Lester D. Friedman,
Citizen Spielberg.
University of Illinois Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 25203114 8 (hb) US$75.00
ISBN: 0 25207358 4 (pb) US$24.95
376pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Illinois Press)

First things first. The blurb says it all. “Steven Spielberg is the director or producer of over one third of the thirty highest grossing films of all time, yet most film scholars dismiss him as little more than a modern P. T. Barnum – a technically gifted and intellectually shallow showman who substitutes spectacle for substance.” In this sentence lies the entire essence not just of Lester D. Friedman’s hugely enjoyable new book, but of prevailing academic discourse for over a quarter of a century. As one (wisely) unnamed industry analyst suggests, Spielberg has always been regarded as the ‘antichrist’ (3).

That Friedman’s introduction is entitled ‘The elephant in the center of the room’ is instructive. He spends much of the opening section attempting to resurrect the critical reputation of his subject, and justifying his decision to write a book on the man Crispin Glover recently castigated for wafting “his putrid stench upon our culture, a culture he helped homogenize and propagandize”[1] Friedman lists critics, academics, and industry professionals who have all, at one stage in his career, sought to reproach him for, among other things, the excess of modern American filmmaking. This has always been the central tenet of any debate about Spielberg, and one that is ritualistically trotted out in every review of his new releases. Spielberg-bashing, for want of a better word, has become an all-too-easy hobby in academia and erudite film critic circles, with the majority all too quick to personify him, along with his acolyte George Lucas, as wrecking balls; nerdy brats who infantilised American cinema at the end of the 1970s, instigated the ‘summer event’ movie, and ushered in the death of narrative film-making.

Friedman’s book seeks to redress this imbalance, justifying Roger Ebert’s comment that “[i]t is likely that when all of the movies of the twentieth century are seen at a great distance […] his best will in the handful that endure and are remembered.”[2] There is an exhaustive overview of the components of Spielberg’s corpus, the issues which animate his most significant works, the roots of his immense popularity amongst audiences, and the influence his vast spectrum of imaginative products exerts on the public consciousness. Friedman fills that void with a systematic analysis of the various genres in which the director has worked and concludes that Spielberg’s films present a sustained artistic vision combined with a technical flair matched by few other filmmakers, and makes a compelling case for Spielberg to be considered as a major film artist.

The Introduction also provides some fairly broad observations on the central concerns of a typical Spielberg film – ‘counternarratives’, ‘characters’, ‘leitmotifs’, ‘male angst’, and ‘female troubles’. The concentration on the former is especially revealing, for as the author correctly claims, “[f]ar from the lock-step, fascist aesthetics his detractors attribute to him, Spielberg’s cinema is filled with opportunities to contest and even contradict the attitudes of his characters” (5). It is these contestations and contradictions that inform the main thrust of Friedman’s study.

This structural clarity is maintained in the main body of the argument. Most books on Spielberg’s work have analysed his filmography in chronological order. Friedman opts out of such an approach and concentrates instead on a theme by theme approach, drawing wide-ranging comparisons of genre between similar (and occasionally divergent) films. Once the reader accepts this methodology, Friedman’s sub-sections allow more specific details of each individual film to emerge. As such, this becomes one of the great strengths of the book, allowing a far more systematic and cohesive study of tropes within the films, and illuminating the multi-generic aspects of his films that many critics tend to ignore or gloss over. Friedman uses the following headings – ‘Science fiction and fantasy films’, ‘Action-adventure melodramas’, ‘Monster movies’, ‘World war II combat films’, ‘Social problem/ethnic minority films’, and ‘The holocaust’. Within these five brackets, Friedman weaves intelligent biographical analysis, close sequence examination, socio-historical trends and turning points, and sensitive deconstruction of the themes embedded within the films. To choose a film from each respective genre; let’s say E.T.(USA 1982), Raiders of the Lost Ark (USA 1981), Jaws (USA 1975), Saving Private Ryan(USA 1998), Amistad (USA 1997), and Schindler’s List (USA 1993), Friedman’s prose style is enthusiastic and insightful. The methodology is decidedly risk-free – genre study and auteur criticism – in a way that consciously primes the reader to expect little in the way of ontological or epistemological tub-thumping, but nonetheless, the reliance upon a clear succinct approach pays dividends. The analysis of the Indiana Jones trilogy is especially interesting, especially as it highlights the sensitivity towards parodic depictions of masculinity that crop up endlessly in Spielberg’s work. When Friedman suggests that the trilogy succeeds in “critiquing rather than celebrating conservative notions of American masculinity and imperialism” (112), we remember that the heroism of Indy, like that of Quint and Hooper in Jaws, is frequently presented with an ironic undertone. As Friedman intelligently reminds us, Indy wins at the end of Raiders and Crusade by not looking at the Ark, and not retrieving the Holy Grail.

There are a few quibbles. It is a shame to see so few illustrations and/or frame grabs in a study of a director who has always relied on visual clarity and large widescreen formats, and it is disappointing that the images that have been included don’t really add to our overall understanding of themes and motifs in Spielberg’s oeuvre. Moreover, it is rather reductive on Freidman’s part to claim that this study was regarded by colleagues as “the academic equivalent of appearing in a porn movie” (2). There is some fine Spielberg scholarship out there, but in a gesture that smacks a little too much of hubris, Friedman tends to denigrate all studies that have come before. Granted, unauthorised biographies and rush-released behind-the-scene revelations will never get to the heart of the Spielberg enigma, but it is remiss of Friedman, for example, to ignore completely Antonia Quirke’s wonderfully epigrammatic study of Jaws, or to refer to Joseph McBride’s highly literate biography as containing “pockets of intelligent analysis” (1). Elsewhere, there is little reference of the enormous impact Spielberg has had on younger directors (Robert Zemeckis, Joe Dante), his motivation behind setting up the DreamWorks studio, his role as benevolent producer for countless other films, or, perhaps most frustratingly, the reasons behind his reliance upon the collaborative team of John Williams, Darius Kaminski and Michael Kahn, all of whom have worked on the majority of Spielberg’s films. The ultimate question, of whether Spielberg is an auteur, is never satisfactorily engaged with, but that is not the remit of Friedman’s book.[3]  Instead, it is to address the notion of Citizen Spielberg, that “consummate popular artist and industry mogul” (4). With the Wellesian inflection of the title, Friedman’s lasting achievement is to have revealed a profundity in Spielberg’s work hitherto only mentioned sporadically. Welles himself once talked of filmmaking as like being in charge of an enormous train set. For Spielberg, his train shows precious little sign of slowing down.

Benjamin McCann,
The University of Adelaide.

Endnotes:

[1] ‘What Is It?’, Crispin Hellion Glover,http://web.archive.org/web/20060503191918/http://thecrispincorner.com/essay.html [accessed 24 April 2007]
[2] Roger Ebert, ‘Steven Spielberg’, Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London, 2006), pp. 98-9.
[3]Things may be about to change. Two more studies of Spielberg have just been released: Warren Buckland’s Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster and Nigel Morris’s The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light.

Created on: Tuesday, 5 June 2007