[For Part 1, see here. This second part is provided with mixed feelings; I could not proofread this as I wanted, but due to storm conditions, I don’t know when I can get to post it at a convenient time. Hence, this version. Slight fixes were done 11/3/12 & 11/6/12.]
The sad devastation from Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, brought to media-borne life in shocking photos in the state newspaper The Star-Ledger, shows there is wonder and awe (as movies might address) and there is such awe at devastation that we can’t help but mourn. Life can go well beyond what the most expensively made movie can portray, when you see what power a storm can wield. And movies are largely for entertainment, aren’t they?
But when a movie chooses to look at a friendlier version of wonder and awe—if we don’t quite opt for this in church, or a quiet walk in the woods—we can see it can be an artistic stunt to pull off well.
Subsections below:
Spielberg as a director of capacities to address different mentalities
A peculiarly 1970s style of film gestation
The film is great despite its problems
The main characters, and how Spielberg’s intuitive strengths play out
What does it all mean?
Director’s dossier: Steven Spielberg
Spielberg as a director of capacities to address different mentalities
I was going to start this Part 2 with a list of Spielberg’s films, and then it became so long that it made more sense to put it at the end. This list shows what a substantial career he has had, along with the fact that as is noted, he is the most successful film directors in film history (or one of the very top). Obviously a lot of this has to do with his aiming toward younger audiences (the nature of which has varied over the decades; for instance, in the early 1980s, when Spielberg was in full “Peter Pan” mode, the type of fantasy tropes that are big now weren’t big, though certain genre approaches brought in the studio-exciting ticket sales). His being popularly oriented seems a keystone to his being criticized (it is noted in one book on the directors who first flourished in the 1970s that Spielberg, along with George Lucas, represented the headwaters toward movies’ pandering to “twerp” audiences: see Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs, & Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood [New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998]). It’s seemed to me Jews in particular take him to task for a sort of shallowness, as if he isn’t (or at times hasn’t been) a serious enough Jew (see, for example, implications in a blog entry—see here—that I cite in my July 20 review, where I refer to Claude Lanzmann having commented on Spielberg’s Schindler’s List; Lanzmann himself has made no secret of his disdain for this film—see here).
This can be addressed a few different ways. One may be to analyze Spielberg along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock’s career. Here, the British director, who was good at technical feats during production, and coming up with interesting visual tricks (like the eyeglasses reflecting a murder in Strangers on a Train [1950]), also seemed to carve out a name for himself on the basis of a popularly oriented type of work: suspense. He was “the Master of Suspense.” This suggests being bound to a sort of genre formula, with whatever shallowness that implies, but of course Hitchcock is valued today not just for his more popularly oriented, “easy-to-eat popcorn” aspects, but for actually taking on adult themes as baggage along with whatever else he is doing. Artists who work in mass-audience realms, where bringing in big money is an imperative when being funded by a big studio, are obliged to cater to people who aren’t out for a lot of dire, depressing content. But an artist, like Hitchcock (or plenty of others), who is in this position can also sneak in looks at adult themes with which he feels he is making the kind of adult work his talent cuts him out for. So in Hitchcock we see, amid the gloss of more pop-type elements, treatments of guilt and paranoia (in Strangers…), aspects of sexual tension related to guilt (in North by Northwest), tendencies to love played upon by fear of death (Vertigo), and so on. By the time he did Topaz (1969), Hitchcock’s “brand” was so much about suspense that he included little sequences in this otherwise “drily” political film that comprised suspense, but which hardly reflected the larger concerns or techniques of the film. They seemed like little baubles reminding you who was directing the film, which otherwise mostly seemed atypical of Hitchcock.
Spielberg always had a playful-ideas side, it would seem. His mother was (she's still alive) something of a flighty sort. It turns out, from a 60 Minutes interview aired October 21 this year, that while Spielberg had long assumed (or told himself) that his father had abandoned his family when he was a boy (which informed some themes in CE3K and E.T.), it was his mother who actually was the homebreaker, in terms of her taking up with another man. And his father, it turns out, was just away so much because he was a workaholic. Spielberg didn’t reconcile with his father until about 25 years ago, while he seems to have excused his mother in her own role in her marriage because of “put[ting] her on a pedestal,” or being blind to her foibles as impacting the marriage. I don’t know a lot about Spielberg’s psychological background (as he has let out), but the long-held trope of a father who abandoned the family certainly contributed to how CE3K and E.T. were viewed, and today you could add that his tendency to engage in flights of fancy may reflect his mother’s own tendencies (or genetics). This can be considered in relation to Spielberg’s being a “sensitive artist” like anyone would pretty much be in his position (the recent 60 Minutes story’s reflecting how he was nervous about every film production is true enough; in DVD talk related to the Jaws film, he tells how after that film’s protracted, difficult shoot, he suddenly had a seizure of some sort; and Dustin Hoffman has said that every time Spielberg embarks on a new production, he has an episode of vomiting). Add to this the fact that many artists can be at their most brilliant, and also most loony, in their youth, and you can understand something about what led to CE3K.
CE3K had been in his mind, indeed worked on, starting before Jaws (whose production was in 1973 and/or ’74). The screenplay is credited to Spielberg alone, though there has been some controversy on who/whether others contributed (see the Wikipedia article on the film). CE3K, especially in retrospect, would seem to be both Spielberg’s flakiest in a way (at least for his work in the 1970s) and yet a prodigious representative of what he would turn out especially good at; it was a thematic hope chest or Petri dish or “golden goose” in terms of what would end up being a cinematic approach that would serve him very well later: science fiction that tried to root things in reality (and middle class life) to a good extent, and (at times) could look at aliens as potential friends. His biggest hit, E.T., was born when he worked on CE3K; and among his numerous hits have been sci fi films, including Jurassic Park and Minority Report. (His later sci fi films did not take the optimistic, “aliens are our friends” position that CE3K did.)
A peculiarly 1970s style of film gestation
It’s pretty obvious Spielberg had earned enough cachet as a promising director, with the enormous success of Jaws, that he was given carte blanche in a sense with making CE3K, with its building on apparent pet themes of his. Also, though this film was to be distributed by a major studio (Columbia
The production on this film, Spielberg says in the ~2007 DVD, would have been the most complicated and lengthy (“the toughest production of my memory”) for any of his films if it weren’t for Jaws, the previous film. Jaws, by all his accounts, was horrible because not only did the shoot take a long time, but the filming over seawater—which was deep enough (at ~20 feet) for a structure that anchored the mechanical shark, but still far enough out to keep out visible land—was plagued by seasickness, movement of structures hurting shots, unexpected boats coming into view, etc. Hence Spielberg’s seizure when the shoot was done. CE3K featured production hassles of its own, not as sickness-making as with Jaws, but such logistical challenges as working with a giant stage in a former blimp factory in Mobile , Alabama India Alabama
In a way, of several of the major directors who first flourished in the 1970s, this film was another “late 1970s production nightmare.” Apocalypse Now was famously like this for Francis Ford Coppola. Stanley Kubrick, who had earlier taken over a year to shoot Barry Lyndon in about 1974, took a long time with The Shining, from about April 1978 through May 1979 (don’t quote me on this last fact; need to double-check). For CE3K, enough footage was shot, with (one would guess) multiple takes of scenes, and alternative scenes not used, that the film’s editor, Michael Kahn, says that costar Francois Truffaut, who was a famed film director himself, was amazed at the amount of “trims,” footage not used, the editor had accumulated. The editor also said (on the ~2007 DVD) that there was over 100,000 feet of film generated for the extended last sequence at the landing site for the aliens. This ultimately made for a highly difficult “post-production” job for Spielberg and Kahn; Spielberg says (2007): “To this day, nothing was harder [for me] than putting together the last 25 minutes of” CE3K.
Yet when Spielberg had finished his initial shoot for CE3K, and presumably before post-production was over, he found (according to the ~2007 DVD) that he didn’t have enough scenes to build up the suspense early on. So he filmed additional scenes to flesh out the story (a sort of error that, today, I would think would get a director fired from a project). Then, when Columbia
This forced wrap-up is what led to his requesting of Columbia (apparently when it suited both parties) to do additional work, resulting in the 1980 “Special Edition,” where the bargain with the devil he made was (per the studio’s marketing-savvy demand) to shoot a scene of Roy Neary inside the spaceship, along with what Spielberg really wanted to do. This compromise later led Spielberg, when he felt motivated to futz around with the film again, and as shown on the 2007 DVD, to do a new director’s cut of the film, a big objective of which was to excise the inside-the-spaceship sequence (a good choice, I think). The result is that this is the only Spielberg film that has had the multiple versions it has (E.T. also was subjected to much-later tweaking, to make it more young-family-friendly). Of the three versions of CE3K (1977, 1980, and ~1998), I think the first and third are most worth viewing, though you won’t suffer a curved spine if you watch all three.
The film is great despite its problems
The New York Times has, in its admirably pithy film summaries in its TV listings, occasionally dismissed CE3K as “the greatest 1950s sci fi film ever made,” or such. The film is flawed, but deserves better than this. Though Spielberg is one director who seems never to have been a druggie, this film leads you to wonder sometimes what he was smoking as he made it, or had he fallen and hit his head. There are numerous things about it that don’t make much sense if you think about them. And yet, overall, it seems to work well enough, and especially makes an impact on an emotional and intuitive level, without being “too sentimental” or cloying (E.T., I think, while it didn’t seem quite so family-friendly when first released, now seems a sentimental film in the best sense, but isn’t something we jaded adults will watch repeatedly, while we can do this with CE3K).
In particular, as I said in Part 1, CE3K well reflects the almost religious sense people had about the possibility of meeting up with life from other planets in the 1970s. This wasn’t just echoed in the Erich von Daniken theories, but there was obsessing about the Bermuda Triangle and other “locations of weird happenings.” I remember a book I got as a kid from the Scholastic book club we were treated to in school, Strangely Enough it was titled, and it was filled with all these phenomena that couldn’t be explained and/or were considered possibly explainable by paranormal phenomena or such.
It is this sort of “possibility of explaining the disappearance of planes over the Bermuda Triangle” or the like that primed audiences for the opening scene where an exploratory crew is coming to a set of World War II planes that have mysteriously turned up in a Mexican desert. How had they gotten here? The planes look unused…and yet there is a calendar from 1945 in one of their cockpits. This scene, by the way, was one filmed after principal photography after Spielberg realized he needed more introductory scenes. It actually has a sort of synthetic quality about it, unlike the air traffic controller scene, which is much tighter and more gripping and apparently was the original opening scene of the first assemblage.
OK, let’s get to some problems. Spielberg may be brilliant in terms of use of the camera, knowing how to make an image click with us and sell a large part of the story, but some aspects of this film’s story don’t make much logical sense.
Some of the inconsistencies or quirks
* If the aliens have so little means of communicating with us besides music and blinking of lights on the UFOs—and oh yes, they can implant images in humans’ heads, like that of Devil’s Tower, where the big meeting place is to be—how is it they are able to determine what are conventions of latitude and longitude are, so that they can send radio signals in the form of beeps that are translated into numbers of latitude and longitude?
* And oh yes, in order to have this plot detail make sense, the translator David Laughlin (played by Bob Balaban) for the French governmental type Claude Lacombe (played by Truffaut) is, by profession, a cartographer—which detail is presented in the opening, planes scene, and may seem puzzling to be delivered there (almost violating common sense, where identifying his credentials would have been more appropriate). Then we find, for whatever reason a cartographer—“a mapmaker,” as he says—is tagging along with a crew of government types hot on the trail of UFOs and related phenomena, he also knows French, hence he ends up being the interpreter for Truffaut’s Lacombe. (Toward the end of the film, Balaban looks more like one of George Lucas’ “ewoks,” scruffy in a beard and yet cuddly-looking.)
* Which raises the question—why is a French man who is rusty in English heading a UFO-hunting group that otherwise seems largely spearheaded by Americans?
* For some reason, Lacombe feels impelled to teach a group of academics or such in an assembly room the musical-tone hand signals apparently defined by one Zoltan Kodaly, as if this is a key tool to further trying to communicate with the aliens. It turns up in the last, big-stage scene, where aliens actually appear before the humans. Lacombe does the hand gestures, and the alien cordially signs them back. (For comedy, the alien could have said, “OK, cool, I’ll sign back. But dude, where I come from? This means ‘You have a booger hanging from your nose,’ and they’re fighting words!”)
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* When the giant “mother ship” comes in for a landing in the final scene, how does such a behemoth approach all the humans on the ground without giving off jet exhaust or some other sense that it has to propel itself to keep aloft above Earth with its gravity? (Note: There is talk in the background chatter in the scene—science-oriented types will pick up a lot of such hokum in the movie—about the possible risks posed [I think it is implied] by the ship’s gravity; you could “expect some dizziness”…. Oh? How about if I just crap in my pants at the sight of such a monster a hundred feet or so away?)
The movie overall, with excitement-making tracking shots being one example of how it still seems pretty fresh, has a sleek look and crisp pace (the director of photography is mainly Vilmos Zsigmond, with additional work by others include Laszlo Kovacs) and good editing (Michael Kahn started his long association with Spielberg on this film). But some scenes seem as if they weren’t written with much smarts, or they certainly are old-fashioned today. For instance, the scene in India, where a huge number of local residents feel impelled to chant the five-note semi-melody (which can’t get out of our heads today) seated in rows like schoolchildren—and where the American UFO-ologists are diligently recording the quasi-religious proceedings—would seem like an insult to Indians today. With their role in the world economy now, not least including pharmaceutical production, the idea of a host of “noble savages” doing no more to contribute to this story than chanting like trained monkeys would seem quite politically incorrect. Cut from this to the assembly where a tape of the chanting is played, and the Zoltan Kodaly signing is taught, and we say these scenes are rather dumb in intellectual justification, and portentous if not downright pretentious in the role they play in the plot. And yet they have a stirring quality, ratcheting up the film’s suspense and sense of excitement, and we tend to excuse them.
A lot of the film seems rather banal in terms of how smart the slices of American society shown are being. The bunch of folks at the military-hosted press conference, including the scruffy character who claims he saw Bigfoot. The country sorts hanging out at the roadside, some killing time playing cards, waiting for another sighting of UFOs in the night sky. Were the rank and file really such a bunch of dopes back then? As far as I was witness to, not really. People could speculate and talk about UFOs without being yahoos.
It may seem as if I don’t like this movie, and some of my criticisms, if professional critics made them about a new release, might mean the movie was a clear dud, or at least severely flawed. But of course I am speaking some 35 years after the film’s release, where cultural change and technological advance (and a maturing director’s career) all can make a former grand achievement look “smaller in the distance.” But if you say, “If Spielberg can be so smart at times, why does he lapse in the ways he does here?,” I’d say you were asking a question that is a little wrong.
The main characters, and how Spielberg’s intuitive strengths play out
Unlike directors such as Stanley Kubrick, who (for a hobby) was a chess ace and (in work) pinged every tiny detail of his films, or the more modern Coens, who can whip up such zingily smart satires, Spielberg in some core way is not so discursive, but can capture the audiences he does because his talent is so much intuitive. For one thing, he knows how to key in to a sense of “middle-class moderation.” For another, it is well known how he has the aspect of knowing “how kids think,” so that he can relate well to child actors (as Cary Guffey, who at age three played Barry Guiler here, attests), and so he can fashion an E.T.-type confection. This kid-knowing side seems to be one basis for some to dismiss him as, at best, a sort of latter-day Walt Disney. But with CE3K, the “child’s mentality” seems relevant also because, in a 1970s day in which “we actually get in touch with aliens” seemed a not-bad idea, the side of adults that seemed amenable to this was, if not childlike, then open-minded enough to share a child’s sense of wonder and, sometimes, awe.
We have seen from the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey
If beings from another planet visited, they simply wouldn’t inspire wonder and awe. For one thing, it would not merely be a natural phenomenon. They would raise the question of their intentions: do they mean well? Can we communicate? What will our contact lead to? Here, fear would be understandable and probably inevitable.
Richard Dreyfuss, who was eager to play Roy Neary, understood the best intentions of CE3K: “This particular project had a noble agenda…. [Which was to say] We not only are not alone but have relatively little to fear.”
Teri Garr has relatively limited screen time as Roy
When the film is as flawed as I’ve noted, it’s obvious not all the implications of an actual alien contact can be traced out. (Heck, it’s tough enough getting a valid film about Nixon’s life made.) For instance, if Jillian Guiler’s son was kidnapped by aliens, would she only go on the road, or whatever transpires after Barry is taken and before she and Roy cross paths at the press conference? Today, an “Amber alert” would be the least of the consequences; there’d be news coverage, Internet trending, President Obama weighing in…. Some Congressman would want to hold the aliens accountable. The mother’s inclination would not merely be to grope her way to Devil’s Tower (with Roy), as genuine and spirit-moved as her motivation is, to “see what there is to see”—and even seem sort of melancholily shy about going on to the landing platform simply because Barry isn’t around, when Roy wants to go down there….
Dreyfuss’s Roy and Melinda Dillon’s Jillian are well-enough drawn as individuals who are dealing with the emotional implications of a “visitation” by aliens, as individuals—almost like teenagers dealing with hormonal changes, or such. As family people, there’s something lacking, especially in Roy Roy
In fact, I think critics of Spielberg, in their more general look at his career, when they say the only interesting characters he’s depicted in his films have been those in Jaws, would say that the adult characters’ two-dimensionality (or close to it) in CE3K is one big problem of the film. Frankly, I find the character Roy to be annoying myself; I hasten to say that Dreyfuss does a good job with him, fleshing out the character within the confines the story gives it, with heart (somewhat similar to Chaim Topol’s giving life to Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof). But there is something obviously self-absorbed about his Roy
Another deviation from film tradition over the many decades is the absence of a normal-type romance. While Roy
What does it all mean?
“This means something. This is important,” Roy
Overall, the film goes to great production lengths to spell out the meaning of the possibly wondrous and possibly hope-giving that could come from outer space, as weird as that idea might seem today. We can get the 2007 DVD, and watch different versions of the film, and listen to the making-of extras, and admire all the work that went into this project, seeing it as both as reflection of times past and yet as an artistic statement of what wonder and awe can mean, not simply in a fantasy realm, and outside your religious life, when they can be considered outside the pressures of shattering natural disaster, lingering economic trials, and weaponized threats from abroad.
I’m sorry I couldn’t say more about special-effects consultant Douglas Trumbull or production designer Joe Alves, who apparently spearheaded work on the enormous stage in Alabama
Director’s dossier: Steven Spielberg
I am not as well-versed in Spielberg as I am about certain other directors, but he seems so familiar in a way that I don’t feel too far off in the following. I found that his career seems to piece out into a few phases (I am focusing only on feature films or what became feature films, not what was only TV work.)
Early phase/1970s dark-hued stories
Duel (1971 TV movie; 1972 feature film in Europe ). A psychopathic trucker stalks a businessman on the road. Seems to do a lot with a “little” story and fairly simple production values. See my February 3 blog entry.
The Sugarland Express (1974). Starred Goldie Hawn, with wacky tale, apparently based on true story, of couple the female of whom is trying to rescue a child; they are on the run on the road, chased by police. Has downer ending, typical of ’70s movies.
Jaws (1975). The first major summer blockbuster, and a durable enough horror film that even a kid today I overheard in a library spoke as if it gave her the creeps. The original idea was to somewhat copy Duel’s style of a sort of chase situation unfolding in real time.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One of only two writing credits for Spielberg for films he also directed. More’s to be said on this point.
1941 (1979). A big-budget effort making a sort of over-the-top comedy out of a World War II situation involving the California coast (if a Japanese sub came ashore there), if I have it right. Included Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi among the stars. Spielberg’s first dud. I’ve never seen it, but apparently it is an acquired taste.
Close Encounters…: Special Edition (1980). Has additional scenes; one was of the inside of the large spaceship, which the studio wanted but which Spielberg didn’t really want but agreed to include as part of a deal to finish the rest of the film the way he wanted.
(Not director: The Blues Brothers [1980], small acting part. He may also have helped as a consultant with the car-chase scenes.)
Works designed to, or happening to, be big hits with young audiences
Raiders of the Lost Ark
E.T. the Extraterrestrial (1982). Built on an idea he had toward the end of making CE3K, this became Spielberg’s biggest hit and is one of his very most recognizable properties.
(Not director: Poltergeist [1982]—he was a coscreenwriter.)
A sequence of Twilight Zone, The Movie (1983).
(Not director: Gremlins [1984], acting.)
(Not director: The Goonies [1985], contributed story.)
Mix of adult films and young-audience films
The Color Purple (1985). His first film in some years where he returned to an adult theme, with stars including Whoopi Goldberg in an adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel.
Empire of the Sun (1987).
Always (1989). A sort of fantasy story, with his third time with Richard Dreyfuss as a star.
Hook (1991). An adaptation of the Peter Pan story, which apparently wasn’t a hit with critics. Included Robin Williams as a star.
Schindler’s List (1993). Spielberg’s first truly sober adult film, and winning him his first best director Oscar (as well as Oscar for best film). I think one of the few major-film treatments of the Holocaust that is well worth seeing, though obviously is by no means fun. See my July 20 blog entry (which mainly focuses on Fiddler on the Roof). While I believe he saw this film as a means to come to terms with his own Jewish background, this film was also, in my view, Spielberg’s unwitting apology for previously utilizing his talents to produce all sorts of space creatures, Indiana Jones romps, and other Peter Pan outings that, on a level, squandered his opportunity to delivery what a capable, high-profile director really had the rare ability to, a bracing story on the more serious matters in our lives and history, as other directors of his generation have been quicker to do earlier in their careers.
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Mostly adult films under the aegis of his studio DreamWorks
Amistad (1997). I think this was his first work under the umbrella of DreamWorks SKG, the studio he founded with entertainment moguls Jeffrey Katzenberg (from Disney) and David Geffen (from the recorded-music industry, among other areas). This film was on the U.S. New World .”
Saving Private Ryan (1998). A landmark film in some ways, on World War II, and done by Spielberg, from what I heard, partly to honor his father’s generation. Its most notable sequence is its first 25 minutes, depicting in harrowing fashion the sensory experience of combat (including periods of numbness—“gating out” sensory experiences); in particular, this sequence depicts what it could have been said to be like landing on the beaches of Normandy during D-Day. The larger story in some ways is atypical and a little shallow as a World War II story, but is effective enough, with Tom Hanks in one of his few collaborations with Spielberg.
A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). The only film he directed, in addition to CE3K, that Spielberg also wrote the screenplay for, though this film was really authored by Stanley Kubrick, who had been developing it for years. Kubrick had commissioned several writers over a long period to develop the treatment (summary/outline of the story), and the treatment as described in a 1999 news story is what this film brought to fruition. Spielberg’s screenplay was putting meat on the bones of the treatment to have a shootable script. See “The Masterpiece a Master Couldn’t Get Right,” The New York Times (July 18, 1999), arts section, pp. 9, 22. This film includes visual and verbal stylistic touches that echo or allude to films of Kubrick (e.g., The Shining, 2001, and Barry Lyndon) and films of Spielberg (such as E.T.). Apparently misunderstood by some as a kind of “endorsement” of child abandonment, it actually is an unusual and touching look at alienation in a child, though the child of the story is a robot. This film and CE3K and the subsequent Minority Report are worth considering as a trio, as Spielberg’s more mature attempts to deal with sci fi themes.
Minority Report (2002). An adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story, this is a dense film, in terms of cultural aspects packed in (technology run amok in some ways); thematic ideas (like that of vision) put into the overall quilt of story and production values; and the Dick-ian ideas about precognition, fighting crime with same, and issues of the extent of knowledge and guilt. Stars Tom Cruise in an effective action-based performance. One of Spielberg’s smartest and darkest films, worth seeing more than once to get a handle on all that’s going on. I might do a separate review of it in the future.
Catch Me If You Can (2003). A story of the con artist Frank Abagnale, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale and Tom Hanks as the lawman after him. Worthwhile.
The Terminal (2004). A return to lighter fare, a still-pleasant film OK for adults, about a foreign man trapped in an airline terminal in New York
War of the Worlds (2005). An adaptation of the H.G. Wells story, starring Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning. Somewhat reflective of post-9/11 conditions for the U.S.
Late films
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War Horse (2011).
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