The “perversely compelling” movie Steven Spielberg compared to performing an exorcism
Darkness and depravity are words that don’t feature in the Steven Spielberg filmmaking handbook, and even when the director tackles heavy subject matter, he always finds a way to let a ray of light shine through.
Not every movie needs to be relentlessly dour and dowbeat, just like not every movie needs to be endlessly upbeat and optimistic. Anyone with eyes and even a passing knowledge of cinema history is aware that Spielberg has always favoured the latter, which is why it was so bizarre when he used demonic possession as the perfect way of describing his filmic midlife crisis.
That might sound hyperbolic, but it isn’t, seeing as he’s the one who said it. Ever since Jaws had launched him into the stratosphere as the ‘New Hollywood’ era’s box office champion, all of Spielberg’s most successful films were reliant on either action, spectacle, visual effects, or a combination of all three.
Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and the first two entries in the original Indiana Jones trilogy had all ticked that box by the dawn of the late 1980s, never mind the pictures he produced or executive-produced, like The Goonies and Back to the Future. The Color Purple was a turning point as his first proper ‘grown-up’ film, but he wanted to go further.
To that end, he snatched an adaptation of JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun from his idol, David Lean, and went to work. As bizarre as it sounds for a 40-year-old man, who was also married at the time and had a young son, to tell everyone it was about time he grew up, he did it anyway, which is where the supernatural metaphor came in.
“It was the end of an era, the end of innocence, and I have been clinging to it for most of my adult life,” he explained to Myra Forsberg in 1988. “But hitting 40, I really had to come to terms with what I’ve been tenaciously clinging to, which was a celebration of a kind of naivete that has been reconfirmed countless times. But I just reached a saturation point, and I thought Empire was a great way of performing an exorcism on that period.”
Hopefully, Spielberg noticed the irony in touting Empire of the Sun as his first foray into directorial adulthood when it happens to be a coming-of-age story, with a young Christian Bale’s Jim Graham forced to forget about his privileged upbringing and grow up faster than he could have ever expected when he’s sent to a Japanese prison camp during World War II, even if it’s not an apples and oranges-type deal.
“I don’t think I’ve made a dark movie,” he pondered, something that’s arguably true today, almost 40 years after his epic war drama hit cinemas. Schindler’s List is brutal and unflinching, but it’s nonetheless laced with a glimmer of hope. Then again, Empire of the Sun isn’t all that dark either, but Spielberg knew that as far as his filmography went, it was.
“It’s as dark as I’ve allowed myself to get,” he said. “And that was perversely compelling to me.” It’s a good movie, but nowhere near one of his best, and it failed to gain any recognition during awards season in the major categories. Once he’d gotten it out of his system, though, it was back to business as usual; Spielberg’s next picture was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
