The Talkies/Kidstuff
Podhoretz, John
THE TALKIES KIDSTUFF by John Podhoretz There are few people in the world worth envying. Steven Spielberg is one of them. He made his professional debut as a television director in 1969, when he...
...John Podhoretz is an editor and critic at the Washington Times...
...This is important...
...In Jaws, Police Chief Brody is snapped out of his lugubrious shell by the disastrous appearance of a shark near the shore of the town he is to protect...
...Those of us who did not like E.T.- all seven of us in the continental U.S...
...Only little kids can see him," Elliott tells his sister when she first sees E.T...
...And once transformed, somehow their previous lives seem utterly valueless to the audience...
...In each case a deus ex machina-an alien in EX, a ghost or two in Poltergeist, and a magical treasure map in The Goonies-enters the lives of our protagonists and transforms them from mere suburbanites into transcendent heroes...
...Steven Spielberg is 37 years old...
...until the bad government men come to experiment on him...
...But then, it is Spielberg's chief theme, and it runs through all his films...
...Unthinkable...
...it was rather like a religious experience, and you can't make fun of that...
...Children need to be protected by adults precisely because they do not understand how the world works, and need to be taught by example and experience...
...alone-faced pressure not unlike the kind one feels when one raises certain questions about a telethon, or a campaign to end world hunger...
...His heroes therefore tend to be children, and here Spielberg scores his most telling points with his audience...
...He and his friends lead life on the edge: When he breaks his girl's heart, she goes off to open a bar in Tibet...
...There is a faint whiff of contempt for all those who are simply getting by-the mother in EX...
...The Goonies of The Goonies are children with a taste for adventure but a relatively bleak life...
...He has branched into producing with generally spectacular results: Twilight Zone: The Movie, Poltergeist, and Gremlins...
...They have lost the capacity for wonder, or the expectation that something extraordinary will happen to save them from their lives of quiet desperation...
...It is, of course, profoundly wrong-headed...
...he must also save the world...
...ET., Poltergeist, and The Goonies all make clear the point that supernatural adventure is broadening...
...It is like some ywood dream of a successful career-even the slight dip in his fortunes that was 1941 provides the tiny bit of failure that makes his triumphs seem all the more extraordinary...
...Raiders of the Lost Ark, EX, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom have together earned nearly $800 million...
...And it is true that in the final analysis, almost everybody is nice-his aliens, the ghosts in Poltergeist, even a grotesque missing link who ultimately saves the day in The Goonies...
...And E.T., his greatest triumph, has not only set a box-office record that will be hard to rival...
...By film's end he is a hero, and likes to swim...
...She photographs him...
...At the end of Raiders, again a supernatural visitation, this time from the Old Testament God, gives Jones's life meaning...
...The movie generated such extraordinary good will among its audience that its essential ugliness-the theme that life is basically worthless without a deus ex machina to give it meaning-went unnoted or unmentioned...
...It also established its director firmly as a "genius" in the eyes of all but the most cynical of American movie critics, and to American audiences he became the inheritor of the godlike mantle of Walt Disney...
...it would be good for children to emulate Spielberg, who made his adulthood fantastically worthwhile, and not secretly wish for an alien to give their lives a meaning it otherwise lacks before their lives have even begun...
...At 27 he made his second feature, Jaws, which became the most successful movie ever...
...He is the rare bird of our time, the entertainer with an almost mystical understanding of how to move an audience...
...In the Spielberg universe, children are the last defense against cynicism and despair, an eternally optimistic group of people who wait for miracles to save them...
...And she does not know because she is an adult...
...Brody is a perfectly pleasant fellow, but a little dull, and even afraid of the water...
...This means something," he tells his horrified wife as he grows obsessed with decoding the message the aliens have implanted in his brain...
...There is much to this charge...
...practically trips over him on several occasions...
...What defines these people is that they are adults...
...In Close Encounters, Roy the electrician is leading a suburban life of comic desperation, complete with shrewish wife and noisy children, when he is given a psychic command to come meet an alien spaceship...
...The question is how strong or weak people are: Do they rise to adventure or do they decline it...
...at 30 he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which earned $150 million...
...He is now returning to television as the producer of "Amazing Stories," an anthology series for which he received an unprecedented commitment from NBC that it will pay for, and air, at least 44 episodes even if it proves to be a ratings disaster...
...Elliott before E.T...
...They take the cards they have been dealt, and for this Spielberg will not respect them...
...This idea-that children are morally and spiritually superior to adults-is a peculiarly American madness...
...Following a flop called 1941, his career has continued to spiral into the rarefied heights...
...And example and experience are what builds character...
...but does not know of his existence...
...And it is not enough that Jones faces huge rolling boulders, swarms of bugs, and legions of killers...
...it is a cheap but powerful form of wish-fulfillment, and is all the better for its exclusivity...
...in an effort to keep her from telling their mother about the alien...
...fans the moral equivalent of telling a three-year-old there is no Santa Claus...
...Always excepting 1941, the movies he has himself directed have received critical encomiums to rival their box-office receipts...
...Elliott, the hero of EX, is a miserable little boy whose divorced mother is an emotional wreck...
...He made his professional debut as a television director in 1969, when he was 20, and at 24 he was making the highly praised Sugarland Express, his first feature film...
...As for his private life: He lives with Amy Irving, one of the world's most beautiful women, and they have just had a son, named Max...
...He gives them miracles...
...Fame, success, the respect and even worship of his fellow man, and at very little cost...
...Those few critics who have actually gone after Spielberg-Robert Asahina in particular-complain that his world view is preposterously optimistic...
...Raiders of the Lost Ark and its sequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, take this to extremes...
...and it is the key to Spielberg's great success...
...Spielberg is a master of characterization, but he does very poorly with villains, usually making them faceless and ominous and therefore lacking in force...
...was more than just a movie to a great many people...
...The mother and father in Poltergeist are a happy but complacent suburban couple...
...His mother does not see E.T...
...and this summer's duo of Back to the Future and The Goonies has solidified his position as one of the industry's canniest producers...
...It's easy not to compromise when you have the world at your feet.the world at your feet...
...To complain against the cloying moment when the title extraterrestrial's space ship leaves a rainbow across the sky was to E.T...
...So important, in fact, that he leaves his wife and children on earth to go with the aliens...
...But he goes one better than that...
...Unlike a lot of popular entertainers, he also possesses a brilliant sense of how to stir critics, who usually take the gloves off when a Spielberg comes along...
...He generally goes the old government-bashing route, expecting that the sight of someone in an American military uniform-or a Nazi uniform, for that matter-is so horrifying in itself that he need not give us any further reason for hating his bad guys...
...But Elliott is right...
...who is struggling to keep her family content in the face of her own emotional rollercoaster ride, the father in Poltergeist who smarmily sells houses in the suburban development where he lives, and the parents in The Goonies, who are prepared to sit by and watch their homes torn down for a new housing development...
...Give me a break," she responds...
...The attack on adulthood present in all Spielberg films since Close Encounters is odd, coming from a man who has had the kind of adult life that we all dream of having...
...Jones is a mild-mannered archaeology professor who doubles as a swashbuckling adventurer...
...Quite a life...
...And Spielberg would do well to have a little less contempt for those of his contemporaries who have had a more difficult time than he...
Vol. 18 • September 1985 • No. 9
