by Martin Amis
All right, conceded Spielberg, shirting up a gear in his own defence. 'I do not paint in the strong browns and greens of Francis [Coppola], or in Marty's [Martin Scorsese's] sombre greys and whites. Francis makes films about power and loyalty; Marty makes films about paranoia and rage. I use primary colours, pastel colours. But these colours make strange squiggles when they run together on the palette ... I'm coming out of my pyrotechnic stage now. I'm going in for close-ups. Maybe I will move on to explore the darker side of my make-up.’
The line of thought is interrupted, as telephones ring and doors swing open. During the interview Spielberg has been attentive enough in his restless way, but some sort of minor crisis is rumbling through the office. His youthful co-producer, Kathleen Kennedy, peers into the room. 'What's happening?' Spielberg asks. 'No, Steven, you don't even want to hear about this.' But Steven does. The row has something to do with a music-publishing spin-off. Later, as I prepared to leave, I could hear Spielberg coping with his stacked calls. 'I'd rather dump the song than get involved in a political war... We think it'll go to number one, which is good ... This has to be solved, and not tomorrow. Two hours.' He doesn't sound like a dreamy kid any more. He sounds like Daryl Zanuck with a bit of a hangover.
Spielberg's career has on occasion resembled that of the old-time Hollywood moguls — and it will do so again, perhaps much more closely. His induction into the studios wasn't quite a case of 'Kid, I'm going to give you a break', but it had its classic aspects. At eighteen, the weird, skinny kid more or less abandoned his studies at California State College and started hanging round the Universal lot. He was thrown off a Hitchcock set; John Cassavetes gave him some unofficial tuition. He raised $10,000 and made a twenty-minute film called Amblin'. (His office now bears the nostalgic logo, Amblin' Productions — though these days Sprintin' would be nearer the mark.) On the basis of this modest short, which was designed to show that he could do the simple things, Spielberg became the youngest director to be signed up by a major studio, and was set to work in television.
The full apprenticeship was never served out. Spielberg made episodes of Columbo, The Name of the Game and The Psychiatrist. He made TV specials. One of these was called Duel. It was pure Spielberg, and showed just how quickly the tiro found his line. A faceless suburbanite makes a business trip by car; he is inexplicably menaced by a steam truck whose driver is never seen. By the end of the seventy-five-minute film, the truck is as monstrous, blind and elemental as anything out of Poltergeist or Jaws. Released in Europe as a feature, Duel made its money back thirty times over. Spielberg was shifted up into the real league. After an inconclusive sortie on The Sugarland Express (a chase movie whose only Spielbergian ingredient was its concern with a mother's forcible separation from her child — a recurring crux), the twenty-five-year-old went on to make Jaws. The rest is history: box-office history.
After Close Encounters, however, Spielberg's career did take a salutary wobble with the chaotic Second World War satire, 1941. Characteristically in a way, the movie was a megaflop — a snowballing fiasco. By now it has laboriously recouped its $30 million budget, yet Spielberg still shows a surprising touchiness about his only brush with failure: 'I haven't read a review of that movie to this day — I just flew into it and forgot to read the script. It taught me that creative compromise is more challenging than the blank cheque-book. And it taught me that I'm not funny when I'm just being funny. There has to be a dramatic context.”
In all his major films, that context has not varied. It places ordinary people, of average resources, in situations of extraordinary crisis. How would you shape up to a shark? Would you enter that cathedral-organ of a mothership and journey to the heavens, never to return? Accordingly, as the strength of his bargaining position has increased, Spielberg has been less and less inclined to use star actors in his films. One scans the cast-lists of Poltergeist and E.T. in search of a vaguely familiar name. Craig T. Nelson? Dee Williams? Peter Coyote? These are useful performers, but they are not headliners, and never will be.
Coppola, for instance, has another way of ducking the star system. Look at the constellation that was formed by Godfather I alone: Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, James Caan, Al Pacino. Spielberg uses a more radical technique for avoiding the big salaries and big egos that always accompany the big names. He casts his actors for their anti-charismatic qualities. 'The play's the thing,' says Spielberg. 'In every movie I have made, the movie is the star.' He is the first director with the nerve to capitalise on something very obvious: audiences are composed of ordinary people.
After his 1941 debacle, Spielberg brought himself violently to heel with Raiders of the Lost Ark, and this perhaps explains why it is the most anonymous of his major films. (It was the most personally profitable too, before E.T.: Spielberg and producer George Lucas simply offered the studios distribution rights — in other words, they kept it all.) With Raiders, Spielberg completed a movie under budget and within schedule for the first time, and has not erred since. A perfectionist and non-delegator, a galvanised handyman on the set, he worked loo-hour weeks to keep the production under tight control. 'Raiders was popcorn,' he admits, 'but great popcorn.' It also brought him to the end of something. It marked the apotheosis of Spielberg the pyrotechnician.
Up until this point in his career it was just about possible to regard Spielberg as merely a brilliant hack. Flitting from studio to studio, he was the lucky mercenary, the big-budget boy with a flair for astronomical profits. Poltergeist and, far more centrally, E.T. put such dismissals quietly out of their misery. The time had come to acknowledge that Spielberg was unique.
Spielberg produced and co-wrote Poltergeist but leased the direction out to Tobe Hooper, the horror-buff and gore-bandit who gave us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like the bygone nabobs of the Forties and Fifties Spielberg had hired his director and yet was unwilling to relinquish his original conception. Later, he ran apologetic ads in the trade-papers, saluting Hooper's contribution. As it turned out, Hooper's contribution was all too palpable. The film's ambitions were in any case pretty limited. 'I started out', says Spielberg, 'just to scare the be-Jesus out of anybody who dared to walk into the theatre.' The film is more than that - and exploits the mother-and-lost-child theme with harrowing relish. But Spielberg's humour and clarity are in the end barely visible through the miasma of Hooper's Gothic-graphic mediocrity.
E.T. is something else again. It is all Spielberg, essential Spielberg, and far and away his most personal film. 'Throughout, E.T. was conceived by me as a love story — the love between a ten-year-old boy and a nine-hundred-year-old alien. In a way I was terrified. I didn't think I was ready to make this movie — I had never taken my shirt off in public before. But I think the result is a very intimate, seductive meeting of minds.’
Intimacy is certainly the keynote of E.T. Using a predominantly female production team, Spielberg effectively re-created the tremulous warmth of his own childhood: a ranch-style suburban home, full of women and kids, with Spielberg the dreaming nucleus of the action. His well-attested empathy with children is tied to a precise understanding of how they have changed since he was a boy. 'The years of childhood have been subject to a kind of inflation. At sixteen, I was the equivalent of a ten-year-old today.' In the movie, the kids have a wised-up naïveté, a callow, TV-fed sophistication. Reared on video games and Spielberg movies, with their Space-Invader T-shirts, robot toys and electronic gizmos, they are in a way exhaustively well-prepared for the intrusion of the supernatural, the superevolved.
Despite his new-deal self-discipline, Spielberg decided to 'wing' E.T., to play it by ear and instinct. (He brought the movie in on the nail anyway, at $10 million.) 'If you over-rehearse kids, you risk a bad case of the cutes. We shot E.T. chronologically, with plenty of improvisation. I let the kids feel their way into the scenes. An extraordinary atmosphere developed on the set.' E.T. is, after all, only an elaborate special effect (costing $1.5 million — 'Brando would cost three times that,' as Spielberg
points out); but 'a very intense relationship' developed between E.T. and his young co-star, Henry Thomas. 'The emotion of the last scene was genuine. The final days of shooting were the saddest I've ever experienced on a film set.' Little Henry agrees, and still pines for his vanished friend. 'E.T. was a person,' he insists.
Later, while scoring the film, Spielberg's regular composer John Williams shied away from what he considered to be an over-ripe modulation on the sound-track. 'It's shameless,' said Williams: 'will we get away with it?' 'Movies are shameless,' was Spielberg's reply. E.T. is shameless all right, but there is nothing meretricious about it. Its purity is Utopian, and quite unfakeable.
You can ask around Los Angeles — around the smoggy pool-sides, the oak and formica rumpus-rooms, the squeaky-clean bars and restaurants — in search of damaging gossip about Steven Spielberg, and come away sorely disappointed. There isn't any. No, he does not 'do' ten grand's worth of cocaine a day. No, he does not consort with heavily-set young men. In this capital of ambition, trivia and perversity, you hear only mild or neutral things about Spielberg, spiced with many examples of his generosity and diffidence.
He has walked out with starlets, notably Amy Irving. He blows a lot of money on gadgets, computers, video games. He owns a mansion, a beach-house; he has just spent $4 million on a four-acre hillock in Bel Air. He seldom goes to parties: 'When I do go, I'm the guy in the corner eating all the dip.' Spielberg, it appears, is a pretty regular guy. Apart from his genius, his technique, his energy, his millions, his burgeoning empire (rivalling Coppola's Zeotrope and Lucas's Marin County co-operative), he sometimes seems almost ordinary.
Towards the end of the interview, I asked him why he had never dealt with 'adult relationships', with sex, in his movies. After all, he de-eroticised Indiana Jones in Raiders, who was originally conceived as a playboy, and he excised the adultery from Jaws (the sex-interest in the novel Spielberg attributes to 'bad editorial advice'; actually the culprit was bad writing — but this is California). For the first time Spielberg grew indignant. 'I think I have an incredibly erotic imagination. It's one of my ambitions to make everyone in an 8oo-seat theatre come at the same time.' Well, we'll have to wait until he has completed Raiders II, E.T. II, and, possibly, Star Wars IV, as well as the host of minor projects he is currently supervising. But if Spielberg does for sex what he has done for dread and yearning, then he can expect a prompt visit from the Vice Squad.
'I just make the kind of films that I would like to see.' This flat remark explains a great deal. Film-makers today — with their target boys and marketing men — tie themselves up in knots trying to divine the LCD among the American public. The rule is: no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Spielberg doesn't need to do this because in a sense he is there already, uncynically. As an artist, Spielberg is a mirror, not a lamp. His line to the common heart is so direct that he unmans you with the frailty of your own defences, and the transparency of your most intimate fears and hopes.
Observer 1982
John Updike: Rabbitland and Bechville
John Updike's 'Rabbit' novels are fattening into a sequence — a wahooing, down-home barn dance to the music of time. Rabbit, Run (1960) gave us Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom's disastrous early marriage, Rabbit Redux (1971) his chaotic experiments with adulthood. Rabbit is Rich, the latest but not the last in the line, traces with appalled affection the contours of Rabbit's maturity: it is about middle-aged spread, physical, mental and (above all) material.
Rabbit has never looked a less likely hero for an American epic. Equipped with a troublesome family and a prosperous car showroom, Rabbit is meant to seem provincial and vulgar even by the unexacting standards of suburban Pennsylvania. His reading consists of Consumer Reports and the odd newspaper — 'mostly human-interest stories, like where the Shah is heading next and how sick he really is'. His mind is a jabbering mess of possessions, prejudice and pornography. But then Rabbit is an extreme middle-American, a voluble and foul-mouthed representative of the silent majority.
The time is 1979 — the time of petrol shortages, the Three Mile Island radiation leak, the hostage crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan. Like its predecessors, the novel is crammed with allusive topicalities; in a few years' time it will probably read like a Ben Jonson comedy. Rabbit, however, is quick to reinterpret global events in the light of furtive self-interest. Will the Iranian revolution give a boost to his precious-metal investments? Is OPEC going to louse up his car-dealership?
The previous Rabbit books had their share of incident - deaths, desertions — but Rabbit is rich now, and largely protected from contingencies. His life, he feels, has devolved to an 'inner dwindling'. The reader is bound to feel a bit like this too, since the novel's structure is not linear so much as quotidian or seasonal. Updike toys with plot and incident, then flirtatiously retreats. Rabbit's son pushes his pregnant wife down the stairs! But she is fine, and so is baby. The leggy blonde at the showroom might be Rabbit's long-lost daughter! But she isn't, and that's that. In the end, the most dramatic events in the book centre on things like car dents, mortgage rates and gold futures.
If Rabbit is Rich has a central theme — and it is by no means clear that it wants or needs one — it has to do with the one-directional nature of life: life, always heading towards death. Not surprisingly, Updike injects a little low-church churchiness here. 'I always felt I was very innocent, actually,' says Rabbit's fat, busted ex-mistress. 'We all are, Ruth,' consoles Rabbit. A few pages later we read: 'Like what souls must feel when they awaken in a baby's body so far from Heaven: not only scared so they cry but guilty, guilty.' It is a fruitful confusion: We Are All Not Guilty, though we keep on thinking we must be. Rabbit, of course, is only lightly touched by this knowledge. He swans on down the long slide, clumsy, lax and brutish, but vaguely trying.
The technical difficulty posed by Rabbit is a familiar and fascinating one. How to see the world through the eyes of the occluded, the myopic, the wilfully blind? At its best the narrative is a rollicking comedy of ironic omission, as author and reader collude in their enjoyment of Rabbit's pitiable constriction. Conversely — and this is the difficult part — the empty corners and hollow spaces of the story fill with pathos, the more poignant for being unremarked.
Not remarking on things, however, isn't one of Updike's strengths. There is just no stopping him remarking on things. The Rabbit books are not first-person but localised third-person: Updike's voice can therefore flit freely in and out of Rabbit's hick musings. A certain nervousness about this device perhaps explains the two derisory sorties into the consciousness of Rabbit Jr. More seriously, in his desire to keep the emotional content topped up, Updike repeatedly lapses into winsome editorials, as if to fill the spiritual gaps. 'Her blurred dark eyes gaze beyond him into time…. love floods clumsily the hesitant space — saying, in a voice tears have stained ...’
Being a boor and a goon, Rabbit is on the whole a healthy influence on Updike's style; but Updike's style remains a difficulty. In every sense it constitutes an embarrassment of riches — alert, funny and sensuous, yet also garrulous, mawkish and cranky. Updike often seems wantonly, uncontrollably fertile, like a polygamous Mormon. His recent novel about Africa, The Coup, was praised as an astounding 'departure' from his usual beat; in fact, though, the very facility of the experiment gave grounds for alarm. Plainly, here is a writer who can do more or less as he likes. But what ought he to like?
Furnished with such gifts, a novelist's main challenge is one of self-contraception. A talent like Updike's will always tend towards the encyclopaedic. Rabbit is Rich is a big novel, and in some ways it would be churlish to wish it any thinner. It is never boring but it is frequently frustrating. You feel that a better-proportioned book is basking and snoozing deep beneath its covers, and that Updike never really tried to coax it out.
* * *
After Rabbit, Run came Rabbit Redux. After Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich. Now after Bech: A Book, we are offered Bech is B
ack. What next? Bech is Broke?
Actually Bech is in pretty good shape by the end of Bech is Back, financially at least. In the Rabbit books John Updike delivers a commentary on the unreflecting side of human nature (at a certain, unspecifiable distance from his own): this is what the unexamined life would be like: venality, fear, and the innocence born of knowing no better. Rabbits are the victims of whatever set of values gets to them first. They are the people whom you see every day and dismiss as junior aspirants, junior sufferers, unvexed by soul. But the Rabbit, like the Babbit, does have his inner life, his private culture, and Updike dissects it with tingling fascination.
Bech is the opposite, though equally remote from the real Updike: he is smart, learned, artistic, cosmopolitan, alienated, Jewish, single and promiscuous. Bech is a blocked writer, and this calls for a spectacular feat of authorial empathy, since Updike himself can hardly let a month go by without blurting out a new novel, short-story collection, book of poems, essay hold-all. If Rabbit is an alter ego, then Bech is a super ego. Or maybe he is just an alter id. Like Bech: A Book, Bech is Back concerns itself with the subsidiaries of authorship: it is about what writers get up to when they aren't writing. In Bech's case, not writing consumes his every waking hour, and yet his reputation grows as his powers decline. The Superoil Corporation sends him to the Caribbean to sign 28,500 copies of his elderly second novel at $1.50 a pop. Here, Bech's block reaches its cramped epiphany. 'He gazed deep into the negative perfection to which his career had been brought. He could not even write his own name.’
Bech is pestered by autograph hounds, Ph.D. students, women's institutes. He is swept off on cultural exchanges (chapter title: 'Bech Third-Worlds It'), during which he is lionised, bored, traduced and menaced (chapter coda: 'He vowed never to Third-World it again, unless someone asked him to'). Showing that mixture of awe, terror and gratitude characteristic of famous, middle-aged American novelists, he is regularly seduced by briskly adoring co-eds, models and cultural stewardesses. But Bech's unfinished novel, Think Big, remains unfinished, even as his privileged gloom nears burnished completion.
