Steven Spielberg. John Baxter
descended from TV’s fantasies of domestic perfection. Leah and Arnold Spielberg were no Ozzie and Harriet. Leah was frustrated in her musical ambitions, Arnold harassed by the need to keep up in a competitive new industry. ‘He left home at 7 a.m.,’ Spielberg recalled, ‘and sometimes didn’t get home until 9 or 10 p.m. I missed him to the point of resenting him.’ Their children roved the emotional no man’s land between them. ‘[My mother] would have chamber concerts in the living room with her friends who played the viola and the violin and the harp. While that was happening in another room, my father would be conferring with nine or ten men about computers, graphs and charts and oscilloscopes and transistors.’ Sometimes the conflict degenerated into domestic arguments. When these started, the four children huddled together, listening to the marriage fall apart.
Steven learned to tune out the rage and fear. He’d go into his room, close the door and, stuffing towels under it, immerse himself in building model planes from Airfix hobby kits. ‘For many years I had a real Lost Boy attitude about parents,’ he said. ‘Who needs them?’ He carried his defence mechanism into adult life. When an employee of Spielberg’s told Leah she’d quit Amblin Entertainment, Leah laughed and asked, ‘Have you ceased to exist yet?’
‘She knew the deal,’ said the employee. ‘That’s his childlike personality. If you do something a baby doesn’t like, he just shuts you out.’
Television became at once Steven’s educational medium and security blanket. Leah and Arnold didn’t allow him to watch anything as violent as Dragnet, but he absorbed almost everything else, in particular the old movies which were TV’s cheapest and most reliable fodder. For him, as for many of his contemporaries who became directors in the seventies and eighties, TV was his film school.
It gave him a taste for Hollywood films of the thirties, in particular the A-pictures of MGM, which often featured an actor who, to him, was the epitome of fathers, Spencer Tracy. Tracy’s appearance in MGM’s 1937 adaptation of Kipling’s Captains Courageous, about a spoiled rich kid who, falling overboard from an ocean liner, is rescued by a Portuguese fisherman and educated and civilised by him, profoundly affected Spielberg. It, and Tracy, would provide the key to his version of Empire of the Sun, just as another Tracy film, Adam’s Rib, in which Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play married lawyers who represent opposite sides in a domestic violence case, would inspire scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Harrison Ford coaxing kisses from Karen Allen parallels Tracy doing the same with Hepburn.
Spielberg was drawn even more to the fantasies of the period. His parents barred him from horror films – which, in any event, were not extensively programmed at the time – but he saw most of Hollywood’s imaginative classics, including Lost Horizon. The virtuoso first third of Frank Capra’s 1937 film of James Hilton’s novel, with the small group of refugees carried across the roof of the world in a montage of maps, mountainscapes, bantering dialogue, high-plateau refuelling stops and a final spectacular special effects crash, would be replicated in the Indiana Jones movies.
Mobs interested Capra. Nobody was more skilful at orchestrating crowds in motion, cutting between a few significant cameos as detonators to drive a screen filled with people into surging movement, and Spielberg learned his lesson well. He was influenced in particular by It’s a Wonderful Life. Offered by Capra and James Stewart as an affirmation to post-war America of everything it had fought to preserve, the fantasy of a savings and loan manager in rural Bedford Falls who sacrifices everything for his neighbours, only to lose faith, then regain it when an angel reveals the hell his town would have been without his contribution, the film endorsed everything Spielberg most needed to believe in: family, community, suburbia.
Steven’s first memory was a visual one, of being taken to a Hassidic Jewish temple in Cincinnati by his father. Still in his stroller, he stared in wonder as he was rolled down a dark corridor into a room filled with men wearing long beards and black hats. He only had eyes, however, for the blaze of red light flowing from the sanctuary where, in imitation of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, the rolls of the holy torah were kept. The impression was indelible. ‘I’ve always loved what I call “God Lights”,’ he says, ‘shafts coming out of the sky, or out of a spaceship, or coming through a doorway.’ Asked to define the central image of his work, he nominated the scene from Close Encounters where six-year-old Cary Guffey, about to be kidnapped by aliens, stands in the open kitchen door; ‘the little boy… standing in that beautiful yet awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway. And he’s very small, and it’s a very large door, and there’s a lot of promise or danger outside that door.’
The blank TV screen exercised a similar fascination. When Spielberg’s parents went out, they draped the set with a blanket and booby-trapped it with strategically placed hairs to reveal if Steven was viewing surreptitiously. He learned to note the position of the hairs and replace them. Then he would turn on the set and watch it, even if nothing was being transmitted. He was fascinated by the hissing ‘snow’, and the ghosts of faraway stations. Pressing his face to the tube, he would pursue them as they drifted in and out of range.
Sensory overload became Spielberg’s preferred state of mind, and remained so for decades. He functioned best, he told a journalist, in a soup of received impressions: radio and television blaring, record player going, dogs barking, doorbell ringing – all while he answered a telephone call. Directing Hook in 1990, he would sit on the camera crane between shots, playing with a Game Boy and at the same time eavesdropping with earphones on flight controllers at LA International Airport.
As a child, alone in his room, he induced an aesthetic frenzy by a sort of optical masturbation, throwing hand shadows on the ceiling and scaring himself with them. Seeing himself as both artist and medium encouraged a schizophrenic division of personality. Until he was fourteen, he would stare into the mirror for five minutes at a time, hypnotising himself with his own reflection. As an adult, he would reach for a camera at moments of stress and photograph his tearful face in a mirror, the film-maker dispassionately recording the stranger inside him.
Insecurity bred fantasies of domestic disaster. He imagined creatures living under his bed, monsters lurking in the closet, waiting to suck him in. At night, he would lie shivering under the blankets, fancying that the furniture had feet, and that tables and chairs were scuttling about in the dark. ‘There was a crack in the wall by my bed that I stared at all the time,’ he said, ‘imagining little friendly people living in the crack and coming out to talk to me. One day while I was staring at the crack it suddenly widened. It opened about five inches and little pieces fell out of it. I screamed a silent scream. I couldn’t get anything out. I was frozen… I was afraid of trees, clouds, the wind, the dark… I liked being scared. It was very stimulating.’
In 1952 Arnold introduced Steven to two phenomena that fundamentally affected his life.
My dad woke me in the middle of the night and rushed me into our car in my night clothes. I didn’t know what was happening. It was frightening. My mom wasn’t with me. So I thought, ‘What’s happening here?’ He had a thermos of coffee and had brought blankets and we drove for about half an hour. We finally pulled over to the side of the road, and there were a couple of hundred people, lying on their backs in the middle of the night, looking up at the sky. My dad found a place, and we both lay down. He pointed to the sky, and there was a magnificent meteor shower. All these incredible points of light were criss-crossing the sky. It was a phenomenal display, apparently announced in advance by the weather bureau… Years later we got a telescope and I was into stargazing.
To memorialise this incident, Spielberg has incorporated a shooting star in all his films.
The other event of 1952 was his first experience of a movie theatre. Again it was Arnold who took him, after carefully explaining what they were going to see. Not carefully enough, however, since Steven thought Cecil B. DeMille’s film about a circus, The Greatest Show on Earth, was a real circus and not one on film. The circus interested him, since his mother had told him how an uncle had run away with one as a boy; the same uncle, it seems, who had been in the black market, and had hidden contraband watches under the family bed.
DeMille’s film conflated all