Steven Comes of Age With EMPIRE OF THE SUN: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues

For most people, childhood is a silo.

An adult raising a child has many jobs, but one of the most important ones that come up over and over again is the protection from the harsh reality of the world surrounding them.  I was a 90’s kid, growing up in a decade that is being looked back on lately with rose-colored glasses by essentially every single person my age.  This is in spite of several turbulent events: the Columbine school shooting, the killing of Matthew Shepard, the impeachment of the President of the United States, the tumultuous murder trial of a famous football player, riots in Los Angeles, the bombing of a federal building…and that’s just keeping the focus on things stateside.

But I didn’t really care, and truly barely knew, about any of it at the time.  I was too busy reading Calvin & Hobbes and watching Animaniacs and drawing shitty pictures, as a child is supposed to do.  Pretty much all of my peers were.  We had our own internal battles to fight, to be sure, but we were siloed from the horrors of the outside world, even in a (relatively) stable era.

Of course, that loss of innocence, that “coming-of-age” moment, when the silo breaks and the outside world finally leaks in, that moment arrives and you’ve now been altered forever (for most of us, that was probably September 11th, 2001).  Unless you’re overwhelmingly lucky, it’s a period of life that is usually inevitable, and it’s ultimately a necessary one.  Coming to terms with the fact that the world can be arbitrarily cruel, that sometimes people just suffer, that your parents aren’t always going to be there to help you swim through the murky waters of the chaos….it’s painful, but it’s needed.

Those types of moments in life tend to form the backbone of most Steven Spielberg movies; it’s no accident they often feature kids separated from their parents.  The universality of those periods of life allows it to be applied to just about any kind of setting: 1930’s Cairo, 70’s Middle America, the far distant future, a theme park filled with dinosaurs…this period makes any imaginable world instantly recognizable, because we all go through it.

Of course, because of this, the exploration of this crucial chapter in everyone’s life served Spielberg well when he returned to the historical time period that captivated him as a young lad, barreling towards his own silo-bursting: World War II.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Christian Bale, John Malkovich, Miranda Richardson, Joe Pantoliano

Written by: Tom Stoppard

Released: December 11, 1987

Length: 154 minutes

EMPIRE OF THE SUN tells the story of Jamie Graham (Bale), a British schoolboy living a very posh, and extremely privileged life within the Shanghai International Settlement in the early 1940’s.  This cushy existence is maintained even as World War II rages on in the background, and Japan continues to ratchet up its invasion into China.  The bubble gets forever burst once Japan attacks Pearl Harbor and the Pacific War officially begins.  As people begin to evacuate, Jamie is separated from his parents and this upper-crust kid is now left to figure out how to navigate an uncertain world on his own.  As the movie goes along, and Jamie finds a kind of bespoke father figure in a thief known as Basie (Malkovich), the question becomes: what kind of man will Jamie be?

The first thing about this I wanted to mention: my knowledge of history is weak enough that I always love it when a movie teaches me about something that I ought to have known about already.  I had no idea about the Shanghai International Settlement, nor that it existed for as long as it did (first established in 1863!).  Whenever something from world history gets depicted in a major film, I automatically assume that everybody else just already knew about it.  However, if you didn’t know about this particular piece of it…well, hey, you oughta check out EMPIRE OF THE SUN!

The second thing to mention: EMPIRE OF THE SUN was initially conceived as a possible David Lean picture!  Yes, after original choice Harold Becker dropped out of the project, Lean was brought in to adapt the J.G. Ballard novel, with Spielberg producing.  However, Lean just never developed a connection to the material, and he eventually passed the project along to Spielberg, who secretly wanted to direct it all along.  And, look, you can definitely see a lot of Lean in this visually (and that’s probably no accident; Spielberg is an avowed fan, citing BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI as one of his favorites of all time).  At the end of the day, though, EMPIRE OF THE SUN is unmistakenly a Spielberg movie.  We’ve got lost children, found fathers, World War II, a reverence for aviation, swelling music…you couldn’t miss his fingerprints on this picture if you tried. E.T. was definitely his “divorce movie” up to this point, but you can’t help but feel like he heavily reflected on the separation of his parents when reading the novel.

These Spielbergian hallmarks also help make EMPIRE OF THE SUN feel kind of comfortable in its own little way, at least in the way it communicates its story and themes.  The set up for Jamie Graham, the character in which we view the entirety of the film’s events, is particularly satisfying.  As mentioned, he’s a boy who’s been placed inside a bubble, both functionally and metaphorically, by virtue of living within the confines of the Shanghai settlements.  To him, the biggest issue he faces is whether the maid will allow him to have his favorite buttered biscuits before bed or not.  He lives wrapped up completely in a cloak of privilege he (understandably) has no awareness of*.  This is exemplified perfectly by the Graham family’s early trip to a lavish party across the city.  The commute to the party leads them through a chaotic and overcrowded Shanghai street.  Pressed faces, hustling children, bloody food wares streak across the passenger side window.  They’re right there, right in Jamie’s face, yet cannot touch them.  He can observe them, but he’s not affected by them.  

*Although not from lack of trying by his parents.  His dad reminds Jamie in the beginning, who becomes fixated on a homeless guy right behind their wall that they have more luck than most, and the homeless guy still has more luck than some.  It’s a nice moment of humanity from a character that could have been really nasty.

EMPIRE OF THE SUN continues the exploration of the role of a father that THE COLOR PURPLE began.  Once Jamie is separated from his actual dad, the movie involves Jamie trying to find new parental figures to latch onto, and boy, does he find a complicated one in Basie.  He’s a transient sailor, a thief and an opportunist in every sense of the word.  Although Basie is comfortable having Jamie tag along once they happen to cross paths (via his compatriot Frank, played by Joe Pantoliano), he also makes it very clear through his actions that he will bail on this orphaned kid if he feels like he needs to.  Hell, on the first day they meet, Basie gives a good try to sell Jamie off to some strangers.  This makes for an interesting turn when the two of them (plus Frank) end up rounded up by the Japanese, into a holding center, officially hostages of a foreign government.

In the hands of Malkovich, Basie becomes a great piece of the thematic bricks that EMPIRE is built off of.  He’s the type of adult you tend to meet over and over again once your world expands beyond the confines of your own home.  As it turns out, many human beings end up existing for themselves, even when they turn out to have something of value to teach another person.  Jamie does pick up some legitimate street smarts from the guy, which is invaluable for his survival (and, in some cases, even thriving) in the camps.  However, this sort of mentorship doesn’t actually translate into any sort of love.  In one of the more heart-breaking moments of EMPIRE OF THE SUN, Basie gets selected by the Japanese to be transferred from the holding center to an official camp.  Despite his loud pleas to be brought along, Basie puts his head down as he climbs into the truck and pretends not to notice.  The Tom Stoppard-penned script can’t help but twist the knife here: Jamie ends up also getting chosen to be transferred, and they both have to sit there in that truck, knowing how Basie really feels.

That is the purpose of a “coming-of-age” story, though, that change from a child to something resembling an adult, and there’s no more profound moment in life than realizing that, oftentimes, you’re on your own.  So it goes for Jamie: the only reason he gets chosen for transfer is by annoying his way onto the truck, pestering the driver into letting him give more appropriate directions to where they’re headed.  In a moment of crisis, he’s now proven to be self-reliant.  Perhaps he’s grown beyond Basie entirely.

I should point out here that, yes, EMPIRE OF THE SUN details a very harrowing and grueling story, involving a lost child forced to grow up in the crucible of government occupation and captivity.  But Spielberg’s direction does keep things from feeling too heavy, often to the film’s benefit.  There is a fair amount of whimsy throughout, best exemplified by a scene halfway through (in some ways, it feels like an Act One finale).  Something that we know about Jamie consistently throughout the story is his obsession with the act of flight and the craft of an airplane (another way the director is undoubtedly infusing himself into this tale).  An early moment involves him sitting in the cockpit of a long-since-wrecked plane, imagining himself as the hero of one of his beloved magazines.  At one point during his tenure in the Japanese holding cell, however, he stumbles across a team of pilots fixing up a fleet of fighter jets.  The sparks of the soldering irons feel something like fireworks, as Jamie becomes captivated, seeing an airplane in person for the first time.  Although he gets yelled at by a general to get back, the pilots seem a little more amenable; as Jamie salutes in reverence, and the John Williams score swells*, they salute back.  As it turns out, nothing can bring two enemies together like a shared love and interest.

*You’ll never believe it, but John Williams did the score to this Steven Spielberg movie.

Yes, I know that Spielberg’s handling of darker materials at this stage of his career is something that has been questioned, but I maintain that moments like this work really well, possibly because it’s a story being told from the perspective of a twelve-year old, as opposed to an adult.  That said, Spielberg does, alas, push the whimsy just a tad too far at places.  There’s a moment in EMPIRE OF THE SUN that, had it been written as a vicious Spielberg parody, would have had not a single syllable altered.  Late in the film, Jamie watches as an ailing fellow prisoner, Mrs. Victor (Richardson), passes away in the middle of the desert.  As she dies, we suddenly see the fallout of the Nagasaki bombing off in the distance.  Jamie, in his childlike innocence, believes the fallout to be Mrs. Victor’s soul flying away to heaven.  Woof.  

Still, the film gets away with these saccharine moments, because the performance at its center is so good.  Take it from me: I am a fairly avowed Christian Bale skeptic.  He’s not the most irritating actor on my enemy list; he actually has a handful of adult performances that I think are pretty good (I think the “Batman voice” meme has overshadowed just how strong his Bruce Wayne is in the Nolan DARK KNIGHT trilogy!).  However, he’s one of those guys who has a whole “method acting” hype machine behind me that makes any potential criticism of his work instantly invalid in the eyes of many a fan, in both online and real life spaces.  “How can you say Christian Bale isn’t a great actor?  Didn’t you see how much weight he lost for THE MACHINIST?”  “How can you say he’s overrated?  Don’t you know how seriously he takes his roles, even in shit like TERMINATOR 4?”  Cool!  Good for him!  I never realized that acting could be quantified by the amount of interesting behind-the-scenes facts you can regurgitate about someone*.  Here I thought I was just alienated by most of his work.  I’ve seen the light!

*You absolutely do not want to start the Daniel Day-Lewis conversation with me here.

ANYWAY, that said, imagine my surprise when I found his lead performance here, at the age of 13, to be easily the best thing I’ve ever seen him do.  Jamie is an enormous role that requires a lot of emotional range, coupled with the normal pitfalls that come with hinging the success of your entire film on the shoulders of a child.  In this sense, Bale is great.  In the beginning, he’s entitled without being annoying.  By the end, he’s confident without being precocious.  He has a remarkable amount of self-control, considering, again, he’s a teenager.  I truly, truly kept waiting for him to piss me off.  It never happened.  One can only imagine what his performance would have been like if he had known to gain thirty pounds first.

Putting EMPIRE OF THE SUN in context with his complete filmography, it becomes clear why it’s become the ultimate “underseen and underrated” Spielberg film.  Despite its relative high quality, it’s flanked by too many all-time Hollywood classics: RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTIAL.  The one-two punch of SCHINDLER’S LIST and JURASSIC PARK a few years later.  It just never hit the zeitgeist the way many other Spielberg movies did.  Although it earned six Oscar nominations, they were all in technical categories, and resulted in zero wins.  EMPIRE OF THE SUN probably just got overshadowed by another big historical epic from a legendary director that year: Bertolucci’s THE LAST EMPEROR.  Hell, even the name is pretty similar.   

It’s also not one of his very best.  But I do think, were you to watch it, it would become an easy answer for you the next time someone asks you for a film recommendation.  If nothing else, it makes you reflect on the way we ultimately have to navigate a sometimes-scary world, how to navigate trusting another person, how to grow into yourself, how to connect with the things you love, even when gatekept by an enemy.

Oh, and a young Ben Stiller somehow appears in this very briefly.  That definitely makes for a fun fact at a trivia night, if nothing else.

Steven Grows Up With THE COLOR PURPLE: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

I often find myself struggling with movies about human misery.

For a couple of reasons, I hesitate to make reference to “message movies”, as these types of films are often called.  For one, I kind of think all movies are “message movies”; what is a film if not an artist communicating with people, even if what they’re trying to communicate is “seeing hot people try to defuse a bomb is cool” (in the case of Jan de Bont’s SPEED) or “I’m a fucking freak” (in the case of Dan Aykroyd’s NOTHING BUT TROUBLE).  But for two, the term “message movie” has always felt pejorative to me, the unspoken implication being “a movie is trying to open my mind to something, oh no!”  That said, there’s no precisely correct way to teach an audience anything, and I think the pitfalls to getting it wrong is what causes some people to get bumped, including myself.  

There appears to be two main ways a movie teaches us about human misery.  It can go for a glossy Hollywood style, where emotions are cued with swelling & active scores, and the screenplay lands itself on some kind of inspiring, if not precisely happy, conclusion.  The tradeoff with this style is that you’re still providing the audience their most common aim of watching a movie in the first place (to get swept away from reality for a while) without risking alienation, but are not precisely providing…well, reality, defeating the purpose of the intense subject matter in the first place.  So, you can instead go for stark, relatively uncompromising realism.  In that method, you remain blunt and truthful, but at the risk of closing yourself off from wide swaths of potential ticket-holders (not everyone feels like watching something that bleak).

In THE COLOR PURPLE, you feel a movie that seems to be vacillating between both styles, unsure of how to exactly find the marriage between the two.  And I suspect this may be because Steven Spielberg himself was aiming to go for the second style, while ultimately feeling more comfortable with the first.

It makes for a fascinating, not wholly bad, viewing experience.  We’ve reached a Spielberg movie I had never seen!  Always exciting.  Let’s talk a little COLOR PURPLE!

THE COLOR PURPLE

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Whoopi Goldberg, Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Margaret Avery, Adolph Ceasar, Rae Dawn Chong

Written by: Menno Meyjes

Released: December 18th, 1985

Length: 154 minutes

Adapted from the 1982 Alice Walker novel of the same time, THE COLOR PURPLE tells the epic story of Celie Harris-Johnson, a woman born into a horrifying world; by the time she’s a teenager, she’s already lost two children fathered by her dad.  Not long after, she’s married off by the same dad to another abuser, a man known as “Mister”.  The only shining light in Celie’s life is her younger sister, Nettie.  Seeking refuge from their dad, Nettie ends up living with Celie and Mister, an arrangement that collapses after Nettie refuses to let him rape her.  From there, it becomes a film-long quest for Nettie and Celie’s paths to hopefully once again unite.

THE COLOR PURPLE is a real fun time, as you can see.  However, it should be said that, although the subject matter remains serious throughout, there are many moments of life.  And light.  There’s song and dance and genuine displays of love (and, yes, the color purple), just like there is in even the darkest parts of lives.  But the dark realities of Celie’s life, as it is for so many of those in marginalized communities, both then and now, always seem to boil back to the surface.

The cast is interesting, especially considering its lead is someone we don’t really associate with drama these days.  This was more or less Whoopi Goldberg’s screen debut*, and she’s done serious roles over the decades, for sure.  But I’m guessing most people my age associate her as one of the rotating Oscars hosts in the 90’s and 00’s, or as one of the hosts of THE VIEW, which has made her a regular source for dumb culture war controversy (not helped by her penchant for making statements that don’t always make a lot of sense).

*Unless one counts William Farley’s 1982 indie flick CITIZEN: I’M NOT LOSING MY MIND, I’M GIVING IT AWAY.

Anyway, she’s pretty good in this, and is putting in the type of performance whose power doesn’t really hit you until after you’ve watched the movie and sat with it for a few days.  It’s a performance fueled by repression, which means it’s robbed of the ability to be showy, like others in the movie get to be.  But Goldberg doesn’t need to be showy here anyway; she’s able to absorb the series of blows that Celie’s life takes and is able to get us to track her emotions even when she’s silent.  It’s the type of performance in the type of high-profile performances that practically guarantees someone an Oscar nomination (and, lo, she was).

I had two other standouts.  For one, Danny Glover does an incredible job with a difficult role.  Mister is one of those characters who is, for 97% of the runtime, just a bottom-of-the-barrel scumbag, not so much wanting a wife as a slave, all the while openly lusting after another woman, Shug Avery, the proverbial One That Got Away.  He’s miserable all the way through.  There’s a very real risk of a character like this serving nothing but a stone over the neck of the movie; can you really watch a guy traumatizing everyone around him for two and a half hours?

But, Glover is successful in making him seem…almost charming at first!  To be clear, there’s nothing charming about the system of marriage as depicted in the movie (guy walks up to another guy and says “I wanna marry your daughter”, thus opening up formal negotiations).  But there’s just enough of normalcy about him, even a nice smile, at the beginning that you trick yourself into thinking this may work out for Celie.  Crucially, you also buy why a woman as self-assured as Shug might bother wrapping him around her finger for as long as she does.

I was also really taken by, of all people, Oprah Winfrey!  She’s been known my entire lifetime as this person that’s just always been…around, first as a television personality (there appeared to be some unwritten, but fully abided, law in the 90s and 00s that at least one TV set in every American suburban household had to have The Oprah Winfrey Show on, even if nobody was actively paying attention to it), then as this figure people get either aggressively defensive, or aggressive, about.  Oh, and I suppose she’s responsible for platforming a half dozen of the biggest dipshits to ever live, one of which is currently in charge of your parents’ healthcare.  But…um…it’s easy to forget she has something like a dozen genuine film roles as well!  That’s pretty cool!

This was also her film debut and I think she probably gets the splashiest role, and arc, as Sofia.  She gets to play a steadfast, confident woman in the beginning, with some genuine comic moments (one of the funniest moments in a movie designed to not have many involves everyone realizing she’s about to beat the shit out of someone at the jook joint), and then we go through the brutal process of seeing that confidence and independence stripped away from her, never to be returned, in the hands of white people both actively brutal, and self-assuredly “helpful” (more on Mrs. Millie in a bit).  Much like Glover, Oprah does a striking job selling us on both ends of Sofia.  By the time we reach the end, when she’s become this physically and spiritually beaten husk, you just want to crawl into a hole somewhere.

There are a lot of interesting thematic elements to THE COLOR PURPLE, the most compelling one being that of the role of a father.  Shug (Margaret Avery) insists at one point that the best thing for a child is to have both a mother and father in the household.  This is in spite of all evidence to the contrary displayed throughout the movie; Celie’s father is maybe the biggest monster in the whole story, kicking off a lifetime of trauma for her and Nettie.  Mister is a miserable and inattentive father himself; all of his children grow up to be lost and immature adults.  Through the prism of fatherhood, we even get some insight into what made Mister the way he is.  His dad (played by the great Adolph Caesar) enters the story from time to time and is brutally honest with his son, in his own unique way that is neither precisely honest nor helpful.  He recognizes the nasty qualities that Mister now displays in his adult life, but isn’t able to fully diagnose it, implying the women around him are to blame.  One has to wonder how much better the world of THE COLOR PURPLE might have been had we been able to fully test Shug’s theory.

Another element that may take some who haven’t seen the movie or the book by surprise: the monsters and villains in this movie about Black pain are not just an interchangeable roster of racist white folk.  (Some of the scariest people in this movie are, in fact, Black men, a fact that would earn it a good degree of controversy and, perhaps, cost it even a single Oscar win).  That said, there are deeply racist white people in this movie, but the one that sticks out in my mind as the most sinister is Miss Millie, the wife of the mayor that attempts to hire Sofia on as a maid.  She sticks in my craw so intensely because she’s a white character that, in her mind, is being helpful!  She’s giving this poor colored woman a job (as if she had asked in the first place).  Even though Sofia refuses, Miss Millie ends up getting her way; Sofia’ refusal gets her beaten by a mob and arrested.  When she’s finally released, it’s into the custody of…Miss Millie, who’s delighted to now have someone who can teach her to drive.  She commoditizes a Black body to feel better about herself.  It’s a profoundly evil character, and she doesn’t even know how evil she is. 

I do think Miss Millie is representative of Spielberg’s discomfort with some of the material.  Millie is given some weird comic material to play; her aforementioned inability to drive causes crowds to start bolting when she hops into a car, which is funny.  But it’s a broader joke that we see anywhere else in THE COLOR PURPLE (and plays out in juxtaposition to a concurrent serious moment), perhaps an attempt by Spielberg and screenwriter Meyjes to find the audience some comic relief.  It’s a good instinct, but it’s acted on in an uncomfortable way.

Spielberg’s discomfort comes out in other, more active ways.  One of the biggest blunders Spielberg makes with THE COLOR PURPLE (and he’s fully aware of this) was the decision to de-emphasize the gay relationship Celie and Shug begin developing.  It’s important to remember this was dead-fuck in the middle of the 1980’s, where homophobia was actively accepted, and a federal government was mitigating an AIDS crisis essentially by pretending it didn’t exist.  In that specific context, it’s a reasonable business decision for Spielberg to have made, especially when you consider he wasn’t yet known as a “social issue” filmmaker in 1985.

However, it’s a lousy creative decision, especially since that relationship is one of the most interesting and emotionally surprising things to happen in THE COLOR PURPLE’s entire runtime.  Considering how much the two characters’ lives have been altered by the same abusive, arrested man, and how limited the role of a woman could really be in that place and time, Celie and Shug coming together in a romantic way feels actively defiant.  But, besides that one scene, it doesn’t get referred to much, or even all that alluded to, although it hangs over the second half of the movie.  I haven’t seen the 2023 musical adaptation, but it apparently features the lesbian relationship with a fuller chest, which makes me intrigued.  One wonders how far into it Spielberg would go if he had it to do over again. 

Anyway, Spielberg’s official response to this softening of the queerness inherent to THE COLOR PURPLE’s text is thus (from a 2011 Entertainment Weekly interview):

There were certain things in the [lesbian] relationship between Shug Avery and Celie that were finely detailed in Alice’s book, that I didn’t feel could get a [PG-13] rating. And I was shy about it. In that sense, perhaps I was the wrong director to acquit some of the more sexually honest encounters between Shug and Celie, because I did soften those. I basically took something that was extremely erotic and very intentional, and I reduced it to a simple kiss. I got a lot of criticism for that.

He stopped just short of saying he would change it, saying the kiss was “tonally consistent” with the rest of the movie, which I would agree with.  But this leads us to the $1,000,000 question about THE COLOR PURPLE: was Steven Spielberg the right person for this movie?

Not to immediately retract from that intriguing, if very loaded, question, but I should mention that I am neither Jewish, a woman, or black, and thus, a lot of my insights to those particular identities are inherently going to be lacking in fundamental, inalterable ways.  I also haven’t read Alice Walker’s book, although by all reports, it is a much lusher text in novel form than a movie can inherently provide.

What I can point out is that this question is not borne from the very sticky, ongoing conversation we seem to be having in modern times about “who gets to tell what stories?”, with great concern over certain types of movies being better served in the hands of underserved demographics (a line of logic I essentially agree with in terms of intent, but which inevitably leads to blatantly unenforceable philosophies of thought such as “gay roles should only be played by gay actors”).  This was a genuine controversy even in 1985; the NAACP protested THE COLOR PURPLE at the time, with most of their ire pointed at its depiction of Black men, who are, as mentioned, complete dolts at best, if not active monsters.  There was real concern that THE COLOR PURPLE was doing more harm than good to the culture’s depiction of Black people, especially when wrapped in the Hollywood Spielberg “feel-good” formula.

For what it’s worth, both Oprah and Whoopi have aggressively backed Spielberg on this, with Goldberg saying he made “a damn fine film”, and Winfrey allegedly saying she wished people would “shut up about it”.  And I will say, it’s possible a stronger, more real, more truthful movie would have been generated from a Black director.  When you view THE COLOR PURPLE as an adaptation of a seminal text, you do have to wonder if something was left on the table.

But…if you view it as a building block in Spielberg’s filmography, it feels like an essential piece of the puzzle.

One can perhaps view this section of his filmography as “the ramp-up to SCHINDLER’S LIST”.  After the visceral propulsion and non-stop thrills and chills of THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, THE COLOR PURPLE slows things down and really analyzes the effects that bodily and mental trauma takes on a person.  It feels like Spielberg is beginning to grow up just a tad, as well as reflecting on his own family and people’s history.

In that same 2011 interview, he stated that he’s never trying to make intellectual career decisions; he just responds to what he responds to and makes his next movie based off of that.  I take him at his word on that one, which begs the question: “what did he respond to in the text of THE COLOR PURPLE”?  To this reviewer, one has to wonder if he connected with the idea of looking back into the past, depicting a world where our ancestors are trapped in a system of abuse, with no legitimate way out or forward, and trying to reckon with that pain (even if, in 1985, that reckoning meant depicting a finale of redemption and reunion).

To be clear, it’s my belief that Spielberg ultimately does a good job with guiding and shaping this film, and I personally feel like a starker version of THE COLOR PURPLE might have been unbearable.  The ending beat, where an older, lonely Mister sees the errors of his ways and facilitates Celie and Nettie’s reunion, feels like classic Spielbergian emotional manipulation, but I also needed it.  I needed to believe there was a world where abusers can rectify their sins, cause it doesn’t happen very often in reality.  I needed that escape.  But, admittedly, not everyone is that needy as an audience member, and would rather have reality depicted back at them.  In that case, Spielberg is absolutely the wrong guy for this job.  It just kind of depends on what your particular mileage is, I suppose.

THE COLOR PURPLE’s ultimate legacy is going 0/11 at the Academy Awards, which seems weirdly fitting.  Good enough to be in the running for all kinds of accolades, but with just enough flaws and questions that you can’t quite justify declaring it a winner in any category.  Still, it serves as an important station in Spielberg’s career and filmography, and one that will inform the rest of the 80s, and beyond.

In that sense, THE COLOR PURPLE is a full victory.

THE TEMPLE OF DOOM and the Art of the Unintuitive Sequel: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

I’ve mentioned it many, many times before in this space, but sequels are as hard to make as they are commonplace.

When you’re suddenly tasked with quickly following up a surprisingly successful movie that you spent years of your life crafting, the temptation is so, so high to just repeat the beats that got you the success in the first place.  The example I always think of is the AUSTIN POWERS trilogy.  The first one?  A perfect combination of silly, smart, and stupid comedy, as well as a vessel for Mike Myers to simultaneously spoof the 60s spy movies he grew up loving and to cram in as many peepee, poopoo and penis jokes as he could manage.  The two sequels?  Save the introduction of Mini-Me in the second and a star-studded opening in the third, it’s…largely more of the same!  It’s the same jokes repeated (sometimes over and over), with the hope of recapturing the magic.

Of course, your other option is to go the entire other way from the original in order to try to create something new once again, at the risk of pushing away the audience that made your original a hit.  The two movies that come to mind are 1986’s THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2 and 2017’s STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.  The former followed up one of the most iconic horror movies of the 70s (as well as one of the most unnerving films to ever dig underneath my skin, pun only sort of intended) with a bunch of 80’s bloody, dark comedy, featuring a scenery-chewing Dennis Hopper front and center.  The latter launched a schism within the Church of Star Wars by asking bold, controversial questions that thrilled some audience members and alienated others (questions such as, “What if a 21st century STAR WARS movie had a story?”).

If the snark wasn’t obvious, I love both of those movies, just as much as I don’t really like the two Austin Powers follow-ups.  I’m an “unintuitive sequel” kind of guy.  My simple demand for any entry in a franchise is that you keep trying to surprise me, which sort of goes against what a Part 2 typically consists of.   How can you keep me on my toes when you’re just playing the hits in a higher key?  Sometimes, you just gotta play a different song and hope people stick with you.

Which brings me to INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, maybe the most famous "unintuitive sequel” that takes America’s favorite archaeologist, the enemy of Nazis and a man who believes artifacts should be sought for preservation and not for power, and puts him in a fight against an evil Indian cult, in pursuit of fame and glory above all.  Oh, and it’s set a year earlier than that RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK movie, with approximately zero of the characters you grew to love returning.  Where the first one had some wonder, this one is grim and dour.  It’s about as unintuitive a sequel as you can get.

It…split audiences at the time!  It even freaked some people out, launching a whole new type of movie rating!  It may not surprise you, then, that I’m largely a TEMPLE OF DOOM guy, even if I think it has one major, catastrophic flaw.  It’s probably the one you’re thinking of.  

Let’s dig into the TEMPLE OF DOOM!

INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM 

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Harrison Ford, Kate Capshaw, Ke Huy Quan, Amrish Puri, Roshan Seth

Written by: Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz 

Released: May 23, 1984

Length: 118 minutes

There are so, so, so many wild decisions made in the creation of INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM that make it a really fascinating watch.

First of all, the movie provides a logical answer to the question that plagues all sequels: “how do we continue the original story, one that was crafted as definitively stand-alone?”  The solution: make it a prequel!  This time, we’re in 1935, one year before RAIDERS, and Indiana Jones is not quite the man of historical ideology as we previously knew him.  This time around, he’s less motivated by “this belongs in a museum” than he is “let’s do this to be legends”.  The objects he seeks are shiny, and that’s enough.

He also has a sidekick in tow: the young boy Short Round (Ke Huy Quan), who splits his time between being a precocious child in danger, and a legitimately helpful fighter and member of the team.  I say “team” because there’s a third person in the mix:  a clueless nightclub singer named Willie Scott (Capshaw) that enters into the fold mainly by accident; she escapes from the opening skirmish at Club Obi Wan only with the unexpected help of Jones himself.

The notable thing about TEMPLE OF DOOM being a prequel is that it’s the kind of move that a franchise usually only makes in order to “fill in” mythology gaps (how did our main characters become the people that we know them as?).  Here, though, if anything, TEMPLE OF DOOM actually somewhat confuses Indiana Jones’ history; he seems fairly protective of Short Round in 1935, so one has to wonder why they’re no longer hanging out by 1936*.  Besides providing us a little bit of an arc as to how Indiana became a little less self-centered (which felt more like an excuse to allow Ford to play Jones a little gruffer this time around), there’s really no connective tissue to RAIDERS here at all.  Really bold!

*Yes, I know there’s an extended universe explanation, that they send Short Round off to boarding school.  My problem with it is that I don’t care.

The official primary motivation for Spielberg and Lucas setting TEMPLE OF DOOM a year prior to RAIDERS was to avoid using Nazis as the primary antagonists again, which…fair enough, I suppose.*  This does wind up with them successfully avoiding that temptation to repeat the beats of the first movie, magnifying it to 120%, then calling it a day.  The eventual departure of Lawrence Kasdan from the project (more on that in just a sec!) opened the door to new collaborators: Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz, who also worked with Lucas on AMERICAN GRAFFITI.  Although there was an initial plan to bring Marion Ravenwood back for this one, that obviously didn’t end up occurring.  It appeared to be fated by the gods that INDIANA JONES 2 was going to be markedly different from INDIANA JONES 1.

*If only God had tried to avoid the same with the 21st century.

Of course, Lucas and Spielberg were in a mood when they made this, too, which undoubtedly contributed to its different feel.

That’s the second bold swing for TEMPLE OF DOOM; its tone.  Where RAIDERS has an old-fashioned, bright-eyed sense of adventure, in the spirit of Buck Rogers, or those old jungle serials of the 30s and 40s, TEMPLE OF DOOM is dark and dour, often crossing the line into actively mean-spirited.  RAIDERS has a very real deference to other cultures (at least, for an 80s movie set in the 30s), with the story delving into Christian theology without ever getting too judgy.  Jones finds friends, well-wishers and collaborators as he hops across the globe just as often as he finds burly men with swords.  The only group RAIDERS suggests is to be avoided at all costs are Germans.

TEMPLE OF DOOM, on the other hand, assumes a worldview that everyone is an evil piece of shit, and continued human interaction is unwise.  India is especially suspicious: its religious cults involve human sacrifice, child slavery, and the ripping out of still-beating human hearts.  Its high society eats a fine-dining meal consisting of scarabs, giant snakes (filled with smaller snakes), eyeball soup, and chilled monkey brains.  Even Jones himself becomes a scary antagonist for about a reel, the victim of mind-control.  The tone was abrasive enough that it convinced Kasdan, writer of RAIDERS, to drop the project altogether, stating “it’s so mean [...] there’s nothing pleasant about it”.  

Oh, and TEMPLE OF DOOM isn’t crazy about women, either.  Where RAIDERS provides us a spunky and capable heroine in Marion (even if, to be fair, she’s also constantly getting kidnapped or defeated in a fight), TEMPLE gives us Willie, a privileged and vacuous nightclub singer who never accepts reality for what it is, assumes a desolate and decimated Indian village has a telephone available for her to use and…just…never…stops….screaming.  Basically, ever.  

So.  To back up just a bit, I actually find its dark and bitter worldview to be really fascinating, even if only because it’s a case of a movie fully assuming the mood of its creators.  As it happens, both Lucas and Spielberg were going through major changes in their relationship status.  Although Steven was about to meet his future wife (Kate Capshaw, who plays Willie), George was in the process of divorcing Marcia Lucas, with whom he had adopted a daughter.  The bitterness and pain of this, along with Lucas’ natural desire to make second installments darker (see: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK), informs why TEMPLE OF DOOM is so acidic.  Hell, it may explain why Willie is such a buffoon; there’s a real hatred behind Capshaw’s character in this movie.

This takes me to my major reservation towards TEMPLE OF DOOM: I cannot bear Willie.

It’s not an original observation (people have been nailing the movie for this character for decades), but it’s one I desperately wish I could buck.  I’d love to watch TEMPLE OF DOOM one time and realize “hey, Willie Scott isn’t so bad!”  But it’s been almost forty years and it hasn’t happened yet.

Don’t misunderstand me: I understand the idea of Willie.  She’s obviously an extension of the “don’t do RAIDERS” again ethos, in the sense that she’s the complete opposite of Marion Ravenwood: she’s incapable, she’s loud, and she doesn’t appear to have any chemistry with Indiana Jones, nor does she have any interest in developing any.  In theory, she should be another fun obstacle in a whole movie made up almost entirely of obstacles for Jones to figure out.  I think the structure of Willie Scott as a character is valid, even smart.

But, the truth of the matter is….Kate Capshaw’s performance is grating.  And annoying.  And persistent.  And not fun for even a second.  And I think that’s the issue for me.  If Willie was a fun snobby, clueless rich girl, we might have had something.  But she’s not.  She’s just shrill, actively trying to keep the movie from moving forward at all times.  I don’t even think she pulls off the “sub-par nightclub singer” aspect to Willie all that well in the opening scene.  Yes, kicking the movie off with a vaguely lame musical number, sung in a different language, is a big swing, and part of the point is that Willie isn’t all that good.  But performing badly on purpose is a unique skill set that is arguably even harder that performing well on purpose (the master of this was probably Lucille Ball).  Capshaw doesn’t appear to possess it.  So, instead of thrillingly terrible, she’s just kinda awkwardly average.

So anyway, I just cannot warm up to Capshaw in this.  And that makes her the single most catastrophic change from RAIDERS to TEMPLE OF DOOM.

The good news, though, is that it’s pretty much the only change from RAIDERS that doesn’t work for me.  Even its frenetic pace, which constantly threatens to be way too much, never quite becomes exhaustive.  Seriously, it’s hard to overstate how fast TEMPLE OF DOOM moves once it begins.  In just the opening reel alone, we get a shootout in a nightclub, a car chase, Indiana Jones and co. hopping out of a crashing plane in a slowly inflating liferaft.  Before it ends, we get a mineshaft roller-coaster ride, a full-on brawl inside a temple, collapsing rooms with spikes and bugs, and a precarious chase on a rope bridge.  It just goes and goes and goes, with just a couple of pitstops for some exposition along the way.  

And, you know what?  It’s great.  I know Scorsese made the infamous remark that Marvel movies were more like theme park rides than films to him, which I never took as fully negative (even though I think it was meant to be) or even really untrue.  But, to me, TEMPLE OF DOOM has always truly had the pace and rhythm of an exquisitely-made roller coaster, the true combination of theme park ride and film.

Also, outside of the aforementioned Capshaw, I think the main performances on display here are pretty great.  Ford playing a slightly more cynical and less-beaten-down Indy is a lot of fun, but it’s even more interesting to see glimpses of the man he’ll become down the line in his interactions with Short Round, as well as his indignity at the slavery of children.  Speaking of Short Round, Ke Huy Quan’s child performance is one of the more comfortable and natural ones in the history of the medium, with something like twenty simply perfect line deliveries.  The moment that I rewound over and over as a kid was him, though, doesn’t involve a line at all: it’s him at the maharaja’s palace, screaming and running away from the line of female dancers approaching him. 

I even think Amish Puri is one of the more underrated villains in the entire Indiana Jones filmography.  Yeah, Mola Ram is painted very broadly, but it’s a fun broad (standing in stark contrast to Willie Scott), an unrepentant leader of a human sacrifice cult, and boy does this guy like sacrificing humans.  Puri’s career was otherwise exclusively based out of India, but he made his name off of villain roles.  His particular skill there translates beautifully in TEMPLE OF DOOM.  He’s imposing, scary enough that it freaked me out just a bit as a kid, and you can’t wait for Indiana Jones to get the upper hand by the end.  If you’re not going to do Nazis again, how much more would you want than that?

The last major thing I love about this movie*?  The beautiful sets.  In particular, the titular doom-filled temple looks so tactile and real, even though it’s so clearly a movie set.  Don’t you want to just wander  around and start touching stuff, just to see what would happen?  Don’t you want to go exploring, just to see what you’d find?  This is an element of filmmaking that we’ve just totally lost now that we have blue-screen, green-screen, and The Volume, and it’s a fucking shame (it’s also a big reason why the fourth Indiana Jones movie is such a letdown, but we’ll talk about that in a couple of years).

*Besides Dan Aykroyd’s micro-cameo towards the beginning.

TEMPLE OF DOOM’s reviews were mixed at the time, although its reputation has improved enough over the years that its Rotten Tomatoes score currently sits at 77%.  No less an authority than Roger Ebert gave it a perfect rating, and, for what it’s worth, Pauline Kael preferred TEMPLE OF DOOM to RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  But many, many others found it unpleasant, and too dark.  A lot of parents agreed, and Spielberg once again found himself at the business end of some complaints, alleging that the movie was too hard-edged for the PG rating it was given.

The thing to remember there is that, in 1984, the MPAA had only four possible ratings: G, PG, R and X.  Yep, there was no intermediary rating between the more family-friendly PG and the decidedly adult R.  We have Steven Spielberg and INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM* to thank for the implementation of the PG-13 rating, which is now maybe the most crucial (and lucrative) rating a movie can get nowadays.  The course of Hollywood history was forever changed by the decision to run the other way (creatively speaking) from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.

*As well as GREMLINS, which also came out in 1984 and received similar criticism about its content.

Spielberg himself has tended to distance himself from THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, stating that the “greatest thing [he] got out of it was that [he] met Kate Capshaw”.  I feel like he may be taking the wrong lesson out of the experience in many ways.  From here, he would enter a period of “responsible film-making”, and one has to wonder if back-to-back films that came with complaints as to its contents started getting to him.  It shouldn’t have.  Messing with ET twenty years later ended up being a big mistake, and I feel like downplaying the power and fun of TEMPLE OF DOOM is an equal error.  No, it’s no RAIDERS, and, yes, you desperately miss Karen Allen.  But it’s also one of the better pure adrenaline action films of the 80’s, with superior filmmaking on display to offset some of its more unpleasant aspects.

And even those unpleasant aspects represent the kind of risk-taking that more big budget sequels should have the guts to perform.  Even when it’s not fully working, the movie is never uninteresting, and that’s probably enough to put it in the top 10% of all sequels ever made.

Ultimately, you’d have to have your heart ripped out of your chest to not at least respect INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.

E.T. and the Light in the Darkness: Spielberg Summer 2 Continues!

E.T. represents something of a fulcrum point for Steven Spielberg’s career.

Depending on who you talk to, his 1982 sci-fi fable is typically viewed as either:

1. the masterpiece that cemented Spielberg as a generational filmmaking talent, a movie unafraid to use unusual story elements as a vessel to reveal emotional vulnerability

2. the movie that exposed him as a storyteller not so much intuitive as manipulative, a creator brazen enough to do anything to get you to cry, even if it means dousing his film with a healthy dose of saccharin.

In my experience, there is an equal chance of E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL being your favorite Steven Spielberg movie as there is of it being the movie that made you swear him off forever.  I truly know both types of people.

Regardless of which camp you reside in, though, it’s undeniable that E.T. was Spielberg’s legacy-maker; it was an overwhelming box-office success, smoking STAR WARS to become the then-highest-grossing film of all time, at over $350 million domestically and over $600 million worldwide.  It snagged nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director; it ended up winning four (Best Original Score, Best Sound Effects Editing, Best Sound, and Best Visual Effects).  It helped boost the sales of Reese’s Pieces, turning it into the premier small round chocolate candy for at least a generation.  It forever cemented phrases such as “phone home” into popular culture.  

More than anything, it proved that, between this and RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, Steven Spielberg was here to stay.  E.T. is an overwhelming success story.  It’s also a movie that I’ve always kept at a little bit of a distance.  It’s absolutely one that I watched quite a bit as a kid; it was almost impossible to miss.  But when I think of my favorite Spielberg movies, poor E.T. doesn’t really come to mind at first.  JAWS?  RAIDERS?  JURASSIC PARK?  A couple of 2000’s outliers that we’ll discuss a couple of summers from now?  Absolutely.  But not E.T.  It’s a movie that holds lots of great memories for me, but it’s never been a stone-cold favorite.

We’re going to try to unpack exactly why this week!  Because there are a lot of tangible things about E.T. that made it a little difficult to fully embrace as a kid, although they’re the exact same things that make it sort of admirable now as an adult.  But also…it’s genuinely hard for me to decide if the movie is fully sincere, or fully cynical.  After my first rewatch of it as a fully forged adult, I’m still not 100% certain either way.  It made for an interesting viewing, if nothing else!

E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Melissa Matheson

Starring: Henry Thomas, Robert MacNaughton, Dee Wallace, Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote, C. Thomas Howell

Released: June 11, 1982

Length: 114 minutes

Even if you’ve managed to avoid it over the past four decades, you likely know the story of E.T. anyway: a visiting alien gets left behind by his family in their mad rush to avoid unwelcome government agents from descending on them.  He ends up hiding in a Los Angeles suburb, in the backyard of a child named Elliot Taylor.  Elliot quickly realizes he shares an emotional connection with the alien, who he names E.T. (an acronym for Extra-Terrestrial).  He slowly recruits his family members to help him escape from the government, as well as get E.T. back home.

One of the most notable things about the movie is just how much of it is shot in shadow, especially during its first forty minutes.  You expect this from the opening sequence, where E.T. gets lost in a forest while running for his life.  But, once we move to the Taylor household, the shadows remain.  His brother Michael conducts a D&D session in half-darkness.  The Taylors eat their dinner in half-darkness.  Elliot’s room is cast in half-darkness as he introduces E.T. to his action figures of Boba Fett.  His sister Gertie hides in a closet consumed by darkness (I guess that one makes sense).

This is a very intentional choice; E.T. stumbles upon a household that has recently been decimated by a divorce that feels both very recent and very raw.  Mary, their mother, falls to pieces after learning little details such as their father being in Mexico (“he hated Mexico”).  Just the accidental evocation of the split by Elliot is enough for Michael to switch gears from making fun of him to genuinely being mad.  This isn’t a family unit waiting to explode so much as one that is crumbling little by little.  Why wouldn’t there be an ever-expanding darkness in the house?

Of course, this isn’t the kind of thing you actively pick up on as a kid, even if you yourself are a product of divorce.  You can sort of grasp it as a story thing (“oh, Elliot’s sad because his dad is gone”), but you can’t really feel it until you’re an adult looking back, which is exactly what Spielberg was when he made E.T; his parents split when he was 19, which is such a weird, awkward time in your life for your mom and dad to get a divorce.  Although broken families have been a theme and feature in Spielberg’s work going all the way back to DUEL, this was the first time he actively dealt with the emotional fallout of divorce.  

But, I didn’t really clock any of that at eight.  I just knew that E.T. made me sad.  It was never so unbearable that I couldn’t ever watch it, and there was so much of it that I enjoyed; I loved the score, I loved the flashes of humor throughout (the top moment for me there was E.T. pretending to be a stuffed animal when Mom pops her head into the closet), I was weirdly fascinated by the design of E.T.; how he’s both grotesque and kinda adorable, a very very difficult trick to pull off.  More than anything, I was taken by the genuine displays of emotions the movie was filled with.  But it’s a movie that just kinda bummed me out.  It’s a feeling that stuck with me so hard that I felt weirdly bummed out by incidental E.T.-related property.  I remember going to Universal Studios one summer and going on the E.T. Adventure and getting a little moody watching the pre-show.  I was just never as much in the mood to watch E.T. as I was, say, JURASSIC PARK or RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK.  So it goes.

But, the fact that it was able to evoke such a strong, foreign emotion as a child, the fact that the movie was sad, hopeful, bittersweet, even a little scary…I kinda love that upon reflection.  Here’s a movie that basically set the bar for what a “family film” could be, and it never really condescends to its young audience.  Melissa Matheson’s script assumes that the children in the theater will be able to handle themes like saying goodbye to loved ones, standing up for what’s right, other-ing things or people that are different than us.  Spielberg assumes the children in the theater will be able to handle actors their age genuinely crying, or getting hurt, or being threatened by adults*.

*Or at least, he assumed at one point in time.  More on that later.

Their assumptions appear to have been correct.  Yeah, I just got done talking about how E.T. bummed me out.  But that’s just my own personal reaction to its particular brand of sad whimsy.  I wasn’t inconsolable.  I wasn’t traumatized.  I don’t know anybody who was genuinely hurt by E.T.*  It was actually good for me to see movies that weren’t afraid to start putting into my mind some concepts that will eventually become realities as life started to truly commence.  This all cuts against the way we tend to treat kids’ media now, with few exceptions: keep it bright, keep it light, put in some pop songs and celebrity voices, and nothing too scary, they’re just kids!

*Unless it was something like “E.T. himself scared me as a kid”, which I get, but is also a different thing.

Of course, the movie isn’t all sadness and darkness.  Once E.T. fully enters the Taylors’ lives, and forges that literal connection with Elliot that causes one to feel the emotions of the other, the movie brightens up (again, intentional).  There are some beautiful moments filmed in complete brightness, the most iconic one probably being all the bicyclists launching into the sky.  My favorite on this rewatch, though, is the scene where Elliott gets drunk at school (thanks to E.T. discovering the power of beer when home alone).  Once he pushes through the phase where he’s falling asleep in class, he reaches a state of irrational bravery.  He can’t bring himself to chloroform the living frog they’ve been given to dissect, so he releases his, along with every other frog in the classroom.  As E.T. watches John Wayne kiss Maureen O’Hara in THE QUIET MAN, Elliot pulls the same confident move to his crush in class, a striking moment of romance in a movie that doesn’t dabble in that emotional realm much otherwise.

(We also get my favorite shot in the whole movie here: the slow scrolling shot of a girl frozen in fear in the middle of the classroom, holding two renegade frogs.)

There are some elements of E.T. that give me a little pause.  Like, I’ve never really known what to make of the Jesus metaphor at the center of it all, the fact that E.T. literally dies and gets resurrected, the fact that (as Spielberg biographer Joseph McBride points out) the film’s poster is literally evoking The Creation of Adam.  This is all very odd (allegedly unintentional!) imagery coming from a director who would very soon be dealing directly with his Jewishness in his work.  Look, I’m not the one to unpack any of this; as I explained in a previous iteration of this blog, when I broke down THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, I’m not exactly a practicing Catholic, nor am I remotely Jewish, so I’m not exactly offended by this possibly unintentional framework.  But…E.T. has always read to me as this lost puppy dog, full of love and wonder, showing up to a household suffering a severe lack of both.  So, when he rises from the dead and there’s this implication that maybe this puppy dog is also Christ, it always throws me.  I don’t know what to do with this.  That’s all. 

Also, it’s hard to be from a certain generation (millennials) and not associate E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL with one of the odder directors’ cuts of the 21st century.  For those who weren’t there: in honor of the movie’s 20th birthday, Spielberg concocted a revised edition of the film to run in theaters.  It was a big deal!  It had its own premiere and everything.  In some ways, the changes ended up being minor: a touched-up special effect here, a re-introduced scene there.  A reference to a Halloween costume is changed from “terrorist” to “hippie”, which seems arbitrary, but 9/11 had happened less than a year ago at that point, so chalk it up to a product of its time.  

In some ways, though, the changes neutered the very nature of the film.  The amendment that gained the highest profile was the decision to remove the guns from the hands of federal agents at the end and replace them with walkie-talkies, presumably to remove the very violent implied threat: that these grown men would shoot kids if duty demanded it.  It’s not easy to source down a contemporary justification for this, but Spielberg has stated that complaints of parents groups at the time weighed on him over the years.  It’s also not hard to assume that this change of heart was a product of the more “responsible” Spielberg that would begin emerging as the 80s marched on.  Kids are vulnerable in so many ways now; why threaten them with guns onscreen as well?

For those younger than me, it may be difficult (or literally impossible) to remember, but there was a very real debate being had at the end of the 20th century that boiled over into the beginning of the next: how much autonomy does an artist have once their art is released to the public?  It’s probably a conversation that goes back several centuries, but it only became serious business to us once it got filtered through the only art we ever seem to care about: the original STAR WARS trilogy.  In honor of that movie’s 20th anniversary, Spielberg’s buddy George Lucas started revising and revamping his magnum opus, replacing subpar special effects with modern ones, and inserting new scenes that he wished he had retained (such as that really horrible-looking Jabba the Hutt scene in A NEW HOPE.

This, of course, missed the point of why we return to older movies in the first place: the escape from the now.  I have my doubts that anybody has ever sincerely wished movies from the past could be updated to look like the present, but even if they did, it wouldn’t be a wish worth granting.  Lucas’ reputation began to erode after all this,* especially when it made it clear that these were now the definitive version of STAR WARS now.  Yes, younglings who now only know Lucas as this revered hermetic figure, there was once a very real hatred towards this guy for a very long time, a fire that was only accelerated once the prequel trilogy dropped and everyone hated it.  

*It should be noted, though, that these Special Editions made a fucking mint during their theatrical runs.  Lucas basically dared us to do something about it, and we responded by giving him money.  Who’s the joke on?

Anyway, it should go without saying that removing some of the danger the kids face in E.T. removes part of the film’s thematic richness.  The world is dangerous and a little scary, and adults don’t always have kids’ best intentions in mind.  Sanding off some of the movie’s edges removes an equal amount of its power.  More to the point…of all the things in E.T. that unnerved me as a kid, the presence of guns wasn’t one of them.  I never even really thought about it.

A pair of positive footnotes to all of this: to his immense credit, Spielberg expressed regret about the Special Edition almost immediately: the DVD release contained both versions of the film and he has never gone back to alter any of his work ever again.  Also, the Special Edition of E.T. is very hard to track down now; the original version is the default one you’ll see if you buy the movie on physical media or streaming, putting Spielberg in stark contrast with his friend George Lucas.  It does seem like Spielberg learned something about himself in the aftermath of this unforced error, and you have to genuinely give him credit for that.

The last thing I wanted to mention about E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL before I close out: the performances are almost uniformly stellar.  Of the adults, Peter Coyote’s “Keys” was the standout for me, elevating a character that really is barebones on the page (his name is only generated from the constantly-jangling “keys” on his belt, giving him the impression of an Old West villain) and turning him into…well, neither a good or bad guy, necessarily.  He really does try to save E.T., and tries to be as kind as possible to Elliott once he fails to (Keys himself was once a young boy who believed in aliens).  However, he ultimately can’t help but be accidentally destructive in the way only adults can be (much like Elliott’s unseen father).

Of the kid actors, the three central ones are shockingly good, and two of them tend to get all the ink; Drew Barrymore was a fucking natural in front of the camera at the age of seven, and Henry Thomas carries this entire movie on his shoulders.  His role is immense; if we don’t believe Elliot’s emotions at every turn, the movie could easily have collapsed, and felt a lot sillier than it ends up being.  But the one who I think gets forgotten about a little bit is Robert MacNaughton.  Maybe it’s because he’s the most obscure name of the three; as a result of him retiring from acting in 2002, his filmography is sparse*.  But his portrayal of Michael really stuck with me on this rewatch.  Yes, he does a great job in the earlier sequences, when he plays that needling, teasing older-brother role (he really is being kind of a penis-breath).  But he’s arguably even stronger when he buys into the reality of E.T. the alien, and becomes Elliot’s primary collaborator to get him home.  Maybe it’s because he’s such a pain to Elliot in the beginning, and such a disbeliever that anything was out there, that it hits so much harder when you see his eventual devastation at E.T.'s apparent death. 

*He did return to the business to do two movies in 2015.

So, there’s much to love about E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, even if it’s never quite been this overwhelming masterpiece for me, at least in comparison to other Spielberg joints.  I just don’t have quite the same emotional connection to it that others do (barring that aforementioned sense of forlornness).  The famous ending scene (where E.T. points to Elliot’s forehead and says “I’ll be right here”) never really makes me sad or happy, I just sort of sit there and appreciate the solid mechanics of it all.  And maybe that’s the thing that holds it back juuust far enough from being a five-star experience?  I’m focusing too much on how the movie is trying to make you feel things at key moments, instead of just feeling them?  Although I heavily disagree with the characterization of Spielberg as an emotional manipulator, there were moments in this rewatch that made me at least understand where people were coming from on that stance.

Still, at least we’ve kept access to a version of the movie that remains a little sad and a little scary, and is still unafraid to let a generation of kids know that, yeah, sometimes adults fuck up, and you’re going to be left to carry that burden a little bit.  But, even in a world of darkness, light can come when you least expect it, and that brief light may eventually extinguish, but the memories of it will be enough to help see you through anyway.  

And what else do you need to cement a legacy?

RAIDERS and The Lost Art of Action and Humility: Spielberg Summers Return!

Hello!  Last year, I began a series where I would be going through Steven Spielberg’s sizable filmography sequentially, one decade at a time, one summer at a time.  Last year, I knocked out his 70’s output, a series of films that took him from one of the most popular TV movies of all time (DUEL), to the first true summer blockbuster (JAWS), before finishing with his first major failure (1941).  

This summer, we’re going through Spielberg in the 80’s.  That’ll mean full articles on the first three Indiana Jones movies, E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL, THE COLOR PURPLE, EMPIRE OF THE SUN and ALWAYS.  And maybe, just maybe, a couple of bonus articles to transition us into the spooky season.  But those are only if you’re good and say nice things about me on social media and tell your friends to read along.

Just kidding.  Probably.

Welcome to Spielberg Summer 2: E(igh)T(ies)!  Let’s roll!

Some movies are just so perfect, so tightly woven into the fabric of global popular culture forty-plus years on, that they actively defy any further discussion. 

Or, to put it another way…how the hell does one write an article about RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK in 2025?

I’m really asking.  What is left to say about perhaps the seminal summer blockbuster in the medium of film (besides maybe JAWS six years prior)?  In a lot of ways, the film’s analysis speaks for itself.  It’s a rollicking adventure that almost never stops moving, essentially from its first shot to its famous closing credits.  Even in its slower moments, every line contained within Lawrence Kasdan’s script is loaded with purpose, sneaking in mountains of exposition without it ever feeling like the movie is sitting you down to do so.  Best of all, it’s aged finer than pretty much any movie from its era: it’s just as thrilling now as it was in 1981, a nearly impossible feat.  Throw in a lead performance that shot Harrison Ford into the stratosphere, and you’ve got yourself one of the all-time greats.

Seriously, I could just stop here and hit “Publish”.  But I do want to start this run of summer Spielberg reviews with a little more effort, if not for you, dear reader, then for myself.  Indiana Jones would have done the same.

So…what to do?  Certainly, the temptation is high to break the film down, iconic moment by iconic moment (That big-ass boulder!  “Throw me the idol, I throw you the whip”!  “Why did it have to be snakes?”  The opening of the ark!  Indiana Jones bringing a gun to a swordfight!  “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage”!  “Top.  Men.”)  You could probably wring a 25-page article out of that.  But the initial Indiana Jones adventure has been such a ripe source for tribute and parody that, frankly, pretty much everyone knows it beat by beat, possibly even if they’ve never seen it.  Do we need one more person to gush over that legendary truck chase?

One could also talk about its unique path to the big screen, it being the other “Big Idea” from George Lucas (the STAR WARS saga being the first), a direct tribute to the adventure movie serials of the 30s and 40s that formed his taste in storytelling.  Or how Philip Kaufman was Lucas’ first choice to direct, before a long discussion during a Hawaiian vacation with his friend Steven Spielberg (taken to avoid what Lucas assumed would be bad critical and financial reception to STAR WARS) led to the duo’s first major collaboration.  Or how the original name for the character was going to be Indiana Smith (changed at the urging of Spielberg to avoid comparisons to the Steve McQueen movie NEVADA SMITH).  Or how Kasdan was the third cog in this dreammaking machine, redrafting the script over and over with Lucas and Spielberg until they landed on the version we all know and love (with many potential character quirks discussed and axed, including Jones possibly being an alcoholic or a gambler).

The stopping point for me there, though, is that there are a million articles and books all about those things and, frankly, they’re all written with more wisdom and skill than I would ever be able to muster.  Do we need one more person to point out that Tom Selleck was the first choice to play Jones?

What I do want to dig into, though, is why, even when knowing every frame of this movie backwards and forwards, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK still makes for an incredible rewatch, a film that continuously makes its case as perhaps the single most purely entertaining one ever made.

To be honest, my wife and I had just watched RAIDERS a couple of years ago, as we geared up to see what would happen when we turned the DIAL OF DESTINY (more on that when I do James Mangold Autumn later this year).  I was worried that not enough time had elapsed between screenings, that maybe its ability to thrill and surprise would be diminished.  I shouldn’t have worried; it’s as good as the first time I ever saw it, as a child on a big screen in an old revival house.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about why you could watch RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK over and over and have it feel like the first time, every single time (I know someone who watched it twice in one day a couple of years ago, mostly because he could).  And I think it comes down to two things: the crafting of Indiana Jones as both a larger-than-life action hero and a deeply relatable figure, as well as Spielberg regaining his action mojo after the letdown of 1941.

RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Starring: Harrison Ford, Karen Allen, Paul Freeman, John Rhys-Davies, Denholm Elliot, Ronald Lacey

Written by: Lawrence Kasdan (Story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman)

Released: June 12, 1981

Length: 115 minutes

“I’m going after that truck.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.  I’m making this up as I go.”

Late in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, during a quiet moment before its gruesome finale unfolds, Indy makes a soft quip to Marion that ends up serving as one of the most famous lines from a script that seems almost exclusively made up of famous lines, as well as one of the most romantic moments in the entire Indiana Jones quintology: 

“It’s not the years, honey.  It’s the mileage.”

Indiana Jones’ relationship with Marion Ravenwood* is a tricky one to fully unwind, as it’s one forged from a slightly aged crucible.  With an established ten-year age gap between them, we learn fairly early on that Indy and Marion first entered into a relationship when she was just a teenager, which is one of those things that is functionally illegal in the modern era, but really wasn’t all that unusual in the era in which RAIDERS is set (technically speaking, my grandmother married my grandfather when she was a teenager, and there was ten years between them as well).  Even if it would have been a problem in 1936, the simple truth is that your heart can’t be bothered to care because the chemistry between Harrison Ford and Karen Allen is just so fucking strong.

*It should be said, by the way, that Marion Ravenwood might be one of the greatest movie character names of all time.  Every syllable is perfect.

Anyway, the reason I bring the “mileage” line up is because it cuts to the heart of what is so endearing about Indiana Jones as a character.  Even as Marion acknowledges that he’s changed in the years since he first broke her heart, Indiana knows only too well what has spurred that change.  It’s not his literal age so much as the wear-and-tear he’s put on his body, his emotions, his relationships.  There’s a tacit acknowledgement in the very text of the film that running around dashing away from poison darts and giant boulders comes with a cost.  Eventually, adventures catch up to you.

In essence, what this line has always meant, at least to me, is that Indiana Jones exists in the same plane of existence as the rest of us.  He’s human.  Which means he’s relatable.

This is a stunning conclusion to draw about a character who, at the age of 37*, is both a renowned globe-hopping adventurer and a tenured archeology professor.  He’s also as handsome as Harrison Ford was in 1981; if you didn’t know it, one only needs to look at the plethora of fawning female students that attend his lectures.  To a large degree, Indiana Jones resembles no human being you’ve ever met, and certainly not one you’ll ever be yourself.  

*His birthday is apparently July 1, 1899, as established on the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles TV show.  RAIDERS takes place in 1936.  So, there ya go!

Despite these basic, incontrovertible facts, Indiana Jones also never feels too far away from us.  Unlike, say, James Bond (who most of the time is generally always cool and calm in the face of danger, just as likely to talk his way out of danger as he is to shoot his way out) or any number of CSI leads (whose powers of deduction are so strong that they’re able to anticipate an infinite amount of threats by observing one stray hair on the floor), Jones doesn’t always have the firmest grasp on what exactly to do next.  He wins fights, but he also loses them.  He does the death-defying stunt just in the nick of time, but he eats a fair amount of shit as well, forcing him to figure out a Plan B on the fly.  

This is, of course, the same magic trick that the best MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE entries managed to pull off with Ethan Hunt.  As chronicled in this space recently, the series cycled through a few different characterizations for Tom Cruise’s iconic secret agent (maybe he’s a paranoid computer guy!  Maybe he wears shades and a leather jacket!  Perhaps he’s a devoted family man!) before landing on the one that made the franchise a consistent success: Ethan Hunt is a man driven by purpose (that being to keep the world safe), but is often forced by circumstances to constantly improvise exactly how to follow through on that purpose.

Indiana Jones is essentially built the same way.  He’s driven to go out and throw himself into a pit of snakes, or throw himself from a horse to a truck, not necessarily because it’s his job to recover these ancient artifacts (it’s not even clear to me if he clears a check for doing any of this), but because he’s genuinely wants to see and preserve these amazing things.  That drive comes at a cost, as his villainous rival Belloq, working with the Nazis on the recovery of the Ark of the Covenant in exchange for power, successfully calls Indy’s bluff when he threatens to blow it up with a rocket launcher.  Belloq bets that he won’t bring himself to destroy something of such human value.  He bets that Indy also wants to know what happens when it gets opened.  

He bets correctly.  Indy lays down his arms.

It’s very arguable whether Indy does the right thing here!  Now, the problem ends up taking care of itself: the Nazis open up the Ark and their faces immediately melt off.  But, without knowing that…is declining to destroy a powerful artifact worth it if it means the fucking Nazis get to control it?  It’s a tough call, one I don’t necessarily have an answer to.  But that kind of human fallibility, which is woven into Jones’ very fabric, is what makes him so compelling to watch.  The thing is: you know how movies work.  Indiana Jones is not likely to die at the end of the movie.  But, because we know that he’s laying down the tracks of his plan after he’s already decided to move, because we’ve heard him admit offhandedly to his friend that he doesn’t have a plan, because he’s already expressed the change that comes with doing this shit all of the time, you continuously watch the action onscreen wondering, “how is he going to get out of this one?” 

Truthfully, though, even if none of that were true, the action onscreen is so top notch that it’s still worth the price of admission.  Both at 1981 and 2025 prices.

———

“We never seem to catch a break, do we?”

It’s really, really easy to take Steven Spielberg’s run in the 1980’s for granted.

I was born in 1988; I’m guessing most people reading this are within five years of that birth date in either direction.  There’s a good chance that Spielberg’s status as the premier director of our time, whose fingerprints were all over basically everything we consumed as children, whether it be movies, televisions, or even Saturday morning cartoons, was simply a matter of fact.  Of course Spielberg produced Animaniacs and Pinky & The Brain and Tiny Toon Adventures.  He’s the greatest director of all time!  Always has been since the dawn of time.

I’m not sure that kind of Holy Status was anywhere near a given in the time in which RAIDERS was made, however.  As discussed when we left off at the end of last year’s Spielberg Summer, 1941 was a high-profile, star-studded disappointment that ended this fairly impressive run (THE SUGARLAND EXPRESS, JAWS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND) the young director had been on since DUEL hit TV screens in 1971.  Spielberg was indeed fallible!  What made 1941’s failure even more notable is that the palpable sense for action and blocking appeared to completely elude him during the making of what turned out to be an overlong, leaden, somewhat desperate wartime comedy.  It’s not the worst movie he, nor his contemporaries, would end up making.  But it still represented something of a blow.  Who knows how a young hotshot recovers from here?

Luckily for us, Spielberg appears to have internalized the failures of 1941 and used them as sources of motivation.  Because what is so striking about RAIDERS, especially when coming off of 1941, is how clear and narratively driven basically every single action scene is.  It can also be a source of sneaking in exposition, using these action sequences as a way to establish the characters in our story.

The whole opening scene serves as a testament to that mentality, using action to establish story and character.  As Indiana and his weaselly guide Satipo (played by a very young Alfred Molina) go deeper and deeper into a Peruvian temple, we see the death and destruction that awaited people who have dared to explore in the past.  We get all that tactile goodness of this cool temple set; the spiky booby-traps, the sunlight triggers, the giant crevasses, all that stuff that undoubtedly sparked an idea for a Disneyland ride a decade later.  More than anything, we see Indy relying on his education to survive.  He has an established knowledge of where and when to anticipate these vicious traps, and is able to avoid them as a result, all the way to the end, when he’s finally able to snag the Golden Idol from its throne.  Indy knows that extraction will lead to another trap.  He even comes prepared; he immediately swaps the idol with a bag of sand that weighs about the same.

Even with his vast knowledge, though, Indiana Jones isn’t infallible.  The sand isn’t heavy enough.  Trap triggered.  Oops. 

From there, it’s a run back through everything we just saw a couple of minutes ago, only with more immediate danger.  Satipo betrays Indy in order to take the idol himself (only to reach a spiky death seconds later).  Indy mistimes a jump over the crevasse, crawling out with only seconds to spare.  Oh, and there’s that famous giant boulder coming down to mess everything up.  Indy now shifts gears to rely on his wits rather than his smarts.  Even though he’s ultimately successful, coming out alive with idol in hand, it’s for naught.  Belloq turned out to have the jump on him, taking the idol away from him, native army backing him up.  Even with all of his smarts and instincts, Indiana Jones can snag a defeat from the jaws of victory.

Jones is able to get away in the nick of time, hopping onto his getaway prop plane as it’s already getting ready to take off.  This, of course, leads to him discovering a snake in his seat, resulting in us learning that he’s terrified of snakes because of course this would be the one thing in the whole damn day that would cause him to completely fall apart (more character insight!).  We’ve opened the movie with an instantly iconic thrill ride and we’ve learned just about everything we need to know about how our new hero thinks and operates.  Masterful work from Spielberg and Kasdan here.

That’s a big moment, in a movie made up, essentially, of one big moment after another.  My favorite little moment to point to that illustrates how RAIDERS never misses an opportunity to keep the ride going is the whole “poison date” sequence.  Never forget that this whole section of the movie kicks off with the revelation that the previously-assumed-to-be-friendly monkey that had been hanging around Indy and Marion turns out to *gasp* secretly be a Nazi sympathizer*!  Now that the bad guys know our heroes are in town, someone takes it upon themselves to pour arsenic over a bowl of dates at their lodging.

*In the entire canon of movies that feature a Nazi monkey, RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK almost certainly ranks near the highest.

Naturally, it’s only a matter of time before Indiana grabs a date, and it becomes this little metaphorical ticking time bomb on screen; he flips the date in the air, he flirts with taking a bite before suddenly having another thought, that sort of thing.  The scene is overall a small expository one, but Spielberg and Kasdan are able to turn it into this edge-of-your-seat ride; again, we know that realistically, our main character isn’t going to poison himself and die an hour into the movie.  But…it’d be so easy for him to do it.  We know something he doesn’t and, like, if I could just tell him…wait, no, don’t eat it!   We get sucked in despite all reason to the contrary.

Thankfully, that poison date doesn’t get eaten by Indiana Jones (that honor instead goes to that damn Nazi monkey, rest in piss bitch), and the movie goes on, filled with all of these elements that have stuck with me for essentially my entire life.  Karen Allen’s effortlessly charismatic performance as Marion.  John Rhys-Davies’ Sallah stealing every single moment he’s in (“Asps, very dangerous.  You go first.”).  Spielberg positioning the Nazis as both the biggest evil in the universe, as well as the dumbest sacks of shit alive, our earliest (but absolutely not the last) indicator of Spielberg engaging with his Jewish background.  I could literally list stuff all day.

All this builds the case for RAIDERS, not JAWS, as the purest Spielberg movie, one with all the thrills and action and humility that made him famous early on, with any of the more heart-tugging moments that would create a schism of opinion on his later work (is he manipulative, or a master of feelings?).  If I needed to sell someone on Spielberg as a director with one movie, this would likely be it.

It wasn’t a given. But it ended up being a hell of a way for him to kick off what would become his biggest decade by far.