Steven Spielberg is undoubtedly one of the most influential filmmakers ever to grace the medium. He has, perhaps, become the face of filmmaking as the most well-known director of his time. It is not Scorsese or Coppola or Polanski that the layman will recognize, but Spielberg. This, notes Stephen Rowley, has sadly been Spielberg’s bane. Says Rowley, “He is, in box-office terms, the most successful director ever, and there are few things quite so damaging to the reputation of an artist than extreme popularity.” But, as we see with Chaplin, Hitchcock, and others, popularity does not mean an absence of substance. His breadth and depth of work is impressive enough to rival the above-mentioned legends. And influence (especially to the lengths that Spielberg has achieved), is a byproduct of substance. For Shakespeare continues to inspire artists across the mediums not for his high-profile murders and crowd-pleasing stories of royalty but because he delves to the intricacies of the human experience. And Gaudi is remembered, and studied, in part for his extravagance but ultimately for the universality of his architecture. Contemporarily, will anyone be aspiring to the merits of Michael Bay forty years from now? Probably not.
Spielberg’s professional work began back in 1970 when he started out in television. After impressing the executives he made his first feature, Sugarland Express, in 1974 and became a household name only a year later with the history-altering success of Jaws. Forty years after Spielberg’s breakout, his influence is beginning to reveal itself in the work of emerging filmmakers who grew up with his hits of the 70’s and 80’s. J.J. Abrams is one such filmmaker. Bryan Burk, the producer of Super 8, as well as one of Abrams’ childhood friends with whom he made films, stated that, “Steven Spielberg was at the epicenter of everything that we dreamed of doing when we grew up” (Abrams). And Abrams himself acknowledges Spielberg’s influence on him, saying that, “It’s hard to separate the experience of growing up in the mid-70s and early-80s from the influence of Steven Spielberg’s films” (Abrams). Thus Abrams entire body of work is strewn about with Spielbergian influences. But his “passion project” Super 8, which Abrams both wrote and directed, is so heavily Spielbergian that, we argue, along with Peter Debruge, that the entire film is an homage to Spielberg and essentially a “Spielberg-era nostalgia trip” (Debruge). Even to the point that were it directed by Spielberg himself it would not lose a single beat in terms of its style, themes, characters, etc; and in essence be the exact same film, except without the lens flares perhaps.
In tracking Spielberg’s success one will find that much of his initial popularity, and admittedly part of what attracted Abrams to his work, stems from his mastery of spectacle. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) pushed the limits of special effects. The Sugarland Express includes various car chases. And nothing need be said of Jaws, the Indiana Jones films (1981-89), and Jurassic Park (1993). But his brilliance comes not only superficially in the set pieces, but in the deep grounding of his characters in reality. Says Rowley of Sugarland Express (but it could be easily said of his filmography in general), “Given Spielberg’s reputation as a master of spectacle, it is easy to be distracted by the dizzy choreography of the many vehicles in the film, and overlook the assurance with which he handles the character drama” (Rowley). Abrams too notes this, “One of the things about Steven is his ability to tell stories about people who are real and relatable and grounded, who are going through something insane” (Abrams). Thus we see Hook (1991), a story with fantastic elements and special effects, really focusing on Peter’s (Robin Williams) profoundly human experience of accepting and/or rejecting one’s past; E.T. (1982) centering on the effects of an alien not on collective society but on intimate family relations; and Schindler’s List (1993) targeting the emotional journey of one man rather than the extensive horrors of World War II, although the film gives justice to these as well. Ultimately, as AMC notes, this combination of spectacle and character forms the “rework[ing of] the genre crowd-pleasers of his youth into the modern blockbusters” (“The 50 Greatest Directors”). The spectacle perks up his audience initially, but his characters pull them in close.
Emulating the master, young Abrams loved to experiment with special effects and magic. On one visit to a particular magic store in New York City, he came across a product that would sculpt the rest of his life and career and retrospectively help him understand why he admired Spielberg’s work. This influential product was a “Tannen’s Mystery Magic Box,” about the size of a shoebox with a giant question mark on the packaging. The box supposedly contained (and still contains) all sorts of magic tricks, but Abrams has never opened it (TED). Why? To him, the box represents infinite possibility and is a symbol of mystery that he keeps to remind him of the power of the unknown. Abrams thinks so highly of mystery, in fact, that he states, “Mystery is more important than knowledge” (TED). From this impetus, Abrams imbues his films with added suspense through the element of mystery. It is what made Alias and Lost successful, it is the driving point of Mission Impossible III and Star Trek. But it is perhaps in Super 8 where Abrams employs the element of mystery to his greatest advantage. Harkening back to Spielberg’s Jaws, the monster is never physically shown until the end of the film. In Jaws, of course, this was unintentional because of the consistently malfunctioning mechanical shark. Ultimately these technical limitations imposed on Spielberg during the production of Jaws turned out to be for the better by adding suspense to the film. Similarly in Super 8, we see the destruction and havoc the monster wreaks, but we only catch glimpses of it here and there. It isn’t until the suspenseful climax when we get to see it in full. Abrams was in fact so adamant about promoting suspense through mystery in Super 8 that he never even let the cast know what the alien looked like and forbade them from mentioning details about the secretive parts of the film.
The spectacle in Super 8 is similarly Spielbergian. As noted above, Spielberg’s work continuously pushed the boundaries of special effects for ‘70s and ‘80s audiences and Abrams, in turn, pays homage to Spielberg by including the proper amount of spectacle for his 21st century viewers. Thus, his main set piece of the film, the train wreck, is done in a way that is obviously over the top but definitely dazzles the screen. Dennis Muren, one of the visual effects supervisors on Super 8 as well as a frequent Spielberg collaborator (Close Encounters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Jurassic Park among his credits) notes this explicit connection between Super 8 and Spielberg’s films, “It was pretty interesting coming onto the film, since I worked on a lot of the movies that this film was trying to remind people of. I really knew the type of feeling that JJ was going for because I had done similar sorts of shots for Steven” (Failes). Muren knew exactly the sort of pizazz that Abrams wanted to add into the film, as he had done the same for Spielberg in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Thus Muren’s visual effects combine in Super 8 in a way that is reminiscent of Spielberg’s visually striking films from the past.
But even though Abrams is, like his idol, a fan of elaborate special effects, he actually prefers to describe his style as focusing more on the character depth than sheer spectacle, again like Spielberg. In fact, in an interview with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, he states:
“I love larger than life spectacle moments but what is important to me is that the characters are at the center; that emotionally you know where you are and you’re tracking characters that are taking you through those spectacular moments. That is the most important thing to me, that balance of the intimacy with the spectacle and sort of hyper reality.” (BAFTA)
Likewise in a TED talk in 2007, Abrams stated: “When people do sequels or rip-off movies of a genre, they’re ripping off the wrong thing. You are not supposed to rip off the shark or the monster . . . if you are going to rip something off, rip off the character, the stuff the matters” (TED). So just like Spielberg, Abrams doesn’t simply want to make a spectacle movie about aliens but rather a film about coping with parental problems in which the alien becomes an integral, but secondary, part of the film. E.T., Abrams says, “[Is] a film, really, about divorce, not about an alien” (Boucher); that Jaws isn’t really about a shark, it’s about a man trying to fit into a new city and job; and A.I. (2001) isn’t about the dawn of robots, it’s about a boy trying to find his identity and belonging (TED). Ultimately, for Spielberg and Abrams, it is not the spectacle, but the characters that make the movie.
For Spielberg, often these characters appear in the form of a child or as a father having parental issues. The list is exhausting. In Close Encounters we see Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) neglect his family for his internal, perhaps spiritual, obsession. E.T. is seen masterfully from the point of view of a child in a divorced family. War of the Worlds (2005) depicts Ray’s (Tom Cruise) parental problems set in front of, and given precedence over, a hostile alien invasion. Both Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and Catch Me if You Can (2002) involve father-son tensions. Hook’s main character is both child and parent with fatherly woes. And even Dr. Grant (Sam Neill) in Jurassic Park is preemptively afraid of parental responsibility. As TIME magazine writer Gilbert Cruz notes, in Spielberg’s films “fatherhood is something to be feared, avoided and run away from…until it isn’t,” a theme that is probably, if not undoubtedly, connected to the divorce of Spielberg’s parents when he was nineteen.
The concept of identity mentioned above in regards to A.I. forms a wider undercurrent in much of Spielberg’s work than in simply that single film. Spielberg himself admitted to going through similar conflicts as a kid as he grappled with his identity as an Orthodox Jew, with which he struggled accepting, says Spielberg,
“It isn’t something I enjoy admitting, but when I was seven, eight, nine years old, God forgive me, I was embarrassed because we were Orthodox Jews. I was embarrassed by the outward perception of my parents’ Jewish practices. I was never really ashamed to be Jewish, but I was uneasy at times. My grandfather always wore a long black coat, black hat and long white beard. I was embarrassed to invite my friends over to the house, because he might be in a corner davening [praying].” (Smith)
Besides A.I., similar wrestles with identity show up in Hook as Peter is presented as needing to accept his childhood identity. And the protagonists in E.T. come to know who they are better throughout their interactions with the alien visitor.
Similarly, Super 8 is a story that is grounded in its characters, centers on strained or broken familial relations, and explores the concept of personal identity set among elaborate, “insane,” events. Joe Lamb is a 10 year old kid whose mother was killed in an industrial accident, and whose father, the small town’s deputy, doesn’t necessarily know how to raise a young child. Joe, however, copes by helping his friends make a zombie movie, much to the chagrin of his father. Similarly, Joe’s love interest in the film (if you can call a 12 year old a love interest), is Alice Dainard, whose mother is absent from her life and whose father is the one responsible for the death of Joe’s mother. Both children, therefore, come from broken homes and are suddenly thrown into a Spielberg-like “insane” situation where they must use their wits and child-like innocence to stay alive. Here there is another connection to Spielberg’s E.T. in particular in that the adults contribute to the antagonism. Yes, they, like the kids, try to figure things out as they unfold, but the kids are already one or two steps ahead of them, and if the adults would just get out of the way then the kids would be able to solve the problem. Ultimately, Abrams reveals the true meaning of Super 8 in his comment about E.T., “I discovered later that E.T. was never an alien movie for [Spielberg], it was a story about a divorced family, and only later had he discovered that it had become an alien movie. So it was cool to see that even he had done something like that before” (Abrams).
And so, Spielberg’s films thus provide an intimate look into the real life familial conflicts of his own life, mingled with his childhood struggles with identity, set among impressive set pieces from the films of his youth, in the end providing, in a sense, a meshing together of his personal struggles and the elaborate special effects from the films he loved, ultimately forming a fully complete portrait of his own childhood. And similarly, Abrams’ Super 8 too gives us child characters within broken families, in conflict with their parents, searching for identity, all amidst a situation, conveyed by special effects, that is bigger than they are. Thus, it could be said that Super 8 is an homage to Spielberg, which is true. But furthermore, it can be argued that Abrams, through the Spielbergian influence of his youth, will continue, in essence, to rework Spielberg as Spielberg reworked the genre classics of his day, perhaps ultimately providing us with spectacle film with a level of substance that surpasses even the mastery of Spielberg.
Works Cited
Abrams, J.J., dir. Super 8. Paramount Pictures, 2011. Film.
Cruz, Gilbert. "The Five Ways To Know You're Watching a Spielberg Movie." Time. Time, 3 Jan. 2012. Web. 4 Apr. 2015.
Dawn, Randee. "TV Exerts Remote Control on Abrams." Variety Nov 19 2013: 76. ProQuest. Web. 26 Feb. 2015 .
DeBruge, Peter. "Super 8." Variety. 4 June 2011. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
"Directors' Trademarks: J.J. Abrams." Directors' Trademarks: J.J. Abrams. 13 May 2013. Web. 27 Feb. 2015.
Failes, Ian. "Super 8: ILM’s Production Value on Screen." FXGuide. 21 June 2011. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.
"J. J. Abrams Biography." Encyclopedia of World Biography. Advameg, Inc., n.d. Web. 10 Apr. 2015.
Rowley, Stephen. “Steven Spielberg.” Senses of Cinema. Senses of Cinema Journal, Feb. 2006. Web. 26 Feb. 2015.
Smith, Emily. "The Sally Field Handbook - Everything You Need to Know about Sally Field."Google Books. Emereo Publishing, 4 Feb. 2013. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
"The 50 Greatest Directors of All Time." Amc.com. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
TED. "J.J. Abrams: The Mystery Box." TED. N.p., Mar. 2007. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
