Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy pinpointed one of the film’s principal flaws: “Avner is not an especially empathy-inducing character. This is partly due to the script, and partly because Bana doesn’t suggest much about Avner’s inner life. To really succeed, Munich would need to have gotten in deep with Avner so that the viewer would be implicated in his growing conflict. The film provides a resolutely exterior experience.” Steven Bauer’s more passionate performance in Sword of Gideon is arguably superior to Bana’s, and the other members of the hit team in Munich are also not especially rounded characters, defined largely by their operational behavior. Munich follows Spielberg’s obsessive fixation on dysfunctional family issues, with Golda Meir and Ephraim coming under critical scrutiny as the film’s symbolic mother and father figures. Avner’s own mother (Gila Almagor) is an emotionally distant fanatic, and he feels compelled to undertake his self-destructive mission to emulate his estranged (and unseen) father, a military hero in the war for independence. There’s yet another dubious father figure in the French crime lord called “Papa” (Michael Lonsdale), whose amoral traffic in information enables Avner to locate his targets. Avner himself becomes an irresponsible Spielbergian father by neglecting his wife and newborn daughter for the sake of his mission, before reawakening to his family responsibilities.
The thinness of the characterizations tends to make Munich seem more schematic than dramatic, unlike Schindler’s List, which conveys its historical themes with overwhelming emotional immediacy. Munich is more of an illustrated intellectual debate. Contrary to its critics, it is a thoughtful, provocative, honorable, and illuminating one. But the $70 million film, made for Universal, DreamWorks, and Amblin, failed to reach a wide audience in the United States, grossing only $47 million; the total worldwide box office, on the other hand, was a respectable $130 million, helping prove Spielberg correct in his belief that the film would be “understood more easily and better” abroad. Munich was nominated for five Oscars, including best picture, director, and screenplay, but won none.
Tony Kushner offered the most eloquent retort to the controversy surrounding the film, writing in the Los Angeles Times, “Violence exacts a psychic toll, unless you’re a sociopath, and who wants to watch a movie about sociopaths? Munich dramatizes the toll violence takes. This bothers a few people at both ends of the political spectrum. I understand why those who think Israeli agents are villainous, unfeeling killing machines disparage our conscienceridden characters. I’m confused by those who think that a depiction of the agents as conscienceless would make them more impressive and heroic…. I think it’s the refusal of the film to reduce the Mideast controversy, and the problematics of terrorism and counterterrorism, to sound bites and spin that has brought forth charges of ‘moral equivalence’ from people whose politics are best served by simple morality tales.”
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DESPITE (or because of) his increasing level of social engagement in recent years, Spielberg has often been attacked for what some consider his deleterious cultural and economic influence on the world of filmmaking. The widespread charge that Spielberg and George Lucas ruined the film medium with their unprecedented level of commercial success, by inspiring the industry’s obsession with the “blockbuster mentality” or “blockbuster syndrome,” ignores the prior influence of The Godfather and The Exorcist (not to mention The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind) and the wider context of changes in film marketing, financing, and demographics from the 1970s onward. Blaming Spielberg for the impact of Jaws not only oversimplifies a situation largely beyond his control but also indicts him for his perseverance and brilliance in turning what could have been a potboiler into a classic thriller. By the standards of today’s graphic spectacles, Jaws looks positively classical, restrained, and character-driven. But Spielberg’s supposedly malign influence on popular tastes has been lamented by, among many others, Pauline Kael, who made the oft-quoted comment, “It’s not so much what Spielberg has done, but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilization of the culture.”
Spielberg’s blockbuster films, especially Jurassic Park, have also been criticized for dominating international screens at the expense of other countries’ own films, leading to charges that Spielberg is in the forefront of American cultural hegemony. French director Jean-Luc Godard has been a particularly vociferous Spielberg detractor, even devoting parts of his 2001 film In Praise of Love to attacking the American filmmaker (“Steven Spielberg Associates and Incorporated”) for allegedly trying to own the cinematic rights to the Holocaust. For some diehard critics and his many fierce opponents in academia, Spielberg has yet to be absolved of his sins against the cinematic medium, real or imaginary. Lester D. Friedman’s 2006 critical study Citizen Spielberg quotes an anonymous academic who accused him of writing a book about “the antichrist.” Friedman feels compelled to engage in some anxiously defensive maneuvers in the initial pages, recounting some of the mockery he received for undertaking such a déclassé project: “When I told my colleagues at a Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference that I intended to write a book examining Spielberg’s entire film output, one friend laughingly suggested that doing so was the academic equivalent of appearing in a porn movie: how would I ever regain scholarly legitimacy?”
This kind of attitude baffled the late British author J. G. Ballard, whose autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun was filmed by Spielberg in 1987. Ballard writes in his 2008 autobiography, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, that when he made an American book tour the year after the film’s release, “Americans were unfailingly friendly and helpful, though I noticed an almost universal hostility to Steven Spielberg. One journalist asked me: ‘Why did you allow Spielberg to make a film of your novel?’ When I replied that he was the greatest film director in America, he promptly corrected me: ‘Not the greatest, the most successful.’ This was the only time that I’ve heard success downplayed in America.” The heated attacks Spielberg continues to engender this late in his career, however bizarre they often seem (a familiar rhetorical ploy is to libel him as a Nazi), are a sign of his continued centrality in modern film history, whether or not observers regard him as a positive or negative force. Fellow director Baz Luhrmann has called him the “president of cinema,” and George Lucas has said, “People like Steven don’t come along every day, and when they do, it’s an amazing thing. It’s like talking about Einstein or Babe Ruth or Tiger Woods. He’s not in a group of filmmakers his age; he’s far, far away.”
The director’s sixtieth year saw a landmark in the ongoing process of his acceptance as a major film artist: the first academic conference on his work. That November 2007 event at the University of Lincoln in England, “Spielberg at Sixty,” brought forth a remarkably wide range of presentations by international scholars, including the authors of several books on Spielberg (including this one) and many younger academics. The conference was commemorated in a special issue of the British journal New Review of Film and Television Studies, which includes my essay “A Reputation: Steven Spielberg and the Eyes of the World” (from which some of these comments are drawn). The tone of the proceedings was overwhelmingly positive and largely lacked the defensiveness that only a few years earlier might have colored any such undertaking. The younger academics seemed to take Spielberg’s artistic stature as a given; some even had the chutzpah to offer thoughtful exegeses of such previously maligned Spielberg works as The Sugarland Express, 1941, Always, Amistad, and A.I. For a scholar of Spielberg’s generation who had written a biography of the filmmaker in 1993–97 in order to argue the controversial case that he was worthy of serious consideration, this was a most refreshing and somewhat unexpected experience.
In that same period, the field of Spielberg studies entered what could be termed its full maturity with elaborately mounted, subtly argued critical studies by Friedman, Nigel Morris (The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light), Warren Buckland (Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poet
ics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster), and Andrew M. Gordon (Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg). This impressive array of scholarship, covering Spielberg from a multitude of critical perspectives, signaled Spielberg’s acceptance by at least some of the more freethinking segments of academia. David Bordwell, perhaps the foremost figure in American film studies and the leading author of film textbooks, wrote after seeing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, “I was taken, as usual, by Spielberg’s brisk direction. In the last decade he’s had a remarkably hot hand. Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal (much underrated, I think), War of the Worlds, and Munich are very strong movies. For all their faults (sometimes those slippery endings), they would be enough to establish a younger director at the very top.” The future of Spielberg studies, once so uncertain, now seems in good hands, critical debates about his films have become more nuanced, and the remaining Spielberg haters seem increasingly passé.
Even some former Spielberg detractors began coming around in this period. John Powers, who once wrote, “He can’t make an honest film if he tries,” amended his views in an L.A. Weekly review of Minority Report: “Spielberg has been around for so long that it has become easy to take his brilliance for granted…. Talk about stamina. Film history is littered with great directors who’ve run out of gas or lost their way—Sturges, Welles, Godard, Bertolucci, Coppola…. Yet for nearly 30 years, Spielberg has managed to sustain an extraordinarily high level of ambition and skill. (A.I. may have been a failure, but it wasn’t lazy.) Where all those easy riders and raging bulls of the ’70s raged against Hollywood—frittering away their talents with sex, drugs and self-indulgent belief in their own genius—Spielberg has always felt at home in the industry whose big-budget machinery is necessary to his success. He’s kept his nose clean and held it to the grindstone, turning out movies with admirable regularity…. This disciplined work ethic has produced one of the great runs in screen history, one worthy of such fabled marathoners as Ford, Hawks and Hitchcock.”
Why did it ever take so long? To borrow a phrase from the great American baseball player and philosopher Yogi Berra, this lengthy saga of critical neglect and disdain seems a case of “déjà vu all over again.” It recalls the state of film scholarship that existed in the 1960s when we critics of the auteurist school began the contentious process of trying to get people to take the classical Hollywood directors seriously. Led by François Truffaut, Andrew Sarris, Peter Bogdanovich, Robin Wood, and others, we went to work mounting cases for such filmmakers as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, Raoul Walsh, Michael Curtiz, Allan Dwan, and other great Hollywood directors who had committed the crimes of which Spielberg has been accused—being popular, versatile, and entertaining, as well as having strong personal visions. It took a number of years to swing the recalcitrant critical establishment around to seeing that American cinema itself was worth studying. Eventually, we prevailed beyond our wildest expectations, even if auteurism itself turned into a knee-jerk methodology and became unfashionable in the world of academic theory. Although, ironically, an auteurist approach still pervades many curricula in practice, the newer disciplines of film study have tended to favor only certain Hollywood directors, those whose work can be fitted, however tenuously, into acceptable ideological frameworks, usually Marxist in orientation.
A younger filmmaker who conspicuously displayed the stylistic skills of Hitchcock or Ford and the cinematic versatility of Hawks or Curtiz might have seemed eminently acceptable as their successor in scholarly esteem, yet Spielberg’s extreme level of contemporary popularity not only made him an object of thinly disguised envy for many critics and academics but also made him seem like the cultural enemy to those who habitually look down on mass-market tastes. His thematic concentrations on suburbia, nuclear families, father figures, children, spiritual escape, and cartoonish adventure made him even more anathema to the keepers of the keys of academic scholarship. The battleground over Spielberg was familiar because it was much the same argument about popular culture we had fought over with those who condescended to Hitchcock or Hawks as mere entertainers unworthy of serious study. Today there’s no director more widely studied in university film courses than Hitchcock, and the same fate no doubt will befall Spielberg once he’s safely dead.
Aside from his popularity, why has Spielberg been so reviled? Although he has generally been a liberal in his personal politics, his fascination with suburbia in his earlier work was not calculated to win favor from left-wing intellectuals, many of whom were in angry flight from middle-class suburban values. Spielberg’s concentration on common-man (or -woman) protagonists, another element in his work that has prompted critical hostility, is a trait he shares with Hitchcock. Both filmmakers suffered at the height of their popular favor from their detractors’ inability or unwillingness to engage sympathetically with such characters. Those who dismiss Spielberg out of hand often exhibit a lack of understanding of how complex and critical his portraits of ordinary life actually are. Spielberg’s view of suburbia is far from the rosy picture his detractors paint it as being. It is, instead, a perspective that demonstrates his profound ambivalence toward the milieu from which he emerged. His characters in any settings, while yearning for stable family lives, seldom manage to achieve that sense of security, and they usually struggle desperately to escape from the constriction, narrow-mindedness, and stultification of middle-class existence.
For many Spielberg detractors, the case against him seems to come down to emotional attacks on his view of family life and his supposed adherence to that worst of traits in the academic lexicon, patriarchy. Their usual tack is to accuse him of propagating “the ideal of the nuclear family, a social and historical construction constantly sold in terms of its supposedly ‘natural’ basis,” as Geoff King writes of Jurassic Park’s “most sustained work as a cultural product.” The filmmaker’s obsessive, career-long concentration on broken families, flawed father and mother figures, children under duress, and attempts by people to recuperate nuclear families seems to make many critics acutely uncomfortable, even if they often displace that discomfort by attacking the dubious notion of Spielberg’s supposed idealization of families. It is obvious enough that some of his detractors may have unresolved issues with their own families and childhoods that have left a lingering anger and bitterness they project onto Spielberg’s screen, which, as Nigel Morris observes, serves as “a tabula rasa on which to etch scorn for popular culture and what, for some, it represents.”
Morris notes that the “extraordinary vindictiveness” of Spielberg’s enemies may be a symptom of “a need to project the critic’s contradictions onto the text and other spectators. Critics sometimes appear less than honest about their responses and define themselves contemptuously against mainstream audiences characterized as passive dupes.” One of the most sustained and serious attacks on Spielberg and what, to some, he represents is Andrew Britton’s 1986 Marxist critique in Movie, “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reagan Entertainment,” which discusses Spielberg as the foremost exemplar of that era’s “intensely reactionary” promotion of imperialistic and patriarchal ideology through the use of genre conventions to distance complacent spectators from experiencing reality. Morris quotes a 1989 response to Britton by Peter Benson in that same journal: “Psychoanalysis is compelled to acknowledge that extreme revulsion is always the sign of an equal unconscious attraction. The energy needed to denigrate a film has to be expended in order to prevent oneself falling in love with it; or, rather, to deny that one has already fallen in love with it.” Benson suggests that the language Britton uses to criticize E.T.—such as describing how its “intensities of feeling and involvement” invite the audience to “bawl our eyes out” over “the ultimate Reaganite movie about patriarchy”—actually conveys enjoyment and as such is a mask for the fact that the film “has, after all, caught his desire, his passion and
his pen.”
Although Spielberg’s attitudes toward patriarchy are far more complex than his critics would admit, his yearning for recuperation of nuclear family life and for reconciliation with parental figures forms a poignantly persistent strain in his work from his youth to the present. There is no disputing that Spielberg’s films strongly wish for more responsible and caring parental figures. Some critics consider this tendency a dangerous nostalgia for paternalism (if not maternalism) and all that implies socially and politically. Susan Aronstein, in a 1995 Cinema Journal essay on the Indiana Jones films, criticizes Spielberg’s “nostalgic desire for authority, the return of the father, and an ideological support of the agenda of the New Right that reinstated the privileged position of the white male hero.” However, the sustained critique of flawed male authority figures throughout much of Spielberg’s work seems to count for little in such a stubbornly one-sided analysis. Spielberg’s yearning for the ideal of the nuclear family may well be characterized as “conservative,” but it is hardly a symptom of an authoritarian personality, as some Spielberg critics suggest (often extending the charge to claims that he is a right-wing apologist for American imperialism). Unless one is an implacable opponent of the very existence of nuclear families, a position that would seem to preclude any sympathy for Spielberg’s work, it should be recognized that Spielberg harbors an intense nostalgia for the kind of imagined family happiness that he never actually knew, an ideal he recognizes rarely exists in reality, and a psychological Lost Eden he remains emotionally committed to mourning in his work. Critics who would refuse him the right to do so, the freedom to examine his deepest traumas and obsessions, are rejecting his artistic individualism. Perhaps they do so with such vehemence because they recognize that he speaks with emotional power for millions of people who share similar feelings.
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