Why you’re wrong about Steven Spielberg
When Steven Spielberg released Jaws in 1975, the summer blockbuster was officially born. A film so impressive in its ability to incite fear that statistics regarding the amount of Americans that went to the beach that year reportedly dropped, you can’t deny the influence that the filmmaker has had on American cinema. Following Jaws, Spielberg has made countless other popular movies, even helming several of the highest-grossing titles of all time. But should he really be held in the same esteem as other greats like Alfred Hitchcock or Stanley Kubrick?
No, he cannot. Sure, Spielberg has made some great films, and many of his ideas have had a lasting and irreversible impact on the industry, but can we really group the blockbuster-making, audience-manipulating filmmaker with other geniuses when he has routinely failed to truly challenge his viewers?
Look at the way Kubrick explores violence, authority, technology, or war, then look at Spielberg. Kubrick used genuinely subversive tactics to explore his ideas – you only have to look at controversial movies like the violent A Clockwork Orange or the erotic Eyes Wide Shut to see the filmmaker’s daring visions coming to life in ways that will, quite simply, never leave you. Kubrick left us asking questions; from the very beginning to the final frame of 2001: A Space Odyssey, audiences must figure out what the film is trying to tell us about the human condition. You can’t passively watch a Kubrick film – with each stylistic choice or deliberately vague decision serving a greater purpose.
Yet, with a Spielberg movie, attempts at shocking the audience often come across manipulative and insincere. None of his choices are subversive, even the moments that he tricks us into believing so. What about the shower scene in Schindler’s List? Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke, a master filmmaker, makes a great point: “The mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water, to me is unspeakable.”
Spielberg doesn’t make any decisions that could truly isolate a large audience, because his films are deliberately intended to make lots of money and serve as entertainment, first and foremost. I’m not saying that Schindler’s List is a bad movie that doesn’t leave the audience thinking about its intense subject matter (the Holocaust), but it is undeniably sentimental and possesses a certain Hollywood sheen that a topic like genocide works better on-screen without. Jean-Luc Godard was another critic of Spielberg’s approach to exploring the Holocaust on screen, explaining that he “used this man [Oskar Schindler] and this story and all the Jewish tragedy as if it were a big orchestra, to make a stereophonic sound from a simple story.”
Then there’s Saving Private Ryan, which is just American propaganda, with its various shots of American flags and its glorification of war. While many argue that this isn’t the case, the fierce sense of American heroism and moral superiority presented in the film is simply undeniable. It encapsulates Spielberg’s interest in serving a wide audience, using emotion to drive the narrative without delivering any truly scathing criticisms of its themes. Following a rather accessible blockbuster method of delivering the narrative, the film might be enjoyable, but it plays things safely, ensuring that while it delivers a horror show of war imagery, it also delivers a spectacle.
Spielberg’s whole thing is delivering spectacles, whether that be in the form of dinosaurs causing chaos or an alien making itself at home. Of course, not every film has to force us to sit and think about the world in incredible detail, but the fact that Spielberg – a filmmaker who so clearly prioritises entertainment value over transgression or philosophical food for thought – is one of the most popular filmmakers of all time reflects the decline in cinema as an artform.
With the dawn of blockbusters, we’ve entered an era of Hollywood where emotionally-manipulative, special-effects-laden, sentimental, big-budget movies are the preferred course on the menu, leaving no room in the average audience member’s stomach for a subversive indie movie or an impactful piece of less-action-heavy drama. Not to sound too pretentious, but with the overwhelming amount of blockbusters that have emerged since Spielberg burst on the scene, it feels as though cinema is constantly moving further away from the golden days of the industry gracing us with truly breathtaking works of art and closer towards truly soulless commercialism.
