Steven Spielberg: The Quest to be a Moral Male (article)

Steven Spielberg is a phenomenon. He is the only director with five movies on the American Film Institute’s list of 100 best motion pictures and he has directed two of the most highly attended films of all time. His movies are the highest grossing of any director in the history of cinema. Not surprisingly, Spielberg is the third richest individual in Hollywood, and ranks 164^th on the Forbes list

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of 400 wealthiest Americans. Of the 29 films he has directed, ten of them have historical subject matters. His astounding creativity, popularity, and concern with the past make him a good candidate for psychohistorical examination. Understanding Spielberg’s trajectory entails how he emerged from a certain family milieu, and with specific psychological issues. As he says, “Hardly a single one of my films isn’t based on something that happened in my childhood” (Schickel, Steven Spielberg, 2012, 1).

Steven was born on December 18, 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio the eldest child of Arnold Spielberg and Leah Posner Spielberg, an Orthodox Jewish couple. Three of Steven’s grandparents were part of the great immigration wave before World War I. Arnold’s life mirrored the recent phenomenon in American life. As with so many Depression-era young men, he was in the Army during World War II. Again, like so many of his generation, the GI Bill financed his bachelor’s degree. Arnold’s was in electrical engineering. Once his career started, instead of being rooted in one place, the workaholic moved his family for work reasons. First he worked in his hometown of Cincinnati, and later in New Jersey, Arizona, and California.

All this time, Arnold was making a number of advances in the computer field. Still, living in different places with an often absent father did not sit well with Steven. He says that after finally getting friends and being acclimated, the family would move; “This happened to me four major times in my life. And the older I got the harder it got. E.T. reflects a lot of that” (McBride, Steven Spielberg, 2010, 47).

The moves unsettled Steven’s mother. Leah had been a talented classical pianist, but gave up her studies, if not piano playing, when she became a full-time mother, eventually having four children. In Phoenix, she felt out of place. Arnold’s workaholic tendencies meant she bore most of the child care responsibilities. In their bedroom in Arizona, Arnold and Leah would argue most nights. The children could hear them. Somewhere during this time, Leah began an affair with a family friend, and Leah and Arnold divorced in 1966. Steven resented his father. A number of Spielberg’s movies show unhappy or disrupted suburban families. Though his father encouraged Steven, he was also critical of his only son, and the son reciprocated. As Steven told Lesley Stahl, he blamed his father for the divorce, even after he found out that Leah left Arnold for another man. He put his mother “on a pedestal… it

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was easier for me to blame him” (Stahl “Spielberg: A director’s life reflected in film,” 60 Minutes, 2012). Steven admits to being angry at his father for “many, many, many wasted years.” As Stahl notes, an absent father busy with his job is a character type recurring in many of his films.

Out of all this disruption, other strands in his movies include a concern with how a man can be moral amidst challenges, and there is a focus on childhood and youth. According to Nigel Morris, in the 1980s Spielberg had a reputation “as a director of adolescent fantasy,” and was “saddled with a Peter Pan image” (The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light, 2007, 178, 73). Another recurring motif is an adult male in dangerous or threatening situations. The protagonist may have had moral lapses or committed unethical actions, but somehow comes back to doing the right thing, or pays consequences for questionable conduct. Spielberg values men becoming moral after trials and tribulations.

In Jaws (1975), there are four main male characters: mayor, police chief, oceanographer, and shark hunter. The mayor, Larry Vaughn, is an opportunistic official. The police chief, Martin Brody, is a family man with a wife and two children. There is an unattached oceanographer, Matt Hooper. Finally, there is the renegade Quint, a navy veteran haunted by killer sharks in the war. In this Watergate era film, the mayor suppresses that a killer shark is preying on the town. Brody defers to his superior and goes along with the cover up. After another victim is killed, the parents confront the chief. Brody admits his fault.

With his guilty conscience, he collaborates with Hooper and Quint to get rid of the shark. Quint is eaten by the shark and Hooper proves ineffective, while the chief ingeniously is able to blow the killer fish up. In doing so does he successfully makes reparations for going along with corrupt officialdom. Instead of an absent father pursuing his own career goals, in Jaws we have a parent dedicated to family and community, admitting his own failures and making amends. Brody the imperfect, honorable official contrasts with the corruption of the mayor, and on a larger canvas, President Nixon and his crew.

In contrast, the swashbuckling Indiana Jones is a traditional male action film hero. He has dangerous enemies, perilous circumstances, and repeatedly takes heroic actions. This fantasy of a superman masquerading as an archeologist has had enduring appeal to

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the public in four different movies.

Since 1993, there have been a series of Spielberg historical films connected to morally complex situations, with male characters becoming honorable and heroic. They were all made after Spielberg’s second marriage in 1991 to Kate Capshaw. He found himself with a large family of hers, mine, ours, and adopted children. At around the age Spielberg’s parents’ divorced, he was finally settling into a comfortable domesticity. Soon some Spielberg films focused on historically significant events.

The first of these is Schindler’s List in 1993. Oskar Schindler seems to be an unlikely hero, a Nazi and a spy. Yet in his own way he fits in with other male figures in Spielberg’s films. Despite his morally compromised past, he risks his life to do right. In this case, Schindler is a factory owner who bribes fellow Nazi officials to protect the Jews who work in his factories. There were over 1,200 Jews whose lives were saved because of Schindler’s actions. As with Chief Brody, Schindler eventually upholds principles and shows heroism existing in immoral, terrifying, and life-endangering situations. It is in character for Spielberg to make a Holocaust-related movie showing how being ethical can emerge in evil circumstances.

In 1997, Spielberg returns to World War II in Saving Private Ryan. Amidst the carnage of D-Day and after, there is again moral action in the most brutal and compromising of circumstances. The U.S. government intervenes to preserve the life of the last son of a family whose other sons have all died for their country. The company commander in charge of this rescue is Captain Miller, portrayed by Tom Hanks. The solder being protected is Private Ryan, played by Matt Damon. During the course of the film, many of Miller’s soldiers other than Ryan lose their lives. They have died to save one man; without this mission they might have survived. The last to succumb is Captain Miller. As Miller is dying, he says to Private Ryan, “earn this…earn it.” The film then shifts: Ryan is an old man at the cemetery where Captain Miller is buried. Ryan turns to his wife and says, “Tell me I’ve led a good life, tell me I’m a good man.” Ryan knows many have died to save him. How could the course of his life undo these deaths? The barbarity of war leaves a stain on many, some lose faith in a moral order and their own virtue. Amidst the evils of war, Spielberg shows how no one remains unscathed, yet Miller, Ryan, and Spielberg search for the morality, the goodness amidst the moral violations inherent in

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modern war. How to be a good man in perilous circumstances is a recurring motif for Spielberg.

Munich from 2005 is the most morally complex of his historical movies. At the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Palestinian terrorists kill 11 Israeli athletes. Israel’s government plans to murder all those who took the lives of their young men. The film is the story of how these terrorists were hunted down and killed; it is based on George Jonas’s book, Vengeance (1984). There is an Old Testament eye for an eye element in this Israeli operation. To many, this retaliation is highly moral; to others it raises questions. The Israeli government authorizes Avner Kaufman to organize an independent team of assassins. They target and kill most of the original terrorists. Some of the Israelis were also slain, and Avner’s group also murdered a woman who killed one of their own. It also appears that the CIA is protecting the mastermind of the Munich attack. The line between justified revenge and other motivations gets blurred. Avner begins to doubt that all the Arabs targeted for elimination were actually Munich killers. He feels used, becomes disillusioned, and tires of all the betrayals and brutality.

Avner left his position with the Israeli government in 1974. He settled in Brooklyn with his wife and children, but suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As Spielberg says of Avner, “there is something about killing people at close range… that is going to test a man’s soul…. I don’t think he will ever find peace” (Schickel, 2012, 235). Some of what torments Avner is whether all this slaughter made any difference. With a view of the Empire State building, he meets his Israeli boss in Brooklyn and asks him, “Did we accomplish anything at all? Every man we killed has been replaced by worse. Did we kill to replace the terrorist leadership or the Palestinian leadership?” He is not given an adequate answer, and refuses his superior’s request to return to Israel. As the two men part and walk their separate ways, the movie ends as in the background the World Trade Center becomes visible. The clear message is that the age of terrorism continues. Spielberg says, “This movie is a prayer for peace” (Schickel, 232). He also says it is about Avner’s “struggles to keep his soul intact” (235). The concern with being moral in an immoral world recurs here as in other Spielberg films. If asked Ryan’s questions about leading a good life and being a good man, it is hard to imagine Avner unequivocally answering yes.

In Lincoln (2012) and Bridge of Spies (2015), Spielberg re-

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treats from the complexities of character in some previous films. Lincoln centers on the period from January to April, 1865, when the President is assassinated. The focus is in Lincoln’s political skill in getting the amendment abolishing slavery through Congress. The President is also shown on the battlefield, with his wife and children, and with various political officials. His calm leadership and level headedness are featured. He appears as a model human and President. Lincoln’s frequent melancholy, spiritual struggles, and his many racist statements about blacks are left out.

The movie ends with a shot of Lincoln delivering his extraordinary second inaugural address on March 4^th, 1865, but omits the rigorous religious self-examination he went through to write this speech. Lincoln says the terrible “scourge of war” was God’s response to the persistent offense of slavery. The nation was punished and suffers because of this peculiar institution. Yet though the inaugural was written during the time covered by the film, its composition is not part of the narrative. Lincoln is a portrayal of a heroic leader, without the moral torment integral to this melancholy man.

Bridge of Spies from 2015 is the story of the negotiations for the release of Gary Powers, captured after his spy plane was shot down in 1960 over Soviet air space. James Donovan, an attorney in private practice, who had been a prosecutor during the Nuremberg trials, and on request defended a Soviet spy, was chosen to negotiate a prisoner exchange to bring Powers home.

There have been many movies about the shadowy world of espionage, and the subject matter of Bridge of Spies falls into this genre and also resembles film noir. In these genres, characters often exist in a morally cloudy universe. As most everyone is not who they appear to be, heroes are hard to find. If someone appears to have noble aims, there is usually reason to distrust them.

As the lead protagonist, James Donovan is seen as a straight forward man of moral integrity, determination, and resourcefulness. He pulls off not only the return of Powers, but of a Yale student imprisoned by the East Germans. He is a Spielberg hero navigating through perilous situations dealing with devious men. Any mixed motives Donovan might have are hidden. In both Lincoln and Bridge of Spies the admirable morality of the lead characters is stressed, their moral struggles are omitted.

Spielberg is only one of a few prominent contemporary film

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directors who will address questions of male morality in perilous situations. As Spielberg acknowledges, many of his films are rooted in his childhood. He has transformed these preoccupations into fully adult concerns. How can men act morally when there is immorality all around? He expresses psychological and ethical questions amidst covering significant events from the past. Spielberg sometimes illuminates and, at other times, evades the complex legacy of history and human character.

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