Steven Spielberg goes home
Steven Spielberg came to prominence in the early-to-mid 1970s – his mid-to-late twenties – with a trio of films that combined humour and suspense to tell stories about a struggle for survival. Each involved a chase, and each was more ambitious than its predecessor, moving from bare-bones to blockbuster but without ever forgetting the virtues of restraint. Duel, made for TV but released in cinemas, portrays a face-off between two men, a travelling salesman and the truck driver on his tail. In The Sugarland Express, an escaped convict and his impulsive wife drive across Texas to recover their son from care and kidnap a policeman on the way. There was no doubting Spielberg’s credentials as a wunderkind, with a preternatural confidence and a gift for making the most of a schlocky premise. Reviewing The Sugarland Express, the American film critic Pauline Kael wrote: “He could be that rarity among directors, a born entertainer.” The strongest kind of vindication arrived a little over a year later with Jaws, in which three men – oceanographer, sailor-turned-bounty-hunter, embattled police chief – go in search of a great white shark menacing a seaside town.
That film changed cinema virtually overnight, but Spielberg used its success to pursue a more personal vision – which in his case meant drawing on his parents’ troubled marriage while serving up ever greater spectacle. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) concerns Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), an overwhelmed family man in rural Indiana who develops an obsession with UFOs that causes his wife to leave him. Both components had deep roots, the flying saucers no less than the bickering parents. Spielberg’s interest in extraplanetary visitors went back to a night in the early Fifties when his father woke him up to see a meteor shower. Barely five years later, aged 17, he made a feature film, Firelight, which was a dry run for Close Encounters (but on a budget – a $500 donation from his parents). Later, while he was studying at California State University, he had been invigorated by a pair of uncompromising exercises in sci-fi: George Lucas’s short film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (which made him “jealous to the marrow of my bones”) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In the nearly 50 years since Close Encounters, Spielberg has made 30 films, and not one has told a realistic story set in the present day. Close Encounters established his obsession with varieties of fantasy; its follow-up two years later, 1941, a farce set in California in the weeks after Pearl Harbor, revealed an interest in history. And though his Oscars for Best Director came for work in this second vein (Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan), his impact on modern cinema and popular storytelling originates in the first.
Spielberg might quibble with the distinction. While the films containing elements of fantasy are preoccupied with wonder (as theme and desired effect) and the period pieces aim for grandeur and gravitas, both reflect his intellectual curiosity. He described Close Encounters – his only film for which he has the sole writing credit – as a work of “science fact”, and his forthcoming UFO film Disclosure Day, which has a meteorologist (Emily Blunt) as its protagonist, reflects a consistent desire to ground the as-yet-unproved or not-yet-invented in technical and practical detail. Close Encounters derives its title from the work of the astrophysicist J Allen Hynek, who developed a classification system for UFO sightings. In one scene, there’s a gripping 40-second debate about the most effective way of evacuating a large area of Wyoming, the predicted landing site for an alien mothership (“Nobody’s going to believe in a plague in this day and age!”). In AI: Artificial Intelligence (2001), a robot sex worker (Jude Law) visits the erudite fairground hologram Dr Know (voiced by Robin Williams). Law’s character is presented with various categories of question and chooses to “combine ‘fact’ with ‘fairy tale’”.
Spielberg’s embrace of that paradoxical formula was key to the emergence of science fiction as what Quentin Tarantino has called “the prestige genre”, displacing the Western, the war film, and the sword-and-sandals epic. It also marked the key shift from Spielberg’s earlier films’ emphasis on adrenaline. Where the police chief in Jaws – though not a film entirely free of oceanographic chatter – announces, “You’re going to need a bigger boat,” a scientist in Close Encounters tells his collaborators, “We’re going to need a geodetic survey map of Wyoming.” His films display a love for pedagogy, jargon, the nerdy specifics of how things get done. Spielberg has been routinely criticised for his commercialism and adolescent tastes, but no director has done more for the representation of experts on screen. He proved that you could break box-office records telling stories containing lines like, “I saw you at the Montsoreau conference.”
While Close Encounters was a commercial success, it didn’t serve as a blueprint, at least not at first. For the next decade or so, fantasy and the supernatural were allied to the action film, as in the Alien and Terminator series, and also to children’s entertainment, most obviously in Spielberg’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), which, like Close Encounters, placed elements of personal history against an intergalactic backdrop, although in an altogether gentler key. And the typical leading men of the 1980s were of a different, less troubled sort than Dreyfuss’s pained, pensive Roy Neary. There was Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) in Beverly Hills Cop, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, Marty McFly (Michael J Fox) in Back to the Future and the bullwhip-cracking archaeologist Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford in three Spielberg-directed films made between 1981 and 1989.
Conceived by Lucas in the few moments when he wasn’t obsessing over the Star Wars universe, Indiana Jones was a product of his and Spielberg’s shared interest in the pop culture of their childhoods, notably the fantasy comic strip Buck Rogers. But the films, though wildly lucrative, provided Spielberg with limited scope to pursue the themes established in Close Encounters. Jones is a tenured professor and an “expert on the occult” but he spends little time engaged in acts of explanation. Only in the third instalment, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, when the quest involves his errant father Henry (Sean Connery), was Spielberg able to touch on personal material, and fleetingly at that.
Beginning in the early 1990s, Spielberg returned to the formula of Close Encounters – adding a strong dose of Jaws – and solidified the genre he had founded. Fact was back. Working with the screenwriter David Koepp, Spielberg made a trio of blockbusters built around scientific explanation (palaeontology, chaos theory, botany, ethology) and a fallible non-heroic male lead defined by his attitude to family life and response to a high-concept scenario: Jurassic Park (1993), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) and War of the Worlds (2005), in which, following the alien attack, a son tells his father (Tom Cruise): “I want to know everything you know.”
During the same period came a pair of dark futuristic narratives, concerned with men driven by their grief over a dead son to embark on an extreme experiment: AI: Artificial Intelligence, about the manufacture of a robot-boy, and Minority Report (2002), in which criminal acts are predicted and intercepted. These films, adapted from celebrated science-fiction writers (Michael Crichton, Brian Aldiss, Philip K Dick, HG Wells), were highly effective, applying Spielberg’s signatures – inventive mobile camera work, extended set-pieces, awestruck and terrified reaction shots and a rousing John Williams score – to explore the battle between the recognition of human vulnerability and a hubristic desire for mastery and control.
For the last two decades, Spielberg has devoted most of his energy to moments from history: Munich (2005), Lincoln (2012), The Post (2017). He addressed his family history without fantasy context or camouflage in The Fabelmans (2022). Though he had hits with the fourth instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise – The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) – and another science-fiction summer blockbuster, Ready Player One (2018), neither generated much affection. His significance has been registered indirectly, through films he worked on as an executive producer – such as the Jurassic Park sequels, or Twisters – or which owed a debt to his example: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), the recent Project Hail Mary.
But with Disclosure Day, Spielberg, who turns 80 in December, has made a film about alien life forms, based on a story of his own conception and aimed at an adult audience – returning, for one last swing, to the central site of not just his cultural influence but also his claim to enduring greatness.
Disclosure Day is released on 10 June and Close Encounters with Spielberg, a season of the director’s science-fiction and fantasy films, runs at the BFI Imax until 28 June
[Further reading: Backrooms: How 4chan “creepypasta” became Hollywood horror]
