‘The Fabelmans’, Steven Spielberg’s latest movie, is a moving and touching tribute to himself.
The movie exists because Spielberg, like Joe Biden, has stuck around long enough to become an institution. Despite recent bombs like a woke West Side Story remake, Hollywood is willing to subsidize Spielberg much as the Democrats prop up Joe Biden, because he maintains the fiction that the industry represents something more than a cynical power and money grab.
And Spielberg, with Bidenesque levels of bad judgment, decided that what he wanted to do was film a mawky coming of age story that had been done a million times before. The sensitive boy, drawn to his mother, misunderstood by his father, who pursues his dream of writing novels or making movies until he succeeds enough to be able to tell the story of his own preciousness is a staple of literary and cinematic industries trapped in a narcissistic love affair with themselves.
‘The Fabelmans’ is formally dedicated to Spielberg’s parents, but would make them roll in their graves. But that’s okay. The protagonist of ‘The Fabelmans’ is the young Spielberg who heroically emerges from the trauma of middle-class life to make a movie about his growth as an artist. And the privilege of being the subject is reducing everyone around you to objects.
The trouble is that Spielberg is no more of an artist now than Biden is a politician. Both men are propped up by parasites and enablers dining out on their name recognition. Spielberg’s Ron Klain is Tony Kushner, a leftist hack playwright who has been the hump on Spielberg’s back for over a decade. The adult Spielberg, like the child filmmaker of ‘The Fabelmans’, had a knack for capturing dynamic moments, but no grasp of the bigger picture. Like other boomer blockbuster directors, including pal George Lucas, he brought to life the creative influences of his childhood, movie serials and thriller comics, monsters and space aliens, created as disposable rubbish by an earlier generation.
It never occurred to Spielberg or many of his contemporaries that they were destroying the culture that had made their childhoods magical while supporting social policies that are wrecking the lives of the next generation. The famed director need look no further than his daughter who has become a porn star. Instead, Spielberg once again cinematically looks to the past while funding radical politicians and causes, from George Gascon to abortion in Kansas.
The present that Spielberg helped to make by funding radical leftist causes is no pleasant place, from the homeless encampments and crime of Los Angeles, to the destruction of a generation of teens, so instead he keeps pointing the camera into the past so as not to see the future.
After running out of fairy dust from past generations, Spielberg turned to historical dramas whose only notable points were that he managed to miss the point about them every time. From ‘Schindler’s List’ to ‘Munich’ to ‘Bridge of Spies’, he rode liberal cliches around history while increasingly coming to side with the villains from the Muslim terrorists to Communist spies. Those movies and the hollowness of the Jewish background depicted in ‘The Fabelmans’ do nothing to disprove the otherwise implausible story from ‘Red Dawn’ director John Millus that Spielberg only discovered about the Holocaust from reading Time-Life books in his thirties.
Kushner provided Spielberg with a point of view, anti-American, and, in the case of ‘Munich’, anti-Israel, that only someone as fundamentally ignorant of history as Spielberg would have taken seriously. The historical howlers in ‘Munich’ and ‘Bridge of Spies’ are legendary, but Spielberg dismissed the critics as just younger versions of his father who don’t get his genius.
That’s fine, but there’s no more genius left. Biden is propped up by teleprompters and earpieces, Spielberg by special effects. The real visual talent in his latter-day movies like ‘The Fabelmans’ belongs to the editors and cinematographers who once collaborated with Spielberg but now drag him through the business of auto-tuning his movies to look visually stunning.
Editor Michael Kahn, who has been with Spielberg through ‘E.T.’, ‘Raiders’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’, and Janusz Kamiński, who followed him from ‘Schindler’s List’ through almost every project since, could make a student film look good. In the Peak TV era of massive budgets and runaway technological prowess, Hollywood projects have never looked so good or been so badly written, composed and edited. Spielberg is lucky to hang on to Kahn who can make even his most disjointed efforts seem coherent or to Kamiński who brings a touch of old world cinematography to fill any frame with light, but none of that can disguise the missing auteur.
Steven Spielberg can’t make a movie just like Joe Biden can’t be president. The army of spongers, grifters, enablers, talented colleagues and technical personnel can fool most people, but the resulting products never leave the ground because there’s no guiding vision. Neither Biden nor Spielberg are animated by any greater impulse than clinging to fame. Facing mortality and oblivion, they retreat into sullen tirades and narcissistic self-pity. Both men are celebrated for their empathy, but their decline reveals that they never cared for anyone but themselves.
‘The Fabelmans’ should be the end of Spielberg’s career. A final tribute to a man who lost the plot decades ago from an indulgent industry that uses the myth of creative genius to cover its many sins. But, like Biden, Spielberg has no intention of leaving the stage. Unable to tell any stories except those gleaned from his Time-Life library and then pre chewed by Tony Kushner, he has achieved his dream of being taken seriously while losing the young boy within.
That boy, the protagonist of ‘The Fabelmans’, is self-centered, but he’s driven by visions of adventure. What happens to that boy when he loses the impulse to imagine, to dream and invent, to escape his suburban life by imagining another one? The familiar story of Boomer culture is that he becomes a narcissistic shell without the redeeming quality of creativity.
The ranks of the Democrats and of the Left are stocked with these aged man-children who, despite their best efforts, became what they hated and feared about their parents, but without the sense of decency and responsibility that Spielberg still ridicules in his father. Spielberg’s Peter Pan, like his ill-fated movie project with Robin Williams, never goes back to fairyland, but also never grows up into a functioning adult. Even at the age of 75, he is still a child. But without the charm, the spark and the inventiveness of childhood. ‘The Fabelmans’ is a bookend to a career that began with glorified pulps, left childhood behind with ’Hook’ and returns once again.
Only this time the house is empty. All that’s left are old grudges and older memories.
The only thing interesting about ‘The Fabelmans’ and Spielberg is how uninteresting it all is. Some artists emerge from trauma, but that is no more of a precondition than any of the other myths of genius. The only achievement of ‘The Fabelmans’ will be to dissuade anyone from believing that there’s anything interesting about Steven Spielberg. But Spielberg was probably the only one who ever thought that there was. Much as Joe Biden believes he’s interesting.
After tiring of the cowboys and urban desperados, the pratfall comics and doomed love affairs that made it an industry, Hollywood fell in love with telling its own story. There’s a reason so many movies are set in Los Angeles and so many Academy Award winners revolve around the film industry. The greatest trick ever played by the industry is the conviction of its own importance. The mysticism of the auteur director, the little god of the theaters, still has its own shrine even as the industry is being reduced to an ancillary Big Tech project that exists to sell subscriptions to streaming services while the movie theaters go begging for spare change.
Spielberg could potentially help change that. ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ struck a powerful blow for movie theaters and for making movies the way that they did in populist 80s. But he’s too busy being wrapped up in his tiresome politics, nostalgia and narcissism. The director most celebrated by the industry is too busy looking in the mirror to save the movie theaters that made him great.
‘The Fabelmans’, prepped for a Thanksgiving release, is exactly the kind of movie that put people off going to movie theaters. Spielberg and his cohort once shook up a movie industry that had become wrapped up in virtue signaling and experimentation by making crowd-pleasing fare. Many decried Spielberg for turning out ‘dumb’ blockbusters filled with special effects and driving out the incoherent leftist navel-gazing exercises being inflicted on audiences at the time.
Spielberg never got over being snubbed as an unserious artist. After ‘Jurassic Park’ ushered in the age of special effects blockbusters that abandoned storytelling for computer generated fantasies, he spent a generation making po-faced cluelessly serious Oscar-bait. Now he can’t even properly do that anymore. All that’s left is more of the incoherent narcissistic navel-gazing that he built his fame and fortune on routing in his talented youth all those years ago.
Biden ran as the man who could save the Democrats, instead he’s destroying them. Spielberg keeps promising to save Hollywood, but like Biden, he’s too far gone to save his own legacy.
America and their respective industries would be better off without both of them.
The described differences between the young and the old Spielberg suggest their affinities and differences could be suitable for a movie. I propose they both appear in a remake of “The Sunshine Boys.” Spielberg could play both roles. It would provide drama to see if they could actually appear together without cracking a mirror.
That search for childhood has been the theme of some of his middle era projects. The self-involvement remains a consistent theme.
“fundamentally ignorant of history” “historical howlers”
Fine psychological analysis. I often think about their ignorance of history.
The “incoherent leftist navel-gazing exercises being inflicted on audiences at the time” constituted some of the greatest films ever made. The Last Picture Show, The Godfather, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, Nashville, I could go on… Spielberg has immense talent, but his “crowd-pleasing” fare like ET or the Indiana Jones films are blithering drivel. As for Lucas, Star Wars is probably the most overrated film of all time.
As if you could make a film about anything.
Excuse me I am wrong….you might make an 8MM about one of your leftist navel-gazing exercises, “Treason Monkeys and Why I Have Zero Influence in America”
I could certainly never make a film like Nashville or Chinatown, but I imagine a monkey (even a treason monkey) could have come up with Raiders of the Lost Ark. Or Top Gun, for that matter.
Nobody shoots on 8mm anymore, btw.
People like you, dealers in low rent scum pornography, shoot in 8mm.
Since a monkey came up with Raiders, or Top Gun how come you didn’t make it? C;mon big guy, make a film. I could even set you up in Hollywood. I still have a contact or two there.
Of course Top Gun and the sequel happen to be two of the most successful films in recent history and unabashedly pro-American (being a leftist squirrel, you hate that, don’t you?).
I remember bitter little film critics around the time of the first Top Gun deriding it as being a “be all that you can be” patriotic screed that promotes the military. Gee the current crop of leftists did the same thing for Pt.2
Of course, you want to see our woke pronoun military summarily execute the J6ers and the MAGA crowd. So I guess you are all that you never will be. What was it?…….M60s or something. But you were unarmed and under fire because you are so tough.
How about another dck compensation joke about Sigs and gun owners. It’s always the Dandy Lions who feel they have to over-compensate.
Well Mr. Bitter, I am off to the range in a bit. Rem 870 shot gun, 1940s sporterized Mauser and 7MM Rem Mag. Sorry no Sigs today.
Honestly, I can’t extract a single coherent thought from all that gobbledygook.
You can’t extract a coherent thought on anything because you are incapable of coherent thought. It’s kind of like your “get out of jail” card for everything when you get stumped by logic.
All I ever do is call you out on the stupid things you have said in the past and the stupid things you say now, It’s not my fault you can’t handle what gets thrown up in that face of yours.
But it’s what I’ve come to expect from a Leftist clown car like you.
Yeah, again, what are you trying to say other than “I don’t like you.”
Rather than The Godfather and Chinatown (I could take issues with some others on the list), I’d point to garbage like Joe, Midnight Cowboy, and yes, for that matter, Nashville. The entire Woody Allen era. The playwrights turning unwatchable plays into more unwatchable movies. The pretense that foreign art cinema was important because it had subtitles. Dustin Hoffman’s entire decade.
I could go on. But in the 80s, populist entertaining fare which didn’t treat people as inherently grotesque or society as dysfunctional reclaimed the movie theaters to the delight of Americans.
Spielberg had visual and narrative talent, which was applied to make inherently worthless but entertaining pop culture.
That captured the transition from the 70s to the 80s.
As for Star Wars, yes it’s garbage whose genius lay entirely with the set and costume designers.
Spielberg’s only great film: ‘Saving Private Ryan’. Spielberg’s good historical films: Bridge of Spies and Schindler’s List.
The rest I could care less about. Maybe he should leave the woke politics out and get back to actual film making.
“in the case of ‘Munich’, anti-Israel”
I never saw Munich as anti-Israel, in fact I saw it as the showing of some strength by Israel who actually fought back against the terrorist cowards whilst doing the utmost to minimise damage to innocent bystanders.
At a time when the IRA were being given free reign to bomb innocent women and children in the UK with soldiers being maimed by cowardly bombers who would never fight against them man to man, Munich was a breath of fresh air to me.
Israel’s actions were strong, the movie however was an anti-Israel screed from Tony Kushner, who has opined that he wished Israel didn’t exist
Gee, Daniel, how do you really feel? 🙂
Daniel, I have loved everything you’ve written because you are spectacularly intelligent and insightful. But this may be my favorite of all your essays simply because it puts into words the inchoate reasons behind my deep and lasting dislike for anything that Steven Spielberg touches. I’ve hated every one of his movies and have been treated like a moron and cultural destroyer. Now, though, I can articulate the strong feeling I’ve always had that Spielberg is a subpart director creating garbage works. Thank you for that.
It’s good to hear from you. It’s been a while. And that’s high praise. Writing the article helped clarify some things for me too.
It has been a while. I’m still keeping Bookworm going, but I do most of my writing now at American Thinker under my real name.
I hope that all is well with you and your family, and I hope that you have a lovely Thanksgiving. Plus, very belatedly, shana tovah u’metukah!
I know, I check in from time to time. And it’s always good to see what you’re doing.
Likewise to you and yours, shana tovah, full of brochos, and may you enjoy a splendid rest of the secular year
“Now, though, I can articulate the strong feeling I’ve always had that Spielberg is a subpart director creating garbage works.”
Indeed! The guy is a master of cheap kitsch.
Geez Dan, tell us how you really feel!
Style over substance. There is always a hollowness in Spielberg’s movies that always exhibit a fraudulent reality. Ultimately, he is the hollow man..
There is no equivalency between good and evil, justice and injustice. There’s an immaturity and emptiness at the center of his films.
Is this going to be like Spielsburg,s big time bomb 1941?
at least that was the Three Stooges blown up to size
I doubt I’ll see the film but I’ve already read My Name Is Asher Lev.
I haven’t seen this movie yet, but this is one of the dumbest rants by a right-wing extremist I’ve read in a long time . I’s nothing but a tired collection of conservative straw men .