[Editor's Note: Press Play is proud to present Chapter 5 of our first video essay series in direct partnership with IndieWire: Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg. This series examines facets of Spielberg's movie career, including his stylistic evolution as a director, his depiction of violence, his interest in communication and language, his portrayal of authority and evil, and the importance of father figures — both present and absent — throughout his work.
Magic and Light is produced by Press Play founder and Salon TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz and coproduced and narrated by Ali Arikan, chief film critic of Dipknot TV, Press Play contributor, and one of Roger Ebert's Far Flung Correspondents. The Spielberg series brings many of Press Play's writers and editors together on a single long-form project. Individual episodes were written by Seitz, Arikan, Simon Abrams and Aaron Aradillas, and cut by Steven Santos, Serena Bramble, Matt Zoller Seitz, Richard Seitz and Kevin B. Lee. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg Chapter 1: Introduction, go here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg Chapter 2: Blood & Pulp, go here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg, Chapter 3: Communication, click here. To watch Magic and Light: The Films of Steven Spielberg, Chapter 4: Evil & Authority, click here.]
Narration:
Steven Spielberg is the product of The Greatest Generation — a Baby Boomer raised on idealized images of the nuclear family, progress, and American might. He is also a child of divorce — a dreamer from a broken home. Spielberg’s attempt to reconcile these two biographical facts—the mythic ideal of the family, and the reality of its dismantling—has been at the heart of many of his films. Spielberg’s movies often focus on a real or makeshift family unit, banding together to fight an outside force that threatens to tear it apart. At the head of this makeshift family, there is often a father figure imparting wisdom to his charges, or being forced to confront his shortcomings as a protector. Often both.
In Jaws Roy Scheider’s Chief Brody is the father figure to a tightly-knit summer community being terrorized by a Great White Shark. The scene where his son mimics his gestures tells us he’s a loving, good father who will do anything to keep his family – and his community – safe.
The film’s second half shows Brody becoming part of a makeshift family of shark hunters, with World War II veteran Quint taking over as protector of the landlubber police chief and the rich-kid, know-it-all oceanographer, Hooper.
The trio of Quint, Brody and Hooper feels like a makeshift family unit: an impetuous, sarcastic younger brother, a tougher, wiser older brother, and their boozing, cantankerous, tinpot dictator dad.
At first, Brody and Hooper question Quint’s methods as well as his manner. The old sea captain is a gruff taskmaster. He’s slobblish, domineering and rude. He is also quite mad.
But when the men sit around drinking and talking we learn the source of Quint’s insanity. He tells them of how he survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, the naval vessel that an atomic bomb that helped the United States defeat Japan in World War II. They were ultimately successful — but the mission is famous mainly for having its crew picked off by ravenous sharks.
Quint’s ordeal trumps anything Brody or Hooper will ever experience. And it seems to make a deep impression on them. Although they never stop resenting Quint’s sourness or fearing his craziness, they appreciate his toughness, and learn to work with him. They are members of the younger generation learning to respect a seasoned elder because they are, so to speak, all on the same boat.
And when the father dies horribly — leaving the boat adrift at sea, and the mission figuratively adrift – it is up to the sons to complete the mission.
In Saving Private Ryan, Captain Miller is an unofficial father figure to a mostly young group of Army Rangers. He’s given the public relations-burnishing task of finding and extracting the last surviving member of a group of brothers who were all killed fighting the Germans. Miller wonders if this mission is worth the price. For every man he’s lost in his command, Miller figures he’s saved maybe 10, 20. Now he’s been asked to put his entire platoon—his family—in harm’s way to save just one.
Miller hopes that Ryan is worth it – that he goes home and invents a longer-lasting light bulb or cures cancer. But he puts the thought aside for the same reason that parents try not to think about whether the incredible effort they’ve invested in their own, flesh-and-blood children will yield a saint, a felon, or something in between. One cannot know such things — and the end result of parenting isn’t the point of the exercise. You do it out of love. And duty. And you hope for the best.
When the men finally find Private Ryan he doesn’t want to go home. Why? Not out of some abstract sense of patriotism, but for immediate, personal reasons. Ryan doesn’t want to leave HIS surrogate family – his fellow soldiers.
Miller and the rest of the rescue team decide to stay and help Ryan secure a tower. It’s practically a suicide mission. And it ends with Miller making the ultimate sacrifice.
The Spielberg who made Saving Private Ryan in the late 1990s was a family man in his 50s. Detractors questioned Miller’s final admonition — asking, in effect, “Well, what if Private Ryan went home and DIDN’T accomplish anything special?” But that’s really not the point of that moment. It is a purely personal, human moment between Miller and Ryan that transcends war or even politics. In Spielberg’s films, every life is worth saving, provided that the saved person goes on to continue to be – or to BECOME — a decent person, and do the best he can with the gift he’s been given.
It’s probably worth pointing out that the Spielberg who directed “Saving Private Ryan” was a different person from the wunderkind of the 1970s. He was no longer the ambitious, single, childless twentysomething who directed Jaws, and who placed his sympathies with the brother figures that were caught between a bad father and a hungry shark.
The late’90s Spielberg is convinced that a son must earn his place in the world — and that it is the father’s responsibility to teach him that lesson. The weight of that conviction gives Saving Private Ryan a momentous quality, as well as a certain dour heaviness. It imparts a sense that a grave lesson was learned in World War II, and that this movie exists to teach it again — for the benefit of people who weren’t around to hear it the first time.
Whether in his serious movies or his pop fantasies, Spielberg often pivots the story on the father figure, be it real or surrogate. It’s not something as trite as Spielberg having Daddy Issues. More likely he is still uncovering something new about the nature of being a father.
For Spielberg, the presence and goodness of the mother is, with very few exceptions, a given. She will always protect and nurture. Fathers do that too. But they can also abandon the child, or be inexpressive when trying to impart knowledge. In Spielberg’s world, mothers are usually instinctive caregivers, healers, and teachers. They know what to do. Fathers are eternal students. They must learn, and keep learning.
In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg shows a father driven to near madness in the pursuit of his dream. Roy Neary exhibits the behavior of a young artist who’ll stop at nothing to make the vision in his head a reality.
The movie contrasts Roy Neary’s destructive obsession against the plight of Jillian Guiler, a single mom. Like Roy, she has been implanted with a vision of extraterrestrial contact. But her motive in going to Devil’s Tower is quite different. Where Roy wants to make his dreams come true – expressing the selfish drive of an artist — Jillian wants only to rescue her kidnapped son.
The contrast between the two storylines is striking. We watch a mother desperately try to hold her family together. Meanwhile, a father abandons his own family to answer a higher calling. Close Encounters is clearly the work of a young artist. Spielberg has said on several occasions that he made the movie today, he would not have had Roy Neary abandon his family to pursue his vision. Whether that’s indicative of deeper wisdom or a sort of creeping personal and artistic softness is impossible to say. But it’s definitely a change that came with age, and that is reflected in Spielberg’s attitude toward parents and their children – and grandchildren.
In any event, the film’s narrative momentum and sense of craft are so overwhelming that we do not judge Roy for what he does. Instead, we root for him – or at the very least, live vicariously through him, as he does something that most of us would not be brave enough – or obsessed enough – to do.
The image of Roy walking into the mothership to be a part of a new family could stand in for Spielberg in the mid-seventies: A young man leaving home to become a part of a filmmaking family, ascending from relative obscurity to become the most popular storyteller of his time.
But it’s a bittersweet moment, thanks to our awareness of what Roy has given up, and what his children have lost. He has chosen visionary fulfillment over personal responsibility.
Spielberg’s 1982 blockbuster E.T. feels like a continuation of Close Encounters – and not just because the story originated in Spielberg’s daydreaming about what might have happened if one of the aliens from Close Encounters got left behind. The film’s hero, Elliott, is the middle child in a bustling suburban home guided by a single mother. The absence of the father is conspicuous, and important. At time it feels as if we’re seeing what happened to the Neary family in Close Encounters after Roy lost his mind and ran off to Devil’s Tower.
In E.T. Spielberg uses the fanciful story of a boy and his friendship with an alien creature as his way of dealing directly with the trauma of divorce. The absence of Elliott’s father, the fact that his family will never be whole, permeates every scene of E.T. Elliott learns the hard lesson early that nothing can last forever.
When Eliott befriends E.T., it’s as if he’s found an equal – a pet that reveals himself as a playmate. But really their friendship is compacted account of how all children will eventually be asked one day to look after those who nurtured and protected them. The relationship between the boy and his alien illustrates the phrase “the child is father to the man.” And as the tale unfolds, both E.T. and Elliott learn it. E.T., like Elliott, feels abandoned by his family. But E.T. quickly assumes the role of friend of protector – and in some strange way, a mentor — of Elliott.
By the end of the story, the roles have switched. Elliott takes on the responsibility of reuniting E.T. with his family at the landing site. But at the same time, though, E.T. also reveals a depth of maturity and wisdom that we might not have suspected earlier. The crowd-pleasing shot of the rescued alien appearing in the back of the hijacked government van suggests an almost mythic power and wisdom. E.T.’s pose is vaguely Christlike. But the wrinkled visage and tattered robe suggest confident, loving grandfather who’s seen it all.
The final scene shows Elliott re-experiencing the heartbreak that comes when a family must separate. But he seems better able to handle it. It’s an intensely sad moment, but also resigned and mature. Elliott seems tougher now. And wiser.
Throughout his films you can track Spielberg’s evolving feelings about the terrors, pleasures and responsibilities of fatherhood. In Empire of the Sun, based on J.G. Ballard’s novel, the preteen hero Jim is wrenched from his family as violently as any Spielberg hero, and must learn to survive on his own. He finds an unexpected ally – a sort of Humphrey Bogart-like, scoundrel-mentor – in Basie, an American steward stranded in Japanese-occupied Shanghai.
The film’s title is a bit of a pun: Son, S-U-N, is a reference to the sun on the flag of Imperial Japan. But it also describes the suddenly parentless hero’s empire – an immense, splendid, and very dangerous backyard for him to play in, and grow in. Empire of the son … S-O-N.
Even in Hook we are treated to the sight of the eternal child Peter Pan coming to grips with being a father, and learning to nurture the child within the man, but without neglecting his adult responsibilities.
Later films show Spielberg to be impatient, even resentful, at the sight of fathers neglecting their duties. You can sense his anger in wanting deadbeat dads to get a clue — a comeuppance.
In War of the Worlds divorced dad Ray Ferrier can hardly be bothered to look after his kids for a weekend.
When an alien invasion occurs, he is confronted for the first time in his life with the prospect of caring for others. Ray has never been reliable. Now, he must reunite his children with their mother. If he can do that then maybe he will earn the right to be a father.
In Minority Report Chief Anderton is a far cry from Chief Brody. This gifted cop watches over the people of D.C. not out of concern, but suspicion.
But there is a reason for his wanting to know the whereabouts of everyone under his authority. It stems from his failing as a protective father, which led to the kidnapping and murder of his only son.
Anderton was a good husband and dad, but a moment of distraction led to the loss of his family, and deep depression, and then to drug addiction.
In Jurassic Park, the childless hero’s discomfort with children is a running joke throughout the film’s first half. In an early scene of paleontologist Alan Grant lecturing about how dinosaurs evolved from birds, he even seems to take pleasure in terrifying the youngest members of his audience.
Alan is awkward and hesitant – fearful, even — when he suddenly finds himself the protector of two kids.
But by the end of the film, his parental instincts are in full bloom and he seems at peace with his responsibilities.
The film’s screenplay has an extremely conservative point-of-view on the matter. Parenting is depicted not just as an important job that perpetuates the species, but a symbol of evolution.
This is driven home in the film’s final shot, which shows the hero, his girlfriend and the two children being airlifted away from an island of primordial terror. The movie cuts from shots of this makeshift nuclear family, safe at last and relaxing, to shots of pelicans soaring through the sky. The meaning is clear: the willingness to take responsibility for a child, even one who’s not your own, is a marker of true maturity. Alan Grant began the film as a dinosaur. By the end he has evolved into a bird.
Matt Zoller Seitz is the publisher of Press Play, the staff TV columnist for Salon.com and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. Ali Arikan is the chief film critic of Dipnot TV, a Turkish new portal and iPad magazine, and one of Roger Ebert's Far-Flung Correspondents. San Antonio-based film critic Aaron Aradillas is a contributor to The House Next Door, a contributor to Moving Image Source, and the host of “Back at Midnight,” an Internet radio program about film and television. Steven Santos is a freelance TV editor/filmmaker based in New York. He has cut docu-series for MTV, The Travel Channel, The Biography Channel, The Science Channel and Animal Planet. His work can be found at http://www.stevenedits.com. He also writes about films at his blog, The Fine Cut.
The human version of this element is authority. In Spielberg’s movies, evil, such as it is, always comes back to the use or abuse of power. The relative good or evil of people in a Spielberg film can be discerned by looking at how they use whatever authority they have in a given situation – how they tap into, and apply, power. This is how morality is measured. It is how good or evil is measured. In the words of WH Auden, “Evil is unspectacular and always human; And shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
Both Goeth and Mister are monsters and emotionally twisted; and, evil does manifest itself — but only through characters that are morally and psychologically defeated. They’re in with the power structure set out by society; even though they’re just individuals, in another sense they ARE authority. 
Spielberg’s slave-era drama Amistad pointedly avoids giving us a single, cartoonish, Mandingo slave master that we can direct our righteous ire against. The villain is a corrupt, debased and complacent system that everyone has grown used to, and that treats humans as property – a system that must be recognized as such, and resisted. Here, as in Schindler’s List, the representatives of corrupt authority are rather bland, even borderline faceless people. They embody Hannah Arendt’s notion of the banality of evil.
John Hammond, the creator of Jurassic Park, at first seems a charming old man who just wants to dazzle people and make them happy. But if you total up the body count of all the films in the series, he seems infinitely less adorable. Hammond is a cross between Dr. Frankenstein and Walt Disney, purveying spectacular wildlife attractions that end up killing the customers.
The UFOlogist Lacombe in Close Encounters might be the first major character in a Spielberg film that fits this description – the ally within the establishment. It is Lacombe who spies the escaped UFO obsessives heading for the Devil’s Tower but refrains from tipping off the army. It is because of Lacombe that Roy is able to don a red jumpsuit and join the other extraterrestrial pilgrims. It is because of Lacombe, a government agent, that Roy ultimately gets his wish, and walks up that ramp into the mothership.
Oskar Schindler deserves a special mention as the ultimate Fifth Column. He is a subversive infiltrator deep in the heart of the Nazi apparatus, fueled by the moral impetus to do the right thing, even though he is almost completely inscrutable, and justifies his goodness on mercenary grounds. Initially, Schindler is a cad and a dandy; an incorrigible womaniser; an exploiter of slave labour; a boorish bully; and a member of the Nazi party. 
Language — and translation — are everything. In Close Encounters, for instance, Roy Neary tries to translate a dream vision into something he can feel and touch … and ultimately visit. Meanwhile, scientists use mathematics and puzzle logic to understand the nature of mysterious signals transmitted from space. In The Terminal, an international terminal becomes a microcosm of the world as a stranded traveler from an invented Balkan country learns to communicate with a sort of mini-United Nations of airport staff and airline employees, many of whom speak languages other than English. Spielberg’s other films feature smaller but no less significant moments of communication between individuals reaching out across gulfs of geography, language and culture. In a pivotal scene in Saving Private Ryan, a German prisoner's clumsy attempt to appeal to his Army Ranger captors' humanity saves his life. It's ultimately not the words that persuade, but the man's all-too-human desperation. 
Ironically, the truth of their human connection can only surface because of a verbal un-truth. The Israelis have convinced the PLO fighters that they're non-Jewish members of international left-wing militant groups. One PLO fighter speaks blunt political truth to the film's German-raised Mossad agent hero because he believes he's a German gentile. The Mossad agent, shielded by his false facade, speaks from the heart as well. Throughout, Al Green's "Let's Stay Together" echoes in the background, gently satirizing the endless Israeli-PLO struggle — but also suggesting a deeper connection that both men consciously deny.
The centerpiece of the movie is when the men sit around the table, drinking and talking. There’s an unspoken rivalry between the crusty old seaman Quint and the young smart-ass Hooper. They start to compare scars they’ve gotten while observing sharks. (Brody, a former big-city cop who has rarely fired his gun, has no scars.) Hooper is amused by Quint, humoring his macho posturings. Quint knows this. But Quint puts Hooper in his place when he begins to tell him how he survived the Indianapolis, the World War II vessel that delivered the Hiroshima bomb. The Indianapolis is most famous for being attacked and its crew being picked off by sharks. There are a couple of things going on in this sequence. Quint’s monologue stops the film cold and gives it a sense of drama that had been mostly absent up until that point. His story is real and is scarier than anything in the movie. That’s probably why some critics (particularly Pauline Kael) raised concerns about its inclusion in otherwise escapist entertainment. Some felt the movie was crossing a line by using a real-life tragedy in the service of an adventure story. It would seem to be exploiting the real pain of the families of those who perished or survived the Indianapolis. But for Spielberg and his contemporaries (Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma), nothing was off limits. Nothing was sacred if it made for a better story. Quint’s monologue transforms the movie from an old-fashioned monster movie into something haunting. It’s why the movie has endured all these years.
These complaints have persisted well into Spielberg's fourth decade as a pop culture force, and it's not hard to see why. He is not a confrontational or particularly edgy filmmaker, nor for the most part does he try to be. Even his most stylistically or thematically daring films are conceived in populist terms, to reach the widest audience – the widest MARKET – possible.
In recent decades, the notion that Spielberg is somehow trying to prove himself, or re-brand himself, or be quote-unquote serious when he moves away from action-adventure or fantasy, has come to seem increasingly quaint, shorthand for a truism that's not true anymore. It's a critical relic from a long-gone era, akin to marvelling at the notion that, say, Woody Allen or Pedro Almodovar has directed a bleak drama. Indeed, hardly anyone under the age of 40 expresses even mild surprise that Spielberg would make a film such as Schindler's List, Munich, or A.I.
This series will examine just a few of Spielberg's key obsessions and motifs, as expressed over a wide range of films, released over four decades. We'll look at the influence of pulp fiction, serials and comic books on Spielberg's skillful depiction of violence – and how he learned to modulate it over time, in ever more varied ways. We'll look at the importance of communication and translation in Spielberg's films: the director's evident conviction that curiosity and goodwill can overcome superstition, bigotry and fear. We'll examine Spielberg's multifaceted portrait of evil and authority, and how the two intertwine, and express themselves in some of his most important characters. And we'll look at the director's sometimes warm, sometimes harrowing portrait of family life, with its negotiations and compromises, disappointments and tragedies — and the pivotal role played by father figures. Cold and loving. Present and absent.
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