Primer is The A.V. Club's ongoing series of beginners' guides to pop culture's most notable subjects: filmmakers, music styles, literary genres, and whatever else interests us—and hopefully you. This week: Steven Spielberg, an American director of science-fiction and adventure films and historical dramas whose latest, Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, opened yesterday.
Spielberg 101
Steven Spielberg, who has made some of history's most financially successful films, is an Eagle Scout who lives in a home filled with movie props and Norman Rockwell paintings. But just as Rockwell frequently cloaked tremendous nuance and unexpected pathos in his images of Americana, Spielberg has only rarely been solely a commercial filmmaker. Since The Color Purple in 1985, Spielberg has alternated between the genre films that made his name and fortune, and artistically ambitious dramatic fare. But the craftsmanship at the fore of his most action-oriented efforts serves him well in films like Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, and, from the beginning, there's always been considerable art in his most crowd-pleasing efforts. He's an artist who sees no contradiction in giving audiences what they want. Sometimes he knows what that is before they do.
Spielberg already had a reputation as a hotshot when he agreed to helm an adaptation of Peter Benchley's man-against-nature novel Jaws, but reports from the set indicated that he was in over his head, saddled with a mechanical shark that wouldn't work and a veteran crew that thought he was just some punk kid. Somehow, Spielberg held the production together, and delivered a movie that honored the traditions of classic Hollywood filmmaking—from the Howard Hawks-style "men on an adventure" conversations to the suspense beats cribbed from Alfred Hitchcock—while adding the sex, gore, profanity and docu-realist Americana that his fellow film-school brats had been riding to success. The result was a massive hit that's often cited as the first summer blockbuster, even though very little about Jaws would mark it as crowd-pleaser in today's blockbuster market. The movie is deliberately paced and extremely talky, with a fairly bleak ending that speaks to one of Spielberg's recurring themes—that when men try to control something uncontrollable, they leave an ungodly mess. Jaws is a hit film with a beating heart.
Flush with the success of Jaws, Spielberg reportedly turned down offers to direct slam-dunks like Jaws 2 and Superman in order to make the odder and more personal Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Though ostensibly a movie about space aliens making contact with Earth, Close Encounters is also about post-Watergate paranoia, suburban anxiety, and—again—how humans greet the unknown by drafting untenable plans. While channeling Hawks and Hitchcock once more, Spielberg also nodded to Stanley Kubrick by inserting creepy, mysterious images without immediately explaining what they meant. (The generation of filmmakers and TV writers who grew up with Close Encounters would go on to create shows like The X-Files and Lost, where the goal has been to creep viewers out first, and fill in the blanks later.) Close Encounters is an unusual film with a sprawling narrative and a problematic hero: Richard Dreyfuss, a family man all too eager to ditch his wife and kids in order to go on a flying-saucer ride. Spielberg now says that as a father and husband, he doesn't understand Dreyfuss' choice, and that if he made the movie today, he would probably change that part of the story. But the Spielberg of 1977 knew what he was doing, asking an audience overwhelmed with late-'70s malaise to invest in a character as restless and dissatisfied as they were.
Where Jaws and Close Encounters found Spielberg redefining what genre films would look like from there on, he settled for homage with his next film. With Raiders Of The Lost Ark, a joint venture with producer George Lucas, Spielberg sought to do for classic adventure serials what Lucas' Star Wars had done for Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, updating the material he liked as a boy, and repackaging it for the blockbuster age. But Raiders is an act of homage that doubles as one-upmanship. The adventure is bigger, the villains nastier, the hero more heroic (with a healthy dash of cynicism to keep him up to date), and, most importantly, the action more impressive. And believable. From the moment we first see Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones running from a rolling boulder, it's clear this world runs on real, however oversized, physics. As elsewhere, the believability helped sell the fantasy. A pair of sequels—one lousy, the other pleasant but lesser—followed throughout the decade. Spielberg and Lucas revived the franchise in 2008.
Released in the summer of 1982, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial seemed an odd candidate to become the most successful film of all time—a title it held until 1997. Rooted in the raw material of an American suburbia increasingly filled with broken homes, it focused on a family united by a lost alien, which wasn't exactly a rip-roaring quest for the Ark Of The Covenant. (And, in the looks department, E.T. wasn't exactly Harrison Ford.) But by drawing on his experience as a child of divorce and balancing whimsy with slow-mounting paranoia, Spielberg built a spiritual fable that, like E.T.'s method of phoning home, found ways to broadcast meaning using cobbled-together elements of contemporary American culture. Immediately overexposed by a merchandising bonanza that included everything from toys to pajamas to a spectacularly bad Atari game, E.T. found its sweetness overwhelmed by the tackiness around it. But the tackiness has long since dimmed—in part thanks to Spielberg's repeated refusal to indulge in a sequel—and the film now looks like a timeless call for acceptance and transcendence sent from a time and place that's faded into history.
After E.T., Spielberg embarked on a shaky decade of prestige projects and half-realized adventure films, some of which have their merits, but none of which caught the imagination of the public the way his work from 1975 to 1982 did. He started to right the ship of his career in 1993, when he tackled Michael Crichton's bestseller Jurassic Park. Making his first extensive use of CGI, Spielberg delivered an amusement-park attraction every bit as thrilling and savage as the one in the movie. Yet in some ways, Jurassic Park has a lot in common with the shaggier early Spielberg blockbusters. The film has a grandiose buildup, filled with science, philosophy, and teasing glimpses of what's to come. Then the monsters arrive, set loose by a series of errors made by arrogant scientists and ideologues. Spielberg returned to Jurassic Park four years later for The Lost World, and this time brought the dinosaurs to the mainland for a grand finale that revisits the car-smashing and suburban subversion of early films like The Sugarland Express and Close Encounters. But the heroes and villains of The Lost World are a weaker breed, and hardly seem worth terrorizing. When the beasts are finally unleashed, it's like watching the Olympic Dream Team beat up on Greece. If ever Spielberg needs another metaphor for powerful men tampering with a good thing, the making of The Lost World would be a fine subject.
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