Circling Around Themes

With a long enough filmography, recurring fascinations emerge...

A local theater did a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind this weekend. I’d only seen the movie once, and, trying to get out to the theaters more to get a good theatrical experience, it felt like Father’s Day was a great day to celebrate the worst father in Spielberg’s canon.

Sitting through it, it solidified the feelings germinating over the past decade or so. It’s peak 70s Spielberg. The John Williams score is incredible. The spaceship production design is beautiful, a gorgeous collision of conjoining likes, curves, and triangles. Spielberg himself is young and hungry and dialed in. The sequence of Roy Nearey traveling from his home to Devil’s Tower is thrilling… and even the intensity of Roy’s marriage falling apart is potent in the wake of something like The Fabelmans, which has recontextualized the rest of Spielberg’s canon.

On the other hand, the climax of the movie drags on despite it celebrating Spielberg’s idea of a peaceable hello between humans and a benevolent alien race. The ending where Roy gets on the spaceship will always be shocking. And the aliens themselves look remarkably silly, even if Spielberg goes out of his way to obfuscate them as much as possible.

But what really played through my head is the way Spielberg has themes he constantly circles around, there’s various topics he likes to revisit. Given that we’re so blessed with a long, winding filmography it’s worth looking at the different ways an artist can attack their thematic fascinations. As most people have seen Spielberg, it’s hardly a surprise.

Aliens & Broken Families

E.T. is one of Spielberg’s most high profile movies, the kind that parents will show their children and that they’ll have in their heads for all their lives. It’s a film about coping with a family in the aftermath of divorce. Elliot’s father isn’t in the picture and his mother is barely holding the two sons and one daughter together. Interestingly, the family composition is the same for Close Encounters, though Spielberg and screenwriter Melissa Matheison exaggerate the age differential in the later film.

But where E.T. focuses on Elliot and seeing the world through his eyes, Close Encounters follows Roy Neary, the checked-out father of that family. Spielberg has been very open about the effect of his parents’ divorce on his life and the trauma it inflicted. In the middle of the movie, when Roy is in the raving throes of psychic distress from his close encounter, his wife Ronnie throws the children into her car and makes for her sisters. Roy never sees them again. By the end of the movie he’s delightedly marching onto the alien spaceship, probably to never see his family again. He’s also shared a kiss with Jillian, showing far more intimacy to her than he has to his own wife.

On the one hand, this feels like Spielberg ruminating on his dad’s role in the divorce. His father played the scapegoat so his children wouldn’t despise their mother for her feelings towards their family friend.

When talking about Roy Neary, Spielberg has been very open in the years since about how horrific it is to consider a father abandoning his family (possibly forever) to join random aliens on a trip to the stars. As a father, he would have made a different choice. As a dude who hadn’t yet considered fatherhood, he’s described his writing Roy as his own wish fulfillment: he always wanted to join the aliens in their trip to the stars.

And yet, in a post-Fabelmans world, it’s difficult to see this as the best reading. No. This particular trauma is one that helps Spielberg to rationalize his father’s role in the divorce. If his father did abandon his family, wouldn’t it be best if it was for an incredible, spectacular reason?

This still hurts the film overall, though. In trying to make something bright and optimistic, Spielberg’s blindspot lends the film a cynical bleakness. To compare, when Spielberg digs into his own trauma, the result is the transcendence of E.T. And, really, because it’s two different views of the same story, it’s difficult to not consider which is preferable.

Close Encounters has its moments for sure. Nothing in E.T. has the thrill of the initial UFO encounter, where Roy chases the ships in his truck and then they fly into the sky. E.T. might have a home invasion scene, where the government agents break into and then quarantine Elliot’s house, but that’s nothing like the terror of the aliens abducting Barry when they descend on Jill’s. Those don’t change the way that E.T. is Spielberg’s masterpiece, more thematically rich and beautiful and entertaining than anything in his filmography. It might be five years after Close Encounters, but its existence makes its predecessor obsolete.

Attacking the war head on

Despite E.T. being one of the best depictions of childhood, it’s not kept Spielberg from returning to the topic again and again. This can be as obvious as The B.F.G. or as oblique as Hook.

In 1987, Spielberg made Empire of the Sun. Set during the Japanese occupation of China in World War II, the film follows a young privileged schoolboy and what happens to him during the war after circumstance separates him from his family. It wasn’t Spielberg’s first swing at a World War II movie¹, but it’s a setting he would return to again and again in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Schindler’s List, and Saving Private Ryan.

It’s only with the one-two punch of his two Best Director Oscars that finally get him to a place where he can move on from trying to capture World War II. The three prior films come at the war from a different angle, like he’s circling but doesn’t have an “in”. It’s almost as if Spielberg was wary of tackling these topics directly. And… sure. Seeing the result it’s easy to see why. Both are unflinching in their portrayals of real events. It takes a strong stomach to watch them. It must have required one even stronger to make them.

Empire of the Sun is Spielberg attempting to tackle World War II using the filter of childhood that worked so well for E.T. It makes sense why he would do it that way. It also makes sense why the glancing blow is not as effective as those later efforts. It’s fascinating to see Spielberg keep trying until it’s clear he’s gotten to the heart of the matter. The Fablemans feels like Schindler’s & Private Ryan because of the ways it tackles the topic of Spielberg’s parents’ divorce head on. It’ll be interesting to see what other thematic ideas Spielberg has to explore now it’s possible he’s exorcised this particular demon.

Any others?

The other director with a long ass filmography who feels similar is Scorsese. His filmography has numerous examples of exploring organized crime. It’s Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed… but it’s also something like The Wolf of Wall Street, which feels like white collar Goodfellas or The Irishman, which has undertones of Casino.

But then there’s Scorsese’s fascination with religion and belief’s role in people’s lives. Who’s That Knocking At My Door?, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Silence all deal with some manner of guilt, the holding fast to belief in the face of persecution and violence. Yet, he also dealth with it in Kundun, which follows the life of the Dalai Lama and his exile to Tibet.

These ideas are fascinations, sure, but they’re also obsessions these creators can’t seem to get out of their minds. While the organized crime well feels like one Scorsese has pretty thoroughly picked over, it feels like he’s never quite managed to say what he’s wanted to about faith and religion. They’re great movies, don’t get me wrong (and Last Temptation is extremely underrated), but there is a sense that, for all their success, there’s still more in the tank.

Spielberg and Scorsese are the two I most think about in these respects, but any other filmmaker who’s around long enough will find themselves circling back to these topics over and over again as their brains keep finding nuances and details to explore. To turn the conversation to you, do you have any other filmmakers who have recurring interests and fascinations?

1. That would be 1941.