The Fabelmans: What’s in a name?

 Fabelmans, Spielberg, Art, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, A tale 

I am not a big Spielberg fan.  His films have often felt contrived.  I leave the theater feeling manipulated rather than moved, even though feelings have, indeed, been wrenched out of me.  In The Fabelmans, a film that is also a memoir, perhaps it is no coincidence that Spielberg’s muse is a particular kind of artist – a circus performer.  Perhaps Spielberg is equating his films with The Greatest Spectacle on Earth – something not to be missed, but also something that is primarily entertaining and only incidentally edifying, even if there is great potential for that when you martial the resources needed to put together a human and animal extravaganza like a circus or a blockbuster movie.

I read somewhere that Spielberg, like Hitchcock before him, was interested in communicating a feeling state that he experienced as a child.  Hitchcock’s father had him locked up in jail by the local constable, a family friend, for a minor infraction at home to teach young Alfred a lesson.  What Alfred experienced was dread tinged with terror, and he mastered this by inducing that feeling in his audiences.  For Spielberg the Ur experience was the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.  And the feeling associated with this might best be understood as a yearning – a wish to repair something that is broken and over which you have little control – the wish to help ET phone home so that he can be reunited comes to mind.  So, I was interested to see how this film would interrogate that emotional territory not in a displaced form but when confronted directly.

Of course, when The Fabelmans was released we were still under COVID restrictions, and we weren’t in the habit of going out.  I knew that it would be streaming shortly and with the summer movie slate promising to be even more tepid than usual, the Reluctant Wife and I decided to wait to watch it at home because we were both curious about whether this very successful director can adequately capture what drew him to the medium that he has so profitably exploited.

The answer to our question is entrusted to young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), who, as the ersatz Steven Spielberg, ends the film spending a few moments with the person he believes to be the greatest film director of all time, John Ford, where he learns to put the horizon high on the screen or low on the screen, because those are interesting, but not in the middle of the screen, because that is not.  And in many ways this scene captures how Sammy has used film – it is a way to capture the interest of the audience – to pull them into an experience – to dazzle them even.  Film is a bright shiny object that captures an audience in ways that a geeky kid would never otherwise be able to.

That is not, however, how he uses film initially.  He is taken to his first movie – The Greatest Show on Earth (in fact- the circus theme runs through this movie) – and he is traumatized by it.  There is a scene in which a convertible full of people drives up the tracks to warn a second train that the first train has been derailed and the car is hit full on by the train and the people are thrown from the vehicle.  Spielberg asks for a toy train set for Chanukah and replays the scene to try to master it, but his father Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), a brilliant but emotionally constricted electrical engineer, is concerned about the damage to the train set during the re-creation.  Sammy’s more sensitive mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) suggests that he recreate the wreck once more and film it so that he can relive it endlessly by showing the film over and over.

There is a lot packed into that set of interactions and the development that film is both the inducer of trauma, but also the means of working it through.  In PTSD, one of the things that fascinated Freud and that did not fit in nicely with his theory of the mind is that traumatic events are replayed, for instance in repetitive dreams.  We keep returning to the scene of the crime, as it were, and he sees this as not fitting in with his theory that dreams are about fulfilling wishes.  I think that the PTSD dreamer is wishing that the dream would provide a different ending than the one that occurred in real life, but the reality of the loss, of the trauma, intrudes, and we wake up not having figured out how to make this thing that has happened unhappen.

But I think Sammy’s mother intuits something else.  I think she intuits that being able to create the accident will give Sammy the sense of mastery over it.  It will be he that is causing the train to strike the car, not something that is being done to him in a movie theater by another person’s film.  It is he that will be taking something that was uncontainable – his terror at the fate of these men – and containing it, making it into something that he is in control of, something that he has produced.  In the trade, we call this turning passive into active.

There are, then, two parallel incidents that describe Sammy’s adolescent trauma, the trauma that involves a greater loss of control than the death of actors on the screen.  Both of these traumas are the result of his family’s move from Arizona to California.  In this move, Sammy’s mother needs to leave behind the family friend, Benny Loewy (Seth Rogen).  Benny has been like Sammy’s father’s kid brother – another engineer that has followed the family from place to place.  As Burt Fabelman’s career has expanded, as he has been in demand, he has been able to negotiate a place for Benny to come with him each time, but the move to LA is a move to the big time and Benny doesn’t have the chops to make it there.  It is also the case that Benny and Mitzi have become lovers – and whether Burt knew that or not, Mitzi’s depression at leaving Benny makes it clear.  Unfortunately, Sammy has known about Benny and Mitzi’s trysts and he is furious with is mother about them.  His incessant filming has caught them secretly being indiscreetly affectionate with each other.  He edits a highlight reel of them so that when he mother asks what is wrong, he can show her the evidence that he has collected.

The other trauma is that Sammy moves from being firmly ensconced in a peer group in Arizona, where he had a cadre of friends to act in the movies that he created, to being the weird kid at the High School in California.  Paralleling his knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, he becomes aware of the prom king’s dalliance with someone other than his girlfriend.  When Sammy tells the girlfriend, and the prom king finds out, the prom king attacks Sammy and demands that he take back the information – to lie to the girlfriend.  Dutifully (and to avoid more bodily harm), Sammy does this, though the girlfriend sees through his meager attempt to undo his interference.

These parallels allow Sammy to use his camera to work out the complex experience of feelings of loss that his parents impending divorce visits upon him.  He does this by filming the senior class’s day at the beach and splicing the film together to portray the philandering classmate as the golden boy who is everybody’s hero.  The golden boy, knowing that Sammy knows that he is not a hero – both because he is a philanderer and because he has bullied Sammy, is ashamed of the film.  He cries that it does not represent who he truly is and demands to know why Sammy has portrayed him in this manner.  Sammy genuinely seems perplexed.  He does not know why he has done this.

I think Sammy’s perplexity is mirrors Spielberg’s.  This film, written by Spielberg about the formative moments in Spielberg’s development, is inarticulate at the central moment of explanation.  This could be a device on the writer/director’s part, but I don’t think it is.  I think he is left wondering about this and he presents this movie as art – raising the question of what occurred in his own and the viewers mind and invited the viewer to wonder.  He is, like his mother, aspires to be not just an entertainer (she is an accomplished pianist), but, as his uncle points out, an artist. 

The maternal uncle (played by Judd Hirsch in a wonderful turn as the impish and crazy family member who should not be let into the house after the death of his and Mitzi’s mother) has predicted that Spielberg’s curse is that he loves film more than he loves his family.  This is the explanation that the writer/director is offering for his tragic hero – that his love of film – his love of, and the scenes of the film emphasize this, creating scenes, filming them, splicing them together and figuring out how to have special effects – his interest (largely depicted as being in the mechanical and logistical aspects of film making) leads him to be isolated from those around him.

But this explanation does not hold water in explaining his decision to glorify the two-timing bully.  I think a more concise explanation is that he wants to restore a complicated world – one filled with philanderers – to one that is simpler; one that is filled with admirable heroes – people that he can believe in and be comforted by.  His isolation from his family is not caused by workaholism, but by the denial of the flaws that he sees in the world and the wish to portray and inhabit a world that lives up to the ideals that he expected of his parents and his workaholism is the mechanism for maintaining the denial.

Some of the irony here is that Burt, Sammy’s father, is depicted as a real mensch.  He recognizes that Mitzi, in spite of her love for him, and his love for her, is better suited to Benny.  Of course, Sammy’s father is being created now by an unreliable narrator – Spielberg has let us know that he doesn’t show things as they are (the prom king), but as he would like them to be.  Is this movie trying to repair his image not just of his mother – to idealize her desire to keep the family together despite the pain that being separated from Benny caused her, but also of his father, to see him not as the person who was not enough for his mother, but as the man who was too smart, too wonderful for any woman to be able to live with?

I have two weird and somewhat random connections with Steven Spielberg.  The first is really random.  I own the home that his cousins grew up in.  They visited the home and gave me a home video of little Steven running around in what is now my house with his camera, taking film of everything in sight.  I also have a less random connection.  A high school friend majored in film and became an editor and worked for Spielberg for years, cutting the films that we have all seen.  Perhaps my friend’s discomfort with working on those films – he did not see them as art but as popular films – is another factor leading to my wondering about denial and wishes for something better as being at the core of the ways that film has led Spielberg to produce the movies that he has.

What this film has helped me see is that the difference between art and entertainment may be that art invites us to wrestle with the unpleasant truths that are difficult aspects of life.  It encourages us to let go of what we hold dear in order to consider a world that is organized along lines that we find uncomfortable, but the artist believes that if we acknowledge them, we will be empowered to better navigate the complicated aspects of that world.  Entertainment, on the other hand, let’s us leave the spectacle essentially unchanged – or,  perhaps, changed back from our complicated selves to a simpler version of who we are and were – children who are fascinated but also bewildered by the world, and soothed by knowing that there is always a happy ending.  The moral of the Fabelmans is that our heroes are real and we can rely on them - the factures that lie beneath the service do not detract from their virtues - even though this leaves us a little mystified because we never quite come to grips with them.

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