Spielberg, The Writer (Patreon)

It is often said that film is “the medium of the director.”

After all, they are the ones who oversee a project’s development. Who guide a vast array of departments through pre-production, direct the actors on set, and then help the editors and effects people craft a singular, final vision that will unfurl onscreen. So much depends on their ideas, their choices, their yesses, their nos, and ultimately, their final calls and concessions. This is why people argue that directors are “the auteur,” or the author of a given film. But I do not care to argue much over that notion. Because even if it is true, we also know that is a half truth. Because just as important to the creative final product are the scores of craftspeople, producers, actors who do the tangible things that bring it to life. And as I’ve spent a decade plus arguing, it is especially true of the writers, who can solve so, so, so, so many future production headaches first by getting the dramatic essence correct on the page.

Steven Spielberg has always existed at an interesting fulcrum within that scope. For one, he is inarguably the most successful filmmaker of all time. His run from the late 70’s to the 90’s was so untouchable that his name not only became synonymous with “good direction,” it became synonymous with direction itself. To wit, when I was kid even all the surly working class Boston dads in the neighborhood didn’t ask if I wanted to be “a directah,” they asked if I was “going to be the next Spielberg.” The answer is of course, no of course I won’t, and probably no one will, but the point of such adoration stands. As a filmmaker, much has been made of his unique skill set; the secret oners, the way he can effectively reframe a scene within itself, the kinetic sense of action, and the emotional clarity and capacity for fireworks. But for all those skills…

There is the deeper question of “voice.”

It is here where it is most important to note the way Spielberg has been rightly defined by collaboration. For it’s impossible to imagine his films without the music of John Williams (and you can debate Spielberg, but Williams is definitely the greatest film composer of all time). Not to mention his longtime producing partnership with industry powerhouse Kathleen Kennedy. Even the look of his films have been defined from stretch to stretch by greats like Vilmos Zsigmond, Douglas Slocombe, Dean Cundey, and most certainly Janusz Kaminski for the last half of all of it.  And somehow the least talked about figure is his relationship with editor Michael Kahn, whom he has been working with since freaking 1977. But within that collaborative artistry, there is the question of writers in his stable. Some of his pulpier affairs brought in the talents of Lawrence Kasdan, the great Melissa Matthison, David Koepp, and in the last half of the career it’s been Tony Kushner of all people, who has brought a more philosophical, reflexive quality to his work. I could take the time to tell you about all the singular qualities of the artists mentioned in this paragraph. And how much they truly add up to something in the service of Spielberg. But, again, I want to zero in on that question of voice.

You see his work get called “sappy” a lot, but I’ve always founds that to be part of an odd dynamic. Because Spielberg has always had an innate capacity for capturing the feelings of wonder, awe, and terror. For all this, he is the director who is probably the best at showing you his exact emotional intention with a given scene. Which brings us once again to the “Spielberg Fan Arc,” which I often write about (but don’t worry, I won't go into huge detail with again). The short version is that people growing loving his work for that exact clarity, then they start discovering the joys of nuance, thus they shy away from what they feel is “manipulative” (but probably just because they’re afraid to show emotion), then hopefully come back when they realize these overt emotional expressions don’t mean his movies can’t add up to something just complex. His films are often infinitely more thoughtful on the thematic level than he is often given credit for.

Thus, we are mostly just left with the subject matter in and of itself. Which often features a whole lot of dad stuff, disconnect, divorce, abandonment, and the unbridled joys and fears of escape. But what happens when you get really, really close to those instincts on the screenplay level? What happens when Spielberg is really, really setting pen to page and executing on his most central ideas? Because, sure, we’ve seen the way he’s contributed to stories he develops, whether it’s Indiana Jones, Goonies, or the odd question of how to credit his work on Poltergeist, but what about the times he is truly a “writer / director” on his film?

It is here that you realize in his entire career, there are only three films where he is the credited screenwriter on a film that he also directed. Those films are Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Stanley Kubrick-developed film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and the most recent entry of The Fabelmans. And as it so happens, all three of these films are deep explorations of those common themes of parentage, lost children, and feelings of abandonment. And thus, it would be easy to apply these films directly to the quality of an autobiography. But please know that I’m not going to be scouring details in a research-y kind of way. I honestly don’t like approaching films that way. Instead, I like taking the film itself as the text and digging deep into themes from there. And more importantly, I like examining how those themes may change throughout the journey of a career. And with Spielberg?

Doing so provides a fascinating examination of one of our most popular artists.

PART ONE - I NEED A CLOSER ENCOUNTER

Like many of you, when I was young, my parents got divorced. Also like many of you, this had an inevitable impact on my life, though I didn’t quite understand how. My brother is a bunch of years older than me and had more time with my dad, so I think he felt the sharpness of things more acutely. But I was young enough that I didn’t quite understand a lot of things that were happening, I more understood the sea change feeling of it all. But (I thought) it didn’t have a big impact. Because my method of dealing with it? Was through disconnection. Denial. Insulation. Avoidance. And ultimately, escape. Because the truth is even before we cognitively understand the events of our lives, we often develop complex emotional architectures - a kind of hard wiring or prime directive - and we develop it whether we like it or not. And they become our way of dealing with difficult things. We do this because we *think* those adaptations are keeping us safe…

And often, we are wrong.

* * *

It begins with trying to navigate through a sandstorm.

We see figures of unknown authority, coming into a desert and trying to find something. Immediately there is confusion as we see those figures trying to translate French into Spanish and English, all often mushing together. We realize immediately that this is going to be a film about trying to communicate with each other. And soon, we realize it will be about trying to communicate with the unknowable. Because within that sandstorm is the discovery of old war planes that were first reported missing in 1945. But now they are miraculously found in the desert thirty years later? “Where’s the pilot?” one asks. What place have these men disappeared into? When asking locals for details of what happened, we are told a simple thing, “the sun came out last night, he said it sang to him.” There’s a kind of poetic license to this, but soon we will gather that this sun was the lights of alien ships. And the song they sing? An anthem, a beacon, a handshake of hope. All of it feels in the realm of something more spiritual. Or to put it in more secular terms: universal. And this will be the spirit that endures.

One of the most remarkable things about Close Encounters of the Third Kind is just how much it is driven by visuals. Which makes sense for a film about witnessing. Just scene after scene of odd discoveries like this, often brought to life cleanly and clearly with incredible practical and visual effects (even now). And when it comes to the dialogue? It is the opposite: dense, technical, and purposefully laborious. In a way, it’s a film about trusting your eyes, but needing your ears to make sense of it all... Or maybe not. Because at the center of all of this is also the fear of the unknown. Or at least fear of an unknown intention. Why are these alien visitors here? What are they doing? Are they going to hurt me? Really, that’s the only dramatic function the film ever uses. Spaceships show up repeatedly. People watch odd things happen. It could be scary or okay. Should they be afraid or should they follow? And the ones who do are often fueled by some insatiable need to know, all symbolized in the way people are being brought to the tower. And the main point of conflict (besides the obstacles in their way) is “what are they being drawn away from?”

Enter the portrait of a family. We meet Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary, who is already a distracted parent with his head stuffed into a paper. But here we also see how Spielberg’s acumen for depicting actual families is there right from the beginning. We have energetic, rambunctious kids (“now, let’s vote!” / “Golf!”), the constantly playing TVs, and the parents hanging on by a thread. But honestly, the messy house thing is always my favorite trait of his films. Because the thing I most dislike about modern Hollywood production design is how every single damn house looks like it’s owned by  a modernist architect / interior designer who anally makes their children put belongings into neat organizational patterns (even their “play time” is ornate). Messiness has to be organic. But anyway, Roy is soon lured away from this same family by the siren song of the otherworldly… And he won’t be alone.

Upon waiting by a hillside he encounters some seeming backwoods-folk, including an old man with a gun who is whistling “she’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes.” The “she” in this case is several small spaceships who are beyond anything he understands. But there is another woman who comes, Julie Guiler, who is chasing after her young boy, Barry. What’s telling is how central Barry is to the story, not just because he is our Macguffin who is taken and thus mom sets out on a journey to get him back, but how central he is to the theme. Because at no point is Barry ever really scared of the looming aliens. He has that innate, child-like sense of trust. There’s this clear, base emotional language between him and the visitors, one far from the (often well-earned) adult fears. And that’s the question right? Are all these things threats? Has our interaction with fellow man taught us enough to be fearful at all times? Or is our fear something we can get beyond? Can we remember the kindergarten-like lessons of coming at things with sharing and caring? Because everything about Roy’s journey is, by extension, giving into the same childhood sense of trust… The fascinating thing, however, is how it does come at the direct cost of his family.

“What about the kids?” / “Oh right, the kids.”

What may seem a funny, off-hand line soon devolves into one of the saddest, most interesting, and perhaps odd things about the movie. Because Roy never really feels like it’s trying to make excuses (unlike a few weird moments in Interstellar). Instead, the film takes great pains to examine the cost and hurt on the family. Like the scene with the great Teri Garr who pleads, “I remember when we used to come to places like this just to look at each other” (I mean *I* would be looking at Teri Garr, but I also don’t fuck around with aliens or ghosts. That’s their business). But his eyes are still looking to the sky. Then comes the full on abandonment scene and the things he feels he MUST do. It’s perhaps no accident that earlier in the film he is wanting his kids to see Pinocchio (“I grew up with Pinocchio!”), a film which dives headlong into both the field of following seemingly-impossible dreams and parental disconnection. It all cascades into the heartbreaking dinner table scene with split-diopter shot, musing that they may notice “something a little strange with dad.” It’s not a decision-making scene, it’s not even about leaving, it’s more the heartbreak of someone already so far gone. Even when having to say “It’s okay, I’m still dad,” it feels like a dagger. Because he isn’t really. And what’s happening is unexplainable. Undebatable. And Unfixable. Thus, the kids only seem to understand it as a sea change. And soon this man will be crazed and building something in his den, falling in with the new family, and chasing the sun of the unknown.

“This means something, this is important.”

Indeed it is. All the observers of the aliens / TV broadcast get the deep, primordial urge to go Devil’s Tower (the famous Wyoming natural landmark). And there’s a whole bunch of sequences of them trying to get there (I alway forget how long this section of the film takes). They’re getting past guards and all of it has this deep state-secret vibe of keeping the public away from the truth and false flag chemical spills and such. To be clear, it’s worth talking about how much this plays as a counterpoint to modern day. In the 1970s Nixon era, so much conspiracy art was about a culture finally not 100% trusting the government. But now? Oof. It’s heartbreaking to see how much the conspiratorial mindset has infected just about everything and some of the events in the film might as well be QAnon parallels. And honestly, the same goes for the film’s depiction of manic episodes where Roy’s running around shouting “I’ve never felt this good!” as he fills a home with garbage. These things are so hard for us because now we understand so much of what those mental health issues are REALLY about. Which makes all the prior depictions in storytelling of “lone man who is branded as crazy actually sees the truth!” as something that’s seemingly harmful. But it’s also worth understanding the wishful thinking behind these narratives. Because, of course, there is a more innocent and even romantic side of it. The dreamer side of it. And in the end, it represents a completely different kind of wishful fantasy for the film’s author.

“What are you looking for?” / “An answer, that’s not crazy is it?”

In the end, all Close Encounters is really trying to be is a film about the power of communication and hope in the face of the unknown. The aliens feel unknowable precisely because of how much we don’t understand what they want - and by extension they are symbols of humanity trying to understand the mysteries of the cosmos, spirituality, or god. Which is such a broad and accessible feeling. But really, the human instinct is also directly tied back to the familial level and Spielberg’s disconnect with parentage. To wit, if you’ve never seen the amazing James Lipton clip, here he gives the insight about how the communication occurs because of a mixture of music (his mother, the pianist) and science (his father, the computer engineer) and then learning to talk this way. It was something that never occurred to Spielberg until that very moment. Which perhaps speaks to the idea of how much this movie feels like it was formed from a place of pure curiosity, instinct, and id. How else to explain the final, almost wordless sequence, which manages to give me goosebumps every time? The bleeps, the boops, the bwams, and even a few seconds of the Jaws score thrown in all convey so much feeling without specificity. And how good is Truffaut as the wide eyed-hopeful staring in awe? The thematic specificity of the sequence thereby falls on the audience. The question, in the end, is what is it all for?

As we watch Roy give up everything to go on the starship, it’s easy to wonder about this expression, specifically around a single question: is Roy meant to be a stand-in for Spielberg himself or his dad? If it’s his father, it is the dream of having some perfect idea of why some person may disappear from your life. “Your dad” becomes an astronaut, someone to be envied as we are literally told in the final sequence. It’s not just a matter of them following wonder, it is important. And so it really seems like a beautiful wish. And if Roy is more of a stand-in for himself? Then it is the essential expression of following one's beautiful dream, perhaps to become an artist or filmmaker. Or is it the expression of self-escapism? Perhaps even a fearful distancing from the encroaching responsibilities of adulthood and the prospect of a family of one’s own. But to go with the meme answer, “why not both?” Because the curious overlap speaks so much to the purposeful sense of vagueness at the heart of the film.

To wit, ask why were the pilots taken in the first place? Why were those other people from history taken? Does it characterize some deeper motive on behalf of the aliens? Or is it simply to give hope to all those who have lost someone?

We don’t learn. We just have to understand that there WAS some reason, apparently. And we are meant to trust and accept that. For in a way… not knowing the specific reason is the point. You could say this is the way we accept the mysteries of God or understand why bad things happen. Or, you could flip it around and say this is a grand film about the literal pursuit of ignorance. Which feels a bit cynical, but there’s a reason the spaceship feels so seductive, and a reason we don’t see the family again. In the end, all of it is a deep contradiction. A paradox. Which is why, for all the feeling of “escape,” it more feels like the insatiable need to get closer, closer, closer to something more essential and true. It’s also why Speilberg never wanted the subsequent cut to go inside the ship (producer’s cut be damned). Because there’s always going to be another step on that journey. A new interior, a new planet. As they say, whatever you worship will never be enough. There are just the moments of transition and the thing you are drawn to. Which finally brings us to the funny, if perhaps incidental thing about the rallying point called Devil’s Tower. Along with the thinking: “this means something, this is important”

Because it actually taps into a big piece of symbolism.

I don’t know if any of you have ever played around with tarot, but, perhaps surprisingly, I like tarot cards a lot. Do I “believe” in it? Gosh no, not at all. I don’t even like astrology. And I don’t like tarot for any of its supposed predictive elements. No, the reason I like Tarot cards is because they are an amazing set of archetypal storytelling symbols that combine genuine proto-therapeutic insight, which actually adds up into a weirdly not-that-bad self-analysis tool (at least for 15th century standards). Often it’s just about taking an archetype, an event, a dynamic, and using them to think about your life. Specifically, they’re designed to get you away from how you are already thinking about your life. And it’s surprisingly effective. Which is probably the reason people have enjoyed fucking around with it for centuries. Anyway, the reason I bring it up is because the ending location is so evocative of one of my favorite Tarot cards: “The Tower.” It’s weird to say it’s a “favorite card,” but it’s the one I think is the most interesting. To best describe it I’ll just go straight to the google definition:

“The Tower shows a tall tower perched on the top of a rocky mountain. Lightning strikes set the building alight, and two people leap from the windows, head first and arms outstretched. It is a scene of chaos and destruction. The Tower itself is a solid structure, but because it has been built on shaky foundations, it only takes one bolt of lightning to bring it down. It represents ambitions and goals made on false premises. The lightning represents a sudden surge of energy and insight that leads to a break-through or revelation. It enters via the top of the building and knocks off the crown, symbolizing energy flowing down from the Universe, through the crown chakra. The people are desperate to escape from the burning building, not knowing what awaits them as they fall.”

I think about this card all the time because I had a big tower-crashing moment in my life. I had built my entire life on shaky foundations, a series of maladaptions based on the aforementioned youthful drive, disconnection, denial, insulation, avoidance, and ultimately, escape. I built a tower in a fit of wishful thinking and thought it stood proudly tall. I thought it would give solace to all that ailed me. And then it crashed… For all the direct comparison to the themes and details of Close Encounters, you could call it a happy accident. And no, the tower doesn’t crash, but it instead feels like the tower built on shaky foundations, ambitions, and false premises. It’s a movie “about divorce” that tries so desperately to be a form of self-expansion escapism, but is really, and perhaps deep-down knowingly, a form of self-suppression escapism. Something that is not quite dealing with the difficult issues at its own core. I don’t mean any of this in a judgmental sense. It’s a great movie, full of hope, and also a weird kind of empathy. But in the end, it is the epitome of a kind of wishful thinking.

And you know how the old saying goes…

PART TWO - BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR

When we are young and have been given our hard-wiring, our love languages, and built our set of assumptions about the world, we thereby develop a series of adaptations and maladaptions that we only think we get better at. We go off into the world and think “this will work.” It is our wish for a happy and fulfilling life. But then we are often violently challenged by that world. And it is here we can either double down, stammer, and turn into all those maladaptions that are likely plaguing us and press on in defiance…  Or we can realize that we must adapt and change, even if it feels like the death of all we already hold dear. But we must do it anyway.

Or else we lose that which we think of as “ourselves.”

* * *

I think A.I. Artificial Intelligence is one of the most terrifying movies ever made.

It’s not because it is some jump-scare horror fest (though it does have a few horror-like elements). It’s because it's so damn unnerving. Particularly the film’s first fifty minutes, where creepy ass Robot David is quietly pacing about their home and asking his new mother figure to “dress him” and such. But it’s not creepy like the trailer for upcoming film M3GAN, which turns into the yikes factor to get the big scares. No, this film keeps riding that line of normalcy and innocence that makes it feel all the more real. Especially with a flesh and blood actor in Haley Joel Osment playing the role. No, the most terrifying part is the idea it is constantly getting at. The thing that feels so impossibly dark it’s hard to really verbalize it. But we must:

A.I. is a film about how terrifying it is to be a parent.

And how even more terrifying it is to be a child.

Now, when it comes to the film’s darkness it may be easy to think “oh this is just Kubrick’s influence on the film” or something, but that’s not how it worked whatsoever. And I want to dispel a lot of assumptions immediately. Kubrick developed the project for years and the entire shape of the story (including the ending, which people falsely assume Spielberg “tacked on”). But the detailed articulation of the script itself was written by Spielberg. Therefore, whoever came up with the original “idea,” you are in the end seeing the way that Spielberg wrestles with it. Moreover, something was already shifting darkness-wise within Spielberg as he was hitting the Dreamworks era. You could argue it’s a simple aesthetic thing as Janusz and his white skies made his work literally feel colder. But it’s more than that. Early on we knew Spielberg as a little terrorizer with spook-a-blast instincts, but now he seemed to eschewing spooky bits in favor of “dark, terrifying existentialism! Moohahahaha!” I mean, he was already making Minority Report before 9/11 and the patriot act. And War of the Wolds was very much about the reactive fear of annihilation. And Munich for all its faults, is a fucking gnarly deep dive into the uglier sides of vengeance, let alone political reflexivism… He was in an odd place. And I think there’s a reason that the lighter, optimistic fare of that decade (The Terminal and Crystal Skull) didn’t work. Just as there is a reason that Catch Me If You Can works and that’s because it is also a tremendously sad movie at its core. So yeah, you could call it a darkness. But I find it’s more an inescapable sadness in this era’s work. A reluctance to optimism. A realization that so much of the funny ha ha adventures that came in his early career are something he might not ever be able to get back to. And a realization that all the fairy tales and wishful thinking might be downright dangerous.

But when it comes to the portrayal of darkness, so many filmmakers throw your face in the fucked-up-ness of it all, as if wanting to drown you in the guts and misery. But what is perhaps so unnerving is that Spielberg is so careful with his edges - and yet so clear with his intent - that sometimes he can conjure up the single most intellectually harrowing images that speak volumes. In Saving Private Ryan it’s not the boy’s spilling guts the stick with you, it’s the way he yells for his mommy as they do. In Lincoln, he has to sum up the pain of the Civil War with a single shot and so it’s a soldier falling into a puddle as his own men stomp on the back of his head. And in their forward march, they drown him. There. It’s the perfect, harrowing metaphor for the war. Or how about the loss of life thanks to the invention of the machine gun in War Horse? All you need to see is the cascade of a heroic charge, an actor’s face falling to boyhood, and a fleet of now rider-less horses fleeing into the woods. It’s the kind of tact that slices you up so deftly that you don’t even realize you’re bleeding out. And it doesn’t come from the instinct to scare. It comes from weariness. A painful understanding about something innately horrible about the world. And ultimately, a personal thing that needs to be shared in that sadness.

When Spielberg wrote Close Encounters, we saw a young man wrestling with abandonment and dreams of another life, but it still felt like under parenthood still a few years away. It’s almost as if he was staving off those encroaching realities. But by 2001, he was firmly entrenched in parenthood and so here it all spills out. For people with abandonment issues, parenthood brings out so many competing fears, but mostly the worry you will hurt in the same way that you had been hurt. For there is so much fear in being responsible for these beings. Even with the simple job of trying to keep them alive. Which is why Martin’s sickness comes first with the narrative of A.I. And with David, there is this whole other side of it. Yeah, yeah, it’s this crazy scenario of a robot. But it’s the same essential question of perhaps having any kid who is a little different. How do you interact? How do you find any kind of stasis with the push / pull of your own instincts? Character actress April Grace asks the important questions so directly. We want someone to love us, but “can you get a human to love them back? What responsibility does that person hold toward that mecha in return?” There is always this terrifying moral question with people who feel insecure in their attachments: how do you love if you essentially feel unloved?

It would be easy to get caught up in the sci-fi nature and philosophical underpinnings of A.I. precisely because the film does a very good job of articulating them. What does it mean to be human? Aren’t we all programmed in our way? Isn’t wanting something the core of human yearning? They’re good questions for an open-ended lecture hall, but I’m most interested in the themes that best connect to our own everyday human struggles. But what’s immediately so interesting about the film’s depiction of robots is how much their very existence is rooted in the need for dissociation as painful things happen to them. They make it clear right in the opening: “what did I do to your feelings?” / “You did to my hand. Same goes for the lack of expression when they die. Here, it’s easy to read it all as documenting a generation of post-apocalyptic kids who need to disassociate in order to survive (good granola the way that metaphor hits now). A generation of kids who separate themselves from the damage their gods and creators (aka older generation) did to them. And what is special about David is that he has the power to want something beyond the dissociation of self-protection.

I mean, there’s a reason they say “you don’t know anyone until you know what they want,” (which I think is a Cormac McCarthy quote) because it is the thing that creates understand and predictability of behavior (which is why it’s so fascinating we DON’T know what the aliens want in Close Encounters, we just have to trust what they want is good). But the problem with giving David something to want - or any A.I. - is that you immediately hit “The Paperclip Problem.” That is, if you tell a machine that its only job is to make paper clips - and ignore all other things just to make paper clips - It will start by going through the resources you give them. Then it will start trying to find the necessary metals in household objects and clocks. Then it will mine from existing buildings and let them crumble and people will die. Then it will scour the earth until every viable atom is turned into a paperclip and then look to the heavens still. You can’t just give something a prime directive without thinking of the end result. But it doesn’t stop us ever does it? Humans do this constantly. Capitalism is a paperclip problem. And oof, when you think about it, our own happiness is a paperclip problem, too. I mean, do you realize how many of us equate being content with our current lives - exactly as is - with death itself? There must be something MORE. And for David, he thinks he can solve that prime directive if he becomes “a real boy” and earns his mother’s love.

Now, it would also be easy to get caught up in the Pinocchio comparison of this film. Or even try to examine why so many filmmakers seem obsessed with telling this particular tale. I mean, even as I write this there are not just one but TWO adaptations of the story on streaming platforms from major directors (including from Spiel’s friend Bobby Z). Perhaps it’s as Roy outright says in Close Encounters, “I grew up with Pinocchio” and it’s such a vibrant, strange film. But the truth is the original Pinocchio story, like many older fairy tales, is basically a scary morality tale that is designed to convince children not to be little shits. By the time we get to the 1940 film, it’s basically about the youthful wish to go out into the world and navigate these modern biblical adventures. To kids of Spielberg’s era, it stands as one of the more playful, magical, oddball, and otherworldly entries of the Disney canon (plus the kids drink booze). And at the same time, it explores two powerful tropes that always seem to draw artists in. That would be the soulful artisan who makes life on his own, and at the same time, the young person who yearns for something more essential within them (perhaps like Roy Neary himself). At the center of which is the belief in self-completeness. And so it’s perhaps understandable why it rings so hard with so many.

And helps understand so much about A.I. in turn.

Let’s start with the parents, who basically reflect two distinct modes of the way adults deal with grief and want. There’s Mom Monica, still holding on hope that her young Martin will live and thus she reads to him in that limbo state, unable to move on. Then there is Dad Henry who is separating himself, at once seemingly accepting he’s gone, but still throwing out questions about the latest science and logic. The doctor warns about the mother’s behavior, citing that this is what happens when “all the grief goes undigested,” but he may be the one who really needs to hear it. Because he immediately goes to the hyper logical place of “wife sad, need new kid” and then that amazingly telling line of: “I love you don’t kill me” when he brings home A NEW FUCKING ROBOT KID I MEAN ARE YOU SERIOUS. But on a deeper level, he’s just trying to fix without adjusting. And it is the perfect metaphor for the kind of guy who has a kid just make his wife un-sad or something.

Thankfully, she’s rightfully IRATE at this. And in the specifics, this is such a fucked up situation because as much as she is feeling all the rightful dread and anger at this situation immediately - there is always some allure to the devil’s bargain. Because, for her to feel even one ounce of love and living again, is something the ailing heart can’t help but want. And thus, she turns it on. Is she sure? “Silly man, of course I’m not sure.” But they do it anyway. And almost immediately it’s clear how much her relationship with David characterizes the “classic” parent dynamic that goes right back to Oedipus. I mean, he’s literally only programmed to love one person, his mommy. He’s hilariously not even a consideration, nor cares to be.  He’s happy just trying to give her a band aid for her grief. And only later does he have to live in the unnerved space of reality of having David there. And thus he embraces the cold, ordered way so many fathers try to engage the space that should be filled with warmth and love.

This is the loaded space where Young David has to learn how to be a person.

And it’s here that I want to mention that Haley Joel Osment is also incredible in this role. There’s a reason he was so lauded in general, but there’s such a specificity in this work that it is hard to imagine the character doing anything else. He simultaneously comes off like an eager shelter puppy and a submissive savant, not even realizing how messed up it is that he is obeying such commands. “Is it a game?” he always asks. Because he needs an objective to make sense of any of it. But so little about this makes sense. From the duality of Williams’ whimsical scary music, to the fractal windows in all the doors, it’s as if we’re also seeing people through a prism. Everything feels unnerving. The miming of salad eating, the weird laughter, the insatiable need to be a part of everything in an environment. And of course, the most haunting question to anyone who is suddenly given love, you immediately wonder what happens if it goes away? When you invent the plane, you invent the plane crash. When you give someone something to love, you give someone something to lose. I mean, there’s a reason David’s very first question is “mommy, will you die?” Along with the crushing reality that he will almost certainly outlive her.

But of course, with childhood developments, the challenges come even earlier. The second Martin gets out of the hospital, the emotional horror of it all gets turned up to a billion. On one level, it’s the kind of cruel stuff lots of boys do to each on the playground, but it somehow feels twice as demented with a kid who doesn’t understand that they are dealing with an innocent. I mean, Martin literally does not see David as a person (and it's hard to determine how much this is a “normal” childlike sociopathy or not). But it’s worth noting that this is kind of the nightmare scenario for both brothers really, as Martin immediately has to establish dominance over a being that can never fall ill, never age, and never disobey. Thus Martin must make him do those very things. It all creates competition, fear, and a deeper wanting to be a part of the family. But note how David is not really cared for because his needs are “different.” Note how much he is filled with an innate feeling of wrongness. Even as David listens to the story of Pinocchio, he hears “because of your good heart, I forgive all your past misdeeds” and is turned into a real boy. But the cruel realization is that David has no misdeeds. His only crime is the way he was born. There are only the perhaps-selfish reasons he was brought to life in the first place, and all that is beyond his control.

Thus, he begins maladaption. God, everything about this movie is steeped in such deep therapeutic language. He does things that hurt himself purely in an effort to fit it. Like the spinach eating (and the horrific sagging face that evokes stroke victims). Even more terrifying is the subsequent cleaning scene where he says, “it’s okay mommy, it doesn’t hurt” and holds his hand up to comfort her. She turns for a simple reason. It doesn’t hurt, BUT IT SHOULD. It’s symbolic of more dissociation, the creation of kids who mask their pain so as to not be a burden on their parents (and oh boy I did that). From there it only gets worse with the brother games and how people will use your desperation against you (to wit, I did every dare my much-older brother asked because I wanted to be like him). The “lock of mommy’s hair” is so much about dramatizing the oedipal threat to Henry. And “what is he really capable of?” Honestly, David is no more or less capable of doing the same things as other humans: misunderstanding, fear, jealousy, and sadness… They just don’t see him as being equally human.

For this, it would be easy to characterize older brother Martin the devil, but there’s this telling and heartbreaking moment in the pool scene. It’s where the other boys start bullying and messing with the “orga / mecha” dynamic and there’s this amazing blink and you’ll miss it moment where Martin actually starts defending him from the others and trying to get him to calm down. It’s part of that brother-like pecking order, where some deep part of him knows he should be nicer to David and doesn’t want anyone ELSE to hurt him, perhaps to keep what’s within his control. But then there’s an even more telling moment… How does David almost hurt Martin and get cast out of his proverbial eden? By hugging him too tight and drowning him in the weights of his fears and needs. I mean JESUS CHRIST THAT METAPHOR. Not to mention the shot of David looking up as one parent rescues the other, more vulnerable boy. To have the proof that he is not the main concern? That they know he’ll be “fine” because his brand of love is not in jeopardy? It cuts to such an existential heart of parent and brother dynamics. David knows he’s at a point of no return so he tries to bargain, even turning on teddy to take his place in the pecking order, much like Martin did to him. But since he’s not “real,” he must be taken away. Which leads to his second, even more painful birth.

I’m talking, of course, about the heartbreaking abandonment scene. Monica (Frances O’Connor) is such a good actress at playing multiple things in this scene. She knows she should be taking him for deactivation, but she also knows the reality of what emotions he has, which just leads to this weird push / pull of “empathy” that puts him in limbo. Because once he’s real, once he wants something, she can't kill a living thing like that. But he can’t stay home. Thus, he must be abandoned to the world. She tells him “you have to be here alone.” And thus, this is the most horrifying “it’s time to move out of the house and become an adult” metaphor you’ll ever see. Especially with someone who has ONLY been programmed to be a child. He bargains adamantly, “I’m sorry I’m not real, I’ll be so real for you,” which only shows his realness, but what would it even mean beyond that? He doesn’t even know what that could mean. And then she says the ultimate heartbreaking line that’s burned into my memory:

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the world.”

It is one the most powerful and loaded phrases I can imagine. All this time we thought we were in this emotional horror movie, but everything actually horrible is about to begin in earnest. David is being shoved into a world that hates him. And the only thing he has inside that could help him deal with that world? All he has is a hole inside him. A need to be loved in the way he was programmed to love, but still so essentially unfulfilled. Again, this is a devastating metaphor about how we transition from childhood to adulthood. One even more pointed with what follows. Because the film then literally has a “fade to prostitution.”

That would be our new co-lead Gigolo Joe, played beautifully by Jude Law, who was still in the middle of his big pop after his turn in The Talented Mr. Ripley (and I’m delighted he’s since turned into a character actor). But this immediately brings up a more essential question with the narrative: why pair him with Gigolo Joe? Is it just Spielberg’s fun idea for a jaunty smooth 50’s gigolo in the style of Elvis and a Ken doll? No, it’s that thematically, he is meant to be the flip-side to David. Where one is forever stuck as a boy in need of mother’s love, Gigolo Joe is the other side of what men are programmed to be. That would be the lover, the ladies man, the charmer of sexual needs. But what’s most interesting about the portrayal is not that Joe is not just some finely tuned machine in the spirit of a robot vibrator that’s engineered to give pleasure, it’s that he isn’t doing this for male approval. Meaning he isn’t a part of the male ego-system. It’s not about chasing ladies for social clout, but to pay specific attention to the emotional needs of his female clientele (though it's worth mentioning the film doesn’t play with other spectrums of sexuality? Maybe that would be different now?). But it’s this combination of ability, attention, and being uncaring of male fragility is precisely what makes him a threat. Which is why one client’s boyfriend seems to murder her out of jealousy (Enrico Colantoni AKA Mr. Mars!) and sets the blame on Joe. You really get the sense this is how easy it is to turn on a mecha’s humanity. He’s human enough to evoke jealousy from the man, thus he needs to dehumanize his fear in turn  The event sends Joe on the run and thus meeting David. But their pairing, for all that it is kind about it, is also probably the least helpful mindset possible? I mean, they are absolutely two sides of a coin when it comes to male thinking about women and it even plays right into The Madonna and The Whore trope. The film seems completely aware of this dichotomy. And thus, Joe’s complete inability to help IS part of the point. But in this journey, it’s interesting to see the way Joe’s paperclip prerogative is to please all the women in the world is chipped away at through his sudden caring and thankfulness toward a young boy.

If it’s not clear, the two are already on a big symbolic odyssey

For instance, it’s no accident they meet in a literal pile of robot death. Because that’s the thing they’re facing: extinction. And they are both programmed to love in the way they think will allow them to keep on going. Other robots seem to be doing the same. As the world has torn away at them, they have to keep finding pieces to fix themselves and make due. None of this behavior is “right” or healthy. But it is the act of preservation in the face of decay. Which is exactly when the light of the moon comes for them AKA robot huntin’ hillbillies. No, it’s not just about inverting the logo of Dreamworks (though it’s a playful realization). The moon is probably one of most variant symbols in storytelling. In one way, it’s the beckoning of the blue light of the fairy, or a dark reflection of the sun’s braver truth. But heck, let's go straight to the popular collegiate definition: “Waxing and waning, the moon is a sign of constant change. It symbolizes nature, its blind and driven forces, the passing and return of its seasons. Transposed into the human realm, this image pinpoints moral instability, the changing heart, the gullible mind, and our frequently vacillating resolve.” ALL OF WHICH is at play here. They are trying to navigate the world and dealing with both a false moon and the greater moon in question. And the false moon is what takes them first.

That’s when they’re captured and go straight to Kid Rock’s Big Robo Destruction Fun Fest (the Kid Rock song really does date an otherwise undate-able sci-fi film and makes me kinda wish Williams wrote HIS version of that kind of music). Anyway, you’ll immediately notice the iconography is meant to invoke Rural White America roots and there’s lots of Nascar vibes. It’s a little clunky, but soon it gets to the robo-murdering and unfurls the most hyper clear language the movie offers for this all being a parallel to racial violence and hate speech. You see all the familiar white supremacy talking points about how “they can maintain numerical superiority!” and labor obsolescence. Followed by all the horrific scenes of them being destroyed and burned. There’s so much here you could talk about or project into when it comes to a larger picture of society - even the problems of false equivalency, or the fact that Spielberg has long had a habit of making most victimhood a passive one - but the thing I want to zoom back into is the parenthood part because it’s most central to the film’s metaphor. Because on one level, there’s that general sense of trying to protect a child from the horrors of the world - and David’s mother’s case not telling him about them - but on another…

There is also a specific lens to these scenes when you consider that Kate Capshaw and Spielberg had somewhat recently adopted two Black children and were in the process of raising them. And look, I can’t speak to the possible problems of the tact of any of this, I just know looking at these sequences through this lens of fear is like UHHHHHH, *GULP* Specifically, the fear of not being able to parent adequately or how to rightly understand them / their specific needs and especially that fear of the larger world. I honestly don’t know how to feel about the stark portrayal of all this (especially considering a lot of it would be handled differently now), I just know this is at the center of Spielberg’s big fear pile. Right along with the way the film zooms in on how we dehumanize other groups. I mean, in this case it’s literally yelling “they’re not human! and there's a reason this becomes the fulcrum of how the crowd turns on the event. Gleeson pleads for them to “not be fooled by the artificiality of this construction” while the crowd notes “mecha don’t plead for their lives!” Because dehumanization is what makes their cruelty not feel cruel to them, but instead part of a perverted sense of justice. So they don’t want to see the humanity that’s obviously so real. That goes for all of them, not just David. Because all those robots *want* to keep existing and serving their prime directives. But the crowd wants to see things that justify the difference (even if those differences were programmed in by their makers). And without them? They see the murder for what it plainly is. And the ruse of it all falls apart. And that’s what allows Joe and David to escape.

Again we come right back to the moon metaphor, but this time it’s the real one, which gives way to the sequence of them heading to Rouge City, which is the stand in for the original tale’s Pleasure Island (the sequence also has a young Adrian Grenier as the horny teen giving them a lift). Honestly, this sequence just has a lot of table setting and shoe leather ? And it’s odd having Robin Williams’ voice cameo as Dr. Know, where he’s basically doing the Genie schtick? I get the instinct, but instead of being a fun moment of affectation it sort of feels like one of those scenes that is trying to figure out its point of view. And with the Pleasure Island comparison I feel like it should be something more lurid? Or at least something that confronts the psychology of the characters? Sure, we get bits of how David looking at Rouge City through confused, boyish eyes, not quite understanding the sexual element of the adult world. The only real thematic thing the sequence is more about is David learning how much of the adult world is completely TRANSACTIONAL. Even when it comes to Dr. Know. For this is how they spend their money, craving information with a trickster program that doesn’t want to give it to them (yay modern silicon valley). And it takes David and Joe spelling out the notion of how their journey must “combine fact with fairy tale” in order to get the lead they need...

“Come away O human child

To the waters and the wild

With a fairy hand in hand

For the world’s more full of weeping

Than you can understand.

Your quest will be perilous

yet the reward is beyond price.”

Such is the poem that tells them how Professor Allen Hobby wrote a book about how a can turn a mecha into an orga. And so they set off. Thefunny  thing about that perilous quest is they kind of just end up stealing a helicopter and getting there fairly quickly, but that’s fine (I honestly don’t really need more adventures at this point). They head toward the end of the world in Manhattan and in the midst we get the only real philosophical discussion between Joe and David, and it concerns their grander purpose: “They hate us you know” / “My mommy doesn’t hate me.” But it’s funny how this thing called love just seems to define their entire viewpoint. Joe retorts, “They love what you do for them. They tired of you. They made us too quick, too smart, and too many. We are suffering for the mistakes they made because when the end comes, all that will be left is us. That’s why they made us.” This is not just a stark portrait of why people have kids, it really taps into what happened specifically between boomers and their WW2 generation of parents. Which is a subject that has been written about a lot, given the horrors of the war, the way the trauma was bottled up, and the way it created a mass of silence as so many damn kids popped into the suburban eco-system. Even now, we have to ask to what degree is this parental dynamic still true? And is it true for David?

They go to Manhattan and I have to say I always get a strange feeling seeing the twin towers represented on screen (especially in future movies) because it’s *still* what the New York skyline looks like in my mind? But the sequence is filled with so much dread for this relic of a city and the moaning of the metal sea (also, it’s worth nothing that what perhaps daunting about the first watch of this film is that you feel like you’re at the climax in this sequence and don’t realize you have 49 minutes left). David arrives looking for the scientist and instead finds… himself.  Yes, it’s an age old trope of storytelling, but it is for good reason. Because searching for answers out in the world and finding “yourself” is really just the metaphor for self-examination. I mean, does David see this discovery as an opportunity for kinship and new friendship? No. He hates that another “him” exists. By the very nature of his possessive, all consuming love, he cannot see another competitor and thus shouts “you can’t have her! She’s mine!” as he bludgeons the other David in fucking horrifying fashion. How awful!

But in walks Allen Hobby AKA Professor God Dad to the rescue. Or at least kind of. Because he thinks all of this is just inspired human behavior! He’s marveling over David’s self-motivated reasoning and how he participated in “the great human flaw, to wish for things that don’t exist!” In all his delight, this person who is so supposedly sensitive to robots doesn’t give a shit about the bludgeoned David on the ground, nor does he even give a shit that he just brutally broke this kid’s entire brain, world, and capacity for love. I mean, why the fuck would David care about being the first of a kind success? Why would he care about this man’s accomplishments and  his own ability to be manipulated? Allen only cares about his ability to create and control. He is, like, the worst Gepetto (along with all the Silicon Valley bros I guess). And for David, there is only the blinding pain of what he is experiencing.

For a film that’s ideally about protecting childhood, Allen has done the worst thing of all which is the horror of playing with a child’s hope. David literally tells us “my brain is falling out” and then there’s the creepy as fuck shot of him staring out of the mask of his own face. But that’s the terrifying thing of adulthood and painful consciousness, right? That terrified feeling that comes sometimes where we’re so numb we feel like we’re just staring out of our own masks. What does it mean to be a person?  A person who has realized all the psychological ways we’ve just been “programmed” by our upbringing and parents? I mean, how would one even try to find new programming? And wouldn’t losing that original programming no longer make us, us? Wouldn’t it be tantamount to death? Which quickly cascades into a reminder of why this film so fucking sad and why audience’s had no idea what to do with it.

Perhaps it’s the moment where an unloved kid tries to commits suicide…

You can say “Hey it happens in Pinocchio!” and you’re right, but good golly. Yes, Joe rescues him, but he ends up getting caught by the police for doing so, offering two moments of insight before he ascends into the heavens. The first is part of the prime directive: “when you become a real boy, remember me to the ladies.” And the other is an existential death knell that shows how all mecha have a unique sense of their own mortality, “I am… I was.” To want and to lose out on that want? Joe is showing us that that is existence itself. And David refuses to lose out on that want. He goes to the bottom of the sea to get a glimpse of the blue fairy and thus becomes trapped “in a cage.” There he worships the false idol, forever wishing her to “please make me into a real live boy.” All as Ben Kingsley ‘snarration lets us know that David keeps wishing through thousands of years. And as this happens, I have a question…

Why do so many people want the film to end here?

I fully admit that the zoom out and narration makes it FEEL like ending. And maybe it’s just that the sequence that follows has A LOT of wonky shoe leather. But I think there’s something deeper to it. Something more relieving. That may seem odd to say given that ending at the zoom would seem “darker,” but I often think that some people like the logical coldness of an ending like this precisely because it actually makes it easier to digest the sadness. As if to sit there and go “yes, this is very, very sad, I agree” and steel themselves against the film’s emotional intent in an equally cold way. But instead, the film goes for something more complex, secretly devastating, and important to the established thematic narrative. It doesn’t let you off the hook. Instead, it’s one of the many aforementioned sequences that carves you up so swiftly you don’t even realize you’re bleeding.

First, it should be clarified that the ending visitors are not aliens, but the generations of robots from our own future. This is one of the rare cases where I think a little more clarity on that might have helped the thematic point here, but it’s not a huge problem. Because the point is that these beings are trying to understand the history of THEMSELVES, which means understanding the motivations of why humans built them. Essentially, their human creators are gods and our entire society is but an archeological dig. They unearth David all these thousands of years later, just in time for him to think he broke the blue fairy! Oh no! But what may seem one of the film’s many cruelties also leads to rebirth of a new myth version (with the voice of Meryl Streep). Here, at the seeming end of time, where the miracle of science and magic meet, David finally has a chance to wish upon a star. But again, we have to understand how much A.I. is still a “careful what you wish for” tale. Because unlike the Pinocchio of 1940, he does not get his wish to be a real boy. Nor does he learn he “is real” and join his kind in their new, gentler world. Nor does he grow.

Instead, he is offered a temporary solution of one day with his mother. For David, this will do. And he even goes to have the very human thought that, “Maybe she will be special. Maybe she will stay. Maybe it will last forever.” In this wishful recreation, note that there is no Henry, no Martin, no grief. None of the memories that haunt him or ever led him on this path (including her abandonment of him). There is only “Mommy and David.” Only the fantasy of him finally hearing “I love you back.” Only the tears of finally closing his eyes and going to the realm where dreams are born. “Oh how happy! He finally got what he wanted and has a sense of peace!” It may seem a nice happy bow, but there’s a reason it still feels so unfulfilling and unsettling.

You just have to think about it for one second.

Because none of this is real. Like, on any level. It’s not even a real memory. There’s a reason a social media friend of mine, Benmont, called it a film almost entirely defined by its sense of “loneliness.” So much of this “one day” is a constructed, hollow echo. And as “nice” as David may feel, the film constantly tells you that this is NOT what it means to be real (right down to Teddy watching them on the bed in the last shot). This is not growing up and learning a lesson. No, this is the paperclip problem as a tragedy of the human condition. It is the only possible endpoint of getting the thing that you want, the thing that you THINK you need, but not the thing you really need. David does not accept that this is a delusional, temporary horror of the paradox he has been aware of from moment one: to imprint a kid with insecure love - specifically one kind of love of his mother - is a curse. For it means they will lose something they can never, ever get back. And the hollow remembrances? They may feel nice, but instead of finding a chance to live anew, the film is instead about the horror of choosing to live the rest of your life within a long-gone memory…

Because it’s the only love you’ll ever know.

… I can think of nothing sadder.

And in the end, nothing more in need of change.

PART THREE - AFTER THE TOWER CRASHES

After we start growing up and start to understand all the terrible parts of the world (AKA the ones we weren’t told about), we start to understand the architecture of our own lives as well. We begin to understand that a lot of those terrible things in “the adult world” were actually there the whole time. We grow to have a deeper understanding of who the people around us really were. My experience with this was perhaps a bit more… extreme than most? But it’s a pretty universal experience in realizing all the ways your guardians and loved ones are, in the end, just people. Flawed as many and most. And once you learn a lot of those things, you realize it’s not the big events or the blow ups that most defined us. It was the everyday things in your life - the little things we normalized - that added up to have this massive impact on our behavior. And when that’s finally understood, when the old beliefs are finally upended, that’s when we can see the architecture of our lives with time, distance, boundary-drawing, and empathy in turn.

Then you can see it for something closer to the truth.

* * *

On the surface, The Fablemans is being sold as Spielberg’s autobiographical childhood story that is seemingly awash in cinematic nostalgia (at least that’s what the trailer is selling). And sure there is definitely some of that. But the reality of the film is something far more graceful and complex. One that actually upends a lot of things that we’ve long assumed about his life. And it does so in a way that makes looking back on his prior films (especially the two ones I’ve written about above) all the more fascinating. Heck, at times, the film is downright self-scouring. But in the end, it all adds up to something deeply introspective, too (Note: if you haven’t seen it yet, this section has spoilers throughout).

Take the film’s cinematic origin point with young Sammy Fabelman (who is Spielberg’s surrogate) It would be easy to reduce it to the fact “he saw The Greatest Show on Earth and wanted to make movies!” But instead the whole thing completely messed him up. And the following sequence plays out as with almost wordless, primordial instinct. We see the train hit the car on screen. We see the fear in the young boys eyes. We see him wanting a train set, then filming his own crash (much to the chagrin of his father when it comes to the expense). But the film underlines what’s going on here: the thing the young boy wants is control. He saw something that scared him and he wanted to take that power for his own. But it’s not just an origin story, it is an admittance for just about everything going forward. with his career. With Close Encounters it is the want to control the chaos of communication - and of giving a genuine reason for abandonment. With A.I. it is the want for control in a life where we are destined to be hated, abandoned, and outgrow the love we cannot let go of. And here within this film, the need to control is at the center of his developing life.

Take the way Sammy is using it in his early childhood films, which also play into Horror subjects like going to the dentist or “The Mummy,” which is also a hint about what will be the film’s central subject matter. But we can put together that these are the things that scared him. And the real thing I love about these early sequences is how much the movie taps into his relationship with his sisters. With Spielberg, we’ve often seen his productions as being brother-laden and featuring packs of boys on bikes. But nope, he was surrounded by sisters. And this dynamic feels so warm and well-observed with the way they’re always giving guff (I particularly like the performance of Julia Butters who played the little actress girl from Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and killed it in the Tammy Craps sketch of I Think You Should Leave). From there we quickly get to the older stories and the fun and games of teenage filmmaking. I once mused about a different film “What if Super 8 but no monster?” and this feels like a really good answer to that question. There are all these delightful little tidbits like the gun shot solution and the shots of all the dead body extras moving as the camera pans. There’s even surprisingly deep moments like Sammy discovering the horror and success of manipulating actors (the way he keeps walking is such a nice touch). All of this is great and important to his development. But the actual conflict of the film rests with his parents and not in a way you might expect.

But first I have to take a quick aside on casting. Because I love almost all the performances in this movie, but there’s something people may not realize is a big issue, but it kind of is a big issue. And that’s the non-jewish casting of Sammy’s parents. To be super clear, I feel odd talking about this issue and I’m not trying to do so with ANY kind of authority, I’m more just trying to reflect the things I’ve learned in being close with my Jewish step-family, my friends, and even a past 10 year long relationship. You just learn to care about it. To also be clear, some Jewish people don’t necessarily care about this issue at all. To also ALSO be clear, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams are actors I both like a lot. Williams especially. From Dawson’s to Dick, then the incredible indie run of Wendy & Lucy, Brokeback Mountain, Synedoche New York, Blue Valentine, through Manchester By The Sea and so much more. There were so many moments where she absolutely stopped my damn heart in the middle of the scene. I adore her… But “playing jewish” is not just a hard and hyper-particular thing, it’s a loaded thing. And the fact that it happens so often is what is more part of the problem, even down to Shiva Baby and so many other recent movies. One of those problems is how much it tends to erase jewish features, which matters greatly. I can’t tell you how many people have talked to me about the crushing social pressure to “not look jewish,” the way families can force that pressure, and how much the casting of movies plays into that. And yes, sometimes the performances from the non-jewish actors are still great and I know there’s even a lot of people who like the performances here.

But surprisingly, I’m not really into the performance from either of them in this film? I love their characters, though. The story is so tight and effective that they definitely function, don’t get me wrong. I know that’s a weird difference to try and split. And it’s weird because I was fully prepared to love both and still talk about this subject anyway, but I feel like you can see them so at odds with the rhythms and timing of every other actor in the film? Am I wrong? Because Rogen kills it. Jeannie Berlin (Elaine May’s daughter) kills it as grandma. And Judd Hirsch is the great one scene killer of the movie. But when it comes to Dano and Williams, I feel this odd disconnect or forcing. Again, I completely realize I’m not the person to speak accurately to all this, but I just have this weird spider sense going off with all of it, so I want to try and account for it. Just as I know so many people who will recognize it, too. I also want to make it clear that what is happening in the casting here is not a matter of ignorance. It’s actually been a huge discussion point in Spielberg’s career, given that he’s made so many gentile films and also dove right into the larger subject matter with popular films like Schindler’s List, which have a huge matter of debate within the community. But it’s also said with understanding that such debate is a central part of Judaism, too? It’s not really about the “right” answer of expressing one’s jewish identity and it certainly is not for me to say which is what. So much of it just falls into the question of how one humanely deals with it and how one sees oneself in the diaspora.

And what is fascinating about The Fabelmans - and maybe my favorite thing about the film - is that this is something that is DIRECTLY addressed in two distinct ways.

It starts with the fact that Sammy Fabelman (played by Gabriel LaBelle, who is absolutely fantastic in this film) has found a place of normalcy in Phoenix. We see him with his friends, a more seemingly more diverse community, and enjoying the Boy Scouts. He’s in a good place. I also love that the Sammy character is actually written to be very funny. A lot of Spielberg surrogates can have this doe eyed, sheepish quality and I love that he’s got a little more reluctant wit and give and take than the usual offering. But when they move to California and are targeted by a bunch of blonde, sun-kissed “sequoia” people? There he becomes deeply aware of his own Judaism and othering. The ensuing scenes are fascinating. I’m not talking about the scenes where he’s directly challenging and challenging back (though I do like seeing his surrogate with a hint of an edge). But the way he bargains and tries to find control.

First off, there’s the way the film playfully engages the Shiksa archetype. If you are unfamiliar with the term, that is the gentile girl or woman, who stereotypically “pulls away” the Jewish male with her outsider seduction (there’s a whole Seinfeld episode about it). This is perhaps an acknowledgement of Speilberg’s own real life relationships and marriages with gentiles, but with the character of Monica we are sort of given a “cinematic origin point.” And what I love is how hilariously over the top it is. The Jesus portraits and discussion of his hotness is, like, galaxy brain level funny to me. The overt praying and kissing overlap? As if part of the lure of seducing him? And the internal push / pull of “I am who I am, but I do like kissing!” is such a telling wink. But it’s also one that is self-scouring. Spielberg fully understands the cartoonish nature of this scene, along with his inner wrestling. He’s genuinely asking, “why am I attracted to this?” And the deeper answer comes out in an even more fascinating way.

That would be the relationship with the goys. Particularly, his bullies. First off, I love that there’s two of them because their differences will be thematically important. There’s the one that is pure anger with the clear button to push. But then, there is the Adonis figure. The golden athlete who acts as more of a lynchpin of control within this entire high school reality. How does Sammy try to assert control over them? Once again, through film. In the big senior skip day project he shows the pure Bully as being off on his rejected lonesome, reflecting the real nature of his soul. He is thus laughed at. But the athlete? Well, he shows him like a Greek God. In fact, the film within a film is making VERY clear parallels to Nazi Propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and her olympic footage and its like HOLY SHIT, he’s doing this?!!??!?! This is what I mean when I say the film is self-scouring. And it gets even more telling in the aftermath, the athlete confronts Sammy, fully confused as to why he shot him in such a flattering way. But Sammy is equally confused. But he makes it clear, he doesn’t like this guy. Sammy hates him, and for that, he tells the athlete that maybe he wanted him to like him, or maybe he just wanted to make his movie better. But as he muses, Sammy doesn’t know the why yet - he’s just manifesting it all in this confessional kind of safe hate born of desperation and fear. It was the only thing he could control.

I know I keep using this word in the essay, but this scene is a FASCINATING example of Spielberg looking at his career and all the gentiles he’s either held up or held down as the Nazi’s he had Indiana punch. But he’s showing he knows there’s a troubling link between the two, along with his own desire to please the very people he hates. Not to mention the way this evokes his own self-erasure in the process. And as Sammy swears to the athlete he will never make a movie about this conversation they’re having (which got a huge laugh in the theater), it comes as this weird acknowledgement that maybe he’s even still doing it - and maybe doesn’t know what to do with the instinct that’s been buried into him (see parent casting issue). This is all so nakedly self analytical, but even that is a way of maintaining control, isn’t it? Which brings us back to the main plot with his parents…

I know that the “do I defy my parents to become an artist?” became a trope because, well, people like writing what they know and often that’s an experience artists will have with their not so encouraging parents. But what’s interesting about The Fabelmans is that the conflict is actually about two parents who are opposed to each other in this “becoming an artist” regard, and how much thereby puts you in at the sea of their own personal problems. As if the fate of Sammy’s artistry hangs in the balance of them being able to agree. When you understand this, you suddenly understand why Spielberg’s artistry would be so directly tied into parents and communication. Moreover, you come to understand the way this film directly upends the long-held assumptions about his real-life parents divorce. With films like Close Encounters and E.T. it is easy to think that his father was the one left, particularly as the “he hates Mexico” line speaks empathetic volumes to his mother. Instead, we realize there was never quite the early leaving… and that so much of the pain was about his mother being in love with another man… that would be her dad’s best friend, who was central to their family...

And nothing about this is clean or simple.

Which is why the rest of the film has to play out with outrageous specificity. His father, the somewhat stern one of disconnect makes for the easy villain, especially in his passiveness. Then there is his mother who is light, airy, and supportive. But the chaos seeps into the edges of everything with her. Like the way the film never quite puts a stamp on her drinking, but the few choice moments speak volumes. Same goes for the way the family speaks around some of the more borderline episodes she may be having (including full on tornado chasing). Then there’s the way it spills into Sammy’s world, the way it turns him into a confessional figure for her (not good!), but also showing that he has no idea what to do with the anger he has toward her (nor does she, which leads to the handprint on the back). Ultimately, you realize just how much he really, really loves his mom and how much he can’t quite seem to make any peace with any of what’s going on. Especially with the family friend Benny, who given the tenderness of his hug, could maybe even be his real dad? That is depending on how much you can even believe his mom. And that’s the whole thing, do you take her at her word that she didn’t know and this is discovery of her feelings for her too? If so, then why the super telling moment where Benny puts his hand on her back and she takes it off as to say “not now,” which implies a whole level of hyper awareness. I mean, we understand a lot of human nature and they're always going off on their own to perhaps put two and two together. But the whole thing about these unknowable situations, particularly with parents required to put up fronts of stability, is that you don’t know what to believe. The yearning only leaves you stuck. And it’s strange to see Sammy, in the end, separated from his mother - and in a quiet way, trying to make peace with his father - but this is him at his lowest point. The tower has crashed. This is his birth into adulthood. Which he has discovered is a time full of rejection and un-belonging. This is the world he was never taught about… And if you take all this dramatizing as being close to “real,” then it provides a deeper look at the choices behind his other films.

Like why it would be appealing to make easy narratives that paint nice bows on the roots of these emotions. In Close Encounters, it’s why a distant father might have some grander purpose or universal pull that takes him away. Or why he might imagine a mother’s loneliness, but in ways that aren’t her fault. But in all these cases, you can see the deeper emotional architecture that guides the wishful thinking. It’s also exactly why all the adulthood realizations of A.I. would be so terrifying. Everything becomes this big gender flop you never realized. Perhaps, part of him not wanting his films to get too close to the truth lest his parents be offended by the dark secret he let spill. But in the end, it’s the same instinct as the opening of the film: “he’s trying to control it” and it's more the train crashes of our lives. As far as the accuracy of The Fabelmans goes, who knows when he actually learned these things about his parents? Maybe so much of this was discovered later and now he’s finally making the narrative that brings us closer to, what perhaps should have been, the truth he experienced in his youth. And even when trying to process it, we see another incredible “blink and you’ll miss it” moment…

The one where his parents tell him of their divorce and Sammy looks up in the mirror and sees himself filming their speech… It’s a self-evisceration. Is he even there? Can he only think about how he’d film this? Or is it still a matter of control? And what do we do with all of that cinematic instinct in the end? Is there some grand, simpler thing we can take away from this?

Well, it finally brings us to the ending coda. Young Hollywood Sammy finally gets a call, but it doesn’t lead to a job or any other kind of “you made it” moment, but instead a hilarious chance encounter with the greatest director in the world. That would be John Ford (which is a thing that really happened to Spielberg). And who is playing the part? Well, it’s THE cameo of all cameos because it is the great David Lynch (who I never realized, both looks and acts the part of Ford quite well). It really is one of the great ending scenes of the last ten years or so. We see Ford futzing back into the studio, covered in lip-stick. Then we get the terse, flagrant back and forth basically leads to one piece of advice. How to distill all of filmmaking into something practical? Young Sammy is commanded to look at the paintings of his office. The horizon is low in the frame? Interesting! The horizon is high in the frame? Interesting! But if the horizon is in the middle of the frame? Then “it’s boring as fuck. Now get out!”

It is, of course, a hilarious simplification of the tenets of cinematography, but all of a sudden you start thinking about it and you realize how much Spielberg’s films have taken the lesson to heart. You realize how much perspective has been locked in the up and down of that Z-Axis and the way it’s always given his films this crucial intimacy and specificity, along with the ability to capture the wonder of looking up and the terror of being looked down upon (it’s also why so much of the current shooting on the Volume rankles precisely cause it often demands the horizon in the middle). And right as I’m genuinely thinking about all that I see Sammy walking to the horizon and I think: “wait, that’s right in the middle-ope.” And the film’s camera hastily tilts upward to fix it. The audience was cackling. And I love that it’s a goofy, bad shot on purpose, where even the lower horizon is an awkward spot, as if calling attention to the fact he feels like a pale imitation of Ford. Maybe it’s even a way of giving up a little control. Maybe it’s a way of making a Brechtian call out of how much this is all just fun and games really. Just another playful gesture from someone who might be our most playful big time director.

But like all things in Spielberg’s work, there’s more going on than it may seem.

There’s a reason the last poster Sammy looks at is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, and it’s not just because it’s a film that was shown earlier in the movie. It’s a film that engages the very thematic questions on display here, whether it’s who really did x to whom, and it even echoes the old adage of “print the legend.” But it’s even more reflexive of that. Because the whole point of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is that the film itself isn’t printing the legend. It’s getting to the complex heart of the ugly truths things that haunt us. And it's real ending evokes the disconnect from self-hood as the words “the man who shot Liberty Valence!” rings hollowly in Jimmy Stewart’s ears. For years, Spielberg has been VERY good at printing the legend. And maybe the comparative hollowness of those efforts is ringing in his own ears. Maybe he’s ready to talk about it in the here and now. Perhaps it’s only because his parents have passed, perhaps it’s because he’s operating from that place of deeper understanding and getting closer to that thing we call truth. And here he’s turned it into a complex, humane story of self-ownership that feels completely holistic, thematically vibrant, and cathartic.

But perhaps we were always heading here. After all, the tower will always crash. But part of that is understanding how and why you were trying to build it in the first place. In speaking about The Fabelmans, co-writer Tony Kushner, said, “Spielberg means play-mountain; 'spieler' is an actor in Yiddish, and a 'spiel' can be speech or can be a play... I wanted to have some of that meaning, and I’ve always liked the German word 'fabel,' which means fable.” In essence, as corny as it sounds, his entire life has always been storified and thus he’s always been scaling story mountain. Coincidentally, you see the image again and again. The California Overlooks above night-lit towns. The Devils Tower. Even the Paramount Logo. Images so often met by the moonlight glowing across the dreams and nightmares of children, often filled with wonder and terror alike. He built a tower and now we finally see the way that it crashed, along with all the shaky foundations that built it. And perhaps it happened long ago. But now, in a fit of “physician, heal thy self,” we got one of my favorite storytellers on the planet trying to communicate with what he’s always struggled to tell. It feels both like an act of exorcism and growth. And I for one want to reach back and communicate in tow, in great appreciation and wanting for that person to be okay.

Because the thing people forget about Pinocchio, for all the themes of youthful adventure and creation, is that the ending is ultimately about the fantasy of saving a parent. And finding your true self in that process. Spielberg has spent a career effectively trying to “save” his parents by better connecting with them, whether it's the wishful thinking of the dreams of boarding and bonding with aliens. Something that, given the modern realization that his father was willing to “play the bad guy” for the sake of the younger children in the family, turns Close Encounters into a gesture of forgiveness. And equally turns A.I. into a film about the cutting pain of realizing how much you truly love your mom despite the push / pull with which she may deal with you in turn. But both films were trying to make sense of something that perhaps never did. Maybe it’s all a car flipping in the night sky and realizing our own terrible incapacity to control it. We only end up recreating it, pain and all. But here at the end of the world, where the waters and the wild meet, comes the story that doesn’t feel much like a fairy tale. Instead, it feels like grief, finally digested. An artist coming to understand the architecture of how they were taught to love and process. But this time we will not get stuck in the half-edited dream, sleeping forever. This time we can  move on from it. Because the moment you realize that it is not your job to save your parent?

That’s the moment you really begin saving yourself.

And it’s okay if it takes a while.

<3HULK