Darkness in the Bliss-Out

A Reconsideration of the Films of Steven Spielberg

James Kendrick

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781441112507
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

While there has been a significant outpouring of scholarship on Steven Spielberg over the past decade, his films are still frequently discussed as being paternalistic, escapist, and reliant on uncomplicated emotions and complicated special effects. Even those who view his work favorably often see it as essentially optimistic, reassuring, and conservative. James Kendrick takes an alternate view of Spielberg's cinema and proposes that his films-even the most popular ones that seem to trade in easy answers and comforting, reassuring notions of cohesion and narrative resolution-are significantly darker and more emotionally and ideologically complex than they are routinely given credit for. Darkness in the Bliss-Out demonstrates, through close analysis of a wide range of Spielberg's films, that they are only reassuring on the surface, and that their depths embody a complex and sometimes contradictory view of the human condition.

1

“I Didn’t Want to See This”

Weekend America and Its Discontents in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Poltergeist

Released within a four-year span, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Poltergeist (1982) form what film scholar Andrew M. Gordon has called Spielberg’s “suburban trilogy.”¹ These three films, which more than any others helped to solidify in the popular imagination what a “Steven Spielberg film” is (albeit for mostly the wrong reasons), have a great deal in common, so much so that they feel like different riffs on the same themes and could be easily combined into a single master narrative. As Gordon points out, Close Encounters, E.T., and Poltergeist are “closely linked” in four important ways: subject matter (“contemporary American suburban families under stress, kidnapped children, and paranormal phenomenon”), emotional tone (“a mix of mystery, suspense, fear, comedy, warmth, breathless anticipation, and wonder”), technique (“awing the viewer by the power of light, sound, spectacle, and special effects”), and underlying psychological concerns (“separation anxiety, the fear of death, and the return of repressed material in the fantastic form of aliens or ghosts”).² They are also among the most directly autobiographical of Spielberg’s career, as many of their images, storylines, and characters derive directly from his childhood experiences, fantasies, and nightmares. Thus, this chapter will employ a more biographical approach than other chapters, linking elements of the films with Spielberg’s life, much of which he has willingly recounted in numerous interviews over the years.

Critics at the time of the films’ theatrical releases also noted the interconnections among them and how they reflected on Spielberg’s cohering sensibilities as a filmmaker. Writing about E.T. in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael compared it favorably to Close Encounters twice in the first two paragraphs, writing, “If the film seems a continuation of ‘Close Encounters,’ that’s partly because it has the sensibility we came to know in that picture, and partly because E.T. himself is like a more corporeal version of the celestial visitors at the end of it.”³ She took a dismal view of Poltergeist, arguing that it lacked precisely what made E.T. such a great film: “the emotional roots of the fantasy, and what it means to children.”⁴ New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, on the other hand, saw E.T. and Poltergeist, which were released within weeks of each other during the summer of 1982 and often played in multiplexes side-by-side, as so interconnected that they “fuse[d] … into a single artistic achievement about the world as imagined by children.”⁵ Canby recognized, however, that despite their similarities, the two films were paradoxically opposites, to the point that “anyone who is charmed by one will probably be disappointed by the other,”⁶ a point that perfectly presages Kael’s criticism, which was published the following day. In trying to distinguish between the two films, Canby wrote, “‘E.T.’ is Mr. Spielberg’s sweet, graceful, wish-fulfilling dream in which small children lead us toward the light of universal understanding as they munch Reese’s Pieces. ‘Poltergeist’ is a delicious nightmare in which children are subjected to all sorts of indescribable terrors and emerge triumphantly, their egos intact.”⁷

On both counts, Canby is only partially right. While there is plenty of sweetness and grace and light in E.T., there is also a great deal of darkness and fear and terror and disappointment, while the children and adults in Poltergeist, after being subjected to terror and violence, do not emerge triumphant or intact, but rather shattered and broken and barely alive, a foreshadowing of what awaits the child protagonists of Empire of the Sun (1987) and War of the Worlds (2005) and, in a more complicated sense, the mecha child in A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). Similarly, while Close Encounters is often described in terms of cinematic religious spectacle,⁸ with the arrival of the alien spacecraft at Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower playing the role of God descending on Mount Sinai, there is a much darker agenda at play beneath the surface. The powerful light show that brings the film to a close is a distraction from, but hardly a solution to, the film’s myriad social and interpersonal issues, none of which are resolved. While on a surface level Close Encounters does play, at least on first viewing, as “a psychological phenomenon, the expression of urgent unconscious desires, wish-fulfillment which reassures the audience,”⁹ closer inspection reveals that its “wish fulfillment” is perilously fragmented; for one character to achieve blissful harmony with the cosmos, he must leave behind not only his family, but the entirety of humankind, which, with few exceptions, is left unchanged and untouched by the extraterrestrial encounter. In fact, if there is a binding tie among these three films beyond their shared suburban setting, it is the manner in which their effects-laden conclusions—exhilarating and emotionally rapturous in Close Encounters and E.T., and terrifying in Poltergeist—create barely sustainable resolutions that easily crack apart beneath the strain of what has happened throughout each film and what has been left unresolved. In one form or another, the supernatural phenomena in each of the films dazzles and excites, but ultimately leaves behind broken families and homes, both figuratively and literally.

“Weekend America” on screen

Spielberg’s early cinematic fascination with suburbia and the culture of what he called “weekend America”¹⁰ may be partially explained by the fact that he was a child of the suburbs, unlike many of his urban-born-and-raised contemporaries who also rose to prominence in the “New Hollywood” of the 1960s and 1970s. Martin Scorsese, for example, grew up in the Little Italy neighborhood of Manhattan; Francis Ford Coppola spent most of his childhood in Woodside, Queens; and Brian De Palma grew up in Philadelphia.¹¹ Not surprisingly, many of their early films reflect the urban environments of their childhood and adolescence: Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967), Mean Streets (1973), and Taxi Driver (1976) are all indelibly New York-centered films, as are Coppola’s You’re a Big Boy Now (1966) and The Godfather (1972) and De Palma’s Greetings (1968), Hi, Mom! (1970), and Sisters (1973). Virtually the entirety of Spielberg’s childhood and adolescence, on the other hand, was spent in various suburban areas, starting on the East Coast and then moving west, first to the Sun Belt and finally to the West Coast. Each of his family’s moves marked a step up the socio-economic ladder and took them further away from densely populated, ethnically defined urban areas and into increasingly sprawling, affluent, white suburban neighborhoods.

Although there is some debate as to what exactly constitutes a “suburb,” there is general agreement that the term is used primarily to refer to “any kind of settlement on the periphery of a large city,”¹² as well as the outlying areas around small towns and the “population blips at the intersection of major highways.”¹³ Arguments over definitions are largely academic, though, as the terms “suburban,” “suburbs,” and “suburbia” are immediately familiar to the vast majority of Americans and conjure up a shared network of images, feelings, and meanings. Suburbia has been “the dominant American cultural landscape” at least since the mid-twentieth century when housing developers started building record numbers of affordable single-family dwellings around the edges of major cities, drawing young families to the promises of open spaces, safety for their children, and convenient access to the benefits of nearby urban centers without their congestion and crime. In other words, the suburbs merged the benefits of rural and city living, and as a result suburbia quickly became “the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies … a landscape of the imagination where Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and economic security, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmony and spiritual uplift.”¹⁴ More Americans now live in the suburbs than in rural areas and urban centers combined; thus, the suburbs, “in all their variety and in their shifting visual, cultural, political, and economic forms, are now central to everyday American life.”¹⁵

Yet, the suburbs are rarely depicted in a positive light in American cinema, as filmmakers have seemingly internalized the harsh critiques of post-war intellectuals and artists who saw them as inauthentic consumption centers, conformity factories, and a refuge from racial and socio-economic “undesirables.”¹⁶ While films that depicted the suburbs during the earliest years of the silent era tended to be light-hearted social comedies, the 1950s saw increasingly satirical films that eventually turned to “outright scorn, ridicule, and condemnation” in the 1960s and 1970s.¹⁷ The gentle satire of Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948) and Father of the Bride (1950) gave way to the vitriol of The Graduate (1967), Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), and The Stepford Wives (1975). The criticisms of suburbia and what it represented could also be found in nonfiction books, including William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) and A. C. Spectorsky’s The Exurbanites (1958), while novelists attacked it in fictional form in books like Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956), John Keats’s The Crack in the Picture Window (1957), and Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961). For post-war intellectuals, the inauthenticity and conformity of the suburbs was most clearly embodied in Levittown, the first and then-largest mass-produced planned community, which was constructed on Long Island by the building firm Levitt & Sons between 1947 and 1951. With its literally interchangeable Cape Code and ranch style houses, which were constructed on assembly lines and organized into geometric rows across a flat, treeless space that had formerly served as a potato farm, Levittown was a ready-made symbol of both the efficiencies of post-war manufacturing and the bland homogeneity of the new suburban lifestyle.¹⁸

Although it was artistically and intellectually fashionable in the 1950s and 1960s to deride the conformity and materialism represented by suburbia, some sociologists and cultural critics began to realize that, despite the surface homogeneity, suburbia and its denizens were widely varied in numerous ways. Researchers in the 1950s had declared suburbanites a “new breed” of Americans who were fundamentally different from their forebears in the city and country. In “Up From the Potato Fields,”a 1950 article in Time magazine about the construction of Levittown, the author describes it as “an entirely new kind of community” and makes special note of the residents’ limited age range (“Few of its more than 40,000 residents are past 35”), the rules imposed on them to ensure a consistent appearance from the street (fences were not allowed, yards must be mowed once a week, and laundry could not be hung out on traditional laundry lines), and especially the sense of isolation and estrangement (“Said one housewife last week: ‘It’s not a community that thinks much about what’s going on outside’”). However, the “suburbanites as new breed” view was soon challenged. Sociologist Bennett Berger’s Working-Class Suburbs (1960) demonstrated that there was a great deal of variety in the suburbs, while The Changing Face of the Suburbs (1976), a compilation of studies edited by sociologist Barry Schwartz, indicated a wide range of views regarding race, religion, and politics, thus supporting the argument that there is no coherent or dominant “suburban attitude.” Suburbanites, as it turned out, weren’t so much a new breed as they were the same breed of Americans who had, for the previous three centuries, sought a better life for themselves and their children and were simply following the spatial, economic, and cultural developments of their generation—which included Spielberg’s family.

A child of the “Baby Boom,” Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio, to a Jewish family whose history biographer Joseph McBride describes as “reflect[ing] the archetypal Jewish-American journey of the last hundred years, from persecution in Russian cities and schtetlach (small towns) to religious freedom in the New World, and in succeeding generations from the comforts and limitations of a traditional mid-western Jewish-American community to the hazardous opportunities offered by the largely WASPish suburbs.”¹⁹ Spielberg’s first three years of life were spent in the Cincinnati suburb of Avondale, which since the 1920s had become the city’s largest Jewish enclave and at the time was a lower middle-class neighborhood comprised primarily of large, older homes that had been subdivided into duplexes and apartments.²⁰ Avondale provided a safe, comfortable environment; Peggie Hibbert Singerman, one of the Spielberg family’s neighbors, described it as “a lovely neighborhood. [The houses had] big backyards, huge porches on the front, ...

Table of contents

• FC
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Steven Spielberg and the Politics of Bliss
• 1. “I Didn’t Want to See This”: Weekend America and Its Discontents in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and Poltergeist
• 2. “Americans Fighting Americans”: Incoherence and Animal Comedy in 1941
• 3. “What Exactly Are We Applauding?” Indiana Jones and the Ideologies of Heroism and American Exceptionalism
• 4. “Lost and Done For”: The Rejection of War Fantasies in Empire of the Sun and War Horse
• 5. “For the World’s More Full of Weeping Than You Can Understand”: Humanity and Inhumanity in A.I. Artificial Intelligence
• Works Cited
• Index
• Copyright Page