Biography
Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films
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Molly Haskell
Yale University Press, $36.99
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Review by Tom Ryan
Molly Haskell has long been one of America's finest writers about film, probably still best known for her oft-reprinted From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (1974, revised in 1987), one of the most evocative studies ever of gender relations in the cinema.
For the latest addition to Yale University Press' "Jewish Lives" series, she has donned a Freudian cap and picked up a microscope, although occasionally it seems as if she's looking through the wrong end. Her subject is Steven Spielberg, "the wunderkind [who] has given more pleasure to more people than any other filmmaker in history".
Her book is a biography with a difference. Rather than extensively probing the arc of the filmmaker's life, as Joseph McBride does in his epic Steven Spielberg: A Biography (1997, revised in 2011), Haskell attempts to excavate his psyche from the films he's been involved with as a writer, director or producer.
She explains that she's taken this approach because he routinely refuses interviews with would-be biographers. "I felt stung," she confesses, "a little red-faced, like a girl angling for a date and being rejected." So, instead of putting the man on the couch, she puts his work there and, with acknowledged guidance from McBride's tome, attempts to glean from it a map of the Spielberg subconscious.
Haskell argues that he's spent a life-time finding ways to come to terms with his "dazzling" and "terrifying" first encounter with the Ark of the Torah at the age of six months. And she believes he's largely succeeded. In his films, she proposes, "the boy in the man, a Proust with a steadicam, manages to retain the wonder while gaining mastery of the fear".
She finds many other examples of private fears that have somehow been filtered into the adult's work: the male anxieties that led to "that Spielberg archetype, the Shrieking Woman"; "the Jewish kid with the long nose and big ears … transformed by cinematic magic into a big-headed extra-terrestrial" in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial; the broken family of Spielberg's youth that has profoundly influenced his depiction of the home as a haven in films as various as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Munich (Haskell's reading of this film's final scene is brilliant).
There are times when her auteurism is stretched beyond breaking point, most notably when she tries to incorporate into Spielberg's psychological profile aspects of films on which he has worked only as a producer, such as Poltergeist and the Back to the Future series.
In the latter films' "decidedly racy Oedipal twist", she hypothesises, "a mother and son meet as contemporaries, as Leah Spielberg and her son felt themselves to be in so many ways". But without ever establishing production histories as evidence of his intimate involvement with the creative aspects of the productions, such readings can carry little weight.
As Haskell points out in the preface, her sensibility and Spielberg's have little in common, and her discussion of some of the films – especially the action ones – seems misguided. In her analysis of Jaws, the dangers posed by the shark to the three men in the boat becomes the threat to patriarchy of the 1970s' women's movement, a reading that certainly makes sense in broad cultural terms.
But, by dismissing the relationships between the men as "hilariously puerile", Haskell seems entirely oblivious to the film's critique of male bonding. And so, while she declares at the start that one of her motives for writing the book is to confront her "blind spots" about Spielberg's work, there's little evidence that she's done this.
While there are insights aplenty in her biography and her prose is a joy to read, the book also leaves one with mixed feelings. Curiously, it seems to run out of puff (or interest) towards the end: from The Adventures of TinTin in 2011 onwards, all we have is a perfunctory few paragraphs (or lines) on each of the films, throwaway afterthoughts that fail to take us any closer to what makes their creator tick.
Tom Ryan is the editor of Fred Schepisi Interviews, published by the University Press of Mississippi.