Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan...and Beyond by Wood Robin;

Author:Wood, Robin;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General, PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2003-03-07T05:00:00+00:00

SPIELBERG AND E.T.

While it is in many respects permissible to speak of a Lucas-Spielberg syndrome—films catering to the desire for regression to infantilism, the doublethink phenomenon of pure fantasy—Spielberg and, especially, E. T. also demand some separate consideration. The Star Wars films are knowing concoctions, the level of personal involvement (that facility of invention that I have granted them) superficial. Raiders of the Lost Ark belongs with them, but with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E. T. there is a certain sense of pressure, of personal necessity. Semiologists would call this the inscription of the author in the film; the popular response is to applaud Spielberg’s “sincerity.” However one takes it—as evidence of a genuine creative drive, or as simply one further level of signification—I am not arguing that it necessarily makes the films better than the Star Wars movies. Sincerity is a difficult concept (Spielberg’s, in conjunction with the films’ extraordinary efficiency, makes him a lot of money) and in itself carries no connotations of value; popularly, it tends to get confused with “giving us a nice feeling,” but logically there is no more reason to credit Spielberg with it than, say, Mickey Spillane, whose novels also carry a charge of personal investment, If the Spielberg films are in some ways more interesting than the Star Wars trilogy, it is because the personal investment has as its corollary, or perhaps its source, a certain disturbance; the sincerity seems in large part the need to cover over that disturbance, a personal need for reassurance (which the Star Wars films peddle as a commodity), the desire to “believe.” Another way of saying this is to suggest that the patriarchal/Oedipal trajectory is never quite as simple, direct or untroubled, and takes more curious and deviant routes, in the Spielberg movies. That the films fail to be more interesting than they are testifies to the success of the fantasy: the disturbance is covered over very effectively, almost obliterated. Illuminating comparisons might be made with two of E. T.’s thematic antecedents: Lewton’s Curse of the Cat People and Cohen’s It’s Alive movies.

One needs to distinguish carefully between the childlike and the childish (just as one needs to distinguish the true innocence of childhood from the sentimental, sanitized, desexualized version of bourgeois ideology). Peter Coveney’s admirable The Image of Childhood undertakes just such a distinction, examining the differences between the Romantic concept of the child (Blake, Wordsworth) as symbol of new growth and regeneration (of ourselves, of civilization) and the regressive Victorian sentimentalization of children as identification figures for “childish adults,” the use of the infantile as escape from an adult world perceived as irredeemably corrupt, or at least bewilderingly problematic.2 Both models persist, intermittently, in our culture: within the modern cinema, one might take as an exemplary reference point the Madlyn of Céline and Julie Go Boating and the multiple suggestions of growth and renewal she develops in relation to the four women of the film. Spielberg in E. T. seems to

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