How The Fabelmans Traumatized Me
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I remember sitting at the entrance to a local cinema near me, shivering from a new kind of depression. I was waiting to enter the screening of Avatar: The Way Of Water, which was released in cinema just after The Fabelmans. The previous film I have seen in that very cinema, maybe already a week before that, was The Fabelmans and that dreadful feeling I had was caused by that movie. I was committing an act of masochism going back to cinema right after the trauma I experienced, and I was pretty sure Avatar 2 would only make it worse. I didn't care. I went anyway. Thank god that James Cameron decided to limit references to himself to a few nods to Titanic and stuff, and instead made a movie that is pretty much designed as a joyride. I don't know if I was alive today if Avatar 2 was anything like The Fabelmans.
I have a huge book on my shelf by Joseph McBride which has something like 640 pages, which was one of the fastest books I have ever read. I want to quote a passage from this book:
She turned sideways to the phone, the camera was in very close. I thought, Here it comes, she's going to come totally unglued. You hear the phone pick up, and she turns her back to the camera. No director in his right mind is going to leave her face! But the camera starts to pull back and you hear her say one word: 'Mama.' Steven is able to present intimacy by doing the opposite thing - the opposite of what anybody else would have done. The whole thing was like that. He broke all the rules and did better by breaking them.
This is from page 194 ( at least in the edition I have ) from a book titled "Steven Spielberg - A Biography - Second Edition". It is talking about some very early work by Steven that he did before cinema, when he was working on Television. And how even early on people caught up to a sense that Steven Spielberg knows how to make emotions work.
Re-Watching The Fabelmans for this review, made me notice this technique used still. Steven Spielberg still channels the same understanding of human psychology, which I assume he has on some deep subconscious level, that lets him avoid awkward closeups of crying actors, and instead induce an emotion greater than that, by subverting and obfuscating the emotion similarly to how that emotion would be subverted and obfuscated by the character in that situation. Instead of a crying face, there is a face trying not to cry. Instead of a closeup of despair, there is a shot of one's face hiding, trying to conceal the pain. The camera pulls back to help the character cope.
So I guess to help me cope with the trauma caused by this movie, I should pull back and view it from a far. View how it happened. And maybe I can finally deal with it.
There is a technique often associated with Spielberg called "The Spielberg's Face" which is this jaw-dropped wonder, which happens first as a signal to the audience to prepare to whatever comes next. You can probably picture a few shots of "The Spielberg's Face" in Jurassic Park, when the characters are staring in wander to something outside of the frame. And then it cuts to the big reveal of the dinosaurs.
Spielberg uses this same technique on many levels, for all kinds of emotions. It could be a face, but it could be some other thing. It could be wander, but it could be sadness or fear. He could show a person trying to hide his reaction, but failing, before showing what the person is reacting to, like the scene towards the end in The Fabelmans where Burt ( the Father ), played by Paul Dano is reacting to a picture, trying to not cry, before we see the contents of the picture. Which makes the contents, when they are revealed hit harder, because we already know how it must feel looking at it.
Or earlier, in an emotional scene where the family is breaking apart, we can see faces of Burt trying to suppress crying and then we see faces of the kids: Sammy Fabelman played by Gabriel LaBelle, Reggie played by Julia Butters, Natalie by Keeley Karsten and Lisa by Sophia Kopera trying desperately to cope. You see the faces before the movie reveals what is the cause of all this. And therefor the cause becomes so much more important and hits so much harder than if the cause and reaction was linear.
He can do that not only with faces. A lot of the times in his monster flicks he would use that technique with environments. The grass is moving, something falls, something acts unnaturally, and only in the end you see the aliens that did all that. Yet it seems like knowing that those were aliens makes the whole effect even stronger. Since it adds a new layer to it all. I've noticed I often have stronger emotional responses for Spielberg's films when I've already seen them before. It seems like they are designed to work better if you know what to feel before hand. He tries as much as possible to prepare you beforehand by showing you "The Spielberg's Face", but if you come prepared yourself, the effect is even better.
I don't talk about my Father nearly enough. And I should talk about him more. This website here would not have happened if not because of my Father. I don't know if you know, but the website this review is posted on is hosted by software that I have written in Python. A language that was introduced to me by my Father. I started using GNU / Linux and Free / Libre Software because of my Father.
I remember back when I was still conceptualizing Space Chabad my Father took me aside from my mindless imagination and explained me that if I want to make a big science-fiction animation thing, I need to sit down and design every single spaceship and every single vehicle and every single thing really. And design it not like an artist, but like an engineer.
At the moment, my Father is learning "Go", a new cool programming language that a lot of projects are using right now. He is very much a computer person. And if he wasn't that I believe I would not be a Blender Dumbass. I would just be J.Y. Amihud.
The book I have referenced about Steven Spielberg talks about a time in the 90s, when pressured by the visual effect industry, and by the Jurassic Park's Computer Generated Images, Spielberg learned some programming from his Father, who was also a computer person. But unlike my Father, Arnold Spielberg was real hard core computer scientist, pretty much on a team that brought the computers we know today into existence.
Bert Fabelman ( a proxy of Arnold Spielberg ) in the semi-autobiographical The Fabelmans reminds me a lot of my Father. He is equally as analytical. He is not quite as religious, but religious enough to remind my Father. Looking at Paul Dano's performance makes me feel like I'm looking at somebody who is playing not a proxy of Arnold Spielberg. But who is playing a proxy of my Father.
The movie The Fabelmans is based on the childhood life of Steven Spielberg, part of which is also documented in some greater detail in the book that I have. There are nods in the film to stuff that the film is not explicitly saying. At some point the characters start to sing in Russian a song called "Калинка", which the actors accents butcher quite a bit, but they are supposed to be the American decedents of Ukrainian Jews, so I guess it is fine. There is also a very Russian / Ukrainian kind of Yiddish speaking Jew character Boris played absolutely historically by Judd Hirsch, which hints at a kind of pre-soviet Russian / Ukrainian ancestry of the family.
It is funny that my Father was born in Moldova and my Mother was born in Russia and they met in Ukraine to make me. A Jewish boy, wannabe Spielberg, that shares roots with actual Spielberg. Writing it seems like I'm wishing stuff up about myself. And I kind of do. My Mother was nowhere near as good of a piano player as Steven's Mother was. I mean my Mom had a guitar, but she didn't know how to play it.
Still though, it is frankly scary to look at Michelle Williams's portrayal of what supposed to be Spielberg's Mother, directed by Spielberg himself, who praised her numerous times for being accurate to the real woman's mannerisms, and seeing my Mother's mannerisms in her performance! The awfully insane nature. The constant bi-polar mood-swings. The looks on her face. There was even a scene where she analyses a piece of music very thoroughly, which my Mom used to do a lot. Apart from her playing the piano, this is just like my Mom. What the actual holly fuck!?
The meta factor of The Fabelmans for me is even more meta. Yes, there are the obvious nods. Casting Julia Butters famous for her role in a movie called "Once Upon a Time In Hollywood" as a proxy for Anne Spielberg who later also participated in Hollywood and giving her a scene where she and Sammy Fabelman do work on a movie together, is a brilliant meta-joke. It is if Spielberg literally telling the audience: Look, this happened Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
But for me, sitting here where I am, not in Los Angeles or near anywhere where Hollywood is, but rather in Gush Dan Israel, the home of the director of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" Quentin Tarantino, is like a layer above the layer. It is like I'm going insane and seeing conspiracy theories here. And it doesn't help that in my movie Moria's Race the main character - Moria is roughly inspired by the look of the same Julia Butters from "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood". Even the reference folder of the character contains an image of Julia.
Then the entire actual Spielberg thing, on which the whole The Fabelmans is based on is literally a copy of my experiences and digging into the book for more details just gives me more chills: The parents are the same, the passion is similar, Steven is the oldest kid in the family, the parents got divorced, he is Jewish, Ukrainian roots, skipped army, moved from one place to another constantly, made action films with kids his age, has similar beliefs... Oh my fucking god!!!
There is a scene towards the end where Sammy Fabelman shows a film he made while on a party on a beach to the kids in the school and the bully dude comes to him with complaints, saying that he doesn't know how to feel about the way Sammy portrayed him in the film. Sammy made a decision to make him this hero person, this over the top, coolest motherfucker. And he obviously knew that it wasn't really him, but a kind of unreachable idealized version of him. That now will haunt him, because he will never be it, whatever it is.
Probably it is Spielberg talking to the audience directly, telling us that this Sammy Fabelman is not really Steven Spielberg, but a kind of idealized version of him that he wishes he had been.
But for me it has another level of meaning. Spielberg to me in a way is this unreachable version of me, but so much worse than that. Not so long ago I found out that a movie-related agency is located within a few blocks from where I live. I could go there, get to know some people and replicate the way Spielberg got to the studio system. But I wont. And that haunts me.
That day in the cinema, when the final shot ( which is a meta-joke in itself ) made everybody who got the joke in the audience cheer and laugh, I could see how those people might get inspired by this. But I felt depressed. This is an unreachable goal. Not because I can't, per se. But because I wont. Because to be Steven Spielberg is to join the copyright industry. Is to join those who pursuit file-sharers. Is to agree that network surveillance is necessary to stop unauthorized copying of media. It is to support proprietary software. Is to be against digital freedom.
Knowing the messages in Spielberg's films, I think that if he knew about Free Software philosophy, or at least if he knew about it before getting a career at Hollywood, he probably wouldn't do that. He probably would have felt the same despair that I feel now. Now I think the momentum is too strong. Spielberg is too far gone into the weeds of Hollywood. He shows some possible resistance. I already linked here an article where I talked about him and Cameron agreeing that Sharing is Caring. Maybe there is a seed of an idea there. And it will maybe grow into something good.
But I... I have this idea planted firmly into me. For me even to attempt pursuing regular filmmaker's career is to go against myself. I am not stopping though. The momentum of films for me is also too strong to resist. But at least I didn't make money from it yet. Which means I can choose if and how I will do it. There is a chance that I might figure it out and be a Free / Libre Alternative to Spielberg. But at the moment I'm just this kid, who saw a film showing somebody like me, but somebody who is too good, somebody who I cannot be for one reason or another. And that scared the fuck out of me!
Happy Hacking!!!
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