In reality, it is possible that a Cretan tells us all Cretans are liars. There is no problem in this statement and things like that occur in every day life. On the other hand, there is a problem if we ask for truth. The well known logical problem of the Cretan Epimenides’ antinomy arises. The Cretan seems to contradict himself or he is no Cretan.
Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay on The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, put the question of reality anew. It is the apparatus that steps between the work of art and the artist as well and the process of creation. Benjamin cites as an example the fact that Chaplin’s film L’Opinion publique afforded the shooting of 125 000 meters of footage whereas the film itself came up to a length of 3 000 meters. He says in this context that the classical artwork of the Greek knew no form of reproduction, let aside the Roman copies. The process of forming the work of art did not allow any alterations. By contrast, the film has a unique quality that is its ability to be improved by technical devices. So shooting a film is a work of montage and cutting and we stand before the conundrum if a film tells the truth when it is a patchwork of glimpses of realities.
Stephen Spielberg, a master of this cutting und mounting, but also a master of story-telling, is he a Cretan? Does he tell the truth or tell us lies when he shows his films? Responding to this question, let’s begin at the beginning, the movie Duel. In my opinion, all artistic elements which account for Spielberg’s style and mastery are already fully plain and visible in his first movie.
Firstly, there is a story that is hard to believe. A man, a certain David Mann, driving home in his car, is suddenly chased by a truck. What first seemed to be a series of mutual overtakings soon turns out to be a game of life and death. The businessman threatened by the trucker to be pushed off the road is the only one in this movie whom we see personally, the truck driver himself remains unkown and anonymous, equally the grounds for his murderous attacks. These become more and more endangering, the trucker being regardless of his own vehicle in the attempts to crush the automobile and its driver. Only a last desperate ruse enables the driver to demolish his antagonist’s eighteen-wheeler by sacrificing his own car and engulfing both vehicles and the trucker within.
Secondly, the spectators are confronted with a splendid dialog direction which delivers an illustration to the actions and a subtext too. We witness a telephone call of David Mann with his wife. She complains to him about his cowardice when she was adressed in an unplesant way by her husband’s superior during a dinner while her husband let her down being unhelpful and unreprimanding. This phone call opens a wide gap between the two settings: the craven and perhaps because of his standing in the company calculating misbehavior at home and the unforeseen necessitiy to become a fighter and to develop personal heroism.
This difference is stressed by the spectators’ not knowing the identity of the trucker. It might be possible that this vengeful person is a woman, a real or symbolic Nemesis punsihing Mr Mann for his homely misconduct. It is things like that that account for the mastery of Spielbergs film-directing, that account for the atmosphere of his movies, that makes them range highest in every day entertainment.
This brings us thirdly and eventually to the question of truth. We may see the plot as a symbol of modern times personal (or rather unpersonal) relationships, as a symbol of overall competition, of depersonalization of human contact, but we won’t look at it as a real event. Nevertheless, Richard Matheson’s script for the film, based on a short story of his, reflects an incident that occurred to him when he, driving home from a golfing match, was tailgated by a trucker. So the question of what is true stays undecided, even if we know that things happen.
There are other elements beside the enforced heroism and the ambiguity with regard to contents. There is the stress on family situation and values, something we can find throughout a lot of Spielberg movies: the Jurassic Park trilogy, ET, but also in Munich for instance. And there is another feature appearing in his films, fascination of technology and its destruction, mostly and gladly performed on cars. See here again the Jurassic Park trilogy with the demolishing of well equipped and newly developed vans and and automatically run driverless autos by angry tyrannosauruses, but also the cell phones appearing in the dung heaps of carnivorous raptors after having digested their human meals. The joy of destruction is also openly displayed in 1941 or in Jaws.
But the question of family and relation reaches further than simple American values. Destruction is here often a subtle leitmotif also in human relationship and beside the realistic depiction of the issues with founding families and raising children while divorcing or having never married, Spielberg shows his dreams of intact families with fathers and mothers as wedded couples and their own children. ET is about the mishap of a single mother who becomes more and more alienated from her son, while he is growing up. This non-communication is mirrored by an extraterrestrian who is not understood in a strange and hostile world.
Equally estranged and complicated relations we find in passing through the three Jurassic movies. In the first movie, Dr Grant is engaged to his colleague Dr Sattler but he does not care about children. They are a nuisance to him and he tries to get out of reach of them. During the adventures in the amusement park-to-be, the black-out of the security facilities and the following escape and attack of the the tyrannosaurus, Dr Grant ist not only becoming the savior of the owner’s two grand-children but also develops a deep feeling for the two kids. After having rescued them from their predicament, we see him in the final scene sitting in the helicopter that flies them out with both the cildren lying in his arms sleeping and recovering. He holds them tight smiling at his fiancée who smiles back. It is insinuated that his attitude towards children has changed. Dr. Sattler can be looking forward to a nice all-American family.
In the second part, the chief rôle is taken by Dr Malcolm, who played a smaller one in the first movie. Now he is starring together with his girl-friend Dr Harding and his daughter Kelly Curtis-Malcom. Ms Curtis is totally absent and we know of her nothing except that she must be Afro-American, regarding the looks of the child, and that she must have married and divorced Dr Malcolm. But this we know only from the program note. In the movie itself, the girl is only referred to as Kelly. We find here a nice albeit not complete display of the modern patchwork family with all its problems and pitfalls. This is quasi ironically (as dinosaurs are no spouses) contrasted or stressed with the love and care of two T-rexes, a real couple, for their cub. This is by the way a motif which reappears in the third part of the triptych, this time in velociraptors and not as a couple but as a clan.
As regards to men in this third movie (no longer a product of Spielberg himself, but distributed by his production company Amblin) we find again Dr Sattler, now in a family with a husband and two kids, but sorry to say not married to Dr Grant who nevertheless remained a friend of the family. The relationship between Dr Sattler, she appears as Dr Grant’s friend Ellie, her new surname is unknown, and Dr Grant is now a symbol of true friendship. She is the one he can rely upon in any plight or need and consequently she is the one who sends in the marines to rescue the expedition to the isle of saurians.
Dr Grant has not succeeded in wedding his fiancée of the first movie. But still the ideal of WASP matrimony and family prevails. This is now depicted by a divorced couple Paul and Amanda Kirby, who are searching with the help of Dr Grant for their lost son Eric – lost straight an a holyday journey to one of the isles where the cloned dinosaurs live. The adventures experienced together of rescueing their common child reunites the family. They are, as Eric says at the the end of the movie, going home.
It is often told that the stress on family in Spielberg is due to the parting of his parents when he was nineteen. I do not agree. I guess that the stress on values of family and ties is part of an all-American conservativism that shows its own specific Spielbergian appearance. One distinctive mark of this conservativism is the question of every day heroism and of being a good man. Paradigmatic to this is the last scene of Saving Private Ryan when the now old Ryan is visiting a military cemetery in France. He asks his wife in front of the cross bearing the name of Captain John H. Miller (the plain common name shows again Spielberg mastership not only in film but also in words, stressing the every day heroism by an every day name), if he, Ryan, has been a good man.
This question and the postive answer is contrasted with the stolid courage of Captain Miller, the pre-war teacher of English compostion, and we never experience in what way James Francis Ryan had been a good man. We may supposedly expect a life as a father and husband and as a well-to-do businessman. But we know from the film that he too had had his moment of personal heroism when he refused the order to be sent home after his three brothers had been killed in action. He would rather stay with his unit regarding its members as his last brothers whom he will at any cost not deceive. Thus Private Ryan was not saved by Captain Miller and his party – a blend of (white) Americans of every kind, descent, and religion – which was annihilated except for two of them, but he lived to be a good man.
We may say that the conservativism of Spielberg’s does not derive from redneck ideology and reactionary historical patterns but from an enhancement of identity, in his specific case of American identity. Another film unfurls this discourse of heroism and identity in a rather painful way. It is Munich. The film shows the deeds of a retaliation squad installed by the Israeli Mossad to kill leaders of the Palestinian Black September and planners of the raid on Israeli sportsmen during the Olympic Games in Munich. Avner Kaufmann the leader of the group and his companions are sucessful in the beginning but develop doubts about the rightness of their actions. Soon the group falls apart, partly by deadly mistakes, partly by actions of other involved secret services.
Aver Kaufmann sends his wife and child to Brooklyn where he thinks they are safe. After another failed operation he aborts his mission and goes to America, too. He makes sure that he will not be trailed but left alone. In the last scene he and his case officer Ephraim meet exchanging their offers of identity. Ephraim wants Kaufmann back referring to the epic Zionist tradition of his parents. Kaufmann asks Ephraim being a foreigner in a foreign country to pay visit to him and his family and to break the bread of Sabbath together as Jews should do. Neither embraces the offer of the other, the Jewish identity of Avner Kaufmann being straight American, the other Jewish identity strictly Israeli.
If we speak of truth in Spielberg’s movie plots we must never forget that he is a gifted story teller and every story has its moral application. Regarding Munich, the truth is not to be found in the deeds of Kaufmann’s group. And to emphasize this, the group in the plot is not even a Mossad group either but a band of bloody amateurs who estrange themselves from their civil life and their national ideals. Regardless of the true operation Wrath of God, Spielberg displays his points of view; Jewish, American, humanist and thinkful in a Socratic way. He leaves more open questions than answers. But through all this destruction gleams a perhaps only narrow route to saving humanity even with heavy losses.
The destruction this time of lives, not of motorcars and technical gimmicks, that is brutally, painfully and detailed displayed in films like Saving Private Ryan, Amistad or Lincoln is the price to be paid for the preserving of mankind and humanity. There must be something worth to be fought for and there must be a hope that all the struggling and battling and killing will be surmounted by the prized values that men are defending.
This gleam of hope that every man and woman is enabled to be strong and to do the right thing is the background of Spielberg’ story-telling. It is diplayed in his work as a director with Private Ryan and Captain Miller, but also in his other work about WW II as a producer of movies and mini series. There are the epic movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood and produced by Spielberg and there are the TV series Band of Brothers and Pacific, produced together with Tom Hanks. They all are connected to Saving Private Ryan in a certain manner. It is the honest manly war which American heroes are engaged in to save the world from fascism and dictatorship. It is not a war like the one fought in Viet Nam or in Afghanistan or in Iraq. These wars appear in other films not made by Spielberg and they show no heroism and no saving of humanity either.
In these films, the combatants are fighting only fulfilling orders and trying to survive. There is no hint of a just cause, of devotion to man’s fate, progress and development. But this is not Spielberg’s standpoint. His films are about Wrong or Right. Films like Zero Dark Thirty by Kathryn Bigelow are only about Wrong. And wrong is the enemy whereas the American soldier is not right; he is obeying. He is not convinced of doing the right thing and need not be so. Spielberg’s fighters must make themselves convinced in one way or the other, even if they have to go through hard and painful experiences that cause them to break laws. Or to preserve or enact them against all odds.
This is what also Lincoln is about. We see a president who is trying to gain the majority for the Thirteenth Amendment of the American Constitution. In the very plot of the movie we witness a president who is cheating, bribing, telling only half the truth, who dirties his hands personally only to get the amendment passed. This is mirrored and contrasted with his family situation, the condition of his matrimony, the mourning of a late child, the quarrel with his wife, the wishes of his eldest son to join the army in order not to be seen as a coward protected by a mightful father – all considered a leitmotif of Spielberg’s beside the one of the brave and good American; in this movie, Abraham Lincoln and the famous abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens.
But this film too is about Spielberg’s story-telling. As the president perverts one fact or the other so does Spielberg. No comment on the Emancipation Proclamation with regard to the fact that there were slaveholder states in the Union as well. No comment on the casus belli that was the preservation of the Union of the US, the Emancipation Proclamation being only a handle for the confiscation of Confederate property as spoils of war. So the Thirteenth Amendment was necessary to let the south stay in the inferior condition of a devastated economy, to let the Unionist war profiteers of the Reconstruction Era relish their loot. No comment either that Lincoln was not unwilling to compromise at the Hampton Roads Conference, a peace conference held in February 1865, to compensate the South for the loss of its slaves.
Spielberg picks what he needs for his stories. In this way Lincoln or Amistad are only pretenses for what he wants to tell. And that is the story of the all over good American. Do his stories tell the truth? As I mentioned above there is a intricate relation between truth, reality and every day life. Is Spielberg a Cretan who tells us all Cretans tell the truth? Or is he an American who tells us all Americans are good?