The Big Screen (74 page)

Something tempered the first enthusiasm for outlets, so
Jaws
opened on June 20 in 409 theaters in the United States and grossed over $7 million in its first weekend. That was astonishing. But schools were just out, and the kids were going to the beach anyway. Spielberg had cut or adjusted some horrific moments to get a PG rating instead of an R. What was more startling was that the box office doubled in the second week. (That sort of surge never happens today.) By June 29 the figure stood at $21 million. A week later (after the July 4 holiday) it was nearly $37 million. The film was in profit already. By early September the number was $124 million, surpassing
The Godfather
as all-time champ. Its first run, domestically, would settle at $260 million, with a worldwide gross of $470 million. Just before the film's release, Brown and Zanuck gave Spielberg 2.5 percent of the net profits—his original deal had had no points and a modest salary.

The reviews were in disagreement. In the
New York Times
, Frank Rich said, “Spielberg is blessed with a talent that is absurdly absent from most American filmmakers these days: this man actually knows how to tell a story on screen.” But Molly Haskell in
The Village Voice
complained, “You feel like a rat, being given shock treatment.” Decades later, in a rhapsodic monograph on the film, the English writer Antonia Quirke said, “Right before our eyes Spielberg is inventing the almost aggressive purposelessness of his Indiana Jones mode.
Jaws
is perhaps the most tonally comprehensive thriller ever made—sheer exhilaration at lacking an agenda or a subject in any classical dramatic sense. The film is sometimes nothing more than a dance to music. Spielberg never meant anything really. But neither did Fred Astaire.”

Spielberg would have winced at the suggestion that he “never meant anything really,” just as he was aggrieved to be left out of the Oscar nominations for Best Director (the film won only for editing and music). He claimed that as
Jaws
earned more money, the Academy lost interest in it—but that had never happened with
The Godfather
. If anything, the Academy may have learned to ignore “Steven” when they saw how much that irritated him. He didn't get an Oscar for directing until
Schindler's List
(1993), a film loaded with agenda and meaning, on which he took no salary.

Still, Quirke has a point. There are so many matters about which
Jaws
is not interested: the sea, the people in the community, the shark, the idea of corruption in the town. Even the danger is spurious. (Spielberg may have gone mad making it work, but you know he doesn't believe in this threat any more than he believed in triceratops in
Jurassic Park
.) All these elements are sketched in instantly and never developed any more than the characters. Quint is harsh and intimidating. Brody is afraid of the sea. Hooper is cheerful. The shark isn't. (Yet what does the shark want?) These are figures in a dance where the thing Rich calls storytelling flattens everything into action. But what is story without character or moral consequence? “Agenda” can be an offputting word, but why should “meaning” be rejected? You cannot see
Taxi Driver
without asking who Travis is and what has made him. Roman Polanski had identified what we treasure in
Chinatown
by insisting on the defeat of Jake Gittes. But when you see
Jaws
you are gravity-free, and just as entertained as if watching a
Tom and Jerry
cartoon. You lose Quint, but who cares? You're asked to watch the screen and its plasticity, and not the quality of life that may exist within the screen. We are wowed, but are we engaged? The notion of “roller coaster” movies came into being around this time, and it's provocative: on a roller coaster you are caught up moment by moment, physically and nervously, and afterward you are agog with incoherent talk about it. But part of the fun is that the commotion meant nothing. The sensation eclipsed sensibility.

There was no industrywide conference to confirm or enact the principles of
Jaws
. But there didn't need to be. So much had been demonstrated: the potency in opening wide, and then wider (like three thousand screens? four thousand?); the opportunity of the summer season for kids at liberty, and the chance of their becoming repeat viewers; the whole economy of a blockbuster film that could suck its money in so fast; the combination of great danger or adventure without any lasting “downer”; the possibility that audiences were ready to see and revel in things that could not happen in life—and still take the illusion seriously. Plus the outline of franchising, of taking a situation and repeating it until there was no one left with patience. Give them something they know they like—make it like fast food.

The movies had always been on to that trick. The comics, silent and sound, did the same routines over and over, from Chaplin and Keaton through the Marx Brothers and Hope and Crosby to Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. But with the comics we forgave that sameness because we enjoyed the personality of the comedians. The impetus within franchising is the reliable situation in so much television—the sitcoms, the Westerns, the police stories, the family shows. Always the situation endures, like the pitch in the advertising that held such shows in place. That is an endorsement of security in worrying times, just as it is an avoidance of drama or resolution. Because television had set up the precept that the show was so consistent, we didn't need to watch every week or every minute. You could leave the room for a few minutes, come back, and know where you were. Our attentiveness had been compromised. It was a covert message—and the messengers didn't need to be aware of it—but we were being told we didn't really have to watch. Who cares if we're there so long as it is “on”?

In the next decades, this tendency would receive exponential encouragement from movie systems that photographed things that never could happen: computer-generated imagery. A mechanical shark need never be such a trial again. Well, you may say,
King Kong
(1933) could not have happened, not on Skull Island or in New York. But if you put
King Kong
and
Jaws
in the same sentence you have to feel the naïve poetic impulse that inspires the earlier film, and the cold-blooded detachment in
Jaws
. People do care about the ape.
King Kong
trembles with shaky effects.
Jaws
is as smooth as its cutting, but smoothness can kill emotion. Kong is a tragic character. He has his inappropriate desire, while the shark is just a streamlined source of energy, a convenient killer, a current in the sea, a vector in the game.

As I write, Spielberg is nearing sixty-five and coming up on one more of his busy seasons: in the same month, he will release
The Adventures of Tintin
(his first animated film) and
War Horse
—it reminds one of the even stranger concurrence, when he was doing
Schindler's List
and
Jurassic Park
in the same year. This is more than talent, prowess, energy, opportunity, and the clout that meant all those films would hang upon his decision. It's more that his imagination has taken on the versatility of the movie screen: it can play anything, and follow it with anything else. It's as if Beethoven were doing the Eroica Symphony
and
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” at the same time. Not that
Schindler's List
and
Jurassic Park
are in those same classes. Am I old-fashioned in being so shaken by the contrast or the clash?

This turns on the possibility of creative character. If you look at the body of Alfred Hitchcock's work, there are missteps, follies, sidebars, to be sure, but what drew attention and admiration for Hitch was the inability to shake off some motifs: suspense, voyeurism, guilt, fear. I have tried to describe those things at work and suggest that Hitchcock himself became distressed by them. He did not float in air alongside his films. They were business entertainments, but his mind emerged from them.

It would be going too far to say that Spielberg has none of that. He has his motifs: success, children, stylistic impersonality, and being exemplary. Long before the fascinating and often heartfelt adventure of DreamWorks, a new studio, made in partnership with Jeffrey Katzenberg, an executive from Disney, and David Geffen, an entrepreneur in music and recording, Spielberg had been a sustaining executive producer or godfather for so many people and ventures. That list is larger than the roll of films he directed, and it includes
Back to the Future
(1985) and
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
(1988; both by Robert Zemeckis); TV series such as
The Pacific
and
Band of Brothers
; the two Clint Eastwood pictures
Flags of Our Fathers
(2006) and
Letters from Iwo Jima
(2006); and the recent
True Grit
(2010, by the Coen brothers) and J. J. Abrams's
Super 8
(2011), which is a gesture of tribute to Spielberg's own beginnings in moviemaking.

With or without DreamWorks SKG, Spielberg has been a studio or a house. Can anyone conceive of American pictures since 1970 without him? You can describe that in terms of a net worth of $3 billion or in a list of all his awards. It could be offered as an example of wanting to be a huge entertainer and a prophet of our nature and our history—that's the shift from
Jurassic Park
to
Schindler's List
, or from
E.T.
to
Poltergeist
, credited to Tobe Hooper but guided by Spielberg and one of the most alarming visions of kids disappearing into a television set. He can do action at a level that seems matchless—the main story of
Schindler's List
and the battles in
Saving Private Ryan
—but then he can spoil those pictures with the underlining that gives us the girl in the red dress in Kraków and that asks Ryan to earn the sacrifice made for him.

Is it youthfulness that cannot quite trust his own work or our response? Is it his fear of our stupidity? Is it even something like the lack of experience Peter Benchley noted as he looked at
Jaws
? The motif of childhood never goes away, and it is the core of his best film,
Empire of the Sun
(1987), in which the boy Christian Bale is the young J. G. Ballard captured in Shanghai as the war begins and struggling to endure in a Japanese prison camp. That is a film in which the balance of history and one boy's life is eloquent and unforced. (Tom Stoppard did the script with uncredited work from Menno Meyjes.) In any measure, it is a film about life, loss, and the capacity to equate the two. There is nothing childish in the regard for the boy; it's a film for grown-ups.

There is a similar gravity in other films—
Munich
(2005),
A.I.
(2001), and even
The Terminal
(2004), a fine, neglected comedy. And yet I cannot forget or see past the determined youthfulness in Spielberg himself, the urge to live up to the oldest models of movie entertainment and to play dazzling games in which nothing is more real or holding than it was in
Jaws
. Call it the drive to make great shows that are about nothing except letting the light play on the screen for a couple of hours and keeping the faces of the audience as open and exalted as the faces in
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
(1977) whenever they face the light. When he made that film, Spielberg was asked if he believed in UFOs and he said no, but he believed in people who believed in them. So
Close Encounters
can be read as a film about the movies themselves and the wonder that light casts on a watching face. If ever you doubt the movies, look at the faces watching the screen.

Spielberg is what Cecilia, the narrator of Scott Fitzgerald's
The Last Tycoon
, calls “a marker in industry.” (Talking in 1940, she names Edison, Lumière, Griffith, and Chaplin, as well as Monroe Stahr, as the select group.) It is touching how old-fashioned Spielberg's attitudes are in a medium of accelerating technological renewal (most of which he has embraced). But does his celebration of a few children and the childlike compensate for the way he represents a culture that has resolved to be childish? No matter the patronage he has offered to other filmmakers, I wonder what he thinks about the erosion of the mainstream entertainment movie. No one has done more to defend the standard of the “movie” as it was being made when he was born (in 1946). Is he Indiana Jones or Schindler? Well, he has tried to be both. Anyone aiming at the audience wants everyone. But his country and his culture have made the other choice, of going with the unattached, floating myth and adventurous élan of Indie. And surely the maker of
Schindler's List
, who claimed that film was a turning point in his own education and his Jewishness, must know that some decisions lead to catastrophe.