"). But the really scary thing Boris does is warn Sammy how his life will always be torn apart by the tension between the love of his family and the love of his art.

And some people might say, "Really? Steven Spielberg's coming the tormented, obsessive artist now?" Well, that's just it. Art might look like an obsession from the outside. But as Sammy gets older, he finds art kind of re-writes his DNA. The things he does with film are sometimes as mysterious to him as involuntary muscle movement, yet they can have tremendous impact. There are two magnificent examples--one being a home movie of a camping trip Sammy films and edits, the other being a film he makes about a high school trip to the beach.

In the first example, as Sammy stays up late editing the film, he's startled to notice something about his father's best friend, played by Seth Rogen. What Sammy sees compels him to edit the film further until he's made something that shows him a clear, undeniable narrative. When he finally shows it to someone else, it has devastating consequences for his family. And yet, as certain as the characters are, it's by no means certain to us--was there a problem, or did Sammy create one? Did reality shape his perspective, or did his perspective shape reality?

Lest we think this is a fluke, the film follows it up with the high school beach trip. Sammy makes a film in which he portrays a student positively for reasons he cannot explain to himself. When pushed, he says, the camera sees what it sees. Then he says maybe he just wanted the person to be nice to him. The reality is, he doesn't know. One could theorise that it's part of a pattern with Spielberg--he's always been more interested in sexualising masculinity. The women in his movies are typically kind of asexual, his blockbusters standing as a massive hole in the very concept of "male gaze". But even if that's partially behind it, it's not enough to explain the whole decision. Whatever the reason, it has rapid and dramatic consequences and changes the lives of people around him.

I never would have expected such a daringly raw statement from Steven Spielberg. I'm not entirely sure he intended it, though. What he did do, I think, is let the music take him where it would. Lucky for us.

Twitter Sonnet #1656

A crystal letter travelled over time.
With faded petals, flowers grew again.
At dawn begins another daunting climb.
With hearts as small as rabbits pull the pin.
The crumbs replaced the sheets and sunk the beds.
Becoming food was voted best to do.
You have to put completed brains in heads.
A sack of flour sates the thirstless crew.
The cavern eye could watch the total town.
Desire passed beyond the vaunted gorge.
So lonely damsels hide a constant frown.
And fires dim beneath the freezing forge.
Belief reflects along the glass of sight.
The sky was cut behind the vivid kite.

Rubble Rumble

I finally saw 2021's West Side Story last night. I think it's better than the 1961 film, primarily because Tony Kushner's screenplay cleared up many of the problems I had with the first adaptation. And, of course, Steven Spielberg's unrivalled instincts for telling a story with a camera are always a boon to a production. But this film has its own problems and, while I'd say it's not bad, it falls well short of the goal it sets for itself.

Poor Steven Spielberg seems like he's consistently failing to get himself back into the zeitgeist. His trouble is that, like a lot of the old guard in Hollywood, he spends too much time listening to younger people in Hollywood, the kinds of people who think specific bubbles of internet discourse represent the public appetites as a whole. If the U.S. public really were on the crusade Twitter makes it seem, West Side Story would be the perfect tale for our times. The story of racial tensions in lower class New York would be crucially relevant. But even the people who passionately push such dialogue aren't, I suspect, much interested in contemplating ideas in that arena as much as they are in using them as cudgels.

The misconception of public appetite diminishes the screenplay a bit, too, leading to awkward moments like dialogue early on between Tony (Anson Elgort) and Doc (Rita Moreno) in which the elderly Puerto Rican woman proclaims to him and the audience that he doesn't hate Puerto Ricans. We shouldn't need her to tell us that but those obsessed with the ever elusive phantom of internalised -isms would need that box checked.

Moreno gives a fine performance but changing Doc from an elderly Jewish man to an elderly Puerto Rican woman creates too many problems. It doesn't make sense that the Jets would use her shop as a base and it's part of the reason the attempted rape scene doesn't work.

Why would a frail old Puerto Rican woman be able to stop a gang of white guys from raping a Puerto Rican girl? The resolution of the scene in the 1961 film strained credibility, too, but the Jewish man would be more likely to be taken as a respected authority by the Jets, as much as they can respect authority. He also provided interesting perspective by comparing the Jets' problems with the ones he faced in Nazi Germany.

The whole tone of the attempted gang rape scene doesn't work, though, because I think Spielberg just didn't have the stomach for it. Anita (Ariana DeBose) too quickly and easily gets to a safe position of dignity and defiance than such a situation would allow her.

One of the improvements in the 2021 film is that the Jets have much clearer motivation. Spielberg establishes it right a way with a sweeping crane shot starting from rubble, passing over a demolition sign, and then establishing a whole neighbourhood being torn down. Anyone who thinks about the rampant gentrification in the U.S. to-day would see the relevance right away. The Jets, who shortly thereafter make their first appearance, are no longer in the bright clean colours of the 1961 film, but are dressed in dingy, greasy hand-me-downs.

You can see why they feel cut off from this world and desperate to form and defend their own community.

The romance between Tony and Maria (Rachel Zegler) works much better. Kushner irons out the nonsense in their dialogue about Maria wanting Tony to stop the rumble. She no longer demands it of him and sees his point when he says it's probably impossible. When suddenly he insists he's going to do it, they've believably worked themselves into an optimistic delusion.

I'm not a fan of Anson Elgort but Spielberg works a lot of magic with him. Spielberg clearly seems more interested in him than in Zegler. With pans and cutting, Spielberg adds to Elgort's muscularity to flattering effect when he climbs the fire escape or just leans provocatively against a wall. Spielberg seems similarly taken with Lieutenant Schrank (Corey Stoll) who might be my favourite character in the film.

Rachel Zegler never comes out of the shadow of Natalie Wood and I don't even think Natalie Wood was that great in the 1961 film. Zegler's Maria is still like a vague idea of a pretty girl. Again, the insightful poetry Shakespeare gave to the dialogue of Romeo and Juliet is sorely missed.

Ariana DeBose is sexy as Anita and her grief when she learns about Bernardo (David Alvarez) is gripping. She's not so effective in her other big scene, the attempted rape, but I actually blame Spielberg more for that.

The songs are still good. The dance choreography isn't bad.

West Side Story is available on Disney+.

Time of the Goonies

I didn't choose to watch 1985's The Goonies to honour the recently deceased Richard Donner. Like many Steven Spielberg produced movies of the '80s, it was really co-directed by Spielberg (Sean Astin apparently confirms this as regards The Goonies in his autobiography). It's hard to believe Mr. Schmaltzy, Squeaky Clean Spielberg of to-day ever made anything this raunchy. But it was the '80s, when filmmakers were interested in depicting kids the way kids actually are, crude sex jokes and all. It's a fun adventure film but among the weakest of Spielberg's '80s output. Then again, being among the weakest of Spielberg's '80s films is kind of like being one of the smallest titans.

I really don't think I'd seen the movie since the '80s. When I saw the first season of Stranger Things a few years ago, I made a mental note to go back and watch Goonies, but I didn't find that mental note until last night while perusing Netflix. I was recommending movies to be shown in class at the junior high school where I work in Nara Prefecture, Japan, and I was coming up with a list last night. I was going to include Goonies but now I realise I can't. The jokes about suicide and drugs would disqualify it. I'm astonished to find the film is still rated G on Netflix.

All the fat jokes about Chunk (Jeff Cohen) would seem like they'd make the movie deeply problematic in to-day's political climate in the West. It's some of the best stuff in the movie, though, and Jeff Cohen's comedic timing is razor sharp. I feel like Spielberg or Donner had him watch a bunch of Abbott and Costello.

Sean Astin is pretty good, too. That inhaler of his works like Sherlock Holmes' pipe or Columbo's cigar. It adds some kind of mystery to his sincere, straight-forward delivery. The movie has a real heartbeat in his conceptualisation of the group as "Goonies" and his building reverence for One-Eyed Willy. The climax has a pretty amazing, albeit historically inaccurate, pirate ship but it's Sean Astin that really sells it.

A wheel on a ship from 1635?

I love the gang of hoodlums chasing the kids, too, they have a real comic book vibe to them. I like Andy (Kerri Green) and her short tennis skirt she wears for the whole movie but they ought to have gone all the way making her Sean Astin's love interest instead of defaulting her with Josh Brolin.

The Goonies is available on Netflix.

I think I only saw it once or twice when I was a kid. I have stronger memories of playing the second Nintendo game over and over, though it bore pretty much no resemblance to the film.

Receding Spielberg

Word came yesterday Steven Spielberg was handing over directing duties on the next Indiana Jones movie. He seemed so determined to make it last year. Maybe he's seen he wisdom of Tarantino's "Ten and done" plan. Maybe he listened to Shia Labouf and admitted Kingdom of the Crystal Skull wasn't up to quality standards. It's sad to think that'll be the last Indiana Jones film to involve Spielberg or Lucas. On the one hand, it's admirable Spielberg can be honest with himself. On the other hand, who can possibly replace him? James Mangold is supposedly the top contender. I haven't seen Ford versus Ferrari. I thought Logan was good, I wasn't a big fan of Kate and Leopold. Not sure if I've seen any of his other movies.

To compensate for Spielberg's unique talent for blending action, humour, romance, and horror into a slick narrative you need a great director, not a good director. The closest you could find in the younger generation would be Christopher Nolan, Denis Villeneuve, Robert Rodriguez, or Taika Waititi. The best choice would be Quentin Tarantino for a pulpy adventure film with gruesome face melting or beating hearts being pulled out of chests. Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom are both, at heart, pulp fictions. But it would never happen, even if Tarantino didn't want to make his last film more personal: there's too much enmity between him and Disney.

I wonder how close they are to casting a young Indiana. A new young Indiana, I mean.

Hopefully David Koepp's out, too.

It's ironic that these great movies that seem most suited to serialisation like the Indiana Jones films somehow resist being serialised. Well, at least it's doing better than Ghostbusters, I suppose.

Twitter Sonnet #1332

A turtle's knee was bent beneath the shell.
A running knight commands a cart to stop.
A covered sea displays a coral bell.
A speeding horse dismays the donkey cop.
A symbol sound could mean a million things.
A wobbly wheel could turn in racing winds.
A perfect cut creates toupees from bangs.
A shady bandage grades the thing it mends.
A walking talk was leggy 'fore the dance.
A boiled egg was runny for the pan.
A lengthy short displaced the shortened pants.
A pumpkin sauce could ne'er replace a tan.
A dogged wind destroyed the fragile tent.
A breeze condensed to ice and peppermint.

Indiana Jones and the Marriage of the Green Screen

With recent talk of another Indiana Jones film beginning production next year I thought it might be a good time to revisit 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I hadn't actually seen it since the first time I saw it on opening night in 2008. I was disappointed with it at the time but wondered if future viewings might improve my impression. However, although I've probably watched every film in the original trilogy at least five times in the past decade, I never quite got around to a second viewing of Crystal Skull. But I noticed it was included free with Amazon Prime so I thought, what the hell. I even got a bit excited, thinking, without all the burden of hype and legacy, maybe I'll watch it and find it's actually a really fun action adventure film. Unfortunately, while I do think it has some good qualities, age seems to have made it even worse. It's not that it's a bad Indiana Jones film, I would argue it's an anti-Indiana Jones film, its ideas and motives in direct opposition to the philosophy fundamental to the first three films. This might actually have made for an interesting, if unpleasant, movie if the filmmakers were truly intent on trashing their own films but the result instead is something as muddled intellectually as it is in its visuals and effects.

If I had to choose the worst problem in the film, I would say it's Steven Spielberg's lack of desire to make it. When I saw the clip of him from Comic Con talking about how all his life he made the movies he wanted to make but the fourth Indiana Jones film was going to be completely for the fans I knew there was going to be trouble. The problem with making art for someone else's tastes is that they're not your tastes--in other words, you have no idea what you're doing. And quotes I've seen from Spielberg indicate this is a problem that infected production all down the line.

Wikipedia quotes him as saying about the alien skulls at the centre of the film, "I sympathize with people who didn't like the MacGuffin because I never liked the MacGuffin." Apparently it was something George Lucas insisted on. So I guess Spielberg went ahead and shot scenes about this thing he didn't care that much about. Is it any wonder audiences had trouble caring much about it too?

Why is it so hard to care about the aliens in Crystal Skull? Probably for the same reason the return of The X-Files has felt so limp. Somewhere along the line, the aliens that seemed so cool and mysterious in the 80s and 90s lost their mystique. I wonder if Crystal Skull might have made more headway if the aliens had been more like 50s movie aliens, since 50s Sci Fi was supposedly the model for this film. If that was they case, they ought to have gone for a genuinely bizarre design like the insects from Quatermass and the Pit or the brains from Fiend without a Face. Maybe not make them exactly like one of those aliens but apply the same basic philosophy in creating new aliens--that is, use elements of earthly biology in truly weird, reconfigured ways. Maybe then the aliens might have had something approaching the effective horror of the Ark or the Thuggee cultists. But the main problem with the MacGuffin is its lack of a thematic relationship with the protagonists.

A MacGuffin is supposedly an arbitrary thing that's more important because people are interested in it than for any intrinsic quality it possesses. But the best MacGuffins demonstrate this isn't so. In Hitchcock's The 39 Steps, the identity of the MacGuffin goes unknown for most of the film, adding to the sense of anxiety for much of the story, and when the MacGuffin is revealed its clever in a satisfying way. The MacGuffins in the first three Indiana Jones films all tie in to the protagonist's story in a meaningful way. Partly this is because of how much they inherit as religious artefacts--the Holy Grail's significance is even spelled out explicitly from Marcus in a line about how it's "the search for the divine in all of us." This easily ties in with the father/son story and each character's preoccupation with whether or not he's been good for the other.

Attempts to echo this story are present in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull but without any depth. Indy (Harrison Ford) doesn't even know Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) is his son for most of the film and when he does the most we get out of it is a corny reversal of his advice that Mutt do what he loves even if it means dropping out of school. Is this meant to tie into the climax where Irina (Cate Blanchett) is killed by her desire for too much knowledge? With the idea of knowledge being the nature of the alien's treasure, it's kind of hard to make the usual theme of the perils of avarice make sense.

There are a few funny moments where Indy gets so caught up trying to piece together the puzzle with Irina that Mutt has to intervene with an action sequence but all these scenes do is make Indy seem slightly scatter brained. There's certainly no connexion to an idea of too much knowledge being dangerous. It's nothing compared to the idea of Indy potentially taking the Sankara stones in the second film for "fortune and glory" and causing the death of a village because of his failure to believe in their power. In addition to the widely maligned artificiality of the film's overuse of cgi, the fact that Indy himself never has the sense of internal conflict he has in the previous films makes the whole movie feel more like a long DVD bonus feature for an Indiana Jones movie than like an Indiana Jones movie in its own right. There seems to be an inherent resistance to the idea of giving any of the protagonists any truly negative character trait.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull also has a very different attitude about sex compared to its predecessors. It's certainly the least sexual entry in the series with no hint of physical chemistry between Ford and Karen Allen. The worst scene in the movie is their marriage at the end which, in opposition to the James Bond inspired format of a new girlfriend for every movie of the first three films, seems to insist on Indy's moral obligation to settle down with the mother of his child, a dull enough intended idea for an adventure film, given the turgidity of creepy orthodoxy for the unintended lack of chemistry between the stars. Allen had long since lost the feistiness that made her effective in Lost Ark and her forced smiles to emulate that lost spark are consequently depressing. Her big moment being the plan to drive off a cliff with the boat/car, one of the film's most gratuitously false cgi moments, emphasises her lack of impact in the film.

I feel like maybe, in one of the script drafts, there was a plan to use Irina to make a commentary about sexual repression. The film's single most sexual moment, which may not have even been intended to be sexual, is the moment where army ants pile up to reach her where she's dangling from a tree and she crushes one between her thighs, causing an improbable quantity of ropey goo to fly towards the camera. I suspect the army ants were inspired by the 1954 Charlton Heston film The Naked Jungle in which Heston's character is a South American plantation owner who must overcome his conservative disinterest in his sexually experienced mail order bride, played by Eleanor Parker, while a mass of army ants threatens to overwhelm his land. The concept of nature overriding starchy, patriarchal morality is clear enough even if the film didn't have "naked" in the title.

In Crystal Skull, John Hurt's character, a professor named Oxley, has seemingly lost his mind and ramblingly quotes literature, including a masque by John Milton commonly referred to as Comus. The masque is about a virginal girl who's abducted by Comus, a mythical being and son of Bacchus and Circe, who tries to tempt her to break her chastity and join in with his animal headed retinue. If we take the biblical implication of "knowing" as sexual experience maybe at some point, on some level, the ascetic Soviet officer Irina was tempted by Indy's decadent Capitalist sexuality. The line Oxley quotes is from the beginning of the masque, spoken by Comus' moral adversary, a mysterious "Attending Spirit" who accepts the duty of protecting the girl and her brothers from going astray.

Yet some there be that by due steps aspire
To lay their just hands on that Golden Key
That ope's the Palace of Eternity

The lines would seem to refer to good people finding their way to heaven. One might read a sexual connotation into the lines with the key being a phallic symbol and the Palace of Eternity being an orgasm. Well, it makes more sense than the words being a clue for Indy to bash an Incan carving with a rock.

Just what are Irina's motives? Spielberg's instincts with the villains were again leading him in the wrong direction. He felt he couldn't make the Nazis adventure villains after Schindler's List, presumably choosing the Soviets because he felt less personally attached, again insuring that the audience felt less personally attached. Certainly Stalin was no lightweight when it came to perpetrating atrocities--there's a fascinating and horrifying story and collection of photographs from Masha Gessen and Misha Friedman in The New Yorker to-day about Soviet Gulags. But Kingdom of the Crystal Skull never quite seems to know its position regarding the U.S.S.R. The first line Indy has is "Russians" as he stands up among a group of Soviets pointing guns at him, the line an oddly flat footed place holder for the more strident "Nazis. I hate these guys." The film also has to negotiate with the Red Scare, which the film reminds us wasn't limited to Hollywood and Joseph McCarthy but was an hysteria on American university campuses as well.

So the movie has to make the Soviets villains and deal with the fact that the Soviets were the subject of irrational fears in the U.S. all while, for some reason, tying neither of these things into the main plot. It isn't that the Nazis were more obviously evil but that the motives of the Nazis were easier to tie into the MacGuffins of the first and third films. Hitler's interest in the occult and possession of the Old Testament power of the Ark has far more interesting thematic implications than Irina wanting to harness alien technology for psychic warfare, a motive that isn't even talked about very much.

Anyway, I'll keep an open mind about the next film. Hopefully Spielberg has learned his lesson.