Picture, just for a moment, that it's 1970, and there's a party in Hollywood of young artists. It's not the louche drug dens with bikini babes around a pool; frequented by Nicholson, Beatty and Polanski -` it's a party where lots of University of Southern California film students and recent graduates pile into a small suburban house, drinking cheap beer and smoking schwag weed. Unlike at Jack Nicholson's parties, nobody's having sex. This is a party where awkward film students (almost all male) go to meet actresses who in high school were A-students who played in the marching band. Even if the room was deafeningly loud, every film brat was talking. The subject of every conversation is movies, everybody is trying to one up each other with their knowledge of camera techniques in obscure movies with obscure actors.
And if you successfully one-upped everybody, you'd get a buzz going for yourself as being particularly knowledgeable, and you were invited 'upstairs' to hang out with what passed for 'VIPs' sitting on the floor in the master bedroom. Presiding over the conversation is an unassuming midwestern guy named Roger Corman, looking way too old to be there, who makes 'the world's best bad movies' and is on the lookout to hire the most knowledgeable members in that VIP room to come work for him, where they acquire the practical knowledge to know how to make films in more than the abstract. And those in Corman's chosen circle, even the ones who don't work directly for him, operate with a kind of halo around them, as though everybody knows that these young upstarts will change movies forever.
Corman doesn't say much himself, but around him like Leonardo's last supper sit his chosen proteges, all of whom are opining as Corman sits patiently to listen. Every one of them has ambitious plans for the films they're desperate to make, and every one of them has drawn up battle plans which they tell Corman about. Corman listens attentively to them all, and every five minutes or so offers just a sentence or two of suggestions.
On one side of him is a diminutive Italian kid with a beard named Marty Scorsese, he's constantly sniffing and everybody knows why he keeps going to the bathroom. But he's talking a mile a minute and no one can keep up as he relates one film to the next from every country and era. On the other side of him is a much bigger, more expansive Italian kid, named Francis Coppola, who talks in long, winding monologues in which he relates every movie to literature, classical music, and painting. Next to Marty is yet another Italian kid named Brian de Palma who's already sporting a combover, kind of a mean-spirited kid who's constantly making bitter asides at Francis and Marty, very funny, but he's much more interested in talking cameras and aspect ratios and even if he has all these conceptual avant-garde ideas, he doesn't buy into any of this 'art' stuff. 'Movies aren't art, there's no such thing as art!" he chortles, 'it's just a fun game, a magic trick.' Agreeing with Brian and sitting next to Francis is a short California nerd named George Lucas with a ridiculously elaborate pompadour, sporting a beard and buck teeth that make him look like a beaver. If Francis relates everything to Conrad and Flaubert, everything for George is Isaac Asimov and Flash Gordon.
There are others in the circle too. A right-wing hothead always carrying a gun named John Milius, a depressed religious kid always writing things down named Paul Schrader, a hippie performance artist named Walter Murch, and a lanky slightly older Jewish kid named Phil Kaufman who acts a little above it all by trying to read a book
But seated across from Corman is the nerdiest looking Jewish kid anybody's ever seen, and he doesn't say a word. He looks like an accountant, and seems to have all the personality of one. Nobody knows what he thinks of anything and nobody really knows anything about him - where he's from, what he believes, what he knows. Nobody even knew if he'd show up because he doesn't even really socialize. He just spends spent all day in the USC library, taking out a mountain of archived prints and reviewing them twelve hours a day, emerging every night with a hundred pages of notes. He just goes home, he goes to bed, and he does it all over again the next day. All anybody knows about him is how hard he studies, and how good his student films are, as though he was born knowing how to film anything at all. Nobody knows how he gets the results he does, but the results are all there, on the screen, and everybody knows that if they can get any insight out of him, any at all, each of them will become twice the filmmakers they already are, but they never get him to say anything.
And from that very beginning, they know, there is something about this kid that's a threat. He's not saying anything because they know that whatever he's planning, it's in direct contradiction to their plans. If they can neutralize him, get him onto their side, they will have the best of them and the filmmaker whose success can finance every risky project they ever make.
But if he doesn't, they know that this is the filmmaker who will put every one of their ambitions out of business.
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These film brats were doomed to success. By the end of the 60s, the generation of movies was so starved for good pictures that the first few pictures from each of these prodigies were greeted like manna from heaven. And by the time they all were 40, their energies were so sapped by the price of greatness that they couldn't do it again. It's just too much stress.
Coppola and Lucas can't strike lightning in middle age, and they basically retire to Northern California to count their money and lick their wounds. The cocaine and divorces almost kill Scorsese, and for the rest of his career he finds again and again that he can only make masterpieces about the fast life in New York. De Palma becomes a kind of hired gun, and he makes the best cheap thrillers in Hollywood, but any substance in his pictures happens entirely by accident. Milius makes too many enemies to do much work after his mid-40s. Schrader and Kaufman spend their whole careers hustling to get their pictures made against all odds, and what are the odds against them?
That nerdy Jewish kid. There is something about him like a robot. Nothing phases him, nothing holds him back. It's easy to make everybody want to keep working with you when you don't even have a personality to impose. He just goes from picture to picture that are pure marvels of technique, but compared to the movies of these other guys, they're nothing more than technique; they have no style, no substance, no character in more than one dimension. You can almost imagine a machine directing them, and what emotions they have seem almost completely synthetic. The characters in his movies seem like how a computer would perceive humans feel - just a series of well-lit sentimental gestures with bombastic music.
That's one way to view Spielberg's movies. Here is the other way:
Isaac Babel said of Tolstoy that if the world could write itself, it would write like Tolstoy. Just as Tolstoy had so much art that he was completely artless, so does Spielberg. Spielberg's movies are as though the world is filming itself, or, perhaps even more to the point, God filming the world he created, with God's own arbitrary mixture of savagery and compassion.
Every one of the greatest Hollywood directors has their niche on which they base their absolute mastery: Scorsese is the master of motion - the moving shots in every one of his films have an electrifying physical energy. Coppola is the master of production design, wherever the camera moves, every one of his movies has a hundred things to look at - even the bad ones. Hitchcock? The master of storyboarding, in which one gesture leads to the next in ways that can never be other than they are. Welles? The master of shadows. Lynch? The master of color.
But film itself is light's projection, and Spielberg is light's master. Light, in Spielberg, is everything and everywhere. It is the engine that drives the plot in every one of his movies. It blinds, it causes shadows, it causes rays, it causes color refraction; look closely and the light against windows show entire other sets possibly built just for that shot.
The light in Spielberg is eternity and infinity calling to us. It is everything in the universe that's awesome, dangerous, and loving. It's the most visual proof of God's existence a person living on either side of 2000 will ever encounter. Apparently Spielberg himself refers to this technique as 'The God Light,' I didn't even know that until I accidentally stumbled on this on the internet.
Even before I'd read that term, I'd thought that a Jewish person should not be able to think of the light in Spielberg without thinking of the "Ner Tammid", the eternal light that illuminates the ark of every synagogue every day and night. In the beginning, whether big bang or divine command, there was light, and at the climax of film as a worldwide influence, shared by everyone in every culture, there is Spielberg.
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Whatever you think of Spielberg, take a still from every shot, and see how many of them don't use light as meaningfully as Rembrandt and Leonardo. Whether Spielberg is as great as Rembrandt or just a mere Reubens, he's essential, inescapable, in 500 years many descendants of ours will still watch him in fascination.
But after a generation of masterpieces, Rembrandt made his very greatest paintings at the end of his career: The Anatomy Lesson, Lucretia, Bathsheba, the Jewish Bride... And in every one of them, Rembrandt paints not just with light, but with an inexplicable inner illumination. The light is so embedded in the painting's fabric that mere mastery can't explain it. It can only be made by a great human, a great soul, the invisible fabric of morality itself is in those paintings. And however many billions of dollars Spielberg's been rewarded with, you cannot make a Spielberg movie unless you're a great soul.
Is Spielberg Rembrandt? Of course not. Rembrandt wasn't even considered Rembrandt until after his death and spent his final decade in poverty. Steven Spielberg is Steven Spielberg, a director worth 3.7 billion dollars whose films sculpt an entire half-century - for 50 years, Victor Hugo WAS France, Giuseppe Verdi WAS Italy, and Steven Spielberg IS America. Every aspiration, every fear, every conflicted motive, every misbegotten intention of our country is present in Spielberg's movies. Are his movies the greatest of the great? Not quite... But what they did was more than enough for posterity. And in so many ways, of greater value to more people than aesthetically greater, crueler souls.
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Spielberg turned 75 just yesterday, an old man by objective standards, but if West Side Story is any indication, COVID seems to have unearthed an entirely new filmmaker. This was the filmmaker who believed in America, he is that man no longer. He is worried about America and simultaneously more American than ever. He is tracing America's current problems back to their roots as only an old man can, and he is naming names as he never has. Only now has he made his greatest film, and it heralds an entirely new director with a decade or two more of these movies in him.
And at the same time, along with pointing fingers, he is giving characters all the compassion you find in Jean Renoir and Ozu. He is using light to get inside their heads as never before, giving characters room to exist in their third dimension, understand what motivates them at their deepest level, and make us realize why they come to the decisions they do.
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It's unfair.
Spielberg's blockbusters ate up the entire biosphere of movies. He gave the most artful production to the trashiest thrills, and in the process conditioned a whole country to adrenaline. He made us forget that movies can be there, like any art, to make us ask questions about our society, which is exactly what we need art to do. He made us hooked to the blockbuster like a drug, as much a fact of American life as credit debt, bad mortgages and crack. He reassured us just like Ronald Reagan, that everything in America was not just OK but great. Reagan cut taxes and created modern deficit spending, Spielberg made Indiana Jones cheat death a million times and reassured us that the universe's unknown was a benevolent place. And now the creditors are coming for our bills, bills which Spielberg conditioned us to double down on.
And what does Spielberg do now? He makes all the grown-up movies the film brats always wanted to make, but couldn't, because Spielberg ran their movies out of business.
The mid-budget, subtle movie about real things is Spielberg's greatest achievement, and he did what Scorsese and Coppola never could. He moved from subject to subject and created masterpieces about ideas and history and science which always flummoxed the others:
Domestic abuse and racism? Color Purple. Imperialism? Empire of the Sun. The Shoah? Schindler's List. Slavery? Amistad. World War II? Saving Private Ryan. Robotics? AI. Warrantless surveillance? Minority Report. Israel/Palestine and terrorism? Munich. Civil War and Presidential leadership? Lincoln. The Cold War and espionage? Bridge of Spies. Feminism and journalistic freedom? The Post. Political partisanship and immigration? West Side Story.
Are they all masterpieces? Of course not. Will they have provocative sentiments? Not particularly. But they all get to the heart of what is at stake in every one of these issues. They're not 'issue movies' like Aaron Sorkin makes, which simply list the terms of the debate. And these movies don't really make us think either, they do something much more valuable: they get us inside the heads of the people to whom these issues matter most. Together, they form a kind of canon: if you want a primer on what it means to be American in our era, to think like an American and feel what Americans feel. These are exactly the sorts of movies that should be no trouble for Hollywood to make and to which audiences should always flock.
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Is he really that gifted? Well, yes and no...
The opportunities other artists have to struggle their whole lives to make for themselves is just Spielberg's to pick like an apple off a tree. There's no such thing as an artist who achieves all on their own, but film makes that process particularly obvious. And Spielberg, being worth $3.7 billion, can get the best collaborators money can buy. Need a great script? Hire Tony Kushner, the great American playwright of our time, or Tom Stoppard, the great British playwright of our time. And for the rest, he finds collaborators who are near-geniuses in their own right who work with him movie after movie, because who will pay better than Spielberg? Who will give them more prestige? Who will crteate a more harmonious working atmosphere?
But Spielberg's two most important collaborators, his editor Michael Kahn, and his composer John Williams, are both around 90. And Spielberg is going to be called upon to change his style and substance as never before.
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If you gotta replace John Williams, Leonard Bernstein is the way to go, and in the place of relying on music cues, Spielberg relies on light as never before.
The 'god light' makes its first appearance at the moment Tony and Maria meet, causing all the blinding, shadow, rays, and rainbow refraction which permeate Spielberg like stained glass in a cathedral. But for just a small moment, the light disappears when Tony and Maria kiss. It comes again when Tony starts singing Maria only for it to show that it was turned on by a janitor carrying a trash can on wheels. Tony stands in a pool of water refracted by light. This is the New York we all know, with those little puddles of magic that appear all around its grimiest parts. In Tonight, the light is not on the streets but on the lovers: in their eyes, in their teeth, the oil on their skin...
Anita, realist to their romantic, gets much less light in her eyes. Spielberg rarely backlights her, but lights her from above. The light is all over every inch of her skin, and in their apartment (which Anita and Maria share with Bernardo), there is laundry everywhere, through which light and shadow of every single type permeate. You see Anita again and again in a haze or a shadow through the laundry. For the first time in Spielberg's career, you really feel the sexual heat: Spielberg is really, really thirsty for this actress. And when Maria sings I Have a Love, the light begins to come into Anita's eyes as she tears up, only for her to walk to the other side of the room. And yet... when they sing together at the end of the song, Anita is the one filled with light, portending that Maria's love is over, and Anita is about to fulfill an act of love more severe than was ever demanded of Maria. And when she leaves her apartment, she experiences a brief panic attack, and her eyes practically widen into suns. After Anita's assult, the light flashes from her eyes, but rather than from her pupils, the light is from the balls themselves, as though to say what went through her mind was the devil's whisper.
But the masterpiece of the whole movie is One Hand One Heart, set in the Cloisters Museum. It is one of the greatest scenes ever made in any movie. There is so much to say here, but I'd bet no American movie had light this inventive since Citizen Kane. Spielberg literally paints with the brushes of the Old Masters. Maria literally looks like Mona Lisa. Again, the light disappears when they kiss, and then Maria walks past Tony, and the light completely disappears.
When Tony and Maria sing Tonight in the reprise, they sing it against a gorgeous, possibly painted sunset, and Tonight ends in darkness, with the same blinding lamp against a dark backdrop as in the most dreadful moments in Schindler's List and Jurassic Park. And that continues all through the Rumble. God's compassion has become God's wrath.
And finally the hellscape of the end is darkness visible. Bright light against sheer darkness, and mist everywhere. We are no longer in the America Spielberg's always painted, but a dark hellscape like the bombed out Europe of Saving Private Ryan. This is a portend of an American future, and it feels like a prophecy. When the police come for Chino after he shoots Tony, the entire movie fades to dark. It surely has to be the first Spielberg movie that ends in darkness.
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The credits show the sun rising again, this is Spielberg after all... But it's difficult to state how much of a departure this is for Spielberg. He just made a movie more suffused with the Spielberg light than any movie he's ever made, and then he ends it in darkness.
This is a movie from a new man: sick with worry for the future as many of us are. The America he knew is dead, and he, like the great soul he sometimes seems to be, is taking account of how it happened, and for the first time seems to realize that the vision of America he conjured is a lie and admitting to his responsibility in it.
Just as ours has, Spielberg's light has become darkness, and by letting the dark really and truly in, he's made one of the two greatest American movies of the new century.
Hopefully America will still have enough money to finance it when it's time for someone to make a third.
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