Nothing, Nowhere, Not Even Once: (part two)
The Fabelmans
In The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg returns to his own childhood, exploring the origins of his obsession with the cinema as well as the difficult family dynamics of his early life. The autobiographical “fable” then combines its love letter to cinema, Spielberg avatar Sammy Fabelman’s first efforts a filmmaking and its increasing hold on his life, with a portrait of Spielberg’s mother, here Mitzi Fabelman, played by Michelle Williams.
From the beginnings of his film career with Duel, Spielberg proved the ability to combine a commercial sensibility with something odder, and the surface reading of his films as simply infused with a naïve fascination with picture-making ignore the way his best work (Jaws, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark) makes the commercial strange through a kind of intensification of its own methods.[1] This sensibility is very much on show in The Fabelmans and yet despite this, and despite a number of brilliant elements, the film ultimately does not work at all.
The principal conduits of The Fabelmans then are film and family (never far away in any major Spielberg production). Starting with the latter, we follow the Fabelmans as they move from New Jersey to Arizona, and finally to California where Sammy’s father Burt Fabelman finds work for IBM. Eventually, the family is broken up by Mitzi’s love, and pining for, Burt’s best friend (Seth Rogan’s “Uncle” Bennie) and she heads back to Arizona to be with him. In general the acting is decent. Paul Dano is the standout as Burt, a delicate balance of awkward, stilted social body, inherited conservatism, and deeply adventurous technical mind. The biggest disappointment unfortunately is Mitzi. In fact the part seems engineered to reveal the limitations of Michelle Williams as an actor. Someone who has rarely been less than good (particularly in her films with Kelly Reichardt) she does not have the, for want of a better word, presence required for a part like Mitzi. The need to inhabit a role that is deliberately theatrical, mawkish even, without flattening into a cut-out or being simply farcical is an extremely difficult thing to achieve. In Williams’ hands Mitzi flounders, failing to be the film’s vibrant, contradictory centre — not enough Gena Rowlands and a little too much Mommie Dearest.
Along the way Sammy makes films. His first a toy train crash on Super 8mm, replicating that from his first movie-going experience: Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. Subsequently come the re-editing of a family camping trip (with a hidden “director’s cut” that reveals his mother’s infidelity), a western conceived after seeing The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a war film, and finally the recording, using his wealthy girlfriend’s professional camera, of his high school graduation “Ditch Day” outing to Santa Cruz. The Fabelmans devotes a great deal of screen time to the mechanics of film-making for a major studio production. We get, then, aside from the names of classic pieces of technical equipment (Bolex H8, Mansfield 8mm Movie Editor, 16mm Arriflex) a definite sense of the constructed nature of cinematic meaning. This, in fact, is an essential plot point. Sammy puts together a family movie of their camping trip that makes it the poignant intensification of domestic bliss that the audience requires. At the same time, the camera proves capable of second-gunman-esque revelation (the aforementioned affair).
That the technological apparatus of cinema has become so culturally disenchanted is evidenced by the prevalence of the love letter to cinema as form (just as the autobiographical/auto-fictional turn in commercial narrative is registered in the biopic). In most cases, it is perhaps best understood as a re-constitution of the project of wonder from a position whereby the projected source of wonder has started to become culturally outmoded. The resuscitation of the “magic” of cinema becomes part of cinema’s own project. The film becomes a séance for the act of mechanical reproduction, a lament for the fetishism of means once effected by a residual form of media.
In the somewhat familiar combination of love letter and biopic, The Fabelmans seeks to re-constitute the cinema’s vanished aura, that is: to re-constitute as wonder the vanishment of aura itself, instilling integrity or unity not at the level of the individual work but at the level of biography. The technological “wonder” of the apparatus is both affirmed and inscribed into the realm of the human being as artist. This double-coded movement is manifested at the level of the familial by Mitzi and Burt when, in the opening moments of the film, they try to stop the young Sammy from being scared before his first trip to the cinema. Mitzi says the movies “are like dreams” whilst Burt gives a mechanical explanation of cinematic apparatus and “persistence of vision”. The technological and the romantic dismantling of cinema’s realistic semblance are inscribed as paternal functions. The key here, for the understanding of cinema as mass art, is that these are not “competing” visions, but inextricably linked elements of the same spectacular activity. They do not suspend realism but nourish it. This is a big part of the problem with The Fabelmans, it tries to recapture magic from within a set of conventions that precipitated that magic’s very erosion.
From the outset, film is linked to shock: the paradigmatic experience of modernity. Sammy is left catatonic by The Greatest Show on Earth. As a result his first film project is presented through a traumatic logic: the shock of seeing DeMille’s train crash engenders his own re-enactment. The need to make a film of the toy train crashing is given an explicitly psychoanalytic reading by Mitzi: Sammy will be able to “work through” the trauma if he domesticates it through the filmic reproduction. Cinema thereby seeks to salve the wound of its own making, to alleviate the repetition compulsion of trauma through the mechanism of infinite reproduction. The moment of cinema’s inscription as wonder stems from a failure of experience that moves from the sphere of circulation (consumption) where it manifests as the desire for (re-)production — commodity as accelerated generational trauma. Cinema’s naturalising force is motor for the relief from, and perpetuation of, a basic contradiction of experience.
From such beginnings, as one might expect, film is continually depicted as a tool of invention, a tool capable of producing extraordinary effects, yet ones wholly within the scope of cinematic convention. Montage is employed for toilet humour (turning dropped ice creams into seagull turds). Damage to film stock is used to make muzzle flashes in the western. Before coming up with the latter solution, Sammy’s response to seeing the prop guns is “fake, totally fake”: fake here meaning low-budget. Only through technical means can the guns be made more “real”, meaning “more cinematic” in the sense of a convincing narrative production of reality. In each case the desired result is achieved: gasps and laughter from the audience. Technique works in the service of effect. In the “Ditch Day” film, Sammy makes hero and villain out of his two anti-Semitic bullies, transforming Aryan jock Logan into an Olympian god. This backfires when Logan breaks down in the face of his image as though its perfection were designed to expose his inadequacy. When Sammy protests that he didn’t mean to upset him, Logan rejoinders like a New Critic: ‘who cares what you meant?’ It is both a rare moment of spectatorial resistance and a testament to the image’s hallucinatory power.
One might expect a film that exposes the mechanical techniques of its own composition to strive for a kind of participation or corroboration: the reminder that we are watching is also a construction might engender that critical, observational distance from the work so prized by Walter Benjamin. This is not the case. The Fabelmans is filmed squarely within the melodramatic and spectacular frame of biopic conventions, smooth, professional and beautifully put together, its only deviation, or potentially site of experimentation, is in the narrative presentation of filmmaking itself. The problem being that Sammy’s use of the apparatus of film mirrors Spielberg’s: the presence of film is there only to generate effect. The biopic has a tendency to de-form the radical potential of melodrama through its autobiographical presumption — i.e. its presupposition of a direct relation to reality sets free spectacularisation without limit.[2] Likewise, the presentation of film without any connection to form ultimately absolves us of critical distance, and reinforces that “subject-effect” of dissolution in a ‘hallucinatory coherence of perceptual identity’[3], that is the cri de Coeur of commercial realism. In a sense, the film thereby enacts its own downfall: acting as though the presence of the apparatus were enough to reignite what its very ubiquity had destroyed.
There is however one element of the film which does force a kind of spectatorial distance to manifest itself, however (albeit in an interestingly problematic way) this only makes things worse. Over and above the film-family tension The Fabelmans is imbued with an extra- (or inter-) cinematic irony, effected through Hollywood references and “Easter eggs”. I considered myself largely immune to these cheap intertextual thrills, but watching Seth Rogan replay Spencer Tracy’s liquorice line from Adam’s Rib at the dinner table left me with a level of cosy smugness usually reserved for the contestants of a comedy panel show. The Easter egg is a peculiar cultural form. Its contradictory structure presents the pleasure of previous consumption or the ache for future consumption in the guise of an intimate or occult knowledge (‘I understood that reference’). As such it is a primary unit in the contemporary construction of fandom. Adorno writes of the commercial film as ‘advertisements for themselves’, being ‘actually only the preview of that which it promises and will never deliver’.[4] The Easter egg not only relishes in this logic, it enables the film to go further: being simultaneously and advert for itself and for another film entirely, perhaps one that has not even been made, that it has not even promised to deliver.
On an epistemological level, the Easter egg operates as a kind of perverted dialectical image: a shard of extra-temporal, historical meaning, one that offers a flash of recognition, but its production is not shock but sedation, reintegration. The fabric of the film world is broken by a thin jolt of reassurance, any Messianic impulse replaced by an endless accumulation of trivia. In The Fabelmans, inevitably, the most numerous Easter eggs are references to Spielberg’s own works; the director retrojecting fragments of his own cinematic mythos back into the self-narration of his past. These fragments however negatively impact both the biographical and the filmic by subjugating them to the extra-cinematic oeuvre. They denature the film’s two narrative enzymes, evacuating them of any genuine resonance. Wonder becomes cultic. Meanwhile tension is dissipated by each nod or wink. The extra-filmic fragments erode the meaning of both the familial portrait and the internal struggling filmmaker, dissipating narrative tension with a vision of ‘completion’ that is Spielberg’s galactic success. The wonder of cinema is pre-emptively guaranteed, the journey of its discovery rendered obsolete.
These occult shards of commodified unity damage the potentially interesting questions about the cinematic art beyond repair. This is particularly evident in the moment of family breakdown, in which Mitzi reveals she is going to return to Arizona and Bennie. The scene occurs shortly after the Fabelmans move into their second California home, an event which Sammy has (naturally) been recording. As this melodramatic climax unfolds, Sammy is loitering by the stairs, his camera now put away. As the emotional reckoning proceeds, we get a close-up of Sammy’s glassy, distanced expression followed by an image of himself (presumably a vision he is having) glimpsed in an oblique mirror, filming the drama in which he is involved. A searing reciprocation between form and content, it is a moment that could be richly significant: the realisation of Sammy’s natural vocation, the final instantiation of the artist’s self-distancing from the activity of life and so on. However, so dredged are we by this point in engineered magic and self-congratulatory cinematic lore, that it appears to be nothing more than a cheap trick, with all the artistic depth of a seagull shitting ice cream into a high school graduate’s open mouth.
In a similar vein: the closing familial dialogue, which takes place between Burt and Sammy in a Los Angeles apartment, happens in narrative terms: ‘we’ve come too far in our story to ever say “the end”. It is, ironically however, one of the most poorly written scenes in the film, and it is a further testament to Paul Dano that he manages to give it anything other than the kind of sentiment peddled in energy supply adverts. That this scene is set to apparently show the final triumph of film over the family, and their reconciliation in the knowledge of this fact, makes it a particularly unfortunate moment for the slick cinematic apparatus to break down. What follows is cinema’s victory lap: Sammy has a job working on Hogan’s Heroes. Whilst down at the studio he is introduced to director John Ford, a cameo performance by David Lynch so ludicrous and fabulous that it shatters any semblance of narrative objectivity. Again, this moment of collapse, when the “Real” Hollywood pierces the curtain and walks into its own studio, might have served as a fitting climax if not for our inoculation by the Easter eggs; nuggets of Spielberg’s success that he has re-inserted into his origin.
These two scenes in particular, mean that The Fabelmans leaves us with an interesting paradox. What we come to realise is that the commercial viability of the love letter to cinema and the wish by mainstream filmmakers to accord dignity to their art through it, runs up against the absolute failure of commercial filmmaking to be able to capture the object of their love. This demonstration of inability, in which cinema is forever beyond the reach of its admirers, accords the art form more dignity than films like The Fabelmans could reasonably hope for.
[1] In E.T. for instance, this strangeness is created by an absolute domestication of the intergalactic event, that gives the film a deeply weird social fabric, where even the shadowy agents in their space suits seem more like weekend hobbyists than some kind of governmental apparatus.
[2] The potential of melodrama to render the political-social within a typified emotional dynamic is explored brilliantly by Thomas Elsaesser. Judith Mayne, in her ‘Fassbinder and Spectatorship’, likewise explores how the stripped, intensified cinematic language of melodrama can be productive in exposing the spectatorial function of film.
[3] The phrase here is Miriam Hansen’s.
[4] Adorno, “Transparencies on Film”, New German Critique, Nos. 24/25 (1981–1982), p. 205.
