There’s a great clip from an interview where James Lipton explains the ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind to the film’s own director, Steven Spielberg. He starts by pointing out that Spielberg’s father was a computer scientist and his mother a musician.
“When the spaceship lands,” Lipton says of the film’s final scene, “how do they communicate? They make music on their computers, and they are able to speak to each other.”
A visibly pleased Spielberg replies, “I’d love to say I intended that, and I realised that was my mother and father, but not until this moment.”
The scientist/artist dichotomy is everywhere in Spielberg’s filmography. It’s there in Close Encounters; it’s in Alan Grant’s traditional palaeontology versus the modern computer modelling he hates; it’s in the feud between primal Quint and academic Hooper in Jaws. Spielberg goes back to the source again and again.
A couple of years back, I trekked out on a bitter evening to see Spielberg’s lightly fictionalised memoir, The Fabelmans, and the first scene took me back to that interview. The movie opens with a young Spielberg — pseudonymised as Sammy — standing in line outside of a cinema, waiting to see a movie. His father stands in front of him, explaining the science of the cinema, describing how the illusion is created. Sammy’s mother crouches beside him and assures her son that the movie “is a wonderful dream”.
Here are the scientist and the artist, harmonising to sing their own parts of the same song.
Here is Spielberg, returning again to the source.
In 1956, Alfred Hitchcock remade his own 1934 movie, The Man Who Knew Too Much. François Truffaut said that the second pass was superior to the first, and Hitchcock told him, “Let’s say the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional.”
I think about that quote when I read an author or watch a filmmaker who, book after book or film after film, orbits the gravity of a central preoccupation. I think about it when I watch a new Wes Anderson film, which looks just like his previous films but hopefully, though not always, pushes the look somewhere new. I think about it when I re-read Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, especially any of his first three books.
A Pale View of Hills shows us a woman who returns to her memories because she struggles to look clearly at her present. Ishiguro’s second (more creatively successful) novel, An Artist of the Floating World, features an artist who returns to his memories because of a clash between what he once believed and what’s presently true. Ishiguro’s third (and most successful) novel, The Remains of the Day, which came out of his desire to entirely rewrite the second book, has a butler returning to his memories to make sense of his romantic life.
In all three stories, memory reveals and hides a lot.
In an interview with The Paris Review, the interviewer commends Ishiguro for showing a “chameleon-like ability” in transforming one theme into three separate novels, but he waves off the praise:
“I’ve written the same book three times. I just somehow got away with it.”
Not often, but sometimes enough, instead of reading a book I watch a film. Quite often, of those times I watch a movie, I re-watch something I’ve already seen. There’s a lot of reasons to revisit old movies and books, but one decent reason is to see how it’s done.
So the other day I re-watched The Fabelmans. I wanted to know how Spielberg keeps refrying the same ingredients without losing any flavour. I was also thinking about that Ishiguro interview in The Paris Review and wondering how he got away with writing the same book three times.
The film has a lot of the usual Spielberg fare. We get wide-eyed wonder; reaction shots in place of the thing being reacted to; mid-century Americana; suburbs and suburban families; and in the end, all is forgiven and everyone is redeemed or ultimately redeemable. The novelty in The Fabelmans — the new recipe for familiar ingredients — is self-consciousness. Spielberg knows who he is, what he does, and he’s ready at last to play with that knowledge.
Sure, we get the origin story of the director we know and love today, the expected bildungsroman of the boy discovering himself through cinema and becoming the man (and something of a myth). The too-pleasant-to-be-real nuclear family presented to us in the film’s first act is pure Spielberg, at his best and his worst — sentimentality saturates the screen. And then Spielberg spends the whole film picking this family fabric apart.
It’s like he needed fifty years and thirty-five films to get enough distance to go beyond eulogy and get into criticism.
Late in the film, Spielberg sets up a familiar scene from teen movies where the bullied genius wins over the jock who made his life hell, using his own brand of mild-mannered superpower — except nothing plays out the expected ways. The jock has a complex reaction to being flattered in Sammy’s short movie, revealing a fear of failure beneath his bravado. In a quietly masterful scene, the two boys experience rage, confusion, envy, self-doubt, scorn, respect, and, finally, a cynical rejection of the kind of simplistic, happy ending Spielberg’s lesser films are known for (E.T. and Hook, I’m looking at you).
The scene takes Spielberg’s newfound self-consciousness beyond the usual boundaries of a Spielberg film. When the jock insists that Sammy never tell anyone about his intense reaction to the short film, Sammy swears he won’t. “Unless,” he adds, “I make a movie about it.” I sat up straight at this flirtation with the postmodern from a distinctly traditional filmmaker.
Then there’s the final moment of The Fabelmans, which I’m not going to reveal here. It’s audacious and self-satisfied and probably too clever for its own good and it’s wonderful. I thought I knew what a Spielberg film was, and with a single shot, I had to rethink everything.
That’s how you get away with it.