Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
This week marks the US premiere of Steven Spielberg’s latest film, The Adventures of Tin Tin. (The public opening will follow in a mere seven weeks.) The film has already ignited the fury of European critics who are howling at the cultural imperialist assault upon the legacy of beloved cartoonist/author Herge.
Tin Tin is the first blow in what is becoming the familiar Spielberg 1-2 punch, featuring the near simultaneous releases of a Serious Spielberg alongside a Spielberg Potboiler. The maneuver was previously executed in 1993 when the director managed to land both the year’s biggest hit with Jurassic Park and take home the Oscar statuette for Schindler’s List, and then again in 2005 to somewhat less success when Munich was released on the heels of War of the Worlds. This time around, Tin Tin will be shortly followed by Warhorse, an adaptation of a British play about a horse lost in the fields of World War I and dragooned into service on both sides. Despite the fact that no one has yet seen this film, it is already appears on most Oscar pundits’ lists as an early favorite to win Best Picture.
Wanting to be taken seriously after making fluffy things is the Hollywood disease, and many a director or performer has been driven to the distant shores of grimly morose claustrophobia inducing dramas to counterbalance a career, say, making sitcoms or recording pop hits. But none has managed this balancing act for so long and with such virtuosity as Spielberg who, as he enters his fifth decade atop the film making heap, finds himself unchallenged as America’s Director.
Given that he has been anointed as the official keeper of the American legend, it is worth asking what is his view of America and its struggles, particularly as having bestowed this crown upon him, that answer says as much about us as it does about him.
Spielberg's world, both the Potboiler and the Serious, is a world beset by great foes and overwhelming challenges, usually faced by a Jimmy Stewartesque American everyman. Two great villains recur in Spielberg’s work: Nazis (Indiana Jones, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan) and slavery (Amistad and the upcoming Lincoln). On one level, this should be plenty; that any artist working in America is conscious that history existed before Saved By The Bell these days seems almost too much to ask for. But looking deeper, it is interesting to note how often Spielberg heroes confront forces in clear battles of good versus evil, and how consistently Spielberg sets those battles at far distant removes, in distant times, against long vanquished foes.
The closer Spielberg gets to a contemporary setting, the more fantastical the enemies become. Present day Spielberg heroes typically go into battle against aliens, sharks or dinosaurs rather than fighting flesh and blood incarnations of “evil.”
Spielberg’s one foray into contemporary politics was the complex and interesting Munich, which was not a straightforward battle of good versus evil. Whatever one thinks of its ultimate conclusions, the film grappled with the problems of evil in our world (or the 70’s at least) and the effect that fighting it has on those who bear that burden. However, the fury stirred up by those who claimed the film created a moral equivalence between terrorists and their victims was by many accounts, the worst public experience of Spielberg’s career. Since Munich, his films have steered miles away from present day life, coming no closer than Indiana Jones' tour of the 1950’s in IJ and The Crystal Skull.
The problem for Spielberg is that as a gifted storyteller he knows that a fight of good versus evil is what gets the crowd buying popcorn, and more than that, he can see it has often been the story of our nation. But as a modern day liberal, he can not bear to point a finger at any force in our modern day world, to label them bad and anyone who might dare to take them on as good. And so in his latest explosion of his tireless energy, Tin Tin will travel to an Indyesque world of animatronic adventure before we, on a more serious note, travel back one hundred years to the Great War.
There is, however, one very real modern day villain that appears again and again in Spielberg’s films: an ever present threat always about to explode, and that is the mob. From his earliest days making his first flop 1941, the threat of Americans rampaging out of control has supplied his darkest moments. In War of the Worlds, a crowd of citizenry out of control provides the film's most terrifying scene, far scarier than anything the aliens have got. In AI’s near future, they are blood thirsty savages howling for the dismemberment of innocent robots.
Spielberg has seen the evil in today’s world and somewhere in his heart, it seems, he knows that it is us.
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Oct '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
A terrific summary of Spielberg, especially for those of us without the time to attend as many movies as we'd like, much less the time to think through a critical analysis.
May '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
This is a tangent, but it seems as if the ability to convey human facial expressions persistently confounds CGI animators. I suppose the alternatives are to make the central figures more cartoonish (my preference), or to insert human actors into entirely computer-generated scenes?
Nov '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
Interesting and accurate assessment of Spielberg. Rather puts me in mind of James Bowman's comparison of Spielberg with Michael Haneke - whose The White Ribbon I recently saw. The following applies every bit as much to Spielberg as to Haneke:
"Sure, violence begets violence. But so does non-violence in the form of weakness and cowardice. In truth, violence is pretty much a given of the human condition...Those who are unprepared to resist evil will provoke it as surely as those who do evil themselves. Maybe more surely."
Spielberg is "brave" with respect to evil that's gone and "history," but embraces moral equivalence and cowardice with respect to the here and now. This nicely sums up liberalism's notion of morality as determined by history (i.e., historical progress or progressivism), rather than morality made intelligible in light of some unchanging ground (God or nature) beneath our changing experiences.
Edited on Nov 7, 2011 at 1:30pmAug '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
Great post Sir. As I consider it, I am reminded why Spielberg and Ken Burns now occupy the same shelf in my minds library. "Not anxious for new content"
They both started well, but I think the aging process affects their fanbase as much as their output. Hollywood is basically bereft of new ideas. It's the story ,not the director.
Too bad the stories are being filtered, vetted, changed, and punched up beyond all recognition of the author's intent. Without that, you just can't fake it for long.
Please stick around and grace us with more.
Dec '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
Wow. What a fascinating, and I believe accurate, take on Spielberg.
I think an interesting comparison can be made to Obama as well. Both Spielberg and Obama see recent American success as the result of exploitation of the weak and therefore we are evil and undeserving. However, both Spielberg and Obama are smart enough to keep these views close to the vest so that they've been able to reach the pinnacles of their respective careers. They may be left-wing lunatics, but they're not stupid.
Dec '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
That Spielberg made Munich as a mature director with virtually unlimited financial resources shows that absolute power corrupts absolutely. While this pampered yuppy icon ineptly twisted himself and us with him into an amoral pretzel, young Israelis were fighting and dying to preserve an Israel that Steven Spielberg doesn't deserve. Mr. Rushfield is quite correct, as long as Spielberg can see things from a very great distance he can manage to sound moral. Actually, even then if you look too closely it is very gratuitous. As soon as we get into anything current or real Spielberg collapses into the boomer lefty broken record we have all come to know and hate.
Somewhere along the way being an outsider became just a pose. He is the ultimate insider. He takes no risks and just vomits back left wing cant that at his age he surely knows is pure garbage. He is a waste of time really. His art is just a gimmick. He probably can continue to get away with it and rake in huge quantities of cash. Nothing could be more boring. Nothing could be more meaningless.
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
Robert Lux: Spielberg is "brave" with respect to evil that's gone and "history," but embraces moral equivalence and cowardice with respect to the here and now. This nicely sums up liberalism's notion of morality as determined by history (i.e., historical progress or progressivism), rather than morality made intelligible in light of some unchanging ground (God or nature) beneath our changing experiences. · Nov 7 at 1:24pm
Edited on Nov 07 at 01:30 pm
It is absolutely true. Modern liberalism loves the heroic ideal of fighting enemies, but sees that as belong to a distant simplistic time and today's world as much more "complex"
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
It is interesting that the aging process does not really affect their subjects. One issue never touched on in Spielberg's work is aging itself, let alone mortality. It remains in both the serious and potboiler version, an 11 year old's worldview. Not inappropriate for the official spokesman of our times.
Dec '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
To all those past posts pondering the future of California and their considerations of the causes of its grandeur and its decadence—The Cultural Dimensions of Economic Growth, The Golden State versus the Lone Star State, Or Who Does Immigration Better?, California: "Home of the free ... lunch.", Because California doesn't have enough budget problems already..., etc.—the response is no more remote than one eloquent and epiphanic elucubration.
What could make California’s unemployment, debt and deficits diminish in importance more than the outrageous affront to European sensibilities the filmmaker of Jaws (who inspired the spawning of Jaws 2, Jaws III, and Jaws: The Revenge) caused with his release of a New-World produced, full-length motion picture of Tin Tin?
Despite the ever tightening stranglehold of regulations choking off the livelihood of any viable business trying to survive in California, there will always be Hollywood.
Not that there’s no place in our lives for gossip. It’s just that there’s no place like Hollywood where more people make a living gossiping about lives having the least consequence or in less need of our commiseration or where a camera obscura wouldn’t be better off remaining obscure.
Oct '10
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
I still can't get over Spielberg's flying to Cuba and giving aid and comfort to the Castro dictatorship. That episode taught me all that I ever needed to know about the man.
Mar '11
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
I used to love movies. It's a shame they don't make them any more.
I've always been indifferent to Spielberg because of an impression that great technique was being wasted on muddled content driven by slick marketing considerations. In short: a prostituted talent.
I can tolerate, even enjoy, cheap crap but obscenely expensive crap really offends me and expensive crap is mostly what Hollywood turns out these days. The investment is hedged by a massive hype machine. Of course, this pattern is not new (Surely, I'm not the only person who noticed that Gone With The Wind was rubbish) but it seems to be the predominant pattern now. Massive budgets seem to be mandated by special effects wizardry. They seem to believe that because they can do a thing, they must do it.
In the past Hollywood turned out blockbusters, some good and some bad, but they also turned out more than a few very good movies made on low budgets by creative film makers. Nowadays only "safe investments" like Spielberg can make movies.
Aug '11
Re: Steven Spielberg Villain Complex
Richard Rushfield, Guest Contributor
It is interesting that the aging process does not really affect their subjects. One issue never touched on in Spielberg's work is aging itself, let alone mortality.
There was the "Kick the Can" segment of the Twilight Zone movie. That segment was directed by Spielberg.