A Book Review of Empire of Dreams by Andrew M. Gordon (paperback $26.95 ) Bowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc. 2008
by Bennett Roth Ph.D.
Published originally in Projections
My qualifications for reviewing this book are multiple: first there is my psychoanalytic training ; second, my love of movies; and finally the fact that my children came of age with these films and they either took me, or I took them to these movies. So as a Dad I took at least one of my children to all the films except “Duel” (1971) and “Always” that Professor Gordon has represented in this current consolidated offering of his papers on Spielberg’s films .
Reading this book was almost as much fun as going to a Spielberg movie for I have always included him among my top five American film makers: Spielberg, Coppola, Kubrick, Scorcese and Eastwood/Lucas/ Allen. Reading this book is similar to having an analytic session on each filmand the amount of associative material generated by this book; the memories od scenes, events and emotions was very considerable. I thank Professor Gordon for that. Further, I have written twice about a non fantasy film, “Schindler’s List” (1993) and have a psychological feel for the man behind the films while I lacked the scholarship of Professor Gordon in researching his personal history and interviews which are his essential sources.
Behind the movie screen
Critics don’t seem to appreciate Spielberg all that much and find his sentimentality and style off-putting, while I believe that the corpus of his work, if you exclude his political films, are absolutely directed at the children’s market or young adult audience. This target population has not deterred me from enjoying his films as a regressive fantasy enjoyment, the kind that movies provide to ‘be’ (identify with) all of the characters and not just the “hero”. My wish to enjoy his films has been curtailed when his comic book style characters fail to elicit any emotional response from me and I am left only with technological art and artifice. Unlike the current book under consideration, I entered as audience into Spielberg’s genre through “Jaws”, and unlike the author did not bring fear with me to that theater. As I remember it, I had missed an opportunity to go fishing and went instead to see Jaws (1975) as partial compensation. As a deep sea fisherman I was not at all disturbed by aspects of the film and realized that the film, shot in Martha’s Vineyard, was a fantasy with some reality touches; a fish(y) horror film. From my seat in the rear of the balcony it was truly evident how the audience emotionally reacted, particularly the huge man sitting next to me in the theater who screamed ferociously at the shark in the final scene. The emotions of fright ! I noticed, other than some true fisherman moments in the film, how the audience reacted: scared ! That summer many of my colleagues asked me to take them shark fishing (counter-phobic) and I agreed, only to find that they all backed out at the last minute. Scared ! I knew Capt. Mundus of Montauk, the character on whom the movie shark hunter Quint was based and he wasn’t scared. I understood during the film that Spielberg had crafted a film that tapped some root of primal oral fear of what lies beneath our sight in the water and done so with flourishes and touches that brought the message to the audiences psyche. Likely he studied Tournier’s “The Cat People” (1942) to get the terrific timing for the appearance of the shark in Jaws, as fantasy about the unseen creature anxiously sets up the sudden appearance of the monster. Hitchcock had similar timing in “Psycho” (1960) which organized in his audience the realization that taking showers alone was dangerous. With the mechanical white shark, a new movie based phobia about a real predator was generated. Has he ever been forgiven? As a personal note I observed many children with swimming phobias when I was a young lifeguard invented being bitten on their feet long before anyone thought of the film. As a cinematic post script, I recently took a boat ride to see actual while sharks off South Africa. One must consider the insight that formerly scared people write the best horror.
So now to professor Gordon and his Empire of Dreams although I thought it necessary to attempt to articulate my point of view before plunging into the pages of this interesting book of collected pieces. Gordon makes the point early that Spielberg is a visceral and emotional story teller with a capacity to tap into the fear, awe and wonder in himself and attract an audience that wishes to have that kind of experience. I don’t think his critics have the same wishes/fantasies as his audience. Spielberg converts not only his dreams, but his wishes, conflicts and wonderment into a highly technically competent cinematic art and in doing so satisfies many levels of real and psychic wishes while arousing deep feelings in his audiences. Early and importantly Gordon points out Spielberg put the E in “motion” pictures turning them into “Emotion” pictures. Gordon also seeks to explain to us why he repeats certain themes and what the source material is within Spielberg’s personality. A number of serious questions are raised by this endeavor. Can you put a film on the couch ? Answer, not really! Can you put the director who seemingly has a huge amount of control and money and ask him why and how he has chosen the works and whether he is aware of its meaning to him? You certainly can but I am not sure you will get an answer that will satisfy a psychoanalyst, for using the media is part of the hype of movies. Utterances outside the analytic office, while interesting and often informative are certainly not analytic grist. But as some analysts have done with Picasso you can offer general and evocative inferences as to the origins of his ideas, despite the fact that Picasso left conscious clues for his biographers as I believe Spielberg does as well.
Psychoanalytic explanations have found a home in Film Departments at the same time that the theory has been mostly evicted from university Psychology Departments. But the problems, questions and limitations of applied psychoanalysis are still difficult to answer. I shall attempt to put a frame around these questions. Michels (2003) a really smart psychoanalyst , said in a review of a book on psychoanalysis and film that clinicians can promote dialogue about what the films arouse in the audience and whether they represent levels of basic human psychic conflict. Example! In female melodrama there are two types of Oedipal conflicts (should I marry? And, which man? ) and then there are resisting conflicts (my career and independence from a man/father/authority). Or, consider ET! What exactly is the psychoanalytic understanding of ET? Transitional object, transformational object, fantasy ‘twin/child/father? The multiplicity of ET’s movie role allows a kind of “plastic” perception by the audience serving multiple psychic purposes.
Gordon composes a well documented and compelling picture of Spielberg as having the fantasy life of a not quite grown up male who has a deep nostalgia and sympathy for the fantasies and quests that belong to a not nearly mature adolescent boy. Many of his films have a child/boy in the narrative center, however true this insight is these films are not shot from the child’s point of view. Rather these films are constructed as if by a sympathetic adult who is benevolently watching this child and non-judgmentally filming his story. Gordon is successful in picking up the autobiographical manifest traces we may take as belonging to Spielberg’s history. For example as a boy, the evidence strongly suggests, Spielberg came from a family disrupted by divorce and many films depict fatherless families. Perhaps Gordon is correct about the psychic sources of his creative output and inspiration but alongside this description of a fantasy ridden pre-adolescent boy are other aspects of his personality. There is a business genius in Spielberg‘s personality that supplements the mythic tale of his opening an office at Universal studio when he had no job there as a college student. Perhaps Spielberg does speak, as Gordon points out, through the old scientist in Jurassic Park (1997) the aim of the character he explains is to make money and truly he has, but he has also created an audience for his cinematic story telling.
The bad films
Like all creative people who have unusual sensitivities, sometimes the narrative and technological achievements of a film don’t work. Spielberg also had his share of failures. All movie goers and movie lovers have in their brain a cinematic super-ego, a small critical voice that pops out and explains the films failure. I bet as a writer/director once told me “it’s always the script that’s bad.” In psychoanalysis we attempt to analyze failure as a repetition of an unconscious character problem to help avoid its continuation. This is a subtle and important clinical task. The failure of a movie has to spin on a different axis as it doesn’t have an unconscious, and Gordon deals with his share of flops. He seemingly can’t find the tempo of comedy in the film “1941,” (1979) starring a pre-Blues Brothers Dan Akroyd and John Belushi. In 1991 he revised a classic children’s story into Hook (1991) starring Robin Williams as a grown-up manic Peter Pan – a movie that his detractors read as broadcasting an apparent mid-life crisis on Spielberg’s part. Then the ‘poltergeistic’ love story Always, (1989) with Richard Dreyfuss playing a ghost who witnesses his love being replaced by a much more alive man: seemingly a ghostly primal scene narrative that begs for a narrative analysis of the dead flyer.
Are these films substantively different that his other films? Likely, they failed to arouse emotional resonance in the audience. I think we understand that he never gave up his nostalgia for World War 2, his fathers’ war with Empire in the Sun (1987) until he took on a more painful topic in Schindler’s List (1993) and the derivative Private Ryan (1998). But one can see a certain tendency in the “Hook “ (1991) problem, that appears through Spielberg’s genre, that of a revisionist mind coupled with a wish to popularize/ modernize his version of a classic tale. A tendency the audience and critics let him get away with in Jurasic Park (1993,1997) series; turning Creighton’s political statements into a technological comic book. In fact, I think along with revelatory research about Spielberg watching the serial, horror and adventure films of the 40’s and 50’s, when constructing the Indiana Jones series, I believe he is invested in making comic book style movies: vignettes of action saturated often with animated images around a loosely constructed plot (Gordon) and these films found their audiences but not always sympathetic critics. I think War of the Worlds(2002) and Minority Report (2005) also reveal an absence of dramatic irony resulting in brilliant techno movies that leave the audience cold and unfulfilled.
Spielberg Family values
The undercurrent through out his films as Gordon’s analysis clearly points out, from Jaws (1975) onward, is the cinematic image of a dysfunctional suburban family. Weak fathers, simply stupid or venal authority figures, or fathers that are absent. Abandoned families in some form of distress, the most poignant being the lost boy of Empire in the Sun (1987) and the bubbled headed family troubles presented in Close Encounters (1977). His comic style bantering of Indiana Jones creates a mock oedipal mirror poking fun at narcissistic foibles in father images. Likely even Schindler,( if I dare say) as a complex protagonist lacks the necessary capacity for intimacy required of good parenting and lasting relationship.In the absence of functional families and parents has Spielberg captured the demographic trend in our American West or has his palette of story telling been colored by his own anxious experience growing up: I choose both explanations. Certainly the father image in ET (1982) and Close Encounters (1977) beg for some stability, but then again are they meant to be real or comic book images. Speaking about ET (1982) is taking on a powerful psychic figure. No where else in movies has the transitional/transformational object been so well represented and Spielberg’s innocence been so emotionally contagious. Embedded in this powerful and simple image is longing and understanding that is evoked well beyond the limits of the cinematic narrative.
On the other hand, mothers in these film are kind but clueless, or rescuing their children from danger. In the divorced families they may be the glue that holds families together, but in his movies they are also squeaky clean, except Diane the heroic mother of Poltergeist (1982) . In that rescue film, hidden in the suburban thriller warning us of where we build, is embedded the subtle paranoid fantasy not of the un-dead (what ever they are) but of the possibility of home invasion and the danger through the devices we bring into our homes: the TV’s that deaden us. Many disturbed children will naturally converse with their TV blurring the boundary with reality.
One serious and pervasive problem in evaluating all these films is that Dr. Gordon and I, like Spielbergs’ critics, are adults looking at films that mostly arouse fears and anxiety in children. For example, my daughter and I went to Close Encounters (1977) soon after it was released and as we left she began to cry and wanted to get home in a real hurry because she became frightened that her younger brother could be abducted by a space ship. Hmmm: where did that idea come from? I certainly had no such thought .Years later while driving through the Painted Desert in Arizona we came upon a mountain that had an uncanny similarity to that one in the scenes of end of that film. Both my children had nightmares that night which I assumed related to the film. Children’s minds are so different yet we all maintained a similar visual representation from that movie and their emotional reaction was vastly different.
Good and Evil in Films
The basic stuff of intra-psychic conflict in pre-adolescent boys on an intra-psychic level is the battle between good and evil, between ego and superego, between impulse and punishment. The child’s ego is held hostage to innocence as he populates his world with monsters and does combat with evil. According to Gordon, Spielberg has repeatedly used this theme. Where Gordon sees these themes in the Star War films in the personifications of Darth Vader and Luke, and played out in the Indiana Jones series, I find this conflict present in almost all his films. In Duel (1971), his first feature, for example the kind of paranoid chase is often construed by children as punishment for some unknown crime and chase dreams are fairly common nightmares. What Spielberg does is mechanize the punishing fantasy (truck, shark, Darth, Nazi) and make impersonal the threat so that there is no animate being to appeal to, something he has a gift for, while building his evil machine into something relentless and pursuing. Evil monsters are constructed at crises points in development so that the dangerous element (raptor, truck, Nazi) is externalized and the child can safely deal with the danger and unknowingly enjoy its destructive powers and threats. This is evident in War of the Worlds (2002) in which 9/11 serves as a transitional bridge for Spielberg to return and update his comic book style of destructive forces in the original H.G.Wells story. Strikingly, he again uses the anonymous divorced father as hero. This likely, outside of its 9/11 reference, is the safest film to watch because there is little real opportunity to identify with any character in the film except the young girl. This is his first female child heroine. The trip to safety in the film through the mechanized special effects disasters represents a trope in his films: the clever, comic resistance to the brute forces of evil ending in survival.
What is absent in Speiberg’s film?
What reveals itself to me after finishing this book, with all the references to the psychoanalytic themes, oedipal and other developmental references are three elements to Spielberg movies: the absence of erotic passion, that survival occurs with comic book luck and without insight or knowledge, and the importance of A.I. Gordon is fully aware that fathers and adventures are significant throughout these films and makes a case for the boys search for the father and the finding of father substitutes in almost all these films. This is the Telemachian stuff of fantasy and mythic tales in which a boy’s origin/fate is at stake. It is almost a requirement of fantasy films to go on a quest, to rebel against unbelievers and to win against evil before one is mature.
Spielberg does not treat woman as well as he treats men in films. They are often stick figures, moms ignorant of their children emotional needs and with very few adult needs or passions. In fact, they are either devious (Indiana Jones) or innocent foils to be rescued, reunited with a lost child or left behind. In sum, they have little inner life in his films.
For me A I was, when I viewed it, a significant film on the surface about adoption, and I was intrigued to learn from Gordon that is was originally a Stanley Kubrick project. Despite critics’ misjudgments, it was for me a tale not only of robots or artificial beings, but a cautionary tale about the perils of adoption and separation. AI is a programmed replacement child on whom the tables were turned and the live child he replaced returns to plot his demise/abandonment, but then the film became something entirely different as Gordon explicates. On a metaphoric level it becomes a search for love, mother and something real among the artificial; perhaps suggesting other Kubrick films about obsession. If this were brought into analysis, and it is not, I would consider it a breakthrough idea of a search for love and realness( authenticity) that fails. I believe that Spielberg found, as perhaps Kubrick discovered something deeply personal in this films emotional quest. A search among the false nannies, gigolos’, programmed and discarded for a love that one can never realize again. How would have Kubrick handled this search ? In psychoanalytic treatment, that search is understood as a beginning realization and in this movie it is “the end.”
Michels, R. (2003). Review of Psychoanalysis And Film, by Glen Gabbard, M.D., London:
Karnac, 2001, 240 pp. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 72:1057-1060