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Film-Philosophy 14.1
2010
Steven Spielberg, the Home-Wrecker
Review: Dean A. Kowalski, ed. (2008) Steven Spielberg and
Philosophy: ‘We’re Going to Need a Bigger Book.’ Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky.
John Bleasdale
University of Ca Foscari, Venice
Steven Spielberg has been the subject of several serious biographies, such as
Citizen Spielberg by Lester D. Friedman, and his films have been analysed,
criticised, lauded and condemned in numerous articles and books, notably
Warren Buckland’s Directed by Steven Spielberg. And yet the witty
immediacy of the subtitle of this book of essays admits a realistic trepidation
and, to some extent, a critical shortfall. Spielberg the Shark versus the boat
of theory, philosophy and critical interpretation is a galling proposition. One
simple reason is the quantity and range of his output. Beginning with his first
feature, the made for television Duel (1971) to his most recent episode in the
Indiana Jones saga, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
(2008), Spielberg has created movies which often attain a definitive status in
their chosen genres. How many Revenge of Nature films can you name after
Jaws (1975) and The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)? Saving Private Ryan
(1998) (along with Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line [1998])
reintroduced the combat experience of the Second World War as a cinematic
topic after it had lain dormant for at least a decade. Schindler’s List (1993)
likewise and more controversially re-established the Holocaust in the popular
imagination. Science Fiction was systematically revitalised by pictures such as
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982), Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001), Minority Report (2002) and the
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most recent War of the Worlds (2005) remake. Alongside the big popcorn
blockbusters (a genre that Spielberg is often cited, along with his friend and
sometime collaborator George Lucas, as creating) such as the Indiana Jones
films and Jurassic Park series, presenting film as pure entertainment,
rollercoaster rides marketing a wide range of ancillary product, Spielberg
would aim for the more serious subject matter of his historical epics: Amistad
(1997), Empire of the Sun (1987), Schindler’s List, and The Colour Purple
(1985). In the midst of these epic treatments of history, there are also the
smaller films, Catch Me If You Can (2002), The Terminal (2004) and
Munich (2005), presenting a more intimate and at times ambiguous picture.
Of course, there were failures, notably his disastrous foray into slapstick
comedy with 1941(1979), his romantic-comedy Always (1989) and Hook
(1991), his version of the Peter Pan story; but it is fair to say that in his role
as director and even more proficiently as executive producer and co-founder
of DreamWorks, he has more than anyone else alive changed the way
American cinema is made, distributed and received.
In formulating a critical response using philosophy as a starting point,
is it possible to identify a philosophy behind the work, a coherent
Spielbergian view of the world and our place in it? Though the adjective does
get an airing in some parts of the book, there is no large claim for the
filmmaker as possessing a self-conscious and meticulously formulated
conceptual framework. There is no case presented that Spielberg is Hegelian
rather than Kantian. Neither is there a posited overarching idea, a
Spielbergism, of which each of his films is somehow a manifestation or
expression. Rather, Dean Kowalski argues that philosophy is ‘not so much
something that you “have” as something that you “do”’ (p. 1). In this sense
the artist, filmmaker and writer will necessarily and inevitably reveal
philosophical insights, address questions and dilemmas pertinent to
philosophical enquiry, and, perhaps most significantly for the purpose of this
collection, illustrate and teach themes. The book comes with an appendix
containing the plot summaries of five of Spielberg’s films, complete with
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questions
to
stimulate
2010
classroom
discussion
and
provoke
broader
philosophical discussion.
It is the philosophy that is fore-fronted. The films often shed light on
the issue rather than the issue giving us an enlightened view of the film. And
so we can learn about ethics by considering Oskar Schindler, the sacrifice of
soldiers in their mission to save Private Ryan and the objections to the
cloning of dinosaurs; we can explore contending theories on rights in our
viewing of Amistad and notions of revenge in respect to Munich; likewise we
can investigate metaphysics via the nature of the alternative realities of AI
and Minority Report. This can mean that some of the essays tend towards
the uncritical in that they are more interested in what happens in the film
than how what happens is represented or constructed. This is made explicit
by Roger P. Ebertz: ‘I should make clear that it is not my intention to analyze
the film. I am a philosopher not a film critic. […] I use Schindler’s List, as a
well-developed thought experiment’ (112).
This is all very well and many of Spielberg’s films offer themselves up
readily to this process: his ‘problem films’ if you will. Saving Private Ryan
contains an overt and protracted discussion on the ethics of sacrificing a
number of men for a mission of only sentimental value, a dramatic conceit
which exists in tension to the anti-dramatic absurd chaos of combat as seen
in the first and last half hour. Robert R. Clewis provides a fresh and wellargued perspective in his essay ‘A Spielbergian Ethics of the Family in Saving
Private Ryan and The Color Purple.’ Likewise Munich establishes itself right
in the mainstream political arguments of its day, concerning the efficacy and
moral rightness of counter-terrorism. This vital debate, which was largely
engulfed by the outrage that accompanied the release of the film, is drawn
out by Joseph J. Foy in ‘Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and “What Happens
Next” in Munich.’ The contemporary philosophical background of the
slavery debate is provided in ‘Human Rights, Human Nature and Amistad’
by David Bagget and Mark Foreman. A.I. significantly questions the
delimitations or otherwise of our concept of humanity as evidenced by
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advanced Artificial Intelligence. V. Alan White discusses the film in his essay
‘A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: Artistic Indulgence or Advanced Inquiry.’
Each of these essays engage in arguments the films themselves seek to
explore and to some extent resolve. There are conclusions that the films
draw: the sacrifice of the Second World War was worth it; slavery was
defeated; counter-terrorism based on vengeful emotions is going to be both
personally and politically self-destructive. Schindler’s List likewise fits into
this category. Even Jurassic Park (1993) involves a literal round table debate
between the main characters about the role and limits of science (the
arguments are explored by James H. Spence in ‘What is Wrong with Cloning
a Dinosaur?: Jurassic Park and Nature as a Source of Moral Authority?’).
However, there is a Spielberg missing here (perhaps inevitably; after all
we need a bigger book). In its extrapolation of the intellectual property of the
films this volume risks missing the more visceral elements of cinematic
experience of which Spielberg is a master. My first experience of watching a
Steven Spielberg film was not about delineating moral debate or wellconstructed thought experiments, but rather about thrilling to one of the
darker poets of gleeful destruction. Jaws introduced severed heads and
floating legs, shark attacks and blood spitting death to mainstream family
entertainment. ‘The Paradox of Fictional Belief and its Moral Implications in
Jaws’ by Christopher R. Rogan and Dean A. Kowalski takes Jaws for what it
claims to be, a scary film about a shark, but I would argue that the film
includes a dark fantasy. The revenge of the shark on the anodyne,
overweight, venal, amnesiac town of Amity, ‘which as you know means
friendship.’ Entirely incapable of protecting itself, swinging from bland
reassurance to lynch mob fervour, the community can only be effectively
protected by the outsiders with their history (Quint), their science (Hooper)
and their marksmanship (the New Yorker, Chief Brody). Likewise, 1941,
Jurassic Park and its sequels, the Indiana Jones films (the final episode
featuring a beautiful, almost lovingly recreated nuclear explosion) and War
of the Worlds all feature scenes of massive destruction and brutal violence.
Saving Private Ryan is almost capsized by its own conflicting attitude to
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conflict. Yes, the film wishes to memorialise ‘the Good war’, but it also loses
its head (literally) in the shocking but exhilarating opening and closing action
sequences. Some of the problems posed by Schindler’s List relate to this. The
liquidation of the ghetto is horrific and shocking, but there is an ingenuity
(think of the Nazis listening to the walls and ceilings with their stethoscopes)
and an aesthetic: for example, the machine gun flashes in the windows.
Gary Arms and Thomas Riley convincingly identify many of
Spielberg’s major films as ‘big-little films’; that is large budget action
features, which include compelling domestic subplots, usually involving
dysfunctional families, or families in peril, which are eventually reunited in
their essay ‘The “Big-Little” Film and Philosophy: Two Takes on
Spielbergian Innocence.’ The world falling to pieces is the background to the
dramas of families hanging on. Michael Le Gall and Charles Taliaferro’s
essay cites Hook, ET and the Indiana Jones trilogy in showing how, inspired
by his own parent’s divorce, Spielberg has consistently explored the
psychology of the domestic space and particularly exhibits a concern for the
protection of children. The figure of the stranded, isolated innocent is one
which recurs throughout Spielberg’s oeuvre.
Families face destruction not only from threats without, but also
tensions from within, the son who wants to run away to join the army in
War of the Worlds, abandoning his little sister to the (at that point)
untrustworthy father. The case of Jim in Empire of the Sun, separated from
his family, who appear ineffective prior to the separation and turn up,
surprisingly identical at the end, with no sign of trauma. As Arms and Riley
point out, the father, who fails at first to recognise his son is an unredeemed
figure of failure (p. 23). Divorces are rife and one-parent families are
common: ET is the best example of this. The home itself is often the scene of
complete literal destruction or invasion: think of War of the Worlds, The
Empire of the Sun, 1941, ET and even Quint’s boat in Jaws.
In Close Encounters of The Third Kind, one house is invaded by aliens
but another is destroyed by the hero, the ‘head of the house’, a father. Roy
Neary is as much a child as his children, arguing with them immaturely
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because he wants to take them to see Pinocchio (Hamilton Luske and Ben
Sharpsteen, 1940) rather than go and play Crazy Golf. His son pointedly
screams ‘cry baby, cry baby’ at him when he is in the midst of an ET-induced
nervous breakdown. But our sympathy is not with his family. As with the
family of The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), this is a family only partly
destroyed by the father’s obsessional behaviour. The fault lines are painfully
apparent right from the very beginning. Despite his almost nonchalant
shedding of responsibility and his physical destruction of the domestic space
when he builds Devil’s Tower in the living room, Neary is our hero, played
by Spielberg’s surrogate, Richard Dreyfuss, with boyish wit and manic
wonder. His destruction of the home is at one and the same time frightening
and liberating. He embodies our role as the adventurous spectator, who
wants of all things ultimately to participate. As John Williams’ score cheekily
suggests (in quoting ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ at the very end of the
film), he wins the argument; he gets to go and see Pinocchio rather than play
the dreaded Crazy Golf.
To comprehend both Spielberg the sentimentalist and the home
wrecker, the rationalist and the believer in wonder, this book has certainly
moved us in the right direction. We are (it is pointless to resist it)… we are
going to need a bigger boat.
Bibliography
Buckland, Warren (2006) Directed By Steven Spielberg: The Poetics of the
Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. New York: Continuum.
Friedman, Lester D. (2006) Citizen Spielberg. Chicago: University of Illinois
Press.
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Filmography:
Hitchcock, Alfred (1963) The Birds, USA.
Kubrick, Stanley (1980) The Shining, USA.
Luske, Hamilton and Sharpsteen, Ben (1940) Pinocchio, USA.
Malick, Terrence (1998) The Thin Red Line, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1971) Duel, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1975) Jaws, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1977) Close Encounters of the Third Kind, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1979) 1941, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1982) ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1985) The Colour Purple, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1987) Empire of the Sun, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1989)Always, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1991) Hook, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1993) Schindler’s List, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1993) Jurassic Park, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1997) Amistad, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (1998) Saving Private Ryan, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (2001) Artificial Intelligence: AI, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (2002) Catch Me If You Can, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (2002) Minority Report, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (2004)The Terminal, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (2005) War of the Worlds, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (2005) Munich, USA.
Spielberg, Steven (2008) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,
USA.
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