Writing about Ray Bradbury, whose books like The Martian Chronicles and Something Wicked this Way Comes share Spielberg’s simplicity of vision and sureness of technique, the critic Damon Knight, in a passage that could well refer to Spielberg, remarked:
To Bradbury, as to most people, radar and rocket ships and atomic power are big, frightening, meaningless names; a fact which, no doubt, has something to do with his popular success, but which does not touch the root of the matter. Bradbury’s strength lies in the fact that he writes about the things that are really important to us: not the things we pretend we are interested in – science, marriage, sports, politics, crime – but the fundamental pre-rational fears and longings and desires; the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings; the fear of things that are not self…
People who talk about Bradbury’s imagination miss the point. His imagination is mediocre; he borrows nearly all his backgrounds and props, and distorts them badly; wherever he is required to invent anything – a planet, a Martian, a machine – the image is flat and unconvincing. Bradbury’s Mars, where it is not as bare as a Chinese stage setting, is a mass of inconsistencies; his spaceships are a joke; his people have no faces. The vivid images in his work are not imagined; they are remembered.
In 1987, cartoonist Jules Feiffer drew a panel for the magazine Village Voice. A writing professor lauds a student for his ‘Joycean gift of language coupled with a Hemingwayesque spareness’. He goes on to compare him with Fitzgerald, Bellow, Updike, Styron, Mailer, then asks him what he’s working on. ‘A screenplay for Spielberg,’ the boy says airily. The professor is suddenly a beaming enthusiast. ‘Do you know him?’ he demands. ‘What’s he really like?’
The public urge to know what Spielberg is really like has never abated. His personality and appearance are so unremarkable, his public statements so bland, that everyone feels there must be a secret Spielberg hidden under the ramshackle exterior.
If you were to ask Spielberg what he is really like, he would probably reply that he is just like his audience. He is like everyone. But the image of Just Plain Steve is simply one aspect of his public persona. Examine that persona, and it fragments into a jigsaw puzzle where real memories slot into fabricated ones, and where childhood enthusiasms jostle for space with the structures of corporate power.
Spielberg’s indifferent communication skills don’t help to explain him to his public. His voice has never quite lost the self-absorbed gabble and stammer of the teenager drunk on ideas. ‘He has all the virtues – and defects – of a sixteen-year-old,’ one colleague remarks. Over the years he’s learned to smile and to pause occasionally for others to speak, but the interpersonal still daunts him. He communicates best from behind a protective grille of technology. On that level, he radiates competence. Everyone notices it. The novelist Martin Amis almost mistook him for the man who’d come to fix the Coke machine. Someone else described his image as ‘chemistry-student-next-door’. Both Amis and actor Tom Hanks compared him to the high school audio-visual assistant who alone understood 16mm projectors. (Spielberg worked his way through three years of college, in part by projecting classroom films.)
His mastery of cinema technology, what critic Pauline Kael called ‘a film sense’, is innate and effortless, his innocent flair and enjoyment disguising the complexities of what he does. ‘I got the feeling,’ said Julian Glover, who acted for him in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, ‘that, if he wanted to, he could have built the set. He knew as much about lighting as [director of photography] Douglas Slocombe. And he operated the camera himself.’ The worst sin for a Spielberg collaborator is to fail in technique. When that happens, Spielberg can be scathing. ‘There is no, “Nice try, guys – better luck next time,”’ complained one crew member. ‘He says things like, “You didn’t get it right. Think about that when you go to bed.”’
Partly by chance but increasingly by design, Spielberg has immured himself in the prison of his facility. It is the central irony of his life that the more he is driven to employ his skills, the more they destroy the very spontaneity he strives to capture. The audience which follows him, and which he helped create, is perfectly happy, however, with technique. To them, not understanding his systematic methods, his ability to engineer entertainment machines like Jurassic Park can seem almost miraculous, and it’s to a god that many of them compare him. Or an alien. When American Premiere magazine entitled one article about E.T. and its maker ‘Steven Spielberg in his Adventures on Earth’, they articulated a sense shared by many that he does not belong here. With his rodigies of imagination undermined by physical fragility and social clumsiness, he recalled the soft-spoken extra-terrestrial played by Michael Rennie in Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, or David Bowie’s Martian, fragile as a stick insect, in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth.
Spielberg makes a credible alien. He’s most comfortable with those who live in private worlds. When stories of eccentric habits and lifestyle accreted around Michael Jackson, Spielberg, who planned to film Peter Pan with the singer and spent hours playing games with him at his Disneyland-like estate, remarked wistfully, ‘It’s a nice place Michael comes from. I wish we could all spend some time in his world.’
Spielberg’s need for protection and distance has its roots in a genuine fragility. Since he was four years old, he’s bitten his fingernails. Despite his technical ease, he was for most of his early adulthood a white-knuckle flier who had nosebleeds at high altitudes. For many years he so disliked elevators that he’d walk up half a dozen flights of stairs rather than enter one. The man who terrified the world with Jaws also hated and feared the ocean, and the director of that archetypal night-time film Close Encounters of the Third Kind admits, ‘I’m scared of the dark except in a motion picture theatre.’
It is only in the welcoming darkness of the cinema that Spielberg truly feels at home – and only with the myths of the movies that he is intellectually comfortable. Increasingly, it has been through and by myths that he has chosen to define himself. Admirers have been quick to add their own manufactured myths that confirm his role as an Honorary Outsider, and just another misunderstood teenager, like them; a Peter Pan of movies, the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, but who invested hugely in preserving himself in artificial adolescence. As early as Jaws in 1974, rumour claimed – erroneously – that Spielberg’s jeans with their multitude of zipped pockets were specially made for him at $250 a pair. Even his pet Cavalier King Charles spaniels were pressed into the fantasy. Some people felt the turnover in dogs was curiously high. As Zalman succeeded Elmer, Chauncey succeeded Zalman and Halloween followed Chauncey, rumours grew that Elmer/Zalman/Chauncey/Halloween wasn’t a dog but a role: when the incumbent lost its puppy cuteness, another replaced it. Friends insist this is untrue. However, Spielberg’s reclusiveness fanned the story, and others like it.
Although Spielberg’s career is entwined with that of George Lucas, the two men are cultural and psychological opposites. Lucas, short, slight, seems habitually curled in on himself, arms often folded across his body. Spielberg, at five feet eight inches and 151 pounds, is fractionally taller, but contrasting body language exaggerates the difference. ‘Some people look at the ground when they walk,’ he says. ‘Others look straight ahead. I always look upward, at the sky.’
Lucas’s expressionless face and low, toneless voice emphasise the mask effect of his beard and moustache. Director John Badham calls him ‘a painfully shy person who hates dealing with people’. Writer Willard Huyck, another student friend, said, ‘George made a few friends at [the University of Southern California Film School], and decided that’s about all he needed for the rest of his life.’
As a director, he communicates even less. ‘George Lucas,’ confided a Star Wars actor, ‘is the worst director in the world. Never takes his nose out of the newspaper.’ The conventional view of film as a collaborative art – or an art of any kind, for that matter – isn’t his.
Lucas’s childhood in Modesto, California, was suffused with Methodism and German Lutheranism. He reacted against it in adulthood