Steven Spielberg. John Baxter
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TV had just begun to pervade America. 1952 saw the debut of the prototypical cop series, Dragnet, the celebrity tribute programme This is Your Life, The Jackie Gleason Show, with Gleason as a New York bus driver with delusions of grandeur and Art Carney as his dutiful sewer-worker friend, and Our Miss Brooks, one of many series to give a new career to a Hollywood character performer, in this case Eve Arden as an acerbic unmarried middle-aged schoolteacher.
It was The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, however, which exerted the greatest influence over Spielberg’s generation. Band leader Ozzie Nelson transferred his situation comedy from radio, and with it his real-life family, including son Eric, known as Ricky, whom the series made into a pop star. TV cloned the Nelsons into a multitude, among them the Cleavers of Leave it to Beaver and the white-bread Andersons of Father Knows Best, led by another Hollywood retread, Robert Young, whom Spielberg would find himself directing. As David Halberstam says, the sitcoms celebrated
a wonderfully antiseptic world, of idealised homes in an idealised, unflawed America. There were no economic crises, no class divisions or resentments, no ethnic tensions… Dads were good dads whose worst sin was that they did not know their way around the house or could not find common household objects or that they were prone to give lectures about how much tougher things had been when they were boys… Moms and dads never raised their voices at each other in anger… This was a peaceable kingdom. There were no drugs. Keeping a family car out late at night seemed to be the height of insubordination… Moms and dads never stopped loving one another. Sibling love was always greater than sibling rivalry. No child was favoured, no child was stunted.
The reality was very different. In 1955 teenage pregnancies reached a level unsurpassed even in the nineties, and one in every three marriages ended in divorce.
It was into this real world that Spielberg 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