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Wondering Where the Movie Magic Has Gone

This year’s Oscar surprise was the Spielberg movie, The Fabelmans. It wasn’t a surprise that there was a Spielberg movie, he makes one every other year, even now at 76, even though the movies are not worth comparing to the spectacular first half of his career. Nor are his many nominations a surprise: Best Director, Best Picture, Best Screenplay. He’s been nominated almost once per year since 2006, mostly for his worse movies, by an Academy that didn’t much care to acknowledge his best work.

The surprise is that The Fabelmans is an autobiographical picture, a coming-of-age story. It’s also Spielberg returning to the themes of childhood and family that made him America’s most beloved director and which he largely neglected for decades. This new movie also seems to be an artistic last word, as it might be his last moment in the spotlight. Even Spielberg is merely mortal.

We should nevertheless remember what an astonishing success he was, a Hollywood star before he turned 30, a boy genius like Orson Welles. He made his name with Jaws, in 1975, which was almost 50 years ago. Nobody expected much, but Spielberg taught everyone there was an entire world out there ready to believe in the magic of the movies and they had the money to pay for it one movie ticket at a time. He’s long lost that power, but we’re still living with the consequences, as fantasies seem more compelling than reality to so many people that the very character of our economy has been transformed.

50s America v. 60s America

The Fabelmans as a whole is a confrontation of the two moments of mid-century America, first the post-war flourishing of new families and new communities in a uniquely prosperous period and then the arrival of conflict that led to the emergence of all sorts of new, individualistic identities. This is intended to explain the character of its artistic protagonist, Sam Fabelman, the eldest son of Burt and Mitzi. Burt is a young professional working with computers, destined for Silicon Valley, and Mitzi is a pianist turned stay-at-home mother, destined for the willful self-discovery that tore the country apart.

The picture is good, even family-friendly, and selectively nostalgic about the ’50s, a world of adventure opened to boys at that time. The Fabelmans, like so many Americans, move to the Sun Belt in the ‘50s, in this case, Phoenix, whose population quadrupled in that decade. Having begun the great national westward movement, Sam begins to take its character on as well.

He is a Boy Scout—a natural leader of his small group of friends as they go about trying to get their merit badges. Spielberg is here in the position of a kind of prophet, showing us these boys riding on their bikes everywhere and even going to the movies as a group in the afternoon, after school. They are unsupervised, but at the time they didn’t call it that. You cannot believe it, but it’s actually what America was like within living memory—it’s just that most Americans aren’t willing to live this way anymore and would probably fear losing their kids to CPS if they dared. It takes cinema to get at the somehow forbidden truths which endure only as the hidden causes behind the strength of that generation now in its dotage and the weakness of the generation now coming of age in the midst of hysteria.

Sam leads these boys to make a movie, borrowing his father’s 8mm camera, and improvising everything else—a Western, of course, which proves a success with its Boy Scout and family audience. Later, he makes a bigger picture, a war movie where the GIs fight hard against the dreaded Nazis, again, with the enthusiastic contribution of his friends and the help of their families. Sam is the artist—writer, director, producer, cinematographer, and editor in one—but they all share in the adventure as boys and they all learn something about themselves in pretending to be their fathers or forebears, who made and protected America. America would be a much more decent and public-spirited society if such habits, which bear a resemblance to ceremonials of civic piety, had been continued, and the institutions that supported them.

But of course, after the ‘50s came the ‘60s, by the end of which decade that youthful, confident, active society self-destructed. In the case of the Fabelmans, the mother divorces the father because she is in love with a friend of the family. The disgrace is also endlessly contemptible because she justifies herself to her boy as following her heart. The children cry in anger and betrayal, but in the new world, freedom is no longer restrained by either law or family. This is also one of the moments where Spielberg’s decay as an artist shows itself, aggravated by his choice of writing partner for the last part of his career, the contemptible Tony Kushner. The American drama of the last generations, divorce and now marriagelessness, is reduced to the therapeutic platitudes that have overwhelmed our public discourse. This is not art that can inspire or reveal human nature but is itself a prisoner of the dementia that has lately affected liberalism.

The Fabelmans have just completed their Westward journey, like America, by moving to California, and the breakup of the family makes the third act of the movie seem as miserable as it had been magical before. They come close to paradise, yet man is not a creature without fault, and perhaps is not fit for paradise. Sam instead graduates high school, scorns college, and begins a career in Hollywood, presumably decisively shaped by his father’s mastery of technology and his mother’s love of art. He ends with a version of a story Spielberg long has liked to tell, the one-time John Ford, the greatest American director, told him something about photography. Spielberg got Lynch to play the old master. At that moment, I realized an entire Spielberg movie of the old Ford played by Lynch would have been far superior to the Fabelmans. The boy protagonist just isn’t as interesting as Spielberg the adult artist, much less the late John Ford.

We should learn from Spielberg how to reach a democratic audience, as well as how to craft visual stories—that may be his last gift to America.

The Magic of the Movies is Over

The movie is a very emotional attempt to keep together the two sides of America, the middle-class family and the personal quest for authenticity or happiness, which have split in Spielberg’s lifetime, as they did first of all in his family. Spielberg chose to live with his father, but in this late movie, he’s trying his hardest to excuse his mother’s desertion. He recreates with fondness not only his own childhood, but the America in which he grew up, and puts his boyish self through the suffering of that world coming apart. He wants to tell a true story and America is particularly a country in love with true stories. Perhaps Spielberg feels, as other artists do, that he has to somehow embody America or obey the American commandment. Unfortunately, he seems to think that’s Polonius’ inane advice in Hamlet, “to thine own self be true.”

Spielberg has always loved Hollywood liberals more than the America that loved him so much. America doesn’t care anymore—nobody went to see The Fabelmans, nor will they after the Oscars. Yet the liberals always despised him—he was too all-American for their taste, a blockbuster director rather than a social critic, sentimental about America rather than indignant like an activist or scornful like a snob. He seemed the opposite of radical chic. They envied his talent for visual storytelling, which was unmatched until old age made him abandon it in favor of moralistic liberal political stories for which he is unsuited.

I find it difficult to say who will remember Spielberg, although it’s hard to understand the last 50 years of entertainment without him, as well as why America so wants to be entertained. The best of his work might be conserved because it spoke to democratic ideals and dramatized the love of freedom that ordinary Americans of all ages feel. But Spielberg’s partisan turn at the end of his life is unwise in every way. The Fabelmans is the movie that shows he is torn between his love of America and his reproaches which, paradoxically, excuse liberal elites while blaming his audience for America’s troubles. Even the Oscar nominations—the ceremonies of prestige cannot confer even prestige anymore.

You have to watch the movie to notice how well it is made, how it rehearses both moviemaking, while the young protagonist learns it, and some of America’s post-war history, which we largely remember from movies and TV ourselves. It is very enjoyable and that’s partly because it’s about the joy we get out of cinema, which has been an increasingly important habit to us for a century. Many might not even be able to imagine the America before moving pictures.

Also, the attempt to make the protagonists of this family drama worthy Americans, each trying to grab onto one understanding of freedom and opportunity in America—it’s got the makings of a worthy story. But even Spielberg’s unrivaled craft cannot fix the problem, he is not true to American aspirations and achievements, including his own career. Perhaps, as I suggested, he’s not to blame—he’s unable to bear the burden of America’s problems. Certainly, there is something praiseworthy in his attempt to tell his story and America’s story.

But this failure is not an accident, it’s part of the general collapse of the arts. Unpopularity is a sign, the absence of great talent is another. Liberals are at fault by commission, those of us on the conservative side by omission—they ruin the culture we ignore. We are alike in our ignorance of the true power of poetry over the nation. Spielberg used to make movies about how we could help each other bridge such divides and now, without him, nobody does it. We should learn from Spielberg how to reach a democratic audience, as well as how to craft visual stories—that may be his last gift to America.

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