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Home , Back to the Future, Catch Me If You Can, Gremlins, Home Alone, Hook (filmmaking), Ian Malcolm (character)

‘Steven Phone Home’

The Cultural Ambivalences of Family in the Cinema of

Suzanne Stuart

PhD Thesis University of New South Wales 2011

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements iii Introduction: Family Consumption 1 • Spielberg’s Families in the Twilight Zone • Minority Report? Spielberg and the Family in Critical Literature • Close Encounters of the Familial Kind Part One: The Private of Hearth and Home 1. The Hook within the (Impossible) Family: Standing on the Outside, Looking In – Ideology, Fantasy and Desire 51 • ‘I Fought the Law, and the Law Won’: • ‘Freud’s Robots’: Artificial Intelligence: A.I. • Conclusion: Artificial Resolution 2. The Lost World of ‘Home’: Suburbia, Family Ghosts, and Alienation in Domesticity 106 • Domestic Off-Screen Space in Duel: ‘not the boss in my house’ • Alienation in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial – The Suburbs Become Home • ‘The grass grows greener on every side’: Avoiding Binaries in the Fantasy Suburb of Poltergeist • ‘They’re here’: The Penetration of the Public/Private Home in Poltergeist • The Gendered Home - ‘Ask Dad’ • Implosion: The Death Drive of the Suburban Home • Conclusion: Not Quite Home Yet Part Two: Rhetorical Families in the Public Sphere 3. A Leap of Faith: the Word of the Father? Representing God, Religion and the Family 162 • Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Melodramatic Masculinity in (Domestic) Space – Mashed Potatoes and Spirituality • The Color Purple and the Shadow of Incest – Obscene Fathers and Father-Gods • A Radio to God? and and the Last Crusade: Postmodernism, Religious Nostalgia and the (Impossible) Father- God • Conclusion: Chasms and Symbols 4. Saving Private Families? Fatherlands, Motherlands, and the National Imaginary 221 • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: ‘You can’t do this to me. I’m an American!’ • Exiled in Munich: Monstrous Motherlands • Amistad: White Marble Busts, Founding Fathers and Historical Representation • Conclusion: Disintegrating Homelands, Degenerating Homes Conclusion: Flat Facts and Fairy Tales 279 References 287 305

Preface and Acknowledgements

This thesis has its genesis in a 1993 high school excursion to see Steven Spielberg’s much-hyped , . The film terrified me, despite my best efforts to maintain critical distance. From the moment the glared menacingly out of her cage, to the iconic water glass quivering on the dash as the T-Rex approaches, and of course during the panic-inducing scene as the raptors stalk the children in the kitchen, I was gripping my seat and clenching my teeth. The CGI worked, the plot pulled me in, and all my youthful cynicism evaporated in the darkness of the theatre. Yet, after emerging into fluorescent cinema lights, somewhere beyond my fear, I felt annoyed. I had gone through all that so some fictional character could discover, by the end of the film, that he wanted a family?

Several years later, this annoyance carried over into my academic interests. Everywhere I turned, political values seemed to turn around some strange, restrictive, even offensive concept of ‘family values’ that seemed to carry vast ideological and moral weight. Any purported ‘antifamily’ position struggled in the face of this omnipresent focus on ‘the family’. ’ sanctimonious Mrs Lovejoy comes to mind: ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’ But why did politics, the media, and so many narratives turn around ‘the family’? Surely Spielberg, that paragon of conservative values and the sentimental family, had to take some of the blame? Yet as I commenced my study of Spielberg, I started to change my mind. On closer inspection, wasn’t so simple. Spielberg didn’t monolithically sentimentalise the family and his representations did not reinforce my stereotypes, despite my best efforts to maintain my prejudices. And so, from an angry critique, this thesis morphed into an appraisal of this powerful, pervasive discourse of family that seems to be a dominant undercurrent in Spielberg’s oeuvre, and in virtually everything else. I wanted to know why and how, where and in what manifestations, the family carried so much affective potency, a potency that cannot be simply dismissed as sentimental and manipulative.

Guiding me through my thesis and this seachange in perspective has been my supervisor, Dr Brigitta Olubas, always ready to offer advice, discussion, argument and debate, as well as some much needed humour and perspective, and multiple,

invaluable proof-reads. She is owed thanks many times over. I would also like to thank Dr Liz McMahon, my co-supervisor, for her considered guidance, and Dr Michelle Langford for the opportunities she gave me to think beyond my own methodological paradigm.

On a personal level, I have to thank my family, who put up with my growing intellectualisation of our relationship. My mother was always ready with some practical advice as well as ‘motherly’ comfort, and my sister managed to put up with my analysis of her ‘hetero-normative reproductive imperative’ as she spawned her first baby. And, consequently, thank you to my wonderful little nephew for a different perspective on the ‘cultural telos of the Child’.

And I have to thank my father (who at times seemed to really embody the disciplinary law-of-the-Father as he put the red pen to my work) for giving so much of his time to help guide me through the highs and lows of thesis writing, for helping me to argue and articulate my thoughts, for the diligent proofing, and for his enthusiasm and belief in my capabilities.

And of course, I am particularly grateful to my own little family: to my ever- supportive partner, James, who put up with so much, and was always there with a glass of wine and some not-Spielberg conversation, and to our own ‘children’, Dexter and Kif (if can have ‘family’, then these cats are certainly mine).

And, after it all, despite the analyses, despite all my intellectual scrutiny, Jurassic Park still makes me jump. Even though I now sometimes side with the dinosaurs.

iv Introduction: Family Consumption

At an archaeological dig in the Montana Badlands, Dr. Alan Grant coos enthusiastically over the fossilised remains of a carnivorous velociraptor. Challenged on his interpretation of the skeletal remains, Grant, one of Jurassic Park’s (1993) central characters, whips around to face his young antagonist. Western style, the crowd parts before him, as Grant approaches and looms menacingly over the boy. The camera follows Grant’s predatory movement toward the child, as he narrates a scenario of violence and horror:

Try to imagine yourself in the Cretaceous Period. You get your first look at this ‘six foot turkey’ as you enter a clearing… you keep still because you think that maybe his visual acuity is based on movement like T-Rex - he'll lose you if you don't move.

An ominous bird sound emphasises Grant’s bullying, and despite the crowd, only Grant and the boy are now framed within the screen. He continues, “but no, not velociraptor. You stare at him, and he just stares right back.” Grant glowers at the boy. “And that's when the attack comes. Not from the front, but from the side. From the other two raptors you didn't even know were there.” Illustrating this attack, Grant draws his fingers sharply together, making the boy startle as he is held in thrall to Grant’s story. “Because velociraptor's a pack hunter, you see, he uses coordinated attack patterns and he is out in force today.” Beginning to move, Grant circles the boy, a fantasy attack, and the camera follows his movement as he circles his ‘’, pulling the audience into his movement. Grant is standing in the foreground as he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wicked, scythe-like object, centering it in front of the camera, from which the boy recoils. “And he slashes at you with this... a six- inch retractable claw, like a razor, on the middle toe. He doesn't bother to bite your jugular like a lion, say... no no.” He continues his movement around the boy, menacing him as he moves closer with the claw. “He slashes at you here... or here.” Grant demonstrates by whipping the claw in front of the flinching adolescent: “…or maybe across the belly, spilling your intestines.” He physically drags the claw across the gulping boy’s fleshy belly, and the camera moves slowly in on Grant leaning over the frightened youngster, relishing his fantasy and the effects of his intimidation. He states, with dry pleasure, “The point is... you are alive when they start to eat you.”

1

Dr. Grant’s velociraptor claw makes one more significant appearance in the film: after only just escaping from a T. Rex in the eponymous Jurassic Park, Dr. Grant, who has been forced into a position of protecting the film’s children, Lex and Tim, takes them up a large tree for safety. He sits between the children, and they snuggle up to him, preparing to sleep, secure now that he has promised ‘not to leave them’. He looks a little perplexed, then distinctly uncomfortable. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the claw, ponders it momentarily, then considers the children and chuckles to himself. The little family unit snuggles firmly into the hollow of the tree, safe and cosy within the paternal embrace: Grant promises to stay awake and protect them. And with that, he throws away the claw.

In a purely functional sense, Jurassic Park’s first scene introduces and explains the film’s key villains/monsters, the , as well as establishing Dr. Grant’s narrative trajectory from ‘anti-family’ to a protector of children, from velociraptor to family man. However, Dr. Grant’s possession of the phallic ‘six inch retractable claw’ also aligns him with the violence of Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs. This potent image replicates a ‘Spielbergian’ preoccupation with, on hand, the enjoyment of violence and aggression toward children and, on the other, a simultaneous sentimental validation of these otherwise threatened images of family.1 ‘Family’ throughout Spielberg’s is not a stable value, but is always constructed, mediated and represented through discourse.2 The seeming ‘ideal’, the ‘inevitable’ trajectory

1 Henry Sheehan notes this first scene in his short discussion of ‘murder fantasies’ in Spielberg’s films. He also briefly looks at (1975), Hook (1991), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) and Schindler’s List (1993), arguing that this last film represents not so much Spielberg’s sudden interest in history, but rather an ongoing preoccupation with father figures walking the line between “life-giver and life-taker” and further, that generally there has “always been a dark, almost morbid streak in Spielberg’s work that most people have overlooked in favour of its easier emotions.” Henry Sheehan, "The Fears of Children," in Action/Spectacle Cinema: A Sight and Sound Reader, ed. José Arroyo (, England: , 2000). P. 190. For a brief discussion of this scene, also see Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 205. Žižek also briefly observes that “the dinosaurs’ destructive fury merely materializes the rage of the destructive paternal superego.” Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in and Out (New York: Routledge, 2008). P. xiii. Žižek, however, states that Grant ‘loses’ the velociraptor claw – the symptom of this paternal rage – when in fact Grant voluntarily discards it, in a deliberate turn to the child. See P. xiii.

2 In Jurassic Park, Ann Brigham notes that “the family is both patient and cure, under attack and offensive strategy, natural and engineered.” Ann Brigham, "Consuming Pleasures of Re/Production: Going Behind the Scenes in Spielberg's Jurassic Park and at Universal Studios Theme Park," Genders 36 (2002). Online, no pagination.

2 toward family in Jurassic Park, and indeed most Spielberg films, is marked by powerful ambivalence towards the familial embrace, despite – or, and in some cases, through – the prominence of such sentimental family narratives.3 While also apparent throughout popular culture, it is this little considered aspect of the Spielbergian preoccupation with narratives of family that are both overtly sentimental yet simultaneously marked by violence and menace, that is the subject of analysis.

Jurassic Park’s renowned digital animation and special effects, and well as genre traits of horror and suspense, are crucially deployed in conjunction with the film’s sentimental familial affects. Thomas Doherty remarks that “in Spielbergia, the magnetic pull of the nuclear family… anchors the effects.”4 And, as Grant rejects the claw and embraces the children, the film’s narrative telos is paralleled by that of the film’s antagonists, as the dinosaurs find a way to overcome genetically engineered obstacles to reproduction, breaking their genetic coding to produce ‘children’ of their own. ‘Life will find a way’ the film declares; family and reproduction is the (seemingly) unproblematic universal, a logical ‘end point’ to narrative.5 Alongside the film’s emphasis on special effects and on the terror of young Tim and Lex, the film’s finale overtly concludes that parenthood is, to follow the film’s theme of evolution, an inevitable consequence of life. Yet, in Jurassic Park, as in many Spielberg films, this trajectory toward the family is suffused with ambivalence. The alignment of Dr Grant with the menacing dinosaurs, with his aggression towards children and reproduction, predominates throughout the film, and is only marginally

3 It is interesting to note the substantial differences between the film and Crichton’s novel of the same name – specifically, how it has been turned into a story of family and redemption of fatherhood by Spielberg. In the book, Grant unproblematically likes children, and is not in a potentially reproductive relationship with Ellie Satler. , Jurassic Park: A Novel (London: Century, 1991).

4 Thomas Doherty, "Jurassic Park: Steven Spielberg Launches the Unfolding of a Whole New Communications Revolution," Cinefantastique 24, no. 5 (1993). P. 53.

5 In the case of the Jurassic Park world, this logic of familial reproduction continues into the sequel, where, beyond the imposition of the reproductive imperative upon the dinosaurs and the scientists, the sequel’s dinosaurs replicate the nurturant family model with their offspring. As Karen Schneider notes of The Lost World: Jurassic Park 2 (1997) “the theme of the inviolate parent-child bond is reinforced through… the dinosaurs, who repeatedly respond aggressively to protect their offspring from perceived harm. The world that is regrettably lost is not that of prehistoric animals but of instinctively self-less caretaking – precisely what the father/hero must learn and practice if he is to win the day.” Karen Schneider, "'With Violence If Necessary': Rearticulating the Family in the Contemporary Action- ," Journal of Popular Film and Television 27, no. 1 (1999). P. 5.

3 alleviated by the film’s final familial scene: Dr. Grant, arms around Tim and Lex, looks at his lover Ellie, and the cuts between man and woman promise ‘family’.6 This shot is also intercut with images of pelicans flying over the water, an overt reminder of the film’s suggestion that dinosaurs evolved into birds. Reproduction and continuity for both the human family and the family is therefore evoked in this final scene. But this final, uncanny, reminder of dinosaurs, as the pelicans fly in tandem with the escaping party, shadows the film’s normalising of seemingly unproblematic reproductive discourses.7

While, in general, as demonstrated in Jurassic Park, Spielberg’s films conclude with sentimental familial returns, such resolutions betray a marked ambiguity. In (1974), fugitive parents cross the country to reclaim their child who has been placed in the care of the state, yet maternal reclamation is coincident with familial disintegration and death. Viktor Navorski’s struggle with US border

6 Lisa DeTora complicates this seemingly satisfying conclusion of hetero-reproductive romance. DeTora argues that “Dr. Ellie Sattler does indeed smile at Alan Grant and the children sleeping together. However, she smiles from her seat between Hammond, the children’s actual grandfather, and … Although Ellie Sattler may want Alan Grant to have children, she is separated from the ‘nuclear family’.” She further points out that the dinosaurs “provid[e] both the monstrous threat and the deus ex machina that demonstrate[s] how little the human nuclear family actually mattes in a world where monsters can change gender at will in order to reproduce.” Lisa DeTora, "'Life Finds a Way': Monstrous Maternities and the Quantum Gaze in Jurassic Park and The Thirteenth Warrior," in Situating the Feminist Gaze and Spectatorship in Postwar Cinema, ed. Marcelline Block (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). P. 15-6.

7 The dinosaurs, and the final shot of the pelicans, work as reminders of one of the film’s core anxieties; Thomas Goodnight describes the film’s power drawing from “the most human of concerns, fear of extinction.” G. Thomas Goodnight, "The Firm, the Park and the University: Fear and Trembling on the Postmodern Trail," The Quarterly Journal of Speech 81, no. 3 (1995). P. 227. Further, on this point, James M. Moran remarks that “[i]t is fascinating that dinosaurs, who vanished from the face of the earth more than sixty-five million years ago, can still be perceived as a threat. Perhaps like the Frankenstein myth, the reanimation of dinosaurs has to do with the uncanny, the return of the dead, and the abject confusion of distinctions. … Perhaps their current threat is thus a primal threat: the inescapable fact of the dinosaur’s extinction… points to a fascination with, but abjection of our own inevitable individual and collective demise. The dinosaur becomes an analogy of the human corpse”. James M. Moran, "A Bone of Contention: Documenting the Prehistoric Subject," in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov, Visible Evidence (Ve): 6 (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1999). P. 267. This point is also observed by DeTora, "'Life Finds a Way': Monstrous Maternities and the Quantum Gaze in Jurassic Park and The Thirteenth Warrior." P. 7. Taking such arguments about extinction anxiety specifically to the family, Ann Brigham argues that “it’s not the resurrected dinosaurs but the white, middle-class, heterosexual family that faces extinction.” Brigham, "Consuming Pleasures of Re/Production: Going Behind the Scenes in Spielberg's Jurassic Park and at Universal Studios Theme Park." Online, no pagination. Alternatively, however, Friedman reads the pelicans as “not only validat[ing] Grant’s thesis about dinosaur evolution, but also [Ellie] Sattler’s about the necessity of social groupings, of natural and extended families. It consecrates the community.” Lester D Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Press, 2006). P. 143.

4 security in (2004) is cathartically justified when he is finally able to fulfil the ‘quest’ of the dead father, yet his narrative is set against a background of civil war in his homeland and a bureaucratic technicality that leaves him ‘homeless’ in a New York .8 And despite his reputation as a familial fantasist, Spielberg’s films could frequently be considered anti-family; as Andrew Gordon points out, “[b]ehind the fear of the destruction of the home lies the wish for the burdensome family to disappear”.9 In particular, Roy Neary’s extra-terrestrial rejection of his family and the suburbs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) affects an escape from the home. And, in the highly sentimental Hook (1991), the workaholic father’s newly-found desire to spend time with his children is premised on a violent abandonment fantasy through their abduction by alter-ego Captain Hook. Grasping how and why the ‘sentimental manipulation’ of the family is a Spielberg film works so effectively cannot simply be achieved by categorising Spielberg films as pro- or anti-family. Spielberg’s films frequently suggest a marked ambivalence about their families, potently evoked through Dr. Grant’s sadistic alignment with his fantisised velociraptor that stalks and eats children alive.

Jurassic Park is one of Steven Spielberg’s most famous and successful films, indeed, one of the most popular and profitable films in Hollywood history.10 And, since the seventies, Spielberg has been one of the most marketable names in the industry, directing and producing numerous successful films. As early as 1989, Nancy Griffin

8 As discussed by Todd A. Comer, The Terminal is “based on the true story of Iranian-born Karimi Nasseri who spent the majority of the last two decades living in the Charles de Gaulle airport do to a bureaucratic snafu.” Todd A. Comer, "The Terminal: Film Review," Journal of Religion and Film 9, no. 1 (2005). Online, no pagination. Translated to an American context in Spielberg’s film, protagonist Navorski, of the fictional state of Krakohzia, is stranded in a New York airport and unable to return to his national home, yet also unable to enter the US. There are some interesting intersections in the film’s alternative representations of the American nation through the ethnically and economically diverse airport staff, and Navorski’s overarching desire to complete the ‘quest of the father’ that structure the narrative.

9 Andrew Gordon, "You'll Never of Bedford Falls: The Inescapable Family in and Fantasy," Journal of Popular Film and Television 20, no. 2 (1992). P. 3.

10 For a discussion of Jurassic Park’s phenomenal success and record breaking box-office returns, as well as discussion of the massive global marketing effort behind this success, see Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. PP. 210-12. The film also generated considerable merchandise sales and cross promotion, a point of interest in its own right, particularly as the film foregrounds Jurassic Park ‘’ with its own visual narrative, ‘making its economics visible’. See Constance Balides, "Jurassic Post-Fordism: Tall Tales of Economics in the Theme Park," Screen 41, no. 2 (2000). P. 49.

5 boldly declared that “Spielbergian images suffuse the planet’s collective unconscious.”11 After a short period of working in television,12 Spielberg’s first industry success was Duel (1971), originally a tele-movie. However, due to its considerable popularity, extra scenes were added for an expanded theatrical release.13 His ‘big Hollywood break’ came with the blockbuster Jaws in 1975, and was quickly followed by Close Encounters of the Third Kind.14 Despite directing the expensive box office failure, 1941 (1979), Spielberg regained his ‘blockbuster appeal’ with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and a successful period followed in the eighties with two more Indiana Jones films in 1984 and 1989, as well as the phenomenal success of ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), in addition to numerous successful producer credits. In the nineties, Spielberg began to add critical industrial accolades to his financial success, receiving as director for Schindler’s List (1993) and (1999).15 Spielberg is also a significant and successful producer, and his production work has been frequently heavily branded to market the ‘Spielberg appeal’; many Spielberg-produced films fit in the mould of family-oriented

11 Nancy Griffin, "Manchild in the Promised Land," Premiere 2 (1989). P. 89.

12 There is not a substantial amount to critical literature on Spielberg’s early television work and his tele-movies, although it has been addressed to a small degree. Warren Buckland discusses Spielberg’s short film (26 minutes), Amblin’ (1968), a segment of Night Gallery called “Eyes”, (1969) and an episode of Columbo, “Murder by the Book” (1971). For discussion of these productions, see Chapter Two ‘Pre-Blockbuster Work: From Amblin’ (1968) to Duel (1971)’ in Warren Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster (New York: Continuum, 2006). Spielberg also directed episodes of The Psychiatrist, Marcus Welby,M.D., and The Name of the Game for television. He also made two early tele-movies, (1970) and Savage (1973), as well as directing one segment of four in The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), none of which are discussed in this thesis. For further discussion, see Chapter Two, Donald R. Mott and Cheryl McCalllister Saunders, Steven Spielberg (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986). Also see Neil Sinyard, The Films of Steven Spielberg (London: Bison Books, 1986). PP. 10-3. Spielberg’s film Duel (1971) is also considered one of his early films, and it will be discussed in considerable detail in Chapter Two of this thesis.

13 These important extra scenes added to Duel are discussed in detail in Chapter Two.

14 Buckland notes that a “blockbuster can be defined in terms of the presence of two linked variables: the huge sums of money involved in production and marketing, and the amount of revenue received.” Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. P.17.

15 Spielberg was also nominated for an Academy Award as Best Director for E.T.: The Extra- Terrestrial (1982) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). He has also won and been nominated for several awards in varying countries and in multiple sub-categories. Please see http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000229/awards for full details. URL accessed December, 2010.

6 narratives, well-known examples including the three ‘’ films (1985, 1989, and 1990) and (1984).16

Over almost forty years of directing both blockbusters and ‘serious’ films, genres films and genre mélanges, box office busts and successes, Spielberg has consistently produced popular films, iconic characters and vast publicity. Since Duel in 1971, Spielberg has directed a wide variety of genres with differing success and varying critical response, including war films, melodramas, romance, family/children’s film, horror/thriller, science fiction, and action films. His films frequently deviate from their ostensible genres, splicing them with the tropes of a variety of generic traditions, as do most genre films: Jurassic Park is a , as the cunning velociraptors hunt the innocent children, while the science fiction possibilities and (moral) consequences of gene and cloning technologies are simultaneously explored. The Sugarland Express is a and a social commentary film, as Lou Jean and her husband become local heroes when they break from gaol in order to recover their child, taken from them by state authorities. However, much of his work can also be assimilated into the ‘blockbuster’, a category that he is credited/accused of perpetuating since the massive US summer release of Jaws in 1975.17 Other mainstream films, generally action and science fiction, have generated considerable box office revenue, and have perpetuated Spielberg’s reputation as a movie maker for the masses – in particular his Indiana Jones series, the first three released in the eighties, with a recent reincarnation in 2008, (Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull). Popular science fiction films, Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World (1997), Minority Report (2002) and War of the Worlds (2005) have enhanced his reputation as a fantasist blockbuster director, initiated with Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third

16 Of note, Spielberg has been involved with the production of the ‘Men in Black’ films (1997, 2002), the ‘’ films (2007, 2009), (2006), Flags of our Fathers, (2006), the television series The of Tara (2009), (1988), (1986) and An American Tail: Fieval Goes West (1991), among many others. However, while many of these films produced by Spielberg at times reveal the thematic preoccupations that mark his directorial work, this study focuses on films where Spielberg retains substantial creative control. For a discussion of some of Spielberg’s producer credits, see the chapter, ‘The Spielberg Productions’ in Sinyard, The Films of Steven Spielberg.

17 Nigel Morris observes that “Jaws became the definitive modern blockbuster as both large-scale production and box office attraction, profiting from enormous promotion and publicity as well as ancillary benefits.” (P.43). Morris further points out that “Jaws is a an industry watershed. Ever since, Hollywood studios repeatedly gamble on the one film that might turn around or consolidate their fortunes.” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 45.

7 Kind (1977), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial early in his career. On the other hand, Spielberg has garnered critical and intellectual praise for his more serious ‘issues’ or ‘art’ films, that while reasonably successful, have not all achieved the (massive) financial success generally associated with the Spielberg ‘brand’: Munich (2005), Amistad (1997), The Color Purple (1985), Schindler’s List, and Empire of the Sun (1987). Yet, pervading all these genres, blockbusters, and ‘art’ films is Spielberg’s preoccupation with familial and reproductive discourses, a preoccupation that marks the wide variety of his films, popular or otherwise.

Spielberg now has the most recognisable name of any from any era or nationality. As Krämer observes, “[f]ew artists have shaped popular culture since the as much as Steven Spielberg.”18 As of 2006, Spielberg had directed six of the top twenty-five box office successes of all time,19 and his status exemplifies the shift from ‘the auteur as artist’, to director as ‘lucrative brand name’.20 As is the case throughout Hollywood and the contemporary industrial system, Warren Buckland argues that we can now also understand Spielberg through an alternative vision of the auteur – the auteur as brand name, with a lesser focus on the idea of ‘artist’:

Spielberg’s external authorship is his brand identity. To establish a brand identity, a product needs to express an inspiring, overarching vision, must be easily recognisable, must connote trustworthiness, and needs to deliver on its promises. A product can achieve these qualities only by establishing a

18 Peter Krämer, "Steven Spielberg," in Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London: Routledge, 2002). P. 319.

19 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. Krämer also ranks Spielberg’s box-office success as of 1998: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (no. 35), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (no. 26), Saving Private Ryan (no. 28), The Lost World: Jurassic Park (no. 18), Raiders of the Lost Ark (no. 14), Jaws (no. 11), Jurassic Park (no. 4), and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (no. 3). Krämer, "Steven Spielberg." P. 323.

20 As Warren Buckland discusses ‘the Hollywood Auteur’ (from which he differentiates Spielberg), “we are primarily referring to auteurs of the classical tradition who work inside the institution of Hollywood but are able to react against its mass production techniques and master the process to the extent that they can create stylistic and thematic consistencies (an authorial signature) in their films.” Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. P. 13. Buckland continues, “Spielberg is an auteur because he occupies key positions in the industry (producer, director, studio co-owner, franchise licensee); he is therefore attempting to vertically reintegrate the stages of filmmaking – but, unlike classical Hollywood, the integration is under the control of the creative talent, not managers.” P. 15.

8 value-based relationship with its customers – particularly an emotional experience.21

The brand, ‘the emotional experience’ that Spielberg offers his ‘consumers’ is the constant thematic reprise of family and the emotional affects that are elicited from this narrative preoccupation.22 While many of Spielberg’s films appear to be about anything but the family – quests for lost artefacts in the Indy films, or battles against prehistoric dinosaurs, bush fires, aliens and Nazis respectively in Jurassic Park, Always (1989), War of the Worlds and Schindler’s List – the subtext beneath his overt action/adventure/war/horror narratives are impelled by images and metaphors of the family, whether this be escape from the family, desire to return to its warm embrace, or a conflicted ambivalence about the familial return.

Spielberg’s Families in the Twilight Zone

Accordingly, this thesis investigates a field of discourse constituted by Spielberg’s films and the varying manner in which he constructs, represents and problematises the ‘family’. It is an analytical study decoding the family drama in Spielberg’s films, illuminating and explaining the force and sentiment of the familial discourse that structures and arguably defines his films. As such, it is not a consideration of the origins of his work, or the development of his authorship, or even the ‘growth’ of a particular dynamic in his films. Rather, this analysis considers the fundamental structure of sentiment that characterises Spielberg’s narratives and representation, extending and expanding current scholarship on Spielberg by looking specifically at the importance of his family imagery, so frequently swiftly recognised, yet also critically dismissed or ignored. Premised on how his films work through, in and around imagery of the family, the task of this thesis is to decode the patterns of Spielberg’s filmic language of sentiment and affect. Significantly, within this

21 Warren Buckland, "The Role of the Auteur in the Age of the Blockbuster: Steven Spielberg and Dream Works," in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (London, England: Routledge, 2003). P. 92.

22 Discussion of emotion and sentiment is frequently marginalised, but any consideration of the family must address such affects seriously. As Barrie Thorne observes generally of the family and the family’s discursive construction, “[t]he ideologies of maternal and romantic love both suggest that the modern family, at its core, is defined by emotions.” Barry Thorne, "Feminist Rethinking of the Family: An Overview," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barry Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York and London: Longman, 1982). P. 14.

9 ‘Spielbergian’ structure of the familial dynamic, there are contradictions, fluctuations, permutations, silences and ambiguities that require investigation. Spielberg is an enormously important director because of the particular emotional resonance of his powerful and prolific representations of sentimental, albeit contradictory, family dramas. Metaphors of family animate Spielberg’s films, whether that be through narrative’s psychoanalytic and ideological, even postmodern, structure, and/or through filmic imagery of suburban home, religious familial parables, and allegories of national home and histories. And regardless of the particular manifestation of the family, Spielberg’s representations are situated between the ideal fantasy family and the fantasy of its disintegration, a fantasy that lingers in even Spielberg’s most sentimental narratives.

Vital to this central problematic of the family, Spielberg’s films frequently, and tellingly, perform as quest narratives – his films are focused upon an object of desire (often nostalgic desire for the way things used to be), and his narratives circulate around attaining/satisfying (the object of) desire. And when the object of desire is not specifically the family, it nonetheless permits, creates, consolidates or reinvigorates the family in some way. Accordingly, the operations of desire are vital to answering questions of how to interpret such cultural narratives of family throughout Spielberg films. Can desire be read as the longing for impossible objects that cannot truly be ‘possessed’ or unified? And how does this relate to the family as an object of desire, and the idealised image of the family as ‘redemptive’ or as a source of wholeness, or completion, or social integration? The oft-depicted sentimental reunion with family echoes a desire for an impossible wholeness – whether this is domestic, religious or national wholeness. Spielberg’s films are repetitively preoccupied by (ambivalent) familial reunions and dreams of wholeness and impossible objects. Consequently, Slavoj Žižek’s appropriations of Jacques Lacan in order to analyse culture and ideology suggest both cultural and psychoanalytic solutions to these significant questions surrounding Spielberg’s deployment of fantasy and desire.23

23 See Slavoj Žižek, "A Hair of the Dog That Bit You," in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994), Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), Slavoj Žižek, "Introduction: The Spectre of Ideology," in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London and New York: Verso, 1994), Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991), Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology

10

Significant to understanding Spielberg’s familial discourse is the recurrent narrative return to the differential between the ideal and the fact of family, representing a filmic expression of how desire circulates around idealised fantasies of family. His films represent an endless desire to return to the unmediated plenitude of the infant/mother dyad, endlessly frustrated by the inevitable mediation of the symbolic in which we exist as individual (and other). As Elisabeth Bronfen argues more generally of popular film, “from the start Hollywood cinema developed fantasy scenarios that produce and propagate, through home and family romances, the relationship that the American subject maintains with the cultural codes and prohibitions that define it.”24 The fantasy of satiated desire is never satisfactorily achieved, except through contrived resolution of conflict, that staple of popular film in general. And in Spielberg’s narratives in particular, the ‘desire’ and ‘lack’ that emotionally invigorate narrative are intimately tied to the discourses of family and their structural relationship to ‘self’ and ‘Other’, to the heimlich and unheimlich. Families throughout Spielberg’s films are absent or lacking, or heavily invested with Dr Grant’s prehistoric violence – family is necessarily and painfully Other, while also representing narrative’s impossible desire to annihilate loss. The overtly sentimental family portrait that Dr Grant manifests with the children as they escape from Jurassic Park cannot be understood without recourse to the ‘strange’ that permeates their encounter with the dinosaurs. Juxtaposed with the nascent familial creation at the finale of the films, the

(New York: Verso, 1989), Slavoj Žižek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London; New York: Verso, 1994). For discussion of Žižek, see Geoff Boucher, "The Law as a Thing: Žižek and the Graph of Desire," in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek, ed. Geoff Boucher, Matthew Sharpe, and Jason Glynos (Alershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2005), Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe, "Introduction: Traversing the Fantasy," in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek, ed. Geoff Boucher, Matthew Sharpe, and Jason Glynos (Alershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2005), Rex Butler, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory, vol. 2005 (New York and London: Continuum, 2005), M Moriarty, "Žižek, Religion and Ideology," Paragraph: A Journal of Modern Critical Thinking 24, no. 2 (2001), Robert Pfaller, "Where Is Your Hamster? The Concept of Ideology in Slavoj Žižek's Cultural Theory," in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek, ed. Geoff Boucher, Matthew Sharpe, and Jason Glynos (Alershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2005), Robert Paul Resch, "What If God Was One of Us - Žižek's Ontology," in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek, ed. Geoff Boucher, Matthew Sharpe, and Jason Glynos (Alershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2005), Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, "Introductory Notes," in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).

24 Elisabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004). P. 71. And arguably, such relationships extend beyond the specific America context.

11 dinosaurs themselves uncannily begin to procreate; the heavy oversignification of the reproductive imperative sits uneasily beside the special effects and the heart-warming story of Dr Grant’s social and familial ‘redemption’.

Such conflicted representations of the family in Spielberg’s films are arguably closely linked to pervading cultural anxieties and ambivalences surrounding current social and political debates about what family means. In contemporary western society, the recent history of changing gender dynamics catalysed by the feminist movement in the seventies have ‘destabilised’ the ‘traditional’ family.25 The political and cultural dynamics within which Spielberg’s films have been created and popularly received are vital to contextualising Spielberg’s preoccupation with family narratives. Such significant changes are crucial to understanding the circulation of ‘family ideology’ within the context of (American) cultural history and throughout Spielberg’s films. As Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner argue about the shifting state of American cultural politics in recent history,

[t]he liberal pluralist consensus that had held the country together for decades was broken by the social movements of the sixties and seventies. The split in that consensus widened throughout the seventies, and previously stable institutions like the family and cultural representations like ‘the nation’ and ‘freedom’ became objects of contestation.26

It is within this milieu of ideological ‘contestation’ that Spielberg’s films navigate the intricacies and ambivalences of representing the family, and most significantly, articulate a dynamic of family imagery and desire significant to contemporary audiences. In this sense, it is not possible to reduce Spielberg’s films and family narratives to either ‘conservative populism’ or ‘radical politics’. Instead, these films

25 For more details about the history of the nuclear family, see “The Rise of the Nuclear Family” Chapter Six in Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (London: Collins, 1976). Also see Linda J. Nicholson, Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). Beyond recent histories of the family, Jaber F. Gubrium and James A. Holstein point out that “[m]any of the distinguishing features of contemporary family discourse - in particular the notions of privacy and sentiment – were either absent from or unimportant to the discourse of primary social relations prior to the last few centuries.” Jaber F. Gubrium, and James P. Holstein, What Is Family? (Mountain View, : Mayfield, 1990). P. 16.

26 Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988). P. 6-7.

12 must be understood within the general ‘split in consensus’ that is any film’s contested cultural milieu.

Significant to understanding the ideological ‘split’ or ambivalent representation of family within recent history, Spielberg’s narratives and ideals of family intersect with postmodern discourse and styles. Spielberg’s films have been produced during the ‘transitional’ stage from modernity to postmodernity, frequently featuring genre- crossing, self-referentiality, audience awareness, pastiche, irony, intertextuality, and emblematic caricatures rather than modernist character development.27 The debates surrounding the cultural moment and aesthetic styles of postmodernism, and in particular, the important intersections and elisions with narratives of nostalgia, are vital adjuncts to understanding Spielberg’s family imagery and representation within his cultural moment. On the surface, the institution of ‘family’ appears to be undermined by the ‘advent of postmodernism’; postmodern flux, fragmentation and simulacra destabilise the ‘natural’, generational bonds and ‘authenticity’ seemingly fundamental to idealised notions of family.28 In this vein, Boggs and Pollard argue that the cinematic representation of the family in postmodernity is now marked by conflict, dysfunction and violence. They suggest that in the current ‘postmodern’ era, “[w]here the contemporary American family is concerned, the prevailing experience is more often that of fragmentation, alienation, and conflict, a trend unfolding over several decades.”29 Spielberg’s representations of family and subjects express anxiety

27 See Robert Philip Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman (New York: , 2000). P. 256. And as Steven Conner argues, “[p]ostmodernist theory responded to the sense that important changes had taken place in politics, economics, and social life, changes that could broadly be categorized by the two words delegitimization and dedifferentiation. Authority and legitimacy were no longer so powerfully concentrated in the centers they had previously occupied; and the differentiations – for example, those between what had been called ‘centers’ and ‘margins,’ but also between classes, regions, and cultural levels (high culture and low culture) – were being eroded or complicated. … It was no longer clear who had the authority to speak for history.” Steven Conner, "Introduction," in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven Conner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). P. 3. Specifically, in reference to Spielberg, Nigel Morris notes that “[o]ne of Spielberg’s characteristics is extensive pastiche and quotation from other films, including Hollywood classics, European art cinema and his own oeuvre.” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 7.

28 Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004). P. 204.

29 Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, "Postmodern Cinema and the Demise of the Family," Journal of American Culture 26, no. 4 (2003). P. 451. Boggs and Pollard claim that “[w]hat we refer to as postmodern films are essentially popular works containing elements of parody and pastiche… and

13 about such ‘fragmentation’ through the repetitive articulation of disintegrating families and the destablisation of familial hierarchies.

Significantly, however, such ‘dysfunctional’ representation are rendered all the more affective and nostalgic due to the concurrent invocation of a sense of ‘pastness’, the (imagined) loss of the family ideal. The connection between postmodern fragmentation and the simultaneous investment in sentimental nostalgia is significant to the dynamic that structures Spielberg’s films and families. The representation of the apparently fractured, ideologically bereft, families of contemporary postmodern culture evokes nostalgia for (an always) ‘lost familial ideal’, contributing to films’ emotional affect. Linda Hutcheon comments on nostalgia that it

in fact, may depend precisely on the irrevocable nature of the past for its emotional impact and appeal. It is the very pastness of the past, its inaccessibility, that likely accounts for a large part of nostalgia’s power… This is rarely the past, as actually experienced, of course; it is the past as imagined, as idealized through memory and desire.30

The frequent invocation of nostalgic longing for familial togetherness and domestic bliss legitimises the pre-eminence of the family ideals, (if not the traditional family), significantly, through the use of such postmodern ‘anxieties’ of alienation, fragmentation and the (imagined) loss of truth and ‘togetherness’. The potent cultural currency of nostalgia is premised upon discourses of contemporary cultural destruction and the opposing idealisation of the past. As Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw remark: “if our consciousness is fragmented, there must have been a time when it was integrated; if society is now bureaucratised and impersonal, it must increasingly reveal a fragmented, chaotic, dystopic universe.” P. 445. Of course, such ‘postmodern traits’ are not limited to only popular films. There are some problems with this overall argument that argues cinematic representations reflect the ‘postmodern destruction’ of the family throughout society. They broadly claim that depictions of the family became more cold and violent in the seventies and eighties (as compared to earlier sit-com depictions), a problematic claim due to the massive variation of films’ familial depictions – between individual films, and even varying representations within an individual film. ‘Postmodern families’, they claim, are “today… rife with insecurity, fear, hatred, and violence, reflections of a larger society veering toward uncontrollable levels of civic (and indeed domestic) violence. The relationship between art and reality, between film and society, seems abundantly clear”. P. 462. Such generalisations about film, family (both those represented and ‘real’), and postmodernism are problematic.

30 Linda Hutcheon, "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern," in Methods for the Study of Literature as Cultural Memory, ed. Raymond Vervliet and Annemarie Estor, Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature (Textxet): 30 (Amsterdam, : Rodopi, 2000). P. 195.

14 previously have been personal and particular.”31 The ‘cultural dominance’ of postmodern ‘fragmentation’ and the undermining of ‘traditional’ familial metanarratives produces a discourse of family that is constantly in flux, emphasising the family as the site of redemption – salvation from a heartless world of conflicting and destabilising cultural debate – even while foregrounding familial conflict and disruption.

The frequent postmodern self-awareness of Spielberg’s narratives brings representations of ‘pastness’ to the fore, even while the films reify the fantasies inherent in the nostalgically evoked past. For example, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Indy flees (pastiched fifties) Russian communists, and finds himself in a strangely ‘familiar’ post-war (fantasy) suburb, green lawns and bungalows lining the street.32 He enters one of the homes to beg help from the family clustered, sit-com style, around the television, blond hair shining. But this family is plastic, the fake town part of nuclear impact assessment zone. The film evokes postmodern delight as the plastic family graphically melts and the town is destroyed in the bomb test – a microcosm of Spielberg’s combination of ironic postmodernism and overt nostalgia, his fascination with the familial codes of representation, and their destruction.33 Such a scene suggests, as Linda Hutcheon notes in her discussion of the way that nostalgia and the postmodern work together,

31 Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, "The Dimensions of Nostalgia," in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). P. 8.

32 The commodification of history (re)produces images of history as cultural quotations. As Jameson points out, of these most easily recognisable quotations, “one tends to feel that for Americans at least, the 1950s remains the privileged lost object of desire.” Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984). P. 67. As Steven Mintz also points out on the same issue, “for many Americans, the 1950s family has come to represent a cultural ideal. Yet it is important to recognize that the popular image of the 1950s family life is highly unrepresentative.” Steven Mintz, "The Family," in The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How Have Portrayed the American Past, ed. Peter C. Rollins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). P. 353. As the subject of nostalgia – for an image, rather than the reality – the fifties were both white and middle-class, a time of familial togetherness and uncomplicated gender divisions that are lampooned in this Spielberg scene.

33 This scene in Crystal Skull is also noted by Joseph McBride, who points out that in “[t]he film’s best sequence… Indy finds himself in a ‘Doom Town’ nuclear test site, [which] parodies government films of the era while annihilating a quintessentially Spielbergian suburban neighbourhood.” Joseph McBride, "A Reputation: Steven Spielberg and the Eyes of the World," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 1 (2009). P. 7.

15 a kind of ironic double vision that acknowledges the final impossibility of indulging in nostalgia, even as it consciously evokes nostalgia’s affective power. In the postmodern… nostalgia gets both called up, exploited, and ironized. This is a complicated (and postmodernly paradoxical) move that is both an ironizing of nostalgia itself, of the very urge to look backward for authenticity, and, at the same moment, a sometimes shameless invoking of the visceral power that attends the fulfilment of that urge.34

Yet, despite this recourse to postmodern irony, or, more specifically, because of it, Crystal’s narrative recoups Indy’s relationship to family through its final narrative closure. Indy, the ever-single ladies-man marries old flame, Marion, after his discovery of their son. The film offers a restored family as fantasy closure to the ironic, distancing image of the melting (plastic) suburban town. The film’s play with ‘reality’ and ‘artifice’, history and representation, brings together the ways in which Spielberg’s affective nostalgia is heavily reliant upon postmodern tropes, and this is particularly visible and important in the cultural construction of family and the ideological nostalgia for ‘lost’ familial unity.

Central to the claims of this thesis, is that while Spielberg’s films appear postmodern on a primarily aesthetic level, they clearly diverge from some of the central tenets of postmodernism in that their narratives and ideology frequently aspire to metanarratives of familialism (most frequently paternalism), religion and the discovery of truth. Spielberg’s films revolve around, if not the actual ‘acquisition’ of authenticity, history or transcendence, a preoccupation or nostalgia for such idealised truths, a key point to understanding Spielberg’s representation of the family. The pastiched references to other films and genres, the play and bricolage of genre conventions, the self-referentiality, intertextuality and self-parody, a preoccupation with style and mimicry, as well as a frequent appeal to ‘spectacle over substance’ are aligned with a conflicted investment in hierarchical grand narratives – specifically the grand narratives of gender, religion and nation that structure, and are structured by, the familial paradigm. There is a balance (sometimes contradictory, sometimes a reinforcement) between postmodern stylistics and metanarratives. The ideological elisions between these superficially contrary forms are particularly significant to representations of the family: the family is simultaneously constructed as a defence

34 Hutcheon, "Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern." P. 205.

16 against the destabilising discourses of postmodernity, yet also as a possible site of disruption, conflict and anxiety. The tropes of postmodernism consistently work with, as well as against, ‘Spielbergian’ sentimentalisation of family, both privileging and undermining this theme.

Minority Report? Spielberg and the Family in Critical Literature

How have critics addressed these fundamental and complex dimensions of Spielberg’s oeuvre? Spielberg’s play with postmodernism and his simultaneous privileging of images of family through overt sentimental representation of the home is often noted, yet simply taken for granted by many observers. Despite a complex approach to postmodernism and the representation of family, Spielberg is frequently viewed simplistically – he offers “an escape into purest fantasy”35 – and he is often critically maligned. Criticism of Spielberg has been as diverse as the films that he directs, and often stems from the ‘branding’ that Spielberg has achieved within the Hollywood economy. Spielberg, both the individual and his movies, have elicited a vast array of critical responses from popular reviews, biographies and journalistic studies to scholarly work – cultural studies, films studies, even psychology and sociology. However, Spielberg’s significant ‘trademark’ ability to produce big budget postmodern blockbusters laden with special effects in tandem with familial sentimentality, in contrast to a ‘high critical’ distaste for action, melodrama and emotional affect, has led to frequent dismissals of Spielberg’s films.36 For example,

35 Sinyard, The Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 8.

36 As Nigel Morris observes of the vast and varying literature on Spielberg, “most books on Spielberg are uncritical hagiographies or highly critical personal biographies, while the films prompt enthusiastic but banal celebrations in cultish science fiction magazines. On the other hand, especially left wing reviewers often sniffily dismiss the films on such grounds as conservative ideology, cuteness, , triviality and escapism.” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 4. And as Morris later pertinently queries of “such a dismissive term” as sentimentality: “why ‘sentimentality rather than ‘emotion’?” P. 379-80. Or, as noted in a short aside by Meaghan Morris, “too Spielberg, i.e., sentimentally redemptive” has become a negative descriptor for films even beyond Spielberg’s own oeuvre. Meaghan Morris, "Fate and the Family Sedan," East-West Film Journal 1, no. 4 (1989). P. 131. For a discussion of Spielberg and sentimental, regressive, and politically conservative, see Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1986). Andrew Ross replicates Robin Wood’s description of Spielberg as infantilizing and regressive through his preoccupation with the return and restoration of the father. Andrew Ross, "Families, Film Genres, and Technological Environments," East-West Film Journal 1, no. 4 (1989). P. 18. And Douglas Kellner also argues that “Spielberg’s ideology machine all too often summons his audiences to escapist fantasies, conservative affirmation of middle-class values, and the traditional mythic heroes and forms of traditional popular culture.” Douglas Kellner, "Poltergeists, Gender, and Class in the Age of Reagan

17 Roy Sexton argues that, “[i]t is troubling… that his films (most obviously his fantasy- oriented hits, but I would contend his more adult ones as well) are placebos, soothing our troubled times with candy-coated archetypal imagery.”37 Such criticisms of Spielberg apply to discussion of the popular film ‘placebo’ in general; as observed by John C. Lyden, there is the “assumption that popular films represent conservative ideology and little else.”38 In a criticism typical of some of the more negative responses to Spielberg which carries with it an implied contempt of Spielberg’s audience, Gerald Early argues that “Spielberg is well considered because, in part, his films make enormous amounts of money, which means that they cease to be films at all and become entrepreneurial events.”39 Early goes on to suggest that

Spielberg is loved by American audiences because he makes very expensive B movies, which means that he combines hokum and splendor, that indeed he cares very much about richly etching the details of hokum, corn, and trash. As a result, he has bestowed an enormous significance on a mediocre art. His purpose is not to make the any less mediocre but to make it a more grandiose spectacle.40

Early’s points are premised on an ideal of film-as-art that is necessarily the antithesis of mass popularity, that is not generated from excessive money, and equally does not generate excessive money.41 This criticism relies upon a division between high art and Bush," in The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, ed. David E. James and Rick Berg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996). P. 229.

37 Roy Sexton, "'Steven Doesn't Understand No': Masculinity and Escapism in the Films of Steven Spielberg," Henry Street: A Graduate Review of Literary Studies 5, no. 1 (1995). P. 62.

38 John Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals (New York: New York University Press, 2003). P. 31. On the issue of popular film and its detractors, Murray Pomerance wisely argues that “it is certainly hopeless (and illogical) to leap from the fact that [Spielberg] is the most financially successful filmmaker of all time to the conclusion that there is little or nothing of artistic, philosophical and social value in [his] work”. Murray Pomerance, "Digesting Steven Spielberg," Film International 6, no. 2 (2008). P. 24.

39 Gerald Early, "The Color Purple as Everybody's Protest Art," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002). P. 95. Such a comment reinforces Nigel Morris’ observation that “Spielberg’s films are overlooked as manipulatively commercial.” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 381.

40 Early, "The Color Purple as Everybody's Protest Art." P. 95.

41 As Frank Manchel notes in his discussion of Spielberg’s career and the importance of Schindler’s List, “film is a medium where the more successful you are commercially, the less acceptable you are to the critical community.” Frank Manchel, "A Reel Witness: Steven Spielberg's Representation of in Schindler's List," The Journal of Modern History 67, no. 1 (1995). P. 85.

18 and mass culture, and Spielberg’s popular appeal and practices of spectacle and excess, ‘hokum and splendour’, frequently elicits such commentary.

Specifically, Spielberg’s ‘revitalisation’ of the B movie, most obviously through the pastiched and postmodern Indiana Jones films, has led to critics blaming Spielberg for ‘dumbing down’ his ‘manipulable’ audiences with escapist fantasies. In reference to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), Douglas Brode remarks that the film “had the effect of creating an immature audience, whatever its age”.42 Also on Temple, Elizabeth Traube remarks that “[t]his desire to avoid life’s complexities is a basic motif in the Lucas/Spielberg films. Hollywood’s young superbards take no delight in any heroism that operates within society or mastering life’s ordinary and extraordinary trials.”43 Yet film frequently works in the register of escapism and fantasy, and such analysis is representative of the frequent dismissal of the fantasy and science fiction genres as completely abstracted from ‘life’s ordinary and extraordinary trials’.44 And, in this instance, Traube, as well as many others writing on Spielberg, also falls prey to the temptation to place Spielberg and his sometimes colleague and friend together as being responsible for Hollywood’s proliferation of ‘shallow and superficial’ films, focused on action and spectacle – what Robin Wood calls the “Spielberg-Lucas syndrome”.45

42 Douglas Brode, "Visionary Children and Child-Like Heroes: Steven Spielberg's 'Primal Sympathy'," in A Necessary Fantasy? The Heroic Figure in Children's Popular Culture, ed. Dudley Jones and Tony Watkins (New York, NY: Garland, 2000). P. 340.

43 Elizabeth G. Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender and Generation in 1980's Hollywood Movies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). Chapter One co-authored with Moishe Postone. P. 29.

44 As Nigel Morris pertinently asks on the important aspects of fantasy and escapism in the cinema, and for that matter, all forms of narrative and representation, “if escapism is a factor in popular appeal, what are audiences escaping from, and what to? Do audiences really ‘escape’ at all? Why does it matter? Does alleged escapism have lasting effects beyond the screening? Do audiences succumb unconsciously? And how do critics avoid implication?” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 6.

45 Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. P. 165. Andrew Ross also replicates this paradigm that conflates Lucas and Spielberg, Ross, "Families, Film Genres, and Technological Environments." P. 16- 18. Also see this conflation in Susan Aronstein, "'Not Exactly a Knight': Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the Indiana Jones Trilogy," Cinema Journal 34, no. 4 (1995). For a discussion of the simplistic intertwining of the careers of Spielberg and Lucas, and why Spielberg needs to be considered independently of Lucas, see Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. PP. 105-9.

19 While Robert Kolker recognises that Spielberg’s enormous popularity makes these films some of popular culture’s most important texts, he too, like many other critics, dismisses him as manipulative. Spielberg, he claims,

[f]lourishes at the heart of the Hollywood machine. But it is a peculiar kind of flourishing, in which imagination is put at the service of placation and manipulation. Spielberg’s and ability to accommodate his audience make him, for the moment, the most significant figure of the ‘new’ Hollywood and its economic contrivances.46

In addition to such accusations of manipulation, and the implicit denigration of Spielberg’s large and varied audiences, criticism of Spielberg’s films reduces to the argument that they are not as good, or morally/ideologically acceptable as other films – for a variety of value-based reasons. Critics of Spielberg frequently take an ethical approach to his films, particularly regarding his historical representations. Spielberg’s adaptation of ‘documentary style’ camera work and his use of washed out colour or black and white film in Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List is, according to such analysis, a disingenuous attempt to represent history, and consequently devalues history’s subjects and traumas. As Bill Nichols argues about Ryan, Spielberg “corrupts historical representation. He has replaced ethics with spectacle and history with fantasy.” The film’s attempt to represent fictional narrative in conjunction with researched historical mise-en-scène and stylised documentary- look camera work becomes “devoutly insidious”.47 This form of positive/negative judgement, while important to some analyses, is not productive for this consideration of Spielberg’s representation of desire, fantasy, ideology, and family.

As Spielberg’s films tend to be motivated by spectacle and melodrama, rather than being character driven, a considerable amount of criticism tends to focus on where his films fail against some idealised standard of ‘art’. Yet, considering his films’ massive popularity and Spielberg’s almost unique evolution into a brand name, it is more important to consider why his films work. Critics have rightfully pointed out that his films frequently rely on sentimentality in conjunction with big budget special effects,

46 Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. P. 7.

47 Bill Nichols, "The 10 Stations of Spielberg's Passion: Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Schindler's List," Jump Cut 43 (2000). P. 11.

20 but such observations are often reduced to accusations of audience ‘manipulation’. As Jon Lewis points out, “[t]he films that have so captured the public interest are… blithely dismissed as juvenile, simplistic, and politically retrograde… At the heart of this new critique is a suspicion about pop culture in general.”48 Lewis goes on to point out that “[r]eviewers, critics and historians tend to blame… Spielberg for what [his] films are not”.49 Such criticism swings from filmic analysis to sometimes vitriolic polemic – Spielberg’s family focused narratives are frequently regarded as escapist, childish, conservative, patriarchal, even fascist.50 Repetitively, and dismissively, the term ‘regressive’ is used to simply describe Spielberg, rather than critically investigating the representations and ideologies that such ‘manipulations’ and ‘regressions’ embody. Such criticism is interesting in itself, and indicative of the affective power of his familial narratives. Spielberg’s immense popularity has elicited diverse audience responses to his particular brand of sentiment – arguably both outraging and attracting his viewers and critics.

48 Jon Lewis, "The Perfect Money Machine(s): George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Auteurism in the ," in Looking Past the Screen: Case Studies in American Film History and Method, ed. Jon Lewis and Eric Smooden (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). P. 69.

49 Ibid. P. 83.

50 For further discussion of ‘regression’, ‘childishness’, ‘manipulation’ and the conflation of Spielberg with right-wing, conservative paradigms, see Chapter Eight ‘Papering the Cracks: Fantasy and Ideology in the Reagan Era’ in Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. For a nuanced discussion of Spielberg’s conservatism, see William Brown, "It's a Shark Eat Shark World: Steven Spielberg's Ambiguous Politics," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 1 (2009). Such criticism has been frequently targeted toward Close Encounters of the Third Kind; for example, in his analysis of the musical score, Neil Lerner argues that “Spielberg infantilises both the diegetic and the non-diegetic viewers and inscribes an authoritarian (or to some, fascist) ideology.” Neil Lerner, "Nostalgia, Masculinist Discourse and Authoritarianism in ' Scores for and Close Encounters of the Third Kind," in Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema, ed. Philip Hayward (London, England: Libbey, 2004). P. 103. For another discussion of the film’s ‘fascist’ and authoritarian elements, see also Robert Entman and Francis Seymour, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Close Encounters with the Third Reich," Jump Cut 18 (1978), Tony Williams, "Close Encounters of the Authoritarian Kind," Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice 5, no. 4 (1983). Also see Frank P. Tomasulo, "Empire of the Gun: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and American Chauvinism," in The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001), Frank P. Tomasulo, "Mr. Jones Goes to Washington: Myth and Religion in Raiders of the Lost Ark," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 7 (1982), Frank P. Tomasulo, "The Gospel According to Spielberg in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 3 (2001). Discussing E.T., Phyllis Deutsch simplistically argues that the structure of the family, particularly the maternal imagery, is inherently sexist and stereotyped, in Phyllis Deutsch, "E.T. The Ultimate Patriarch," Jump Cut 28 (1983). A similar argument can be found in William Alexander, "Send 'Em Back Where They Came From: Another Look at E.T.," North Dakota Quarterly 51, no. 3 (1983).

21 In addition to such dismissals, there has been considerable critical literature produced on Spielberg, from a vast range of perspectives, including those that defend his films against these dismissals. Yet, despite this array of work, little of it seriously, extensively and exclusively engages with Spielberg’s oft-cited but rarely investigated preoccupation with narratives of family. As Joseph McBride notes of Spielberg criticism, and its relations to his focus on the family,

[t]he filmmaker’s obsessive, career-long concentration on broken families, flawed father and mother figures, children under duress, and attempts by people to recuperate nuclear families seems to make critics acutely uncomfortable, even it they often displace that discomfort by attacking the dubious notion of Spielberg’s supposed idealization of families.51

While Spielberg’s familial and sentimental preoccupation is widely acknowledged in both popular and academic criticism – he is frequently described as Hollywood’s premier fantasist of the family and suburbia52 – a detailed analysis of Spielberg’s conflicted representations of the family sphere has not been considered in great depth. And further, within Spielberg literature, the box office successes have dominated the critical field, while his less lucrative films have been substantially neglected.53 Successful films are often analysed as representative of Spielberg’s ‘trademark manipulation of the masses’, and from this perspective, his widely acknowledged

51 McBride, "A Reputation: Steven Spielberg and the Eyes of the World." P. 10. McBride further points out, as this thesis also argues, that “Spielberg’s attitudes towards paternalism are far more complex than his critics would admit”. P.10.

52 Andrew Gordon argues that “Spielberg has established himself as the wizard of the suburbs, transforming tract homes into cottages, bringing back some of the magic which has been leached out of our mass-produced, brand-name lives.” Andrew Gordon, "E.T. as Fairy Tale," Science- Fiction Studies 10, no. 3 [31] (1983). P. 298. And as Jill Terry points out, Spielberg, at least until the release of The Color Purple, was “popularly regarded as the creator of the fantasies of the white , the Hollywood blockbuster and perhaps the whitest of white canons.” Jill Terry, "The Same River Twice: Signifying The Color Purple," Critical Survey 12, no. 3 (2000). P. 60.

53 Smaller budget films, such as Duel and Sugarland Express, particularly Sugarland, both early films, have been critically neglected, not having the cachet of blockbuster status. 1941, Always, and The Terminal, also suffer the same problem – while bigger films in terms of budget, they failed to capture the public’s imagination, and correspondingly have received little analysis. The exception is the financially successful sequel, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, where most of the criticism has been subsumed into the first film. While there are obvious similarities between Jurassic Park and The Lost World, the sequel pushes its preoccupation with the family even further; the violent T-Rex has also discovered family values, and the corporate criticism of the first film is extended, also in a familial manner. There are some other exceptions; A.I., while not successful in terms of Spielberg’s standards of box office success, has received considerable critical attention. A.I. will be considered in detail in Chapter One.

22 familial representations can be interpreted as manifestations of popular sentimentality. On the other hand, many of these discussions amount to little more than in-depth film reviews, rather than sustained analysis of the cultural significance of Spielberg’s appeal and the ideologies that elicit such popular resonance.

Given the trajectory of current Spielberg scholarship, questions need to be asked about how and why Spielberg structures ‘the family’ as both the root of, and the end of, narrative and representation. Consequently, this thesis asks, for example in Jurassic Park, why salvation from hungry dinosaurs requires the sentimental reversal of Dr. Grant’s initial anti-family aggression; and why does the film emphasise the embrace of children, and the relinquishing of the claw? As one of the most successful films ever made, by one of the most influential people in popular culture, the shift from Dr Grant’s menacing of a child at the commencement of the film, to the idyllic family portrait of Grant, Lex and Tim in the final shot requires analysis, not only in terms of the specific film, but also more broadly in terms of the preoccupations of Spielberg’s oeuvre, and the cultural and familial thematics that he is so proficient in mobilising.

Of the critical literature on Spielberg, there are extensive studies focusing on his role in the , his early family life, and the importance of his personal life to his films.54 Spielberg himself has frequently referred to the influence of his family – his parents’ divorce, and his own relationship to his children – particularly in terms of more ‘personal’ films.55 While interesting, Spielberg’s personal life is not relevant to

54 For example, Harry Haun’s “Con Artistry: Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me if You Can Recalls Youthful Scams” identifies a link between Spielberg’s personal history of a broken home and of charlatanism with that of the film’s protagonist Harry Haun, "Con Artistry: Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can Recalls Youthful Scams," Film Journal International 106, no. 1 (2003). Another biographically-based review, Alan Vanneman’s article, “Steven Spielberg: A Jew in America”, addresses the Catch Me if You Can’s plot in terms of Spielberg’s childhood anxieties about being Jewish. Alan Vanneman, "Steven Spielberg: A Jew in America: Deconstructing Catch Me If You Can," Bright Lights Film Journal 41 (2003). For an industry history, see Peter Biskind, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex- Drugs-and-Rock-'N'-Roll Generation Saved Hollywood (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). For a thorough , see Andrew Yule, Steven Spielberg: Father of the Man (London: Little Brown, 1996).

55 In addition to Spielberg biographies, also see, Peter Krämer, "'He's Very Good at Work Not Involving Little Creatures, You Know': Schindler's List, E.T., and the Shape of Steven Spielberg's Career," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 1 (2009). For another example of this approach to understanding Spielberg’s work, see Griffin, "Manchild in the Promised Land." Griffin argues that “[a]ll of Spielberg’s glistening myths have been intensely personal. … Spielberg’s movies always illumine the human heart – specifically, his own.” P. 89.

23 this discussion of culturally articulated representations of the family and their popular appeal and success. Biographical details, while important for some approaches to the man, the director, and authorship of the films, do not contribute to this analysis of the filmic representations of family, and analysis of why such discourses are so popular. Spielberg’s personal narratives have little to do with larger cultural narratives of The Family.

Likewise, Spielberg’s significant role in film production and the Hollywood economy, the rapidly changing film industry throughout the seventies with its renewed focus on the blockbuster, and the advent of director as brand and money- maker, have also been the focus of critical literature.56 This is an important element of the commercial context in which Spielberg’s representations of the family have flourished, and such insights remain an assumed background to any study of Spielberg, which must be underwritten with an understanding of this popularity and industrial success. As Jon Lewis remarks,

The increased media coverage of box office numbers and features attending the movement of money within the industry have inextricably linked the films directed and produced by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg to a larger Hollywood story regarding recovery, conglomeration, multinationalization, and vertical and horizontal integration.57

Lewis goes on to ask a question: did the success of Spielberg (and Lucas) precipitate change, or were such industrial changes inevitable? The answer is necessarily a combination of the two. While such industrial revolutions were inevitable, they were triggered by ‘blockbusters’ that necessarily appealed to the particular zeitgeist of the

56 See Buckland, "The Role of the Auteur in the Age of the Blockbuster: Steven Spielberg and Dream Works." For a general edited collection of work on the Hollywood industry and the blockbuster, with frequent reference to the influence of Spielberg, see Julian Stringer, Movie Blockbusters (London: Routledge, 2003). Also see Lewis, "The Perfect Money Machine(s): George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Auteurism in the New Hollywood." For an interesting account of marketing, the family film and the ambiguity of the ‘target audience’ of such films in the eighties and nineties, although not specifically focused on Spielberg, see Robert C. Allen, " Together: Hollywood and the Family Film," in Identifying Hollywood's Audiences: Culture, Identity and the Movies, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 1999).

57 Lewis, "The Perfect Money Machine(s): George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Auteurism in the New Hollywood." P. 64.

24 moment.58 While many of the detailed industrial appraisals acknowledge this point, and outline the box office and budget records broken, and the changes to the way that films were produced, directed and marketed as a result of Spielberg and his success, such analysis must be supplemented with an understanding of the appeal of the thematic content, the specific construction of representations that facilitated such revolutionary commercial change. For the purposes of this analysis, research on the industry and the history of Hollywood is used to support claims that Spielberg’s preoccupation with family representations is a necessary subject of analysis because of his success within the industry.

Beyond such industrial histories, there is little sustained research on Spielberg that directly evaluates his representations of the family. The studies that seriously approach the issue of family imagery generally focus on one specific film, rather than identifying characteristics that animate his oeuvre. When Spielberg’s families are the primary focus, the cultural significance of Spielberg’s emotional ‘manipulation’ tends to be marginalised, and thus much of the critical literature only notes Spielberg’s preoccupation with the ‘family’. Larger questions of why the imagery of family is such a powerful sentimental device or how and why the family metaphor is capable of such superlative emotional affect have been largely unaddressed. It is tempting to simplistically approach investments in the family as conservative and regressive when confronted with the sometimes saccharine and ‘manipulative’ representation of the family in Spielberg films, but a more sustained interpretation of the texts suggests considerable ambivalence and ideological confusion toward his familial deus ex machina. As opposed to conflating Spielberg as a director obsessed with ‘the family’ and as an ideologue of conservative ‘family values’, Spielberg’s representation of family must be considered in terms of how narrative makes use of such a powerful and ubiquitous discourse and why it is so significant to representation – questions that do not rely on politically motivated theories that either reclaim or reject the family. And, rather than interpreting the specific imagery of each family ‘character’ – the trends and traditions of representing the father/mother/child – it remains to be

58 Robert Baird observes that “[b]eyond a shared ability to anticipate and deliver cross-cultural cognitions, a blockbuster must offer something unique or timely to achieve mass popularity.” Robert Baird, "Animalizing Jurassic Park's Dinosaurs: Blockbuster Schemata and Cross-Cultural Cognition in the Threat Scene," Cinema Journal 37, no. 4 (1998). P. 90.

25 considered how the metaphor of the family circulates through and structures Spielberg’s films. How does the narrative animation of the family work as a psychoanalytic function and as an ideological structure, and how do these structures resonate through Spielberg’s representations of the ‘home’, religion metaphor, and national imaginary?

As discussed, there are a variety of articles and studies addressing Spielberg and his films, but only a few comprehensive studies on his work as a whole. Of the work on Spielberg, much of it tends to be useful as an historical overview of the development of his career, general discussion of his films’ themes, plot synopses, technical production details and personal stories, and the popular reception of the films, as well as, in some cases, readings of Spielberg’s use of film style and mise-en- scène: see, for example, Donald R. Mott and Cheryl McAllister Saunder’s Steven Spielberg, George Perry’s Steven Spielberg: The Making of his Movies, and Kenneth von Gunden’s Postmodern Auteurs: Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, Spielberg and Scorsese.59 Mott and Saunders provide little in-depth analytical detail about the films, and, further, only cover Spielberg until 1987, although they discuss his early television career, as well as assessing some of the less considered early films. Neil Sinyard’s history of Spielberg and his films, The Films of Steven Spielberg, details the story of his filmmaking in conjunction with his biographical details, as well as providing reflections on profitability and blockbuster status, locating Spielberg’s considerable success within the industry.60 Such research contextualises Spielberg and his films, providing important detail and thematic analysis in which to consider the more specific dynamics of his films.

Robert Kolker provides a sustained scholarly and critical discussion of Spielberg in his book A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg,

59 Mott and Saunders, Steven Spielberg., George Perry, Steven Spielberg: The Making of His Movies (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1998). Kenneth von Gunden, Postmodern Auteurs: Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, Spielberg and Scorsese (Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland and Company Inc., 1991).

60 Sinyard, The Films of Steven Spielberg. Neil Sinyard’s coffee table-style book provides some points of interest about Spielberg’s filmmaking and film style, and a general overview of his directorial development, but only until Empire of the Sun, (1987).

26 Altman,61 contextualising Spielberg’s filmmaking within the contemporary styles and preoccupations of popular (postmodern) film. In order to locate his discussion of Spielberg, Kolker details the history of American politics in the seventies and eighties: Nixon, the assassination of Kennedy(s), Vietnam, the hostage crisis and anxieties about the weakness of the United States, and a concomitant move to political neoconservatism.62 Kolker’s discussion elaborates in detail on the politics of the postmodern resonating throughout contemporary film, and considers ideology in Spielberg’s movies, an important element of this thesis’ understanding of the representation of the family. Kolker’s well-argued and detailed discussion of ideology and film, however, as mentioned, exemplifies some of the anti-popular culture discourses that dominate (and consequently marginalise) discussion on Spielberg. Kolker argues that

[i]ndividuals give their subjectivity willingly to the ideological discourse, because something obviously recognizable and desirable is there. … The ideological structures of Spielberg’s films ‘hail’ the spectator into a world of the obvious that affirms the viewer’s presence (even while dissolving it), affirms that what the viewer has always believed or hoped is (obviously) right and accessible, and assures the viewer excitement and comfort in the process. The films offer nothing new beyond their spectacle, nothing the viewer does not already want, does not immediately accept. That is their conservative power, and it has spread throughout the cinema of the eighties and nineties.63

Rather than reading Spielberg’s narratives as conservative, even propagandistic, they can instead be interpreted as offering something that their viewers desire – as Kolker acknowledges – but, contrary to Kolker, representations may be accepted, rather than forced onto a passive, uncritical, or manipulated audience. The structure of narrative and powerful imagery that popularises Spielberg’s films is, as opposed to Kolker’s interpretation, considered as the animation of compelling and important cultural discourses that work because of conflict, ambivalence and ambiguity in

61 Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman.

62 Ibid. P. 258.

63 Ibid. Kolker is using Louis Althusser’s work on ideology: “‘It is indeed a peculiarity of ideology’ [Althusser] says, ‘that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are obviousnesses) obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out (aloud or in the “still, small voice of conscience”): “That’s obvious! That’s right! That’s true!”’. P. 257.

27 representation. Instead, Kolker forgoes this ambiguity, problematically suggesting that Spielberg’s directorial skills ‘force’ audiences to accept a film that they would, with a less accomplished director, otherwise reject:

The problem with Spielberg is that the security and joy offered by his films are rarely earned but rather forced on the viewer, willing or not, by structures that demand complete assent and emotional compliance in order to survive. His films are not so much texts to be read and understood, but mechanisms… constructed to stimulate desire and fulfil it, to manipulate the viewer without the viewer’s awareness of what is happening.64

While Kolker’s discussion of Spielberg includes detailed interpretations of how his narratives function, including some discussion of the significance of the family, in general his study works within a problematic of conservative versus liberal politics, and Spielberg’s families are frequently viewed through this prism. As Kolker further argues, “‘The family’ has become one of these commodities, fetishized, sentimentalized, and gutted of substance in political discourse, sold... as something viewers must desire, that they might in fact be able to own if they purchase its images”.65 Such interpretive practices do not leave room for an understanding of Spielberg’s profound ambivalence, even ideological confusion, about representations of the family that is the subject of this thesis.

One of the more prolific writers on Spielberg, Andrew Gordon, focuses instead on the explicitly ‘entertainment’ films about which Kolker objects, in his book The Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg.66 Gordon

64 Ibid. P. 285-6.

65 Ibid. P. 325-6.

66 Andrew Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). Gordon has also published widely on individual Spielberg films, although some of this work has been consolidated into Empire of Dreams. See Andrew Gordon, "Close Encounters: The Gospel According to Steven Spielberg," Literature/Film Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1980), Gordon, "E.T. as Fairy Tale.", Andrew Gordon, "Poltergeist: Divorce American Style," in Eighth International Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Frederico Pereira (Lisbon: Inst. Superior de Psicologia Aplicada, 1992), Andrew Gordon, "Raiders of the Lost Ark: Totem and Taboo," Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 32, no. 3 (1991), Andrew Gordon, "Science-Fiction and Fantasy Film Criticism: The Case of Lucas and Spielberg," Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2, no. 2 (1989), Andrew Gordon, "Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun: A Boy's Dream of War," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, M.D: Scarecrow, 2002).

28 seriously addresses the films that are often dismissed. As Gordon argues against critics who reject Spielberg as ‘childish’ and regressive, “[a]ll narrative film could be said to offer the regressive appeal ‘of the lost breast endlessly rediscovered’.”67 Gordon’s chronological and film-by-film discussion of Spielberg’s science fiction and fantasy films comprises detailed mise-en-scène analysis as well as varying and often deliberately conflicted alternative interpretations of these popular texts and their emotional appeal. While Spielberg’s representations of the family are well discussed, they are not the central focus of Gordon’s discussions. Further, Spielberg’s imagery of the family is not specific to his fantasy and science fiction films, so this thesis builds on Gordon’s insights about such genres and their emotional resonance in order to consider the broader and more thematic implications of the family’s role in the production of affect.

In an alternative approach, another prolific Spielberg scholar, Warren Buckland, focuses on style and film construction, rather that content, ideology and familial discourses, most specifically in Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster.68 In the course of detailing Spielberg’s filmmaking practices, Buckland refers to thematic preoccupations, but they are not analysed in depth, an omission which he admits: his book does not “offer interpretations of [Spielberg’s] films, in the sense of reading social, cultural or political meanings into the stories they tell.” Instead he examines Spielberg’s “filmmaking practices – the choices he makes in placing or moving his camera,

67 Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 6. Gordon is referring to Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. P. 163. Gordon also defends fantasy and film in Gordon, "Science-Fiction and Fantasy Film Criticism: The Case of Lucas and Spielberg."

68 Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. Buckland has written extensively on Spielberg. See also Warren Buckland, "A Close Encounter with Raiders of the Lost Ark: Notes on Narrative Aspects of the New Hollywood Blockbuster," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London, New York: Routledge, 1998), Warren Buckland, "The Artistry of Spielberg's Long Takes," Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema 27 (2003), Buckland, "The Role of the Auteur in the Age of the Blockbuster: Steven Spielberg and Dream Works." Buckland has written on Jurassic Park and The Lost World and the importance of special effects, initiating a critique from C. Paul Sellors and Buckland’s response in turn. See Warren Buckland, "A Reply to Sellors's 'Mindless' Approach to Possible Worlds," Screen 42, no. 2 (2001), Warren Buckland, "Between Science Fact and Science Fiction: Spielberg's Digital Dinosaurs, Possible Worlds, and the New Aesthetic Realism," Screen 40, no. 2 (1999), C. Paul Sellors, "The Impossibility of Science Fiction: Against Buckland's Possible Worlds," Screen 41, no. 2 (2000).

29 framing a shot, blocking the action, editing a scene, designing the sound, and controlling the flow of story information via a multitude of narrational techniques.”69 Analysing how filmic techniques and traditions produce narrative meaning is fundamental to any analysis of film – ideology and narrative affect are the result of many interlocking factors in the presentation and production of movies. In this reading of Spielberg’s film and representations of family, the techniques of film analysis are necessarily applied – mise-en-scène, for example, is the language of film and is at the heart of any interpretation of film, while the structure and vagaries of genre are necessary to understand certain films that speak in such forms. But Spielberg’s use of lighting, music, props, settings etc, are not the specific focus of this thesis, and are instead tools for understanding one of the primary thematic preoccupations of his films – the family. An appreciation of Spielberg’s directorial techniques, supplemented by Buckland’s analysis, enhances an understanding of how meaning is generated, and therefore how the family is represented and used in film narrative. The way that the camera constructs Grant and blocks him in relation to the child in the opening scene of Jurassic Park is crucial to understanding Grant’s alignment with the lethal velociraptors – but the techniques themselves, so well discussed by Buckland, are not the central focus of this discussion of familial discourses. Instead, the varying and contradictory discourses, the conflicted ideologies, and the narrative repetitions of family that dominate Spielberg’s storytelling are the main concern of this analysis.

Lester Friedman’s recent book Citizen Spielberg approaches Spielberg’s films through analysis of the themes and genres that Spielberg has addressed throughout his films.70 Friedman’s study divides Spielberg’s films into their genres, such as science fiction and fantasy, melodramas, war films, and considers them within this context, although he does not discuss how familial representations vary throughout and across genres. Friedman’s book foregrounds an overt recognition of the importance of the family ideals to Spielberg’s films, as does much critical analysis of Spielberg, but without any substantial theorising of the significance of these powerful tropes within

69 Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. P. 1 (italics in original).

70 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg.

30 contemporary cinema and culture. Recognition that Spielberg films are mobilised by the family dynamic must be explicated beyond the tacit acknowledgment of family imagery as a successful formula for filmmaking.

While also not focused specifically on representation of the family, Nigel Morris’s book, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light, substantially contributes to the study of Spielberg.71 As with Gordon and Buckland, Morris analyses each film individually, developing his argument for Spielberg as an auteur, and breaking down the ways that his films self-consciously reflect upon filming and spectatorship. Morris’s book fuses the tools of film analysis, psychoanalysis, a thorough understanding of popular culture and ideology with an understanding of Hollywood industry, as well as a respectful consideration of Spielberg’s audience and the potential of oppositional readings of Spielberg’s oeuvre. Rather than accusations of ‘manipulation’, Morris is focused upon the conflicts, ambivalences and ambiguities within texts that similarly are the focus of this thesis. He does not rely on politicised claims to moral authority, instead offering a critical approach to film and ideological analysis that informs this thesis’ understating of family representation in Spielberg’s films. However, while Morris acknowledges Spielberg’s widely recognised preoccupation with families, such considerations are not the focus of his extensive analysis.

Although this thesis is a study of a single director, it is not intended as a genuine auteur study – Spielberg is not specifically considered in terms of his stylistic directorial approach. Rather than considering his position as a groundbreaking film director, Spielberg’s ongoing influence, his popularity, and ‘brand name’ status is the key facet of his cultural significance, and it is the investigation into such points which structure this thesis. The stylistic importance of Spielberg has been thoroughly covered by Buckland’s examination of Spielberg’s blockbusters, recouping Spielberg as a talented auteurist – a category that, although interesting, has limited usefulness in analysing his imagery of the family. Instead, this study will specifically look at the

71 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. As a recent study, Morris’s work importantly includes analysis of Spielberg’s recent Munich, as well as thorough discussion of some of the less recognised films, such as The Terminal, 1941 and Always. His book, however, does not include a discussion of the recent Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

31 thematic/ideological preoccupations that are common in many popular and not so popular films, and that have become a ‘signature’ of ‘Brand Spielberg’, contributing to his reputation and financial success.

With that in mind, this discussion focuses upon the final film product only – script development and the highly collaborative aspects of film production, while interesting and highly important, are not the focus of this discussion. To that end, this analysis will consider his films as stand-alone cultural texts. Although many of Spielberg’s films are based on books, some very famous and successful (critically and popularly), the purpose of this discussion is to look at filmic representation, rather than at the debates surrounding book-to-film conversions. Many Spielberg films have literary antecedents, for example, Jaws, Empire of the Sun, Jurassic Park, The Color Purple, Minority Report, Artificial Intelligence: A.I (2001), Duel, War of the Worlds, Catch Me if You Can (2002), and Munich (2005).72 However, in most cases, it is recognised and assumed that the translation from book to film requires changes, and this is not a direct point of analysis.73 Consequently, issues of translation from text to film, while at times addressed in regards to several of Spielberg’s films, have little influence on this analysis, although, as with script and storyboarding development, these are interesting avenues of interrogation. While such criticism is productive, this analysis is specifically concerned with only the final filmic text.

72 Spielberg has made films ‘based on’ books and short stories, starting with the short story, “Duel”, published in Richard Matheson, Duel: Terror Stories by Richard Matheson (New York: Tor, 2003). Other narratives adapted include Frank W. Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can (Sydney: Bantam, 2002), Brian W. Aldiss, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," in Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time, ed. Brian W. Aldiss (London: Orbit, 2001), J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun (London: Flamingo, 1994), Peter Benchley, Jaws (London: Pan Books, 1974), Carlo Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio (London: Collins Clear-type Press, 1937), Crichton, Jurassic Park: A Novel, Michael Crichton, The Lost World (London: Arrow, 1995), Philip K. Dick, Minority Report (London: Gollancz, 2002), Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1982), Alice Walker, The Color Purple (London: The Women's Press, 1986), H.G. Wells, of the Worlds (Aerie Books Ltd., 1987).

73 In particular, there has also been considerable discussion of The Color Purple, Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s acclaimed novel to the big screen. Much of this analysis is preoccupied by questions of the aptness of a white male director to take on such an adaptation of a black woman’s narrative, as well as the significance of deviations taken by Spielberg from the original text. In the case of Purple, this has become a much bigger issue, due to the complex issues surrounding representations of race, gender and sexualities.

32 Spielberg’s representations do not simply pertain to literal, or ‘obvious’ families; rather certain roles and relationships signify familial relationships, enhancing cinematic tension and emotional resonance. While critical research on Spielberg lacks specific and direct discussion of his engagement with family imagery across his films, scholarship on the family itself is vast. Yet representation of ‘the family’ is a nexus of multiple discourses, and its significance remains difficult to isolate and theorise. As Sarah Harwood concisely notes of this problem, “the family is an overused and underdefined term which conveniently collapses a complex tapestry of individual and social activities, desires and power relations into a single normative entity.”74 Consequently, in order to investigate ‘the family’, theory is needed which elucidates why the family image is so central to popular culture, film and Spielberg, and explains why representations of the family vary, are fragile, ambiguous and are at the heart of considerable cultural anxieties. As Christine Bridgewood recognises, “[t]he question of what actually constitutes the family is repeatedly stretched and renegotiated… activating conflicting discourses which are not easily contained by the text.”75 What exactly is ‘the family ideal’; how can it be defined, how does it work, what are the ideological investments that propel this ‘ideal’ constructed in contemporary culture?76 While family has not been analysed in great depth by Spielberg’s critics, (although it is noted as central) the representation and construction of the family has been consistently and productively addressed by cultural theorists, and such insights are invaluable for an analysis of Spielberg’s preoccupation with the family.

74 Sarah Harwood, Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in Hollywood Cinema (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). P. 9-10.

75 Christine Bridgewood, "Family Romances: The Contemporary Popular Family Saga," in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). P. 173. Bridgewood is specifically discussing the representation of the family in the ‘family saga’.

76 There is another question here – how does film as a medium relate to the social world being studied in this work on the family? With Spielberg, there is an interesting point about effect, as opposed to affect. How does Spielberg’s (and other medias’) representation of the family effect a normative discourse? Important as this question is, it falls outside the scope of this thesis. Such issues begin to be addressed through a discussion of the ‘family adventure film’ and the role that plays in the cinema- going audience/family, discussed for example, in Peter Krämer, "Would You Take Your Child to See This Film?: The Cultural and Social Work of the Family-Adventure Movie," in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1998). For a consideration of reception studies analysing the family and the significance of fantasy and desire, see Valerie Walkerdine, "'Video Replay: Families, Films and Fantasy'," in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (New York: New York University Press, 1999).

33

Current research into the modern family is substantial, and falls roughly into two categories: demographic analyses of familial structures and change within populations – statistics of population growth and density, marriage, ethnicity and birth rates; and analyses of patriarchal social structures and the significance of the family institution in maintaining gendered discourses. Social research into demographic trends, government policy and statistics about population, education, family planning issues, poverty, and the like, while raising significant issues about the sociological structure and political circumstances of families, has less relevance to discussions on how the family is articulated through narrative and representation. The ‘reality’ of the family is only marginally useful to the conceptualisation of familial discourses, although the lived experiences, the origins of critical perspectives (the specifics of race, gender, class and ethnicity) necessarily need to be acknowledged in both those forming cultural products, and those who interpret them.77 In film, and particularly Spielberg’s films, affect and sentimentality are at the heart of narrative, and the representation of the family is frequently the key decoding how such films work. As Murray Pomerance points out, “[t]he family is a cultural dream and obsession to which we return and return. The felt home of music and our torture, birthplace of pleasure and wonder, it is at once a mechanism and a phantasmagoria”.78 Consequently, rather than considering any specific political or economic practice, this thesis asks why certain representations dominate and how and why these images are challenged, what are their discursive mechanisms and their fantastic appeal? How does culture continually create and recreate an image of the family; why do narratives

77 Critically, it must be recognised that the dominant ideals of family in mainstream Western media (and Spielberg) are premised on discourses of middle-class whiteness. This dynamic in Spielberg’s films, and the ethnocentric assumptions and positions that necessarily structure analysis of these tropes, is certainly worthy of detailed consideration, but is beyond the trajectory of this particular discussion. For further reading, see the collection of essays, Patricia Pisters and Wim Staat, eds., Shooting the Family: Transcultural Media and Intercultural Values (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005). These essays focuses on the family in film, but discuss issues of migration, ethnicity and globalisation and its effects on the family and society, a more demographic approach, representing a different focus to this analysis. Alternatively, also see Kristin M. Langellier and Eric E. Peterson, "Family Storytelling as a Strategy of Social Control," in Narrative and Social Control: Critical Perspectives, ed. Dennis K. Mumby (Newbury Park, Calif: Sagge Publications, 1993).

78 Murray Pomerance, "Introduction: Family Affairs," in A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home, ed. Murray Pomerance (New York and London: Wallflower Press, 2008). P. 1.

34 return again and again to this ‘fertile’ metaphor and cultural obsession with the family that ‘transcends’ particular demographic categories and trends?79

On the other hand, the vast area of scholarship on the family’s construction within patriarchy and gendered discourse, the purported separation of private and public spheres, as well as the racialised and class dimensions of family, is crucial to understanding Spielberg’s representation of family.80 This mode of analysis is often focused on the effects of gendered ideologies in constructing the social world, and less specifically on representative and narrative modes of expressing familial discourse. Yet, such analyses of the prominence of the gendered family and how it is ideologically constructed are significant in understanding how familial imagery is intrinsic to Spielberg’s films.81 However, while clearly the family metaphor can and

79 On the difference between real families and the represented ideal (nuclear, white, middle-class, heteronormative, suburban families), it is important to note that “[w]hile the ideology of familialism is everywhere, the [ideal] families themselves are increasingly hard to find.” Andrew Ross, "Cowboys, Cadillacs and Cosmonauts: Families, Film Genres, and Technocultures," in Engendering Men: The Question of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990). P. 87.

80 Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh’s The Anti-Social Family is an example of feminist, sociological discussion that dissects the ideology of the family in gendered terms and in the context of capitalism. Barrett and McIntosh’s work locates current understandings of the (idealised nuclear) family within some of the more important studies of the family by Jacques Donzelot and Christopher Lasch – critical knowledge when approaching how popular culture mobilises representations of the family. In another significant discussion, Annette Kuhn discusses the family and patriarchy through both a psychoanalytic and a materialist ideological framework, pointing out that “the family becomes more than simply one ideological state apparatus among many, but the privileged place of the operation of ideology.” Annette Kuhn, "Structures of Patriarchy and Capital in the Family," in and Materialism: Women and Modes of Production, ed. Annette Kuhn (London and Boston: Routledge, 1978). P. 65-6. Also see Thorne, "Feminist Rethinking of the Family: An Overview." For a somewhat different approach, Naomi Zack considers the history of political philosophy and its discourses of the family. Naomi Zack, "'The Family' and Radical Family Theory," in Feminism and Families, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). For a sociological study of the relationship between the family and its relationship to modes of production, see Rayna Rapp, "Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes toward an Understanding of Ideology," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barry Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York and London: Longman, 1982).

81 As Susan Moller Okin details the broad feminist analysis of the family, “[f]eminists have found most forms of family prevalent in history and in the present to be destructive of women’s equality both within the home and in all other spheres of life, and sometimes of their basic wellbeing. Due to assumptions about the family, women’s child rearing and other domestic labor and household management have been taken for granted and often not acknowledged to be work at all. Women’s allegedly ‘natural’ role within the family has been used for centuries to justify their exclusion from civil and political rights, as well as from many occupations – in effect, to make them publicly invisible. And women’s economic dependence and subordinated position in the family have rendered them vulnerable to various forms of abuse – physical, sexual, and psychological. Thus, most feminists contend that women’s public and private inequalities are closely linked, and questioned the tendency in Western thought to dichotomize the two spheres.” Susan Moller Okin, "Families and Feminist Theory:

35 does function within patriarchy, as feminist literature persuasively argues, there are further considerations about why there is such an attachment to a fantasised family ideal and how these structures of the cultural imagination work in popular culture. Interpreting the family as a patriarchal tradition will only take analysis so far; questions remain about how and why the ideal of the family occupies the heart of cultural desire. As family and cultural studies scholar Dana Heller notes in her analysis of the family romance,

[t]he pervasive and multiplex character of [the family romance] narrative mode… has often been misrepresented as a draconian discursive implement of patriarchal oppression, a policing agent of social boundaries and class hierarchies, or as an unproblematized mass-culture commodity.82

How the family is constructed and imagined through ‘the policing agents’ of hierarchical patriarchy is one fundamental aspect of understanding the family as a discursive construct. However, while understanding such conservative versus progressive polemics is vital to any discussion of family imagery, as Heller points out, it must further be asked why family occupies the heart of cultural narratives in so many films and throughout popular culture. Emphasising the centrality of familial ideals to cultural representation, Heller’s argument, as well that of others, is interested in contradiction and ambiguity – that both the ideal (and the practice) of the family is not monolithic. As Sarah Harwood argues, the family is “a site of contradiction, revealing its uneasy ideological positioning. It is simultaneously represented as a ‘natural’, universal and inevitable form while also being constructed as a fragile, threatened entity”.83 Such readings therefore empower an understanding of the fragility and ambiguity, as well as the emotional power, of narratives of the family in Spielberg films.

Some Past and Present Issues," in Feminism and Families, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). P. 14.

82 Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture (: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). P. xii. Heller goes on to note that “Of course the family… does have ties to mass culture as well as the discourses of patriarchal bourgeois modernity.” Her point is that there are other aspects of familial narratives beyond the feminist critique.

83 Harwood, Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema. P. 5.

36 Of the literature on the family in film, analysis of the melodrama genre is a rich source of more general scholarship elaborating on the representation of the family within cultural narratives.84 Melodramatic familial narratives are prominent in Spielberg’s work – from his emotionally driven dramas to his more fast-paced action films – so that the emphasis upon plots, high emotion, and right and wrong within the family are staple Spielberg trademarks. Significantly, Spielberg has ‘co-opted’ the melodrama genre, even down to the small details of mise-en-scène, into ‘male melodrama’, although as Christine Gledhill notes, “[m]elodrama was at best a fragmented generic category and as a pervasive aesthetic mode broke genre

84 For critical work on the melodrama, see Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishers, 1987). For an edited collection on the melodrama, see Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: BFI Publishers, 1987). Also see Kenneth MacKinnon, "The Family in Hollywood Melodrama: Actual or Ideal," Journal of Gender Studies 13, no. 1 (2004). Linda Williams, "Melodrama Revised," in Reconfiguring Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nicke Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). Pam Cook, Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia (New York: Routledge, 2004), Tom Lutz, "Men's Tears and the Roles of Melodrama," in Boys Don't Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U. S., ed. Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2002). Justine and Lesley Johnson Lloyd, "The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-War Housewife, Melodrama and Home," Feminist Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2003). E. Ann Kaplan, "Classical Hollywood Film and Melodrama," in The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1998), Laura Mulvey, "'It Will Be a Magnificent Obsession': The Melodrama's Role in the Development of Contemporary Film Theory," in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: BFI, 1994), Jane Shattuc, "Having a Good Cry over The Color Purple: The Problem of Affect and Imperialism in Feminist Theory," in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London, England: BFI, 1994). E. Ann Kaplan also specifically considers the representation of the mother in the maternal melodrama, in E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London; New York: Routledge, 1992). Vivien Sobchack considers the genre permutations of the melodrama with horror and science fiction in Vivian Sobchack, "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange," in The Dread of Difference, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, Texas, 1996). The western as melodrama is considered in David Lusted, "Social Class and the Western as Male Melodrama," in The Book of Westerns, ed. Ian and Douglas Pye Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1996). Nina C. Leibman considers the representation of the family in the television families of the fifties, arguing that this genre shares considerable similarities with the melodrama, Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). For a discussion of masculinity, action films, and the melodrama, see Mark Gallagher, "I Married : Spectacle and Melodrama in the Hollywood ," in Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharret (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999). For emotion and masculinity in the melodrama, see Joy van Fuqua, ""Can You Feel It, Joe?" Male Melodrama and the Feeling Man," Velvet Light Trap 28, no. 11 (1996). For a discussion of Spielberg, the melodrama and an analysis of the role of ‘sentimentality’, see Charles Burnetts, "Steven Spielberg's 'Feelgood' Endings and Sentimentality," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 1 (2009). Also see Friedman, Chapter Two, for a discussion of Spielberg and the melodramatic action/adventure film in Friedman, Citizen Spielberg.

37 boundaries.”85 Spielberg’s ‘reworking’ of the melodrama foregrounds images of spectacle and fantasy, in conjunction with melodramatic narratives preoccupied with familial anxieties. In this sense, while reliant upon the conventions of ‘women’s films’ and melodramas, Spielberg is not so easily classified. His ‘melodramas’ are frequently dominated by action-adventure spectacle, even if meaning, narrative and film style are motivated by the family dynamic and the melodramatic mise-en-scène of the home. The benefits of considering Spielberg’s family representations within the melodrama framework emphasise the ambivalences, emotional affect and the problematic resolutions that are so prevalent in Spielberg’s films.86

In addition to work on melodrama, the cultural studies approach has contributed substantial insights into the study of family and representation. Estella Tincknell’s Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation provides such an analysis of media and cultural representation of the family in the post-war period, particularly within the UK, using a cultural studies and sociological approach to examine the relationship between representation and culture, government, and social policy.87 In contrast to a textual analysis of the ‘mediation of the family’, and a focus on the representation of the ‘fantasy of the family’, Tincknell’s study concentrates upon the media in relation to ‘real’ families and their varying political and economic circumstances. More specifically focused on film and representation, the interrogation in this thesis of Spielberg’s narratives lacks cultural studies’ full scope, and bypasses the cultural, economic and political range of texts as they relate to the ‘real’ social world, that is the focus of Tincknell’s work. However, Tincknell’s reading of the media’s familial representation, as well as much of the cultural history that she discusses, provides an important support for more textual studies of narrative and filmic construction of the family.

85 Christine Gledhill, "The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishers, 1987). P. 6.

86 As Lester Friedman points out, “[a]lthough few critics discuss Spielberg’s films as melodrama, almost all of them could aptly be classified as family based narratives that centre on the tensions, fissures and breakdowns within domestic relationships.” Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 63.

87 Estella Tincknell, Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005).

38 Concentrating more on how texts and narratives deploy and deconstruct the family romance, Dana Heller’s Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture examines the rhetoric of the family through textual analysis of sitcoms, books, and Hollywood cinema. As Heller notes, the family romance is “one of the most massively produced popular narrative forms.”88 Focusing each chapter on a particular text, Heller omits discussion of Spielberg. Theoretically, however, her conceptualisation of the family within its history of representation enables a consideration of the family image beyond simple binary functions of the private and public sphere and the way that narrative and representative power works in a variety of cultural texts, styles and genres. In addition to Heller’s discussion, Sarah Harwood’s important Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema89 also focuses specifically on popular texts, analysing the manner in which popular culture represented the family, which she specifically contexualises in the politics and the cultural movements of the eighties. Harwood divides her analysis into discussions of the familial roles of mother, father, child, and then analyses the consistencies and variations of their representation. She further divides her many and varied topic films into types in accordance with particular narrative structure and familial conflicts/relationships. Such categorising of the family deconstructs the internal logic of the family, and the cultural politics around the representation of the family member. However, by breaking the family into its individual ‘units’, such analysis elides the way that the representation of the greater family metaphor works through narrative mobilisation and as a point of anxiety, resonating in alternative ways throughout texts. Throughout the majority of her discussion, Spielberg’s other important films of the eighties are only briefly mentioned, although Harwood provides an extremely nuanced and detailed discussion of E.T. in terms of Spielberg’s family representation. As with Heller, Harwood’s insights about filmic representation and the family present a theoretical platform upon which to further understand the cultural influence and mediation of the family that is vital to an analysis of Spielberg.

88 Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture. P. xii.

89 Harwood, Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema.

39 Isolating the representation of one particular family figure, Stella Bruzzi’s Bringing Up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood is a chronological analysis of film fathers, providing an historical, decade-by-decade overview of the way that images of paternity have developed in Hollywood.90 As with Tincknell’s and Harwood’s studies, Bruzzi’s analysis is premised upon an historical understanding of family imagery, where changing cultural contexts are paramount, specifically addressing how representation has changed in the post-War years. Bruzzi briefly discusses Spielberg, touching on the fraught depictions of fatherhood in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although she does not consider any of his other work, looking more broadly at other father films. Conceptually rich, Bruzzi’s book investigates the cultural traditions that inform the family ideal, and particularly the conflicted discourses that surround the ‘father’, with considerable emphasis on how paternal imagery works ambivalently and is often broken down in Hollywood film. Such detailed examination of particular representational strategies and the fantasies that compose the representation of the father and the (Freudian) ideal of the perfect, even omniscient, father is particularly relevant to Spielberg, with his overt preoccupation with (problematic) fathers. However, while such discussions of the actual and the symbolic father are relevant to Spielberg’s films, they are not the only perspective that must be considered. Supplementing Bruzzi’s insights, fatherhood can also be understood in the way that such paternal imagery pervades narrative structure beyond the more literal role of the father within the family.

As with the representation of the father, the way that the home functions within film narratives is also a key motivating principle and ideal in Spielberg’s films. Inextricably linked with the cultural imaginary, the attachments (and repulsions) of the home and the familial ideal are central to film narrative and representation. Elisabeth Bronfen’s Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema interrogates the idea of ‘home’ in psychoanalytic terms, as a fantasy imagined through the Hollywood ‘dream factory’.91 Conflict within and surrounding the family home is at the heart of Spielberg narratives – in both a material sense as well as in its

90 Stella Bruzzi, Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood (London: BFI Publishing, 2005).

91 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema.

40 conflicted relationship to the fantasised ideal. Bronfen argues that the ideal of home is simultaneously underwritten by the uncanny – that ‘home’ can only exist as an always-absent ideal. The (perfect) home is therefore always out of reach. As Bronfen reconfigures Dorothy’s journey to and from ‘the home’ in The Wizard of Oz, ‘there is literally no place like home.’92 The core anxiety of the always-idealised home lies between the nostalgic return to a ‘place’ of reunion, and the sense of alienation that necessarily provokes desire. Bronfen’s cultural and psychoanalytic insights about the home are refracted within Spielberg’s narrative tensions and the desired (sometimes) resolution in his depiction of family and home – the slippage between anxiety and sentimentality that mark his families.

Moving to consider broader social and cultural interpretations of the family, in a productive theoretical approach to familial politics, Pierre Bourdieu’s essay, “On the Family as a Realized Category”, analyses the family as ideology, as a product of collective social discourse, institutionalised at the level of government and policy, as well as everyday life and representation – concluding that at the same time that families are ‘described, they are prescribed’. The significance of the family, according to Bourdieu, is “as a kind of political ideology designating a valorized configuration of social relationships”.93 He goes on to note that “[n]othing seems more natural than the family”.94 and that the family as a norm enjoys the privilege of a seeming universality. Examining the ideology of the family in representation foregrounds the familial privilege and universality at the core of Spielberg’s narrative work – yet closer examination also identifies ideological anxiety permeating this ‘naturalised’ construction. The violence of the unnaturally ‘produced’, and unnaturally reproducing, dinosaurs of Jurassic Park threatens to tear apart the fictions of the family. However, through classic Hollywood resolution, the film restores the threatened familial imperative, preserving the children and bringing together the heteronormative couple, thereby sustaining Bourdieu’s ‘collective social discourse’ of

92 See specifically Chapter Two: ‘Home – There’s No Place Like It: The Wizard of Oz’, in Ibid.

93 Pierre Bourdieu, "On the Family as a Realized Category," Theory, Culture and Society 13, no. 3 (1996). P. 19.

94 Ibid. P. 21.

41 the family.95 The strangely deviant ‘female’ dinosaurs, who threaten the boundaries of ‘natural’ reproduction, are left behind, abjected on the island.96

In an important perspective on discourses of the family, queer theorist Lee Edelman interrogates cultural narratives and regulatory heterosexuality in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.97 He argues that ‘the family’, normalising heteronormativity, and specifically the romanticised Child work in cultural narratives through an ideal of the future, which renders the Child – as a representative of ‘the future’ – sacrosanct.98 Edelman argues that “[i]n its coercive universalisation… the image of the child… serves to regulate political discourse – to prescribe what will count as political discourse – by compelling such discourse to accede in advance to the reality of a collective future.” The image of the Child “affirms the absolute logic of reproduction itself.”99 This reproduction is both a social and biological imperative; sexual reproduction through the family is necessary for the social reproduction of the family.100 Alternatively, queerness, argues Edelman, is that which is radically other

95 In a discussion of the prevalence of violence surrounding the representation of the family, Karen Schneider notes the lengths that films go to in order to preserve the apparent naturalness of the family. She claims that in “family-centered action-thrillers… violence has a positive function; it may rend the fabric of hegemonic American society, but it also reweaves it. It is, therefore, not violence per se that most people object to; it is the breaking of the Father’s law, in this case the dismemberment of the family unit that embodies and reproduces that law. Moreover, such spectacular narrative suturing betrays a desperate attempt to efface ideological contradictions within that law, for it is the increasing visibility of such contradictions that constitute the real threat to patriarchal rule. Straining under contemporary culture’s exposure of the imposed nature of the rule, the naturalness of the traditional family must be asserted again and again – with violence if necessary.” Schneider, "'With Violence If Necessary': Rearticulating the Family in the Contemporary Action-Thriller." P. 11.

96 Although, of course, remnants of the dinosaurs’ disruption intrudes in the final scene in the form of the pelicans.

97 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004).

98 Vivian Sobchack, also discussing the romanticisation of the Child, points out that the “child becomes the signifier of the future. But the child is also the signified of the past. Its familiar identity and family resemblance are produced as visible traces of the past’s presence in the present and ensure the past’s presence in a future safely contained and constrained by tradition and history. At best, it will carry the father’s name forward – at least, his seed.” Sobchack, "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange." P. 148.

99 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. P. 11.

100 On the discourse of reproduction, Kath Weston also argues in a similar vein that “[b]y shifting without signal between reproduction’s meaning of physical procreation and its sense as the perpetuation of society as a whole, the characterization of lesbians and gay men as nonreproductive beings links their supposed attacks on ‘the family’ to attacks on society in the broadest sense.” Kathy

42 to the investment in the ‘future’, and is a point of resistance; as non-reproductive enjoyment, queerness threatens established cultural discourses of the (reproductive) future with the alternative ‘death drive’ of ‘no future’, no children; the refusal to reproduce. To reject the familial narrative rejects the overarching cultural principles of heteronormativity and the future.101

The idea(l) of the family in terms of the (nostalgically) imagined future illuminates the family image as a privileged term in Spielberg films. Yet as Edelman argues, these representations carry an undercurrent of an alternative ‘anti-family’ narrative and non-reproductive pleasure – a cultural death drive. Edelman’s take on the rhetoric of the future, the role of the Child, and heteronormative cultural discourses thus articulate the ambivalence in how Spielberg’s families are represented. And as John Brenkman suggests in his critical analysis of Edelman’s theories, “this jouissance and death drive are surely at work in all sexualities, including the straightest heterosexual practices and experiences.”102 While Edelman claims this rupture for queerness, arguably, to varying degrees, the representation of the heteronormative family is always suffused by this ‘shadow’ – like Bronfen’s uncanny that permeates the conceptualisation of even the most mundane home. Spielberg’s sentimental resolutions through the heteronormative reproductive couple, focused on the future, are ambivalently shadowed by the uncanny, the negative, the death drive that Edelman posits. Dr. Grant’s intimidating circling of the Child, his alignment with the queer, all female, theoretically extinct, dinosaurs,103 these ‘Jurassic’ anachronisms in the twentieth century, suggests Edelman’s queer death drive, one

Weston, "Is 'Straight' to 'Gay' as 'Family' Is to 'No Family'?," in The Family Experience: A Reader in Cultural Diversity, ed. Mark Hutter (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2000). P. 145.

101 On the family romance, Diana Tietjens Meyers observes that it “embodies the meaning of the family as a site of procreative heterosexuality and as a transmitter of procreative heterosexuality.” Diana Tietjens Meyers, "The Family Romance: A Fin-De-Siecle Tragedy," in Feminism and Families, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). P. 240.

102 John Brenkman, "Queer Post-Politics," Narrative 10, no. 2 (2002). P. 179-80. Edelman posits queer identity against normative reproductive futurism. Instead of focusing on this radical analysis of gay cultural identity, the argument of this thesis uses the idea that future oriented cultural politics is at the heart of the ideological power of the family, manifest within all manner of texts.

103 Even, arguably, in Grant’s profession as a paleontologist, he is focused upon unearthing skeletons, on the always-dead – a career path rendered useless by living and breathing dinosaurs. Asked by the children what he will do now that is job is superfluous, he wryly tells them that he will have to “evolve.”

43 which popular culture invariably represses as Grant discovers family, and the dinosaurs begin to reproduce, to replicate the family. However, that the dinosaurs begin to breed also casts a shadow of the uncanny on Jurassic Park’s narratives of reproduction – they are unnaturally created,104 and their reproduction, too, is unnatural. This overdetermined insistence on reproduction clouds the final image of the two children, smiling in the contented Dr. Grant’s arms.

Close Encounters of the Familial Kind

Given these theoretical insights, it is not surprising that familial representation is persistently suffused with contradiction and ambivalence, even as melodramatic narratives motivate and empower pathos and emotional affect. The family is a powerful entity in political and cultural discourse, almost possessing an ‘anthropomorphised’ identity of its own. As Robert C. Allen argues, “family has become the ‘black hole’ of contemporary American social discourse and popular culture: impossible to identify in its exact characteristics yet exerting inescapable gravitational force.”105 In attempting to understand Spielberg’s specific representation of the family, questions remain. How can we understand what the imagery of family means in Spielberg’s narratives? Why and how are narratives of the family used for ‘emotional manipulation’ and melodrama? What desires and attachments to such ideologies endow these familial relationships with filmic and sentimental affect? This study investigates how the ideology of family is articulated and what the investments are in such ideologies – how are such ideologies, desires and fantasies continually replicated? Building on specific analysis of Spielberg’s narratives and on critical theory on the family, this thesis seeks to tease out the manner in which ideology, through cultural production, creates and recreates the fact of family as the ideal of family, through the particular familial manifestations that erupt in popular culture.

104 Judith Halberstam points out that “the family emerges triumphant, but then so do the dinosaurs who are left behind, alive and well and out of control.” Halberstam further points out that “Jurassic Park is not really trying to destabilize the notion of natural reproduction… but it certainly holds the notion of ‘family’ up to some serious scrutiny. … it is the family that must run for cover, the family that is hunted and tormented.” Judith Halberstam, "Is Jurassic Park a Lesbian Zoo?," On Our Backs 10, no. 2 (1993). P. 10-11.

105 Allen, "Home Alone Together: Hollywood and the Family Film." P. 115.

44

In addressing such questions, this study analyses the way that family, fantasy and desire structure familial narratives throughout Spielberg’s films, and then details these insights in a consideration of his representations of home, family relations and domestic ideology. Part One of the thesis discusses the family in terms of its ‘private’ manifestations, firstly psychoanalytically, and then furthering the first chapter’s analysis, through a specific discussion of Spielberg’s construction of home/suburbia. In the second section, Chapters Three and Four consider how the familial metaphor works in the more ‘public’ discourses of religion and the family.106 The theoretical ideas of Part One are extended to investigate how familial ideologies resonate through an appeal to religious iconography, and then, considers ideologies of the national imaginary – both global and domestic – and how the metaphors of the family play out in these terms. These two chapters look at different manifestations of familial metaphors, but unlike the first section, they do not build on each other, rather, they supplement the core insights of the thesis in terms of Spielberg’s contested narratives of family. Each chapter analyses Spielberg’s representation of the family, but with a particular thematic and analytical focus – theoretically, the thesis moves from the microcosm of the home and the suburbs, to how religious discourse and the family are interwoven, and then on to how the family works on the national stage. Considering the different aspects of familial discourse and metaphor analysed across the chapters, at times this study employs a variety of different, although complementary approaches in order to appreciate the diversity of familial themes that manifest within Spielberg and popular culture. Broadly, however, these themes are investigated primarily through the overarching paradigm established in the first chapter which understands the family through ideology, narrative, desire and (ir)resolution, as well as an investment in the biological and social reproductive imperative that structures Spielberg’s familial discourse.

In the first section on at the ‘private’ manifestation of family, Chapter One, ‘The Hook within the (Impossible) Family: Standing on the Outside, Looking In – Ideology, Fantasy and Desire’, establishes the essential dynamic of the study, investigating the contested terms that will be used throughout, such as family, fantasy,

106 Of course the terms ‘private’ and ‘public’ are slippery and contested: ‘the private is the political’.

45 ideology, desire. This chapter considers the theories of Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, and how their approaches to interpretation and textual representation can be appropriated in order to understand the power and the uses of the ideology of the family throughout Spielberg’s oeuvre. The films Catch Me if You Can and Artificial Intelligence: A.I. are considered in detail because of their explicit representation of familial desires and anxieties, and the ways in which these desires are negotiated in (sometimes) contradictory ways in each film. The ambivalence towards family in A.I. and Catch Me if You Can, and their apparently sentimental resolutions foregrounds the latent issues that suffuse almost all of Spielberg’s representations of the family. The examination of these films sets up the core premises that underlie an understanding of Spielberg, narrative and familial imagery. Desire circulates around the idealised relations of family, which can never be satisfactorily achieved, except through the explicitly contrived and sentimental resolution of conflict characteristic of many Spielberg’s films. Jameson’s theory of narrative as a socially symbolic act informs this discussion of such ideologies and desires – how contradiction, subtext, resolution and history work through (melodramatic) family narratives, animating sentimentality and filmic affect. In Spielberg films, emotional affect is augmented when the family is destabilised or destroyed, but ultimately reunited and consolidated: loss and the recovery of family is the primary narrative conflict. Interestingly, the compromise and/or antagonism that ‘tarnishes’ Spielberg’s ‘perfect’ endings of familial reunification (overtly foregrounded in A.I.), suggests an uneasy recognition of the impossibility of attaining the object of desire, and implies the ambiguity of family within narrative closure. While the sentimental family is a discursive behemoth, it is also a site of fracture and distress.

Continuing the investigation of the private sphere, the second chapter, ‘The Lost World of ‘Home’: Suburbia, Family Ghosts, and Alienation in Domesticity’ – furthers arguments about ideology and desire by investigating Spielberg’s recurring representations of domesticity and the suburbs, so fundamental to popular perceptions of the family.107 Such milieux, while often idealised and revered, are also fraught

107 It must be noted that the suburban family is premised on normative assumptions of whiteness, as well as that of the middle-class. This dynamic in Spielberg’s films is worth detailed consideration, but is beyond the scope of this thesis, which is generally using the tools of psychoanalytic theory to understand the family drama.

46 with ambiguity, and even hostility, in Spielberg’s films. The suburb, family and the home are gendered spaces, and historically often approached through the melodramatic genre; Spielberg’s adaptation of these gendered spaces and genres to address familial concerns and particularly the anxieties of masculinity is analysed. Three films with a strong focus on negotiating the home, the suburbs and the domestic are considered in detail in this chapter. Duel, one of Spielberg’s earliest films, bases its thriller narrative on a premise of suburban emasculation and a problematic escape and vision of empowerment; E.T.: The Extraterrestrial is a recuperative fantasy of the family and the suburbs; and Poltergeist (1982)108 invokes horror and the uncanny in its exploration of the suburban home. The central preoccupation of this chapter is the way that these suburbs, homes and lives are represented, and how narrative is preoccupied by often uncanny discourses. It analyses the contradictory desires invested in the fantasy of the suburbs and home life, and the cultural narratives and ambivalences which empower and undermine such images.

Shifting from the particular representations of familial life and home, the second half of the thesis interrogates the manifestation of the family metaphor within ‘public’ and political discourses. The third chapter, ‘A Leap of Faith: What Lies Beneath the Word of the Father? Representing God, Religion and the Family’, specifically considers how metaphors of the family resonates through religion, spirituality and mythology, and conversely, how such imagery permeates Spielberg’s films. Religious discourse or analogies in popular culture work to make films more emotively powerful, endowing affect with greater appeal through cultural/religious appropriation. Religious metaphors themselves mobilise the framework of the family, and specifically the authority of the f/Father-God. Many Spielberg films supplement their ‘affect’ by drawing upon religious imagery or narrative that privileges familial discourses. The Color Purple, with its preoccupation with familial dislocation and reunion, good fathers and fathers, is considered in this light. Close Encounters of the Third Kind, contrary to the stereotype of Spielberg as the domestic and familial fantasist, represents an escape from these ideologies through the protagonist’s extra- terrestrial ascension/quasi-religious awakening in his ‘close encounter’. In addition,

108 Poltergeist’s status as a Spielberg film, although directed by , is addressed in Chapter Two.

47 the ‘quest’ narratives that are at the heart of many of Spielberg’s films are intimately bound up with ideals of family and broader religious metanarratives, as in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989). Knowledge and illumination, as attained at quest’s conclusion, are augmented by familial resolution and spiritual transcendence, endowing the imagery of the family with the authority of religious/spiritual narratives.

The representation of the nation is another significant manifestation of the family metaphor within public discourse. The final chapter, ‘Saving Private Families? Fatherlands, Motherlands, and the National Imaginary’, considers the ways in which the construction of domestic fantasies and religious narratives, ideologies of national identity and homeland are intimately connected to the institution of the family. The patriarchal family has long been the model of the nation-state, an ideology that naturalises systems of national government and systems of family. Interconnections between metaphors of family and nation form the nexus of desire and ideology that impels national narratives, and are investigated through specific analysis of three films that invoke alternative representations of the intertwined ideologies of family and nation. In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the privileging of imperial familial metaphors resonates through Indy’s adventure-quest narrative; Munich is thematically structured by anxieties of homeland, whether that is motherlands or fatherlands, and the duty of the citizen to family/nation; and Amistad reveals a recuperative preoccupation with historical narratives and founding fathers/Fathers.109

109 Arguably, Schindler’s List would also be appropriate to consider in terms of nation and family, and especially in terms of the film’s emphasis upon the implied reproductive and generational recuperation of the Jewish nation from genocide – ‘whoever saves one life saves the world entire’. Schindler is constructed as a rescuing father figure for the Jews of (as opposed to Nazi commander Goeth’s bad father). Schindler’s List is one Spielberg’s most successful films and has accumulated considerable scholarly analysis, but will not be specifically considered in detail in this thesis. However, many of the arguments put forward in this thesis can be successfully applied to the film’s familial representations. For analysis of the film, see Yosefa Loshitzky’s collections of twelve essays, Yosefa Loshitzky, ed., Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler's List (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). There are also many other articles that further address various aspects of the film such as: its use of generic traditions of the Holocaust film, the War film and the documentary, and of course the melodrama; the representation of history and collective memory; the fraught (im)possibility of representing the Holocaust; Spielberg’s cinematic use of style; the depiction of Jewishness; as well as considering issues around the film’s reception across the globe. See, for example, Ilan Avisar, "Holocaust Movies and the Politics of Collective Memory," in Thinking About the Holocaust: After Half a Century, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), Thomas Elsaesser, "Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler's List," in The Persistence of History, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), Ora Gelley, "Narration and Embodiment of Power in Schindler's List," in The Films

48 The concept of homeland is a significant part of understanding how the dynamics of the ‘family metaphor’ refract within popular and political culture, played out through interpersonal relationships, civil society and on a national, even global stage.110

First considering the private family and then moving to examine its role in broader metaphors of religion and nation, Spielberg’s films are examined in a thematically logical order. All four chapters are interlinked in this thesis, as family narratives in Spielberg’s films can be understood from differing, even conflicting view points – in terms of psychoanalytic formulations of desire and fantasy, its relation to ideologies of home and domesticity, religious mythologies, as well as conceptions of national identity and homelands. Consequently, almost all of Spielberg’s films can be considered through the prism of a national cinema, particularly in terms of the home and suburban world, or the relation to (Judeo-Christian) discourses and narratives that inflect representation. Family as ideology is a cultural dominant, crossing definitional boundaries and lying somewhere between, as A.I’s Dr Know recognises, ‘flat fact’ and fairy tale.111 As a definition, ‘family’ seems straight-forward – as an idea and ideal it permeates a huge cross section of highly significant yet ambiguous cultural narratives. As Dana Heller suggests, “the family romance is everywhere because the family itself is nowhere… the family exists for us… as an embodied expression of of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002), Steven N. Lipkin, "Defining : Schindler's List and In the Name of the Father," in Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice, ed. Steven N. Lipkin (Carbondale: Southern Illinois press, 2002), Manchel, "A Reel Witness: Steven Spielberg's Representation of the Holocaust in Schindler's List.", Gary Weissman, "A Fantasy of Witnessing," Media, Culture & Society 17, no. 2 (1995), Timothy R. White and Lewis Stiller, "Memories in Black and White: Style and Theme in Spielberg's Schindler's List," in The Silent Word: Textual Meaning and the Unwritten, ed. Robert J.C. Young, Ban Kak Choon, and Robbie B.H. Goh (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1998). For some interesting points on the imagery of family, generations and the Child, see Geoff Eley and Atina Grossman, "Watching Schindler's List: Not the Last Word," New German Critique 71 (1997). PP. 55-9.

110 Once again, the prevalent imagery of the white family and the discourses of race and ethnicity play an important role in the conceptualisation of the family, and in this instance, the construction of a national family. Hilary Harris points out, in her discussion of Saving Private Ryan, that “by virtually all accounts, the single most important institution for ‘the creation and recreation of whiteness’ is of course ‘the family’, but not just any family. This is a family with quite specific and predictable characteristics.” Hilary Harris, "Failing 'White Woman': Interrogating the Performance of Respectability," Theatre Journal 52, no. 2 (2000). The intersection of family and normative constructions of race are worthy of a greater focus than is enabled within the parameters of this thesis.

111 The little lost David of A.I. wants to know where he can find the Blue Fairy, the deus ex machina that he believes will lead him to his mother. Dr Know, a super computer, can only locate the answer when asked to combine ‘flat fact’ (whatever that is) and ‘fairy tale.’

49 cultural rediscription.”112 Consequently, this study draws upon a range of intellectual traditions and critical theory, addressing questions of representation, narrative, and the production of meaning and some of the broader ideological and cultural concerns of Spielberg’s films in order to further contribute to this neglected aspect of one of popular culture most important figures.

This analysis is analytical and interpretive, rather than polemical. The ‘family’ is central to individual and social life, and is both the focus of conservative family- oriented politics, and simultaneously liberal counter-attacks ‘reclaiming’ the family. Rather than making specific political claims for and against the family and its representation, this analysis is concerned with the contested discourses and fantasies that construct ideologies of the family, as conceptualised in the diverse directorial work of Steven Spielberg, with a focus on how such family imagery is constructed through narrative and storytelling. Most importantly, this argument is not pro or anti- family – everyone has a family in some sense, part of the fundamental and obvious aspects of its sentimental and emotional power. Instead, this thesis investigates how narratives of family, positive, negative or ambivalent, are deployed in film – in some cases such representations work in a conservative fashion; in others, and often at the same time, they can be radical. In many cases, they are simply interesting and worthy of analysis and further interpretation, recouping both Spielberg and the intricacies of familial representation from critical neglect. Some of the most seemingly obvious ideas are the most difficult to isolate and interpret, particularly when they are so ‘close to home’.

112 Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture. P. 3.

50 Chapter One The Hook within the (Impossible) Family: Standing on the Outside, Looking In – Ideology, Fantasy and Desire

Light falls from the open door across the bed as the boy looks up at his parents, his mother sitting on the bed leans over and kisses him goodnight, and his father smiles indulgently at the scene, dressed in his dressing gown and clutching his glasses and newspaper – an idyllic vision of family, nestled in wealth and comfort. This scene is played out in two different ways in Spielberg’s 1987 film Empire of the Sun: first in the film’s mise-en-scène as Mary and John put their son, Jamie, later known as Jim, to bed. This image is then insistently duplicated, as Nigel Morris notes, in a Norman Rockwell image in Jamie’s possession that surfaces throughout the course of the film.1 The Rockwell image, however, in both its incarnation within Jim’s family, and the cutting that he carries with him, is shadowed by the war that hangs over in 1941. When the Japanese Army moves on the city, this idyllic family imagery is shattered. In the swelling, panicking crowds, Jim loses his grip on his mother’s hand, and the family become separated for the duration of the war. The Rockwell image, however, stays with Jim, despite separation. As Jim moves through the Japanese prisoner of war camp that becomes his home during the war, he carefully and lovingly takes the picture with him, always gently packing it, and placing it in a privileged position. A vision of familial togetherness, the image is a sentimental reminder of loss that hangs over the entire film.

In the dying stages of the war, the camp is packed up and evacuated, and as the picture is lovingly placed in Jim’s baggage for the final time, the camera focuses on the name Jamie Graham written on the case – a reminder of his name before the war, his parents’ childish name for him, lost to the now adolescent and weary ‘Jim’. After days of trudging through the hot sun, Jim stops to look out over the river, before throwing away his meagre possessions, finally relinquishing the Rockwell image of

1 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 138. Morris identifies the image as one of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post paintings. Rockwell was a popular American painter, particularly prolific in the thirties and forties, well known for his iconic scenes and imagery through the depiction of the (perceived) American everyday. The Rockwell theme and imagery is also observed by Claudia Springer, "The Boy at the Keyhole: Watching Bombshells," Literature and Psychology 34, no. 4 (1988). P. 25. domestic togetherness that had haunted his sparse existence in the camp. He continues to walk on, unencumbered.

The film ultimately grants familial reunion, if not resolution, after the war. But, as this chapter discusses, the family’s role in narrative resolution is not as simple and ‘Spielbergian’ as it may appear, and the persistent failure and ambiguity posed by Spielberg’s conclusions mark his invocation of familial sentiment. Jim, motionless and expressionless, stands amidst a swirl of lost children and searching parents, a scene that recalls the swarming crowds that pulled Jim away from his mother. His father moves past Jim, without recognition, shot from behind, the camera centring his neck and back as he pushes through the crowds. He is then shot from a very low angle, his face mostly obscured by other children, oblivious to his son. Jim watches his father walk past, but says nothing, and it is not clear if he too does not recognise his family, as he stands still and hollow-eyed amidst the moving sea of stricken families. Music starts to swell when his mother sees him; she calls out to Jamie, but Jim doesn’t respond – it has not been his name for several years, and that boy is lost. He keeps staring resolutely ahead. She calls out to him again, and the camera frames her and Jim together as she moves toward him, the father on the periphery. Jim looks at her, touches her hand, her lips, removes her hat and looks at her hair. Jim slowly moves towards his mother and embraces her. A cut to their embrace foregrounds mother and child, while John stands helplessly in the background, his mouth twitching, excluded from this Oedipal moment. The rising music and intense sentimentality that closes the traumas of war with the reunion of mother and child is, however, in contrast to the frantic children who restlessly move in the background, remainder children without parents. The camera then shifts to an extreme close-up of Jim’s eyes, slowly closing as he relaxes in his Freudian return to his mother’s arms. Yet this final scene remains ambiguous; family has been found, and Jim can finally close his eyes, can sink into the imagined world so coveted in the Rockwell image. At the same time, the maternal embrace can only superficially erase the war, it cannot return Jim to Jamie, and the Rockwell image remains just that, an image.

This sentimental scene of familial reunion attempts to excise the loss that structures the film and Jim’s survival. But its failure is further implied in the concluding shot, which recalls the establishing shots of Shanghai at the beginning to the film. After

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the close-up of Jim’s closing eyes, the camera moves through the liberated and celebrating city to a shot of Jim’s abandoned case floating in the Yangtze, mirroring the opening shot of coffins floating on the river, a potent evocation of death that taints the preceding maternal embrace.2 The idealised constructions and anxious replications of familial circles throughout the Empire of the Sun are only superficially redeemed by familial reunion – Jim survives the horrors of war, but, despite closing his eyes as he sinks into his mother’s arms, the overriding sense of trauma and loss of innocence lingers. The film’s deployment of nostalgia for the family ideal through the Rockwell image emphasises its status as always-lost. The picture on the newspaper is a clipping, an image, a Rockwellian dream of American familial unity for a boy whose relationship to his family is irrevocably lost, even when he recovers it. As Lester Friedman notes, the “Rockwell’s image function[s] as more of an ironic comment than a scrap of nostalgia… while the treasured Rockwell picture overtly sparks memories of the lavishly cloistered and deceptively innocent world Jim inhabited… it simultaneously reveals the growing distance between the essential requirement of the father to be protector”.3 The fantasy that had sustained Jim’s existence in the internment camp, the imagined fulfilment of maternal plenitude becomes artificial – a Rockwell painting brandished in the face of death, displacement and nuclear weapons.4 As is widely recognised, the desired, traumatic ‘return home' is always corrupted, and in the specific case of Jim’s Oedipal return to the mother, is doomed to failure, floating away with the coffins on the river.5

2 Frank Gormlie notes that the book begins and ends with the image of coffins floating on the Yangzte. Frank Gormlie, "Ballard's Nightmares/Spielberg's Dreams: Empire of the Sun," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, M.D.: Scarecrow, 2002). P. 130. He goes on to note that, in contrast, in the film, “Jim’s war life floats away in this coffin. ... He is once again Jamie, safe in his mother’s arms.” P.132 This interpretation, however, ignores that the name on the ‘coffin’ in the final scene is that of the little lost boy, Jamie, rather than Jim.

3 Lester D Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). P. 204.

4 Andrew Ross argues that the final scene of parental reunion is the ‘familia ex machina’, and that the film instead resolves through nuclear weapons and the triumph of faith in military technology through the bomb, which Jim describes as “like God taking a photograph.” This is an interesting reading, suggesting the death drive that haunts the film. Andrew Ross, "Families, Film Genres, and Technological Environments," East-West Film Journal 1, no. 4 (1989). P. 20. The conclusion of the film can easily be read as sentimental reunion triumphing over despair, yet other interpretations also linger, in that the death and violence is not so easily resolved through ‘familia ex machina’.

5 Springer, "The Boy at the Keyhole: Watching Bombshells." P. 30.

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As can be seen when Jim is (somewhat) reunited with his parents, the representation of the family in popular culture is often a complex and contradictory nexus of anxieties, and this chapter is broadly concerned with understanding the anxieties induced by both Jim’s maternal embrace and the hovering, possibly censorious presence of the father that shadows this desired moment. In the period of Spielberg’s filmmaking, grand narratives of the family have been incessantly disintegrated, redeveloped, and recuperated. Spielberg’s films have been produced in a recent history that has radically challenged traditional notions of the family, reformulating the normative assumptions of nuclear families into new and often surprising permutations. Despite being strongly inflected by a fantasy ideal of family, Spielberg’s families deviate considerably from this nuclear ‘ideal’; bickering families, single parent families, inter-racial families, even child-less families, as well as undercurrents of anti-familialism characterise Spielberg’s rapprochement with familial imagery. The fracturing of familial idealisations and assumptions is at the heart of Spielberg’s conflicted representation of the family: the maternal embrace that both returns the child to his family, but also emphasises continual separation and loss and the undercurrent of death. The space opened by the ambiguity of such an image rhetorically inflects Spielberg’s narratives and his representations of the family.

The family in cinema functions as a fantastic social construction, premised on collective recognition. The inherent ambiguities and anxieties of the ‘family category’ are utilised not just by Spielberg, but by many other purveyors of popular culture, from religious organisations to fabricators of political and national metaphors. Understanding how desire, fantasy and the family function is paramount to any understanding of Jim’s problematic return to his mother, and generally the omnipresent representation of the family in popular texts. As Fredric Jameson argues, “[i]t is in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of … fundamental history, that the doctrine of the political unconscious finds its function and its necessity.”6 Such narratives and textual representation construct such ‘categories’ as the family, as they are recognised by collective culture. Texts are processes, never ‘completed’ narratives –

6 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). P. 20.

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interpretation seeks the mediatory impulses of cultural dominants, the fissures and contradictions that locate the narrative as a ‘socially symbolic act’. In Jameson’s words,

to restructure the problematics of ideology, of the unconscious and of desire, of representation, of history, and of cultural production, around the all informing process of narrative, [is]… the central function or instance of the human mind.7

In the aesthetic realm, social contradictions find expression where individual texts represent ‘utterances of collective discourse.’8 The seemingly ‘universal’ family is manifested though ideological constructions and cultural representations; as Pierre Bourdieu observes, “this arbitrary social construct [of the family] seems to belong on the side of nature, the natural and the universal”.9 Yet, he continues to argue; the family is always created and reified as natural through cultural processes. It is in these terms that such processes relate to the (cultural) fantasies and the explication of desire disclosed in Spielberg’s depiction of the family. Significantly, the seemingly universal journey toward the family throughout Spielberg’s films at times seems to betray the very ‘nature’ of this construction. The family, so frequently portrayed as threatened or weakened, is artificially re-created through narrative and filmic devices, through the use of ‘sentimental manipulation’ that characterises Spielberg’s narrative closure.

The family’s ideological and fantastical construction is revealed in Spielberg’s take on the Peter Pan narrative, Hook, a film which alternates between fantasies which (attempt to) cover the trauma that characterises the family: time, death and the future. In Hook, the aging Peter Banning, formerly Pan, is reluctant, and even at times, incapable, of nurturing his children, or even rescuing them. Opposed to Peter is the eponymous Captain Hook, who presents the greatest threat not as a dastardly pirate, but instead as an alternative father, representing a threatening rupture in the

7 Ibid. P. 13.

8 Ibid. P. 80.

9 Pierre Bourdieu, "On the Family as a Realized Category," Theory, Culture and Society 13, no. 3 (1996). P. 21.

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ideological and biological category reified as Family. Bourdieu suggests that the family, as a social fiction, is empowered ‘as a realized category’; it becomes a social reality when it is collectively recognised: “It can be said without contradiction both that social realities are social fictions with no other basis than social construction, and that they really exist, inasmuch as they are collectively recognized.”10 Peter’s to Neverland and the fantastical flight from children and domesticity express a fantasy of escape from the social enmeshing that characterises the family, flight from the reification of social familial fictions.

Hook’s emotional renaissance is achieved through the middle-aged Peter’s fantasy of liberation from fatherhood in the land of eternal youth, Neverland, yet accedes to an increasing cultural preoccupation with ‘involved fathering’ in the concluding familial return to his wife and children. The film’s central dynamic is preoccupied by the restitution of the proper father, represented through the struggle between Peter and Hook. As Henry Sheehan observes, “Hook is merely the agent of Peter’s most secret, repressed desires, and as such is his mirror image.”11 The film represents a dualism between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ fathers, Peter/Hook, who are different sides of the same coin; the anxieties and actions of the one must be brought back to the other.12 Consequently, the majority of the film betrays Peter’s rejection of family – the fantasy of Neverland discloses a desire for childlessness, for ‘no future’, no growth, a permanently childhood.13 Significantly, Peter’s displacement of the internalised prohibitive father onto the character of Hook permits fantasised access to

10 Ibid. P. 20.

11 Henry Sheehan, "Spielberg II," 28, no. 4 (1992). P. 70. See also Andrew Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). P. 196-8. Patricia Pace points out that Hook is “at once the rival father and the disturbing spectre of the feminized male.” Patricia Pace, "Robert Bly Does Peter Pan: The Inner Child as Father to the Man in Steven Spielberg's Hook," The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature 20, no. 1 (1996). P. 116. For more discussion of Peter and Hook, also see Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 180.

12 In a more explicitly Oedipal interpretation, Carol Anita Tarr points out that Hook’s “hook is an obvious phallic symbol… that evidences his previous castration. Peter Pan’s challenge and then defeat of Hook is a replay of the Freudian process of the son defeating his Oedipal father for male authority.” Carol Anita Tarr, "Shifting Images of Adulthood: From Barrie's Peter Pan to Spielberg's Hook," in The Antic Art: Enhancing Children's Literary Experiences through Film and Video, ed. Lucy Rollin and Jill P. May (Fort Atkinson, WI: Highsmith, 1993). P. 66.

13 As Lester Friedman observes, “for a film ostensibly concerned with eternal childhood… Spielberg stuffs Hook with a startling amount of talk about dying”. Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 21.

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forbidden desires – Tink, , the memory of his mother. The Neverland fantasy fills the gap that Peter’s voyage from ‘reality’ to a substitute fantasy of timelessness, of an attempted cessation of the familial imperative. Peter relinquishes his children in order to return to boyhood and recapture memories of the mother. It is no irony that Peter’s dark other, Hook, the childless, somewhat ‘feminised’, even queer, pirate, is haunted by the threat of time, of a future, (of Peter’s ‘real world’ existence) and that Peter’s children, as symbols of familial continuity, generations and the future, expose the anxiety that underlies the Neverland fantasy. As Hook asks, “what would the world be like without Captain Hook?” Hook’s queer representational coding – his preoccupation with his curled wig and his ostentatious moustache, his ‘effeminate’ relationship with side-kick Smee, his childlessness and hatred of the parentless ‘lost’ boys, even his repeated threats of suicide and the cessation of time – exemplifies Edelman’s argument that queer politics is the antithesis of ‘reproductive futurism’, “that the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity”.14 Peter’s final defeat of his Hook identity is the ‘defeat’ of the broken clocks and stationary time that signify this queerness, Peter’s own internal refusal of the future. Peter, in leaving Neverland with its broken clocks, and its ageless children, returns to the family and the future. But Peter returns to an alternative idealised fantasy of the family that, in its own way, elides anxiety about the ideological function of the family expressed in Neverland, of aging, death, and the cyclical biological and social replacement facilitated by the family.

Spielberg’s popular narratives provide a significant insight into the ‘collective fantasies’ and the contradictory subtexts that constitute the family in popular culture. They unite ‘master narratives’ of family, mediating social and political constructions through the bourgeois family, compulsory heteronormativity, the private/public divide, and political investments in a biological and cultural future, even as they express anxieties about these discourses of the family. On the family, Sarah Harwood claims that “[a]t its most basic, [it] is the unit to which society has entrusted its reproductive function. … not only physical reproduction of our species but also the

14 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). P. 4.

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reproduction of cultural, social and psychic norms.”15 These ideological functions of family, so significant to the ‘private’ and ‘public’ realms of discourse, are necessarily collective, as are related processes of desire and subjective investment, materialised in the text. As Jameson argues,

[i]deology necessarily implies the libidinal investment of the individual subject, but the narratives of ideology – even what we have called the Imaginary, daydreaming, or wish-fulfilling text – are equally necessarily collective in their materials and form.16

The ‘libidinal investment’ expressed by collective nostalgia in familial representations can be understood in terms of Jameson’s insights about narrative as a larger part of a necessarily collective cultural discourse. As Steven Helming notes, Jameson posits “a criticism capable of achieving mediations between the social and the individual that could draw on psychoanalysis without reducing the social to the categories of individual psychology.”17 Popular representations of the family are structured by powerful discourses of fantasy, desire and pleasure, played out through social and individual narratives. The appeal of narrative stems from its powerful intersection with desire, loss, rupture, fundamental concepts which structure Spielberg’s families. Discussing narrative through Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, Terry Eagleton points out that

the pattern of classical narrative is that an original settlement is disrupted and restored … Narrative is a source of consolation: lost objects are a cause of anxiety … In Lacanian theory, it is the original lost object – the mother’s body – which drives forward the narrative of our lives, impelling us to pursue substitutes for this lost paradise in the endless metonymic movement of desire.18

15 Sarah Harwood, Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). P. 36-7.

16 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. P. 185.

17 Steven Helmling, "Jameson's Lacan," Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism 7, no. 1 (1996). Online, no pagination.

18 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, (London and New York: Verso, 1983). P. 185. Quoted in Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 16.

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Throughout Spielberg’s narratives, there is continual ideological and libidinal investment in the image, or the ideal of the family, narratives which are preoccupied by loss, desire, substitution and return.

Slavoj Žižek’s theorisations of desire, fantasy, the law of the father and psychoanalysis in critical interpretation are productive in understanding Spielberg’s fantasised and idealised families. Žižek elaborates on the ways that Lacan can be used to understand popular culture and politics, whereas Jameson refers to psychoanalysis and the unconscious in collective terms and is primarily focused on the manifestation of culture and history through narrative. The two theories elaborate on the narratives of the ‘political unconscious’ through textual interpretation and narrative and discourse analysis. As Jameson argues:

history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but... as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and ... our approach to it, and the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.19

Jameson’s schema considers the effects of history and the irruptions of the Real into texts; Žižek focuses on the Real (of history) and its manifestations within popular culture. In his discussion of Lacan and culture, Žižek describes the Real as “the lack around which the Symbolic order is structured”.20 The Symbolic is structured around a desired return to originary (maternal) wholeness, forever lost. It is this always-lack of the maternal body, the Maternal Thing, which cannot be expressed through representation, and yet which haunts representation. The everyday workings of culture and representation, the Law, that is the Symbolic, is, according to Žižek,

19 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. p. 35

20 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989). P. 169-70. Carolyn Jess- Cooke also concisely describes ‘the Real’: it “is implicitly concerned with the repetition of repressed experience that cannot be symbolized. The reason it cannot be symbolized, moreover, is because all signifiers and symbols lead only to the representation of desire, and not the object of desire.” Carolyn Jess-Cooke, "Virtualizing the Real: Sequelization and Secondary Memory in Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A.I.," Screen 47, no. 3 (2006). P. 349. This ‘object of desire’ can be understood as the desired return to ‘oneness’ with the maternal body and the obliteration of desire and otherness. However, complicating this, as Nigel Morris points out, “[t]he mother’s body, however, ‘stands as a representation, no more than that, of what is ultimately unrepresentable, in that the object that could overcome the lack is non-existant.” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 17, quoting Robert Lapsley and Michael Westlake, Film Theory: An Introduction,(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). P. 68.

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always troubled by this lack that is the Real, the unrepresentable, the unsymbolisable, and the impossible. As Matthew Sharpe notes of Žižek’s work on Lacanian theory, it “aims to … systematically chart the effects that this unsymbolizable kernel [the prelinguistic Real] has on our ordinary sense of reality.”21 Emphasising the importance of collective desire with a conceptualisation of the unconscious and thereby of collective cultural narratives, Žižek’s psychoanalytic and cultural interpretive frameworks theorise the Law and the Real and their effects within cultural and political narratives, narratives which in Spielberg’s films, circulate around images of the family.

The culturally constructed ideal of family is created and sustained in various ways through ideology and fantasy, and the recurring narrative drive around the familial metaphor; filmic narratives support such constructs through the invocation of desire, emotion and identification. The ideology of the family is heavily invested in the idealised family fantasy that (re)produces images of ‘harmonious unity’, suggesting the attainment of the Maternal Thing and the dissolution of the lack that structurally haunts the Symbolic. As Žižek argues, “society as a Corporate Body is the fundamental ideological fantasy.”22 The family both as biological entity and cultural metaphor facilitates the constant replication of this ‘fundamental ideological fantasy’ of harmony, both on the familial individual level, the domestic ‘home as fantasy’ level, the spiritual level, and the national level. What is strikingly apparent in Spielberg’s films is that, although the dominant trend is toward the fantasised ideal of a harmonious family, there is almost always a concurrent and opposing tendency (fantasy) that leans toward the destruction of the family.

Spielberg’s idealised fantasies are always at risk of exposing the ‘Hook’ hidden within the family man, or what Edelman would describe as a ‘cultural death drive’ away from ‘reproductive futurism’ and heteronormativity, opposing “the fantasy that generates endless narratives of generation.”23 Varying and contradictory discourses

21 Matthew Sharpe, Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004). P. 4.

22 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. P. 126.

23 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. P.82.

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of fantasies, anxieties and politics within the representation of the family inform the incessant production of narrative; the interpretation of texts unearths the collective ideologies informing the construction of the familial fantasy. As Jameson says on interpretation:

master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them; such allegorical narrative signifieds are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality.24

Reading the family in Spielberg film is about understanding and interpreting the collective fantasies that construct narrative. The family is the biological and discursive point of origins, existing as a biological ‘fact’ upon which are written these ‘collective fantasies’. As Althusser argues in his discussion of ideological state apparatuses, “before its birth the child is always-already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by specific familial ideological configuration in which it is ‘expected’ once it is conceived”.25 Yet, the relationship between familial ideology and its role in the formation of the subject is always haunted by the Real, and the subsequent desire to fill that emptiness, to maintain the social screen (of the familial/cultural); the family fantasy protects the subject from the void of the Real.

Popular narratives of family are thus important moments in the conceptualisation of the symbolic, mediating cultural experience of the other through fantasy. In his psychoanalytic reading of fantasy and desire in David Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997), Todd McGowan argues that “fantasy serves as a respite from the ambiguity of desire”,26 and further, that

[m]eaning depends on the constant presence of fantasy. Fantasy, though it is opposed to ‘reality,’ nonetheless provides an underlying support for our sense of reality… Unlike the social reality, fantasy provides the illusion of

24 Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. P. 34.

25 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes toward an Investigation)," in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London; New York: Verso, 1994). P. 132.

26 Todd McGowan, "Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch's Lesson in Fantasy," Cinema Journal 39, no. 2 (2000). P. 51.

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delivering the goods; it offers a form of enjoyment for subjects that reality cannot – such as, for instance, the enjoyment that comes from watching a filmic narrative unfold.27

In Spielberg, the enjoyment is stimulated through the unfolding of fantasy family narratives through the staples of conflict and resolution. The ‘ideal family’ is a standard fantasy in popular culture narratives, and powerful ideological investments and desires circulate through these representations of family. Spielberg’s ‘fairy tale’ adaptations, such as Hook, are fundamentally structured in terms of fantasy, and the characters’ fraught relationship to desire.28 In Empire of the Sun, Jim’s constant replication of the (forever lost) familial unit, mirrored by his coveting of the Rockwell family image, represents his struggle to construct an adequate fantasy to stage his desire (for the maternal embrace). To understand Jim’s desire and his fantasy of family, we turn to the fundamentals of psychoanalysis and narrative theory. As Žižek argues in psychoanalytic terms

fantasy designates the subject’s ‘impossible’ relation to a, to the object- cause of desire. Fantasy is usually conceived as a scenario that realizes the subject’s desire. This elementary definition is quite adequate, on condition that we take it literally: what the fantasy stages is not a scene in which our desire is fulfilled, but on the contrary, a scene that realizes, stages, the desire as such. The fundamental point of psychoanalysis is that desire is not something given in advance, but something that has to be constructed – and it is precisely the role of fantasy to give the coordinates of the subject’s desire, to specify its object, to locate the position the subject assumes in it. It is only through fantasy that the subject is constituted as desiring: through fantasy, we learn how to desire.29

The goal of desire is not to ‘possess’ the object, but rather it is the repetitive circulation of desire itself that constitutes the enjoyment within the fantasy.30 As psychoanalytic narrative theory recognises, once the happy ending or resolution is achieved, narrative must cease or reveal that enjoyment is premised upon the process

27 Ibid. P. 52.

28 Other Spielberg films which explicitly deploy the codes and conventions of the fairy tale are E.T. and Artificial Intelligence: A.I.

29 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991). P. 6.

30 Ibid. P.5.

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of desiring, the questing and questioning, rather than resolution configured as the romantic/familial reconciliation which precipitates the ‘end’ of desire. The ideological closure of narrative (in fantasy) disguises the recognition of fantasy’s stop-gap nature. McGowan explains that

Fantasy fills in the gap that haunts the social reality, but in doing so it reveals that there is something not encompassed by this reality – a traumatic Real. The very fact that we must have recourse to fantasy – that the social reality does not satisfy us – testifies to the existence of the Real that haunts us… the turn to fantasy, the transition, makes the Real evident because it reveals, however briefly, the point of fissure within the social reality.31

Spielberg’s films, through their repetitive preoccupation with the (idealised) family, replicate this dynamic of desire and fantasy. Narrative is impelled by desire for resolution through family, the impossible solution to the fissure that haunts narrative. Todd McGowan further argues that

narrative usually holds together [...] desire and fantasy. Desire fuels the movement of narrative because it is the search for answers, a process of questioning, an opening to possibility. Fantasy, in contrast, provides an answer to this questioning, a solution to the enigma of desire (albeit an imaginary one)… fantasy is always there, [in most narratives] clearing up the ambiguities of desire.32

Loss and conflict within the family opens up the processes of narrative desire, while the staging of familial resolution presents a fantasy finale to the desire-driven ‘movement of narrative’. In the case of Spielberg, narrative motivation is not arbitrary, but is constituted by the ideological investment in (the fantasy of) the family. Family and desire are intimately linked, and Spielberg’s films ‘stage’ the movement between subject and family. In particular, the narrative moves from the family as the point of origins, the reminder of maternal sublimation (the loss of which originates desire), to the family as facilitator of law and the symbolic, the differentiation of the other, and as the compensation for frustrated desire.

31 McGowan, "Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch's Lesson in Fantasy." P. 65.

32 Ibid. P. 51-2.

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In Empire of the Sun, Jim’s substitute mother, Mrs Victor, dies as Jim watches the bright white flash in the sky as the atomic bomb explodes over Hiroshima. Upon familial reunion, Jim is embraced by his mother, but his father stands apart, a reminder of the law and paternal prohibition. In this scene, the family is split; maternal recovery remains haunted by the inevitable death/loss of the Mother and the ambiguity of desire, and the pure destruction realised in the bomb’s beautiful, almost spiritual explosion. The family, whether (constructed as) metaphoric or biological, is foundational to the constitution of the properly desiring, interpellated subject of discourse; yet as the apparatus of movement to the Symbolic, the family necessarily provokes the reminder of the real beyond language and the Law. In his account of Žižek’s philosophies, Boucher explains that “[i]n unconscious thought, the subject constructs certain fantasies, which bring it into contact with ‘objects of desire’. But these objects are… ‘partial objects’.”33 They cannot recover the longed-for always lost object, but only stage a fantasy reunion, an embrace where eyes must necessarily be closed.

In Žižek’s analysis, fantasy plays a mediatory role between the subject’s necessary constitutive differentiation from the unknown desire of the Other and the return to the maternal embrace; between Jim’s closed eyes and the memory of the bomb and maternal death, and the father that stands outside the maternal embrace, looking in. The fantasy of familial reunion simultaneously exposes the trauma of familial separation. As Boucher explains:

I accept that as the subject’s response to the intolerable anxiety provoked by the incompleteness of the Other, the fantasy translates the gaping void of the Other’s desire into a determinate mandate, a definite symbolic identification. In other words, as Žižek elsewhere notes, fantasy represents a sort of ‘pre- emptive strike’ whereby we anticipate ‘the signifier which represents me in the Other, [which] resolves the impasse of what object I am for the Other’. Typically, fantasy is the imaginary scenario of a harmonious unity – for instance ‘society as a Corporate Body is the fundamental ideological fantasy’. But Žižek concludes that ‘fantasy… is a construction enabling us to seek maternal substitutes, but at the same time a screen shielding us from

33 Geoff Boucher, "The Law as a Thing: Žižek and the Graph of Desire," in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek, ed. Geoff Boucher, Matthew Sharpe, and Jason Glynos (Alershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2005). P. 27.

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getting too close to the maternal Thing’. This suggests that fantasy shields us from the maternal Thing and not the paternal signifier.34

These Žižekian interpretive frameworks facilitate an understanding of social and ideological discourses of the family in popular culture and representation – ‘the corporate body as the fundamental fantasy’ that imbues the representational anxieties embodied in Spielberg’s never quite reunited families. The fantasy maternal embrace ‘shields’ Jim from the Real of the maternal; he closes his eyes in relief, but his hollow eyes and unsmiling, gaunt face are reminders of permanent separation, of the permanent loss of the fantasised ‘harmonious unity’ of idealised, Rockwellian family. The fantasy scenes of familial recovery can only attempt to ameliorate the trauma of war, of separation, of the bomb, of the Real, by permitting fantasised access to the object of desire.

Yet, despite this preoccupation with the maternal figure, Spielberg’s films are frequently dominated by the consolidation of paternal family models, representing a move toward the Law of the Father. Maternal separation and paternal prohibition generates a proper desiring subject which structures Spielberg’s representation of familial narratives. These narratives, however, are fraught with ambiguity, and the predominant characteristic of Spielberg’s families is desire for the Law of the (Paternal) Father, conflicted by the (attempted) sublimation to the Real of the maternal, the vacillation between fantasised wholeness and always unsatisfied, uncertain desire. As McGowan observes of the importance of fantasy to narrative: “[e]ven narratives replete with uncertainty… necessarily betray some investment in fantasy, or else they would cease to be narratives altogether. Narratives allow us the respite of knowledge, thereby delivering us from the horror of desire’s complete uncertainty, even as they receive their energy from desire.”35 It is this tendency in Empire of the Sun that infuses the final scene with ambiguity as Jim attempts to return to the pre-linguistic Real of the mother; yet the ordeals of his years in the prisoner of war camp resist such an easy resolution. No words are ‘possible’ between Jim and his

34 Ibid. P. 33. Boucher is referencing Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology. P. 115, P. 126 and P. 119-20, and Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). P. 76.

35 McGowan, "Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch's Lesson in Fantasy." P. 57.

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mother in the wake of the unspeakable trauma of the war and the bomb. Such ‘impossible’ resolutions are formulated through this repetitive trope of family; Jamie’s abandoned case floating on the Yangtze, the sense of loss that is associated with family relations in Spielberg films must be understood, not just in order to read each film, but also to understand the cultural milieu in which such popular narratives resonate and the psychic structures that underlie them.

Spielberg’s 2001 Artificial Intelligence: A.I., like Empire of the Sun, ends with an unsatisfactory maternal embrace.36 A Frankenstein-influenced retelling of the Pinocchio story, the little robot ‘boy’ at the heart of the narrative is programmed to forever love his ‘mother’, but is inevitably rejected by his family. Instead, however, of wreaking vengeance as does Frankenstein’s monster, or learning some moral lessons in order to be accepted back into the community, as does Pinocchio,37 David’s futile 2000 year search to become a ‘real’ boy and be welcomed into the family only ends when his mother is artificial herself. The impossible object of David’s obsessive Oedipal quest is to attain the eternal love of the mother/other – a desire for wholeness, unity, authenticity, to go to the ‘land where dreams are born’, a return to the mother and the rejection of the Symbolic Law of the Father. With the incursion of ‘artificial’ creation into the biological family, Spielberg’s film queries the construction of the family in terms of nature, technology, and the individual and cultural workings of desire through the explicitly Oedipal journey of David, who is unable to relinquish his desire for the maternal return.

36 The film was developed from the Brian Aldiss short story “Super Toys Last all Summer Long”, which was worked on for many years by . The project was completed by Spielberg after Kubrick’s death. It is important to note that Kubrick offered the film to Spielberg, despite tinkering with the project himself for many years, because “he felt that Spielberg had the right sensibilities for the story.” Scott Loren, "Mechanical Humanity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Android: The Posthuman Subject in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Artificial Intelligence: A.I.," in Stanley Kubrick: Essays on His Films and Legacy, ed. Gary D. Rhodes (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008). P. 211. The history of A.I., and the parts played by Spielberg and Kubrick in bringing the story to be filmed are detailed in Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. PP. 46-9.

37 The desire to be ‘a real boy’ is the main element borrowed from Carlo Collodi’s story. Thomas Morrissey points out that the differences are in fact “the film’s ultimate tragic core: David is Pinocchio, but he is not Pinocchio, for if he were, his suffering would have character-building implications. He would have a future.” Thomas Morrissey, "Growing Nowhere: Pinocchio Subverted in Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence," Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 45, no. 3 (2004). P. 254.

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Moving toward the paternal handshake, rather than the maternal embrace, Catch Me If You Can (2002) is also motivated by familial desires and fantasies. With a particularly nostalgic postmodern style, the narrative focuses on the exploits of young con-artist, Frank Abegnale. However, the narrative dynamic is not driven by his crimes, so much as by his struggles with his broken family and particularly, with his problematic paternal relationships – with his father, Frank Abegnale sr., and with his father substitute, the federal agent Hanratty who is pursuing him. Frank’s (postmodern) criminality and identity crises are framed by his conflicted relationship to these father figures, congruent with Frank’s uneasy relationship with the paternal Law.

The two films seem to contrast ideologically and filmically, but they share some significant dimensions. A.I.’s narrative illuminates the familial anxieties provoked by a desiring yet artificial robot child; Catch Me if You Can’s Frank ultimately rejects his ‘fraudulent’ personas and ‘accepts’ his original identity, and the authority of the father, and the law. Both films are preoccupied by the question of what constitutes the authentic – who is the ‘real’ Frank beneath the multiple façades; at what point (if any?) can the desiring robot be considered a real boy? Exploring the nature of the inauthentic and the artificial, the films generate, while simultaneously problematising, a fantasy image of family, a nostalgic, popular culture ideal of what it ‘authentically’ means to be Family in postmodernism. Catch Me If You Can presents a fantasy resolution of paternal substitution and harmony in the film’s ‘lawful’ ending, just as the substituted fantasy maternal-object is the only logical ‘resolution’ to David’s familial, yet technologically programmed, desire. Frank rejects the maternal and the fantasy through his movement toward the father and the Law. In contrast, A.I.’s David, frozen forever as child/robot, cannot replicate this Oedipal trajectory, and is left in a permanent state of desire for union with the mother. The ambivalently sentimental reunion of mother and child is necessarily perverse in its evocation of the incestuous family and the denial of the Oedipal narrative, leaving David, unlike Frank, unable to progress into the symbolic.

Although most of Spielberg’s films display a preoccupation with the Oedipal crisis, A.I. and Catch Me if You Can represent two ideal, although ideologically contradictory, films from which to dissect the problematic of narrative and desire. While both films are preoccupied with the motifs of family reunification/separation,

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anxieties about ‘postmodern’ identity crises, concerns over nostalgia, history and the future of family, society and humanity, and apprehension about identity and narration, the differences between these two films suggests some meaningful points of dialogue when discussing ‘family’ as fantasy, ideology and the genesis of desire. Catch Me if You Can constructs a nostalgic approach to the structure of the family, sentimentally recalling and validating a traditional and patriarchal image of family and identity. In A.I., however, such motifs are instead critiqued.38 The sentimentality of David’s reunion is foregrounded to privilege the artificial nature of the narrative (fantasy) response to the ambiguity of desire. Radically different to the (assumed) ‘Spielbergian’ ending of reunion and familial harmony, A.I. undermines many of the ideological assumptions that comprise the traditional narrative arc of families lost and resolutions found, and final assimilation into Symbolic Law.

‘I Fought the Law, and the Law Won’: Catch Me if You Can

The stylised, jazzy opening credits of Catch Me If You Can establish the nostalgic heist/caper flick mood, a postmodern nod to a characteristic of the sixties. The retro sliding lines and stylised two-dimensional figures posing with cocktails nostalgically recall the traditions of such films as the popular The Pink Panther movies, famed for their opening captions.39 Nigel Morris notes that the “flat animated graphics, characteristic of the period […are] straight, affectionate pastiche, not parody”.40 a self-conscious application of nostalgic and superficial style introduced and maintained throughout most of the narrative. Catch Me if You Can is an adaptation of the same-titled autobiography of Frank W. Abagnale,41 a sixties con- artist, notable for both his success and his extreme youth. Commencing his life of

38 William Beard actually describes A.I. as “a Spielberg meta-film, a film about Spielberg films.” William Beard, "A.I. Or, the Agony of Steven Spielberg," CineAction 66 (2005). Online, no pagination.

39 Deborah Allison, "Catch Me If You Can, Auto Focus, Far from Heaven and the Art of Retro Title Sequences," Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema 26 (2003). Online, no pagination.

40 Morris also notes that these title sequences invoke the stylistics of Bond films, the Pink Panther films, The Charge of the Light Brigade and “sequences by , particularly Anatomy of a Murder.” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 330.

41 Frank W. Abagnale, Catch Me If You Can (Sydney: Bantam, 2002).

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crime at seventeen, Abagnale swindled millions of dollars before his eventual arrest five years later, after having impersonated a , a paediatrician and a lawyer. In Spielberg’s hands, this narrative is transformed to a story of Frank’s troubled adolescence, and of ‘family’ lost and regained, commencing his narrative with the break-up of his family and the loss of the suburban home. Frank cannot stabilise an ‘authentic’ identity, despite his many frenetic attempts at social acceptability, and he dissolves into a multiplicity of postmodern identities, two dimensional figures sliding across the screen. In contrast to the (imagined) ‘harmonious unity’ of the familial past that the film constructs, the family is always at risk of dissolution, the subject is threatened, and the institutions that sustain culture and the family are endangered.

Temporally situated in the sixties, Catch Me If You Can, is preoccupied with particular images of this period, familiar from TV shows and architecture, while more political or radical depictions are marginalised.42 The film is nostalgically attached to the (oft-televised) image of happy traditional families of the American cultural fantasy.43 While the focus of his films may be the apparently ‘apolitical’ family rather than sixties radical politics, the conflicted construction of Spielberg’s living rooms intimates significant anxiety and ambivalence about the family and its representation. Such representations comprise part of the political unconscious that underlies narrative; family, while idealised as the private sphere, can never completely obfuscate its political and the social origins, origins which emerge in the fractures and fissures of narrative representation of the family as a socially constructed, collectively imagined ideal that is the logical fantasy endpoint of narrative desire. Throughout Catch Me if You Can, the emphasis is on Frank and the

42 As Robert Keser argues, the “tumultuous period [of the sixties]… appears sanitized here. There is not one sign of the cultural upheavals… Spielberg simply ignores that anything special happened, presenting history as experienced on TV, in the safety of the living room, not of the streets. But it seems a narrow kind of humanity when he limits his focus to family and not society”. Robert Keser, "Up/Down with Retro: Three Recent Hits Retrofit the Sixties," Bright Lights Film Journal 41 (2003). Online, no pagination. Of course, a clear separation between ‘family and society’ is not so simple.

43 As John Story describes Jameson’s take on the nostalgia film, it “works in one and/or two ways: it recaptures and represents the atmosphere and stylistic features of the past; and it recaptures and represents certain styles of viewing the past. What is of crucial significance for Jameson is that such films do not attempt to recapture or represent the ‘real’ past, but always make do with certain cultural myths and stereotypes about the past.” Story argues that representation has always been so, and that Jameson’s claims of it being a specifically postmodern effect are incorrect. John Storey, "The Sixties in the Nineties: Pastiche or Hyperconsciousness?," in Action TV: Tough Guys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks, ed. Bill Osgerby and Anna Gough-Yates (London, England: Routledge, 2001). P. 239.

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FBI agent in hot pursuit, Carl, as products of broken (nuclear) families. Carl indicates his familial concern for Frank: “You’re just a kid”. Frank retorts, “I’m not your kid!” By the resolution of the film, however, Carl’s legal custody of Frank has been firmly established, and the father-son relationship consolidated, although not without considerable anxiety and ambivalence. Together, the conclusion of the film suggests, they will heal the wound to the family, applying a narrative bandaid over the fracture within the (ideal) familial home. But such restitution necessitates that Frank’s flair and panache are replaced by tedious grey office cubicles; family may be the desired narrative resolution, but it is also a sacrifice, a submission to the Law of prohibition.44

The breakdown of Frank’s family, paralleled by Carl’s history of divorce and the loss of his daughter, structures the film’s narrative trajectory. The narrative’s movement from idealised harmony to fragmentation, alienation and conflict is expressed through Frank’s postmodern escape into various identities and his glorification of status symbols. This is then juxtaposed with Carl and Frank’s loneliness, expressed most vividly during the ‘family-time’ of . Both characters are alone – Frank has only the company of his alternative personalities, and Carl is at work on Christmas Day, a day symbolically structured by family and ideals of harmonious togetherness.45 Family-less, they reach out to each other in their phone calls, as Frank cannot return home, while Carl does not have access to his daughter. Understanding and empathy, access to ‘genuine’ emotion, in contrast to Frank’s fraudulent life, is nostalgically established between the characters in the sharing of their family traumas – when Frank surrenders, cuffing himself, it is only after Carl uses his daughter as currency to prove his truthfulness.

44 As Morris describes, “Frank Jr too merges into grey, faceless, bureaucracy in the final tracking shot in FBI headquarters. Design and lighting here emphasis uniformity and dull conformity”. Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 334.

45 Christmas is “the time, symbolically, mythologically, of maximally happy domesticity”. Fred Pfeil, White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference, (London: Verso, 1995). P. 16, quoted in Yvonne Tasker, "The Family in Action," in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London; New York: Routledge, 2004). P. 261. Estella Tincknell also notes on the significant discursive construction of Christmas, that “[n]ostalgia for a golden age of the family is perhaps most noticeably… articulated via the emphasis on tradition in most Christmas celebrations in western societies. [An emphasis] stitched into a narrative that links childhood, family and tradition.” Estella Tincknell, Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005). P. 82.

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Chase and Shaw hypothesise that the pervasiveness of nostalgia has perhaps arisen because “we have lost faith in the possibility of changing our public life and have retreated into the private enclaves of family, and the consumption of certain ‘retro’ styles”.46 Truth, so ambiguous and intangible in the context of Frank’s creatively larcenous life and the retro imagery of the film, is validated through the family, symbolically resolving fears of postmodern familial fragmentation, even as they are evoked. In Spielberg films, family is the fragile seal of authenticity.

The narrative’s sentimental affect is sustained through such nostalgia, working on two levels. There is the quirky, tongue-in-cheek, postmodern nostalgia of retro styles that the film fondly recalls; and there is the narrative nostalgia, characterised by Frank’s longing for the ‘past’, for his bygone ‘utopia’ of family life. As argued by Chase and Shaw, “[n]ostalgia becomes possible at the same time as utopia. The counterpart to the imagined future is the imagined past.”47 Although evoked through his postmodern play of shifting identities, Frank’s nostalgia is considerably conflicted, ‘anti- postmodern’; he repeatedly conjures fantasies of unity, authenticity and a desire for authority, qualities perceived as past and lost. Frank’s aversion to the law and authority is only skin deep, while ‘beneath’ is a fundamental tension with the f/Father and traumatic loss of the mother; as Morris observes, “[u]niversalisation of Frank’s criminality into Oedipal conflict effaces questions of immediate morality, thus easing identification with his unreality and exhilaration”.48

The centrality of family to the film’s narrative structure is established by the initial representation of the Abagnales – Frank, his father, Frank, sr. and his French mother, Paula. They are prosperous and content, living the ‘American dream’ in their luxurious suburban house in New York; the family dance together to sentimental music, an extravagant Christmas tree and warming fireplace in the background. The gentle, warm atmosphere is infused with nostalgia, evoked by the crackling fifties

46 Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, "The Dimensions of Nostalgia," in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). P. 3.

47 Ibid. P. 9.

48 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 341.

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music and the sense of ‘togetherness’, enhanced by an aura of ‘lost’ perfection. As this scene is immediately preceded by an introduction to Frank’s life of crime after the fact, showing scenes of his horrific physical condition when incarcerated in a French prison, these establishing family shots empower an irrecoverable, idealised past. Contrasted to the horror of the French gaol scenes – dirty, claustrophobic, dark, and unkempt – the sentimental music, colour schema, and mise-en-scène of this early representation of family harmony privileges imagery of “domesticity versus exclusion”,49 privileging a narrative structure which emphasises Frank’s familial loss. The dancing scene becomes the emotional heart of the narrative, motivating its nostalgic preoccupation with this idyllic image of family. Suzanne Vromen claims that “[t]hrough narrative, [nostalgia] allows for the temporal ordering of events and for their dramatization, and it acts as a counterweight to a sense of fragmentation experienced in the present.”50 The film’s narrative is structured through this dialectic of past ‘nostalgic order’ as opposed to a fragmented, always lacking, present.

The film’s critical moment of loss is precipitated when Abagnale sr. encounters financial problems with the IRS. The fantasy family of the establishing sequences collapses; the large suburban house is sold, the family relocates to a small apartment, and Frank transfers from his prestigious private school to the local public high school. And returning home one day, Frank discover his mother, Paula, ‘entertaining another man’. His parents’ subsequent divorce “shatter[s] him into a variety of larcenous identities.”51 Frank flees his home to , attempting to survive at seventeen with no qualifications and a checking account worth a measly twenty-five dollars. Through his guile, Frank commences his career as a ‘paperhanger’, passing bad cheques, fleecing banks and adopting various alternative guises. However, while Frank’s various schemes comprise the significant events of the film, the emotional effect emerges from the ‘typically Spielbergian’ narrative journey of, as describes it, “a kid searching for his identity, searching for the love

49 Ibid. P. 339.

50 Suzanne Vromen, "The Ambiguity of Nostalgia," Yivo Annual 21 (1993). P. 81.

51 Harry Haun, "Con Artistry: Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can Recalls Youthful Scams," Film Journal International 106, no. 1 (2003). P. 10.

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that he can’t find in his own house.”52 This quest for familial harmony structures the film’s narrative progression. However, the achievement of harmony also requires a sacrifice, the relinquishing of the postmodern play that haunts the film’s ‘resolution’.

Throughout Catch Me if You Can, images of the idealised family are infused with nostalgia; however, by the very invocation of such nostalgia, the film concedes the fantasy of such images, that this ideal is ‘lost’.53 The fantastic connection between present and past is nostalgically maintained through objects, memorabilia of ‘better times’, endowed with far greater significance than simple use value. The film equates the loss of material objects, wealth, and status, with the loss of the family – regain one, and thereby regain the other. Such objects then become symptomatic of Frank’s desire for the familial home, an attempt to repair the lack of family. In the aftermath of his family’s financial ruin, Frank is horrified when his father sells their luxury car, replacing it with a cheap older model. This scene is later evoked when, with his stolen funds, Frank buys his father a brand new Cadillac. Such a purchase serves dual purposes in the film: it attempts, in the present, to compensate Frank and his father’s original loss, as well as recreate an image of past wealth that it is hoped will bring the mother, Paula, back into the family, an attempt to ‘get it all back’ through Frank’s (nostalgic) substitution. Accumulation of money is not merely for prestige, but a means of fulfilling his (familial) desires; Frank is determined to recover his lost home, and reunite his family. Nostalgic objects such as the flashy car and the expensive suit create a material link whereby Frank expresses these nostalgic desires for plush family rooms and laden Christmas trees. Frank makes his objectives explicit in a letter to his father:

Dear Dad, you always told me an honest man has nothing to fear, so I am trying my best not to be afraid. I’m sorry I ran away, but you don’t have to worry. I’m going to get it all back now, daddy, I promise, I’m going to get it all back.

52 Steve Ryfle, "Catch Me If You Can: Interview with Jeff Nathanson," Creative 9, no. 6 (2002). P. 12.

53 Arguably, however, such ideals are never available – images of ‘lost eras’ are just that, images, superficial historical connections to the irretrievable totality of history.

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Frank’s desire for his idealised ‘lost’ family is intimated through three significant scenes which link Frank’s original family and his later, thwarted attempt to create his own family by marrying the innocent young nurse, Brenda. In the primary family scene, Frank dances with his mother in their affluent home, and then stands aside for his father. From the doorway, Frank observes his parents dancing, and his father looks up from his wife to fix his son with a long meaningful gaze. In this way, the film constructs an image of family bonded together through their shared gaze, yet this togetherness is marked by immanent loss. Much later in the narrative, when Frank has inveigled his way into Brenda’s family’s home, he sits with his fiancé and her parents, and eventually joins in with their TV sing-along. But the connection is established by the shared gaze at the television, not with each other, a comment on both the idealised sit-com family of Frank’s unattainable fantasy, and the film’s knowing deployment of pastiched familial images. Isolation from this familial fantasy is further emphasised in the scene, when, again from a doorway, Frank covertly observes Brenda’s parents washing the dishes while singing and swaying together. Contrasted to the earlier ‘dancing scene’, where the family is united through eye contact, Brenda’s parents remain with their backs to him. Frank is disconnected from this domestic fantasy, and can only voyeuristically watch from behind the doorframe, reinforcing the loss of the original family from the initial scene and Frank’s continual fetishisation of this image.

The contrasts between the ‘primal’ family scenes strengthens the film’s ‘nostalgia effect’, generating an image of unity in the first, and exclusion and fragmentation in the latter. David Lowenthal argues that

[t]he diverse goals of nostalgia do have one point in common. They mainly envisage a time when folk did not feel fragmented, when doubt was either absent or patent, when thought fused with action, when aspiration achieved consummation, when life was wholehearted; in short, a past that was unified and comprehensible, unlike the incoherent, divided present.54

This structure of ‘postmodernism fragmentation’ in relation to nostalgia for (familial) ‘unity and consummation’ is evident within Catch Me if You Can. The representation

54 David Lowenthal, "Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't," in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). P. 29.

74 of fragmentation, in effect, strengthens the ideological investment in ‘unity’ – a mutually reinforcing binary fundamental to Spielberg’s depiction of the family ideal. The influence of nostalgic fantasy increases the feeling of present incoherence; such incoherence, in turn, empowers the nostalgic fantasy. But what is it that creates this ‘incoherence’, this ‘divide’ in the present that must be nostalgically fantasised away? Even as the film dreams the idealised family, it is preoccupied with Frank’s postmodern play of identity, surface and simulacra.55 Frank plays at a life where surface dominates depth, films determine his style, and professional skills are learnt from the television. This is itself an ironic touch; the familiar pastiched images of the film’s version of the sixties are learnt and recognised in the same manner. Authenticity becomes equivalent to the high quality of the forgery, and the easy confidence with which image and identity are simulated. In Catch Me if You Can, the act of imitating everyday life becomes a glamorised art form, part of Frank’s professional skills. Setting the stage for the film’s salute to such postmodern con- artistry is the repeated question, “Why do the Yankees always win?” The properly postmodern answer, “nobody can keep their eyes off the pinstripes”, is a rebuttal to the straight-laced, alternative response that the Yankees have recruited one of baseball’s great champions. People, Frank argues, only see the surface, only hear what they expect and desire to hear. He persistently manipulates people, taking advantages of an attraction to ‘pinstripes’, the artificial, rather than to deeper meaning and knowledge.

Yet, in contrast to his avowed advocacy of the postmodern ethos of glamorous pinstripes, Frank proves vulnerable to manipulation by Hanratty, who secures his arrest through a strategy premised on Hanratty divulging his own troubled family life. The ‘incoherent, divided present’ challenges the (nostalgically idealised) harmony of the family; the film represents such postmodern ‘fragmentation and depthlessness’ as unsatisfactory and ‘inauthentic’, although pleasurable and appealing, both in relation to the characters’ development as well as the film’s style. As touched upon above, glamorised postmodern surfaces are paralleled by the movement toward familial

55 In a definition pertinent to Frank’s adoption of various identities and play with established systems of law and authority, Terry Eagleton defines postmodern tropes as “depthless, decentred, ungrounded, self-reflexive. Playful, derivative, eclectic, pluralistic art which blurs the boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, as well as between art and everyday experience.” Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). P. vii.

75 structures, toward a fantasy home that permits individual and familial harmony; such a dynamic is not necessarily a contradiction, but rather reinforces the film’s sentimentally generated fantasies of the ideal family. Chase and Shaw point out that

some cultural critics have identified the whole experience of postmodernity as a kind of macro-nostalgia. There is no space that we authentically occupy, and so popular culture fills the gap by manufacturing images of home and rootedness.56

‘Postmodernity as a form of macro-nostalgia’ is established in Catch Me if You Can’s opening scene, introducing Frank. This introduction is via a retro-style game show where contestants must listen to the narratives of three different men all claiming to be . The contestants must discern which of them is telling the truth, to identify the ‘authentic’ Frank. The postmodern play with lies and deception is central to the film’s representation of ‘truth’ as a game. Truth is to be chosen from amongst a plethora of ‘truths’, carefully acted out for participants and audience. Frank steps from multiple illicit identities, then competes on a game show of his story, only to have the truth duplicated by impostors. The opening sequence betrays a serious anxiety about truth – foregrounding the desire to distinguish (the possibility of) the authentic amongst the ‘lies’ and postmodern simulacra. This is the film’s conflict – it is simultaneously a celebration of the postmodern ease in which identity can be created and how social institutions, in particular, can be undermined, but ultimately, the film only ‘plays’ with such concepts, instead promoting Chase and Shaw’s ‘images of home and rootedness’, which are all the more appealing after the journey through ‘postmodern instability’. In the aftermath of Frank’s familial conflict, the ‘truth’ that the film ultimately endorses is that a stable self, law and family are inevitable; that the ‘childish’ play of identity is suppressed by the father figure of the Law.

The problematic of the Father is central to the Frank’s narrative of open-ended desire and the film’s final resolution. Throughout the film and his developing criminal career, Frank maintains his relationship with his father, who, as opposed to his increasingly wealthy son, swiftly loses his initial glamour. Abagnale sr. progressively

56 Chase and Shaw, "The Dimensions of Nostalgia." P.15.

76 becomes an object of pity and contempt, more so when his present is contrasted to his initial portrayal as a man of substance. The elegance of his former life is replaced with the uniform of his new postal job, public transport substituted for his Cadillac, and the chic of the New York social scene exchanged for seedy bars. Meetings are fraught with tension and awkward dialogue as father and son attempt to reconcile their pasts; Frank obsesses about reuniting his parents, while his father is preoccupied with his fight against the government and the IRS. Paternal encouragement of breaking the law stems from Frank senior’s desire to avenge his troubles with the IRS, to ‘fight the man’, to undermine the Symbolic. On the other hand, despite his criminality, Frank craves the prohibitive f/Father to extend Symbolic authority.

Consequently, while it can be argued that the FBI agent Hanratty is positioned as the lawful opposite to Frank’s postmodern larceny in their ‘odd couple’ hide-and-seek chase around the world, the most important contrast is that between Carl and Abagnale sr. – Frank’s competing father figures. Carl is awkward and humourless, his colleagues noticeably discomfited by his lack of charisma; he is the film’s straight-laced embodiment of the law. He is opposed to Frank sr., who is out of favour with government, and refuses to ‘discipline’ his son; he is decreasingly a figure of authority, bordering on the hysterical. The masculine symbolic authority that Frank emulates through his varying assumed identities (pilot, doctor, lawyer) represents the paternal authority and discipline he lacks within the family. The embittered father struggles for his son’s respect, but tacit approval of Frank’s criminality denies him credibilty as the proper, prohibitive Father. Frank Abagnale sr. proudly addresses his son: “Come and sit with me. Have a drink. I’m your father.” But in response to this statement of paternity, Frank begs, “then tell me to stop.” But Frank sr. refuses: “You can’t stop.” His son walks away from this void in the paternal structure of authority, leaving his father ranting and calling after him.

The Father, as “the agent of prohibition”, structures the fantasy in which desire can be enjoyed; Frank sr. however, is a permissive father, and does not attempt to limit or structure his son’s fantasy ‘play’ with the Law. In contrast, Hanratty, as the face of the law, prohibits Frank’s enjoyment, denying access to his apparent desires, money, clothes, women, even a brief engagement, preventing his free play of identity within

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the postmodern, ideologically unstable world within which Frank moves.57 While specifically interpreting Lost Highway, Todd McGowan generally describes this paternal dynamic through a psychoanalytic understanding of fantasy:

Within the structure of fantasy, the Father provides the anchor on which we ground meaning and get our bearings… this is the function of the Father in the Lacanian schema. He is the point from which everything else can be made sensible. With the assistance of this paternal function, fantasy transforms what does not make sense into what does – questions turn into answers. But the answers it provides – the way it structures our enjoyment – are never pleasant, because the Father always structures enjoyment as something prohibited.58

While Frank sr. protects his son, and encourages his conduct, Carl attempts to bring Frank to justice and punish unlawful activity. Hard on Frank’s trail, Carl follows the trail of false cheques around the world, steadily inching closer. Carl is the Father that structures Frank’s enjoyment as prohibited, fulfilling the paternal function. Throughout the chase, the two develop a rapport; Frank’s phone calls every Christmas Eve reinforce Frank and Carl’s paternal relationship during the ‘season of family’. These phone calls structure the narrative’s movement toward the Lacanian ‘paternal function’, from Frank’s (postmodern) freedom of enjoyment to the ascension of his prohibitive father.59

Even within Frank’s postmodern play, explicit forms of his desired paternal authority, however inadequately, emerge. Beyond Frank’s attraction to Carl’s symbolic status as the Law and the Father, the film’s paternal investments are reinforced by Frank’s preoccupation with images of masculine authority, which he compulsively replicates

57 This good father/bad father dynamic also structures Empire of the Sun, as Jim moves between the American trickster Basie and the genteel, proper English Dr Rawlins. Gordon notes that Jim’s “identification with the Japanese, and later with the Americans, involves a disidentification with the British, which includes Jim’s father.” Andrew Gordon, "Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun: A Boy's Dream of War," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, M.D: Scarecrow, 2002). P. 123. This paternal conflict also works in terms of a national dynamic as well – the American father versus the English father – an idea that will be elaborated upon in more detail in Chapter Four.

58 McGowan, "Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch's Lesson in Fantasy." P. 65.

59 This function is also powerfully invoked in The Color Purple through the character of Shug, who relinquishes her enjoyment in order to reunite with her preacher father and the Father-God. This film and its religious familial implications will be discussed in more depth in Chapter Three’s discussion of the religious familial metaphor.

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as pilot, doctor, lawyer. The film specifically shows Frank learning his ‘roles’ from film and television, his chameleon-like identity a model of postmodern simulacra. His play with identities, however, collapses in the presence of domesticity, his potential to subvert the Law, marriage and the Symbolic of family – on the eve of his wedding, his constructed life of lawyer, protestant and groom-to-be falls apart. Simulacra and trickery do equal the ‘real thing’. The fantasy collapses, the intrusion of the prohibitive face of the Law leaves Frank’s engagement party shattered, as Frank once again flees the Law which cannot sanction this play with the symbolic structures of the family. Evading Carl at the last minute, Frank abandons the too- perfect family home of his near-wife, who sobs, broken-hearted as her own fantasy disappears in a flutter of banknotes, floating in the breeze.

The free-wheeling nature of Frank’s play with the law and paternal authority comes to a head when Carl tracks Frank down to his mother’s home town in France on a subsequent Christmas Eve, and returns him to the US. In Frank’s request to Hanratty from the French gaol to ‘go home’, Morris observes that “[m]ore than the USA, ‘home’ refers to his family, whose break-up precipitated his escape into crime. Desire to repair it motivates him.”60 However, this desire is irrevocably thwarted by the death of the father. Upon learning of this death, Frank escapes Carl in one last attempt to evade the reach of the law, fleeing to his mother’s new home. There, through a frosted window, he observes Paula with her new husband and daughter in yet another Christmas scene that evokes a sentimental sit-com life of happy home- makers. Literally excluded by the icy window from this saccharine fantasy of home- life, Frank meekly succumbs to his final arrest, his face now framed by the window of the police car, as his mother’s new family, a now forsaken fantasy, watch mutely from the doorway. But Frank’s nostalgic search for the maternal family is translated into his submission to paternal Law; the film’s paternal metaphors are realised when Frank is released into Carl’s custody, Carl having negotiated Frank’s early release on condition that he uses his talents to assist the FBI. Frank’s deviance is absorbed within the symbolic. It is at this point, Murray Pomerance argues, that

60 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 339 This return to the American fatherland from the ‘foreign’ and alienating motherland is also significant when considering the familial gendering and metaphorics of nations and paternity, elaborated on in Chapter Four.

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[p]erformance must be terminated, and the fictive role evaporates, before we take ourselves to be in the presence of a ‘real’ person (one such as Hanratty). And as ‘real persons,’ of course… Abagnale must face up to the truth of [his history] and submit to the law.61

Frank’s latent desire for paternal authority and ‘respectability’ is finally realised when he switches paternal allegiances to his FBI agent, and learns ‘honest’ familial mimicry. Having finally been ‘caught’, Frank, under the mentorship of his ‘new’ father ultimately becomes, like Carl, a representative, and enforcer of the Law.

Frank is repeatedly and visibly excluded from his fantasy scene – the Christmas tree, the big family house, the dancing parents, the authoritarian father. Frank’s persistent desire for such ‘objects’ stems from their lack. As Žižek argues, fantasy articulates the subject’s impossible relation to the object/cause of desire: “Through fantasy, we learn how to desire”.62 Throughout Catch Me if You Can, Frank’s frustrated encounters with ‘ideal’ families perpetuate desire for the (fantasised) relationship to the family as all-encompassing cultural institution of Symbolic Law. The film stages three fantasy family situations that stimulate Frank’s desire via his exclusion. The first of these fantasy scenes is the original (always) lost ideal, the family dancing together in front of the Christmas tree, the image of fundamental family unity whose loss at the beginning of the film initialises lack and desire, thereby propelling Frank’s narrative. The next family is one that Frank attempts to fashion himself by scheming his way into Brenda’s home. Marriage to Brenda is false redemption, an attempt to relinquish his juvenile play with identity and surface, authenticating himself as a family man. Domesticity is averted at the last minute – the authoritative figure of Carl interrupts the pending marriage, forcing Frank to flee. As such, the Law prevents the corruption of its primary institution within the Symbolic, from Frank’s transgressive trickery, his manipulation a mere façade of familial authority. The last family from which Frank is excluded, quite literally by a frosted pane of glass, is his mother’s new family. As Frank stands outside in the cold, observing the warm Christmas scene in which he cannot play a part, he relinquishes his transgressive existence of deception and

61 Murray Pomerance, "Nothing Sacred: Modernity and Performance in Catch Me If You Can," in Cinema and Modernity, ed. Murray Pomerance (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006). P. 222.

62 Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. P. 6.

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submits to the Law, which once again arrives in time to prevent Frank’s liaison with his object/cause of desire. The film plays out Žižek’s dictum that “the Law functions as the agent of prohibition that regulates (access to the object of) his desire.”63 It is significant that Frank turns away from the maternal family – from the little sister, from his ‘traitorous’ mother, from France, the ‘mother’land, to the narrative resolution of the custody of the police force, the masculine penal system, Carl, and American law enforcement.64

Prior to this final ‘capitulation’ to Carl’s authority, Frank’s multiplicity of identities and occupations reveals an underlying fascination with visions of house and home, fantasies of family and father, and phallic desires to embody the Law. Throughout the film, Frank betrays an attraction to positions of status and authority. His first sight of a pilot is filmed in slow motion, surrounded by beautiful glowing airline hostesses, with beams of soft sunlight illuminating the man in his crisp uniform, as smiling children gaze at him adoringly, a vision that for Frank is akin to an epiphany. The pilot, a figure of respect, authority, and instant masculinity stimulates Frank’s fantasy. As Stella Bruzzi argues, “the son necessarily identifies with a symbolic image of masculinity, an image he internalises, idealises and reinterprets … produc[ing] a mis- recognition of the father and masculinity.”65 Inspired by a vision of patriarchal authority, Frank impersonates a pilot, relishing the position of power and admiration that is incumbent in the uniform. He strolls through New York streets, filmed in golden light, followed by appreciative murmurs, speaking down gently to an awe- struck little girl. By adopting the trappings of such authority, Frank mimics his own fantasy, initiated through lack. He lacks the commanding rule of Law, the authoritative Father, the father who within Frank’s literal family no longer inspires respect and has actually become a fugitive from the Law (the IRS). Frank must

63 Slavoj Žižek, "Fantasy as a Political Category: A Lacanian Approach," in The Zizek Reader, ed. Edmond Wright and Elizabeth Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). P. 94.

64 As Sara Ruddick discusses in regards to the role of the father, the “most complex paternal function is concerned not so much with fatherly activities as with values a father ‘represents.’… Symbolically, father represent reality in opposition to the comforts and protectiveness of maternity. Morally, fathers are judges with the authority to discipline and punish. Fathers legitimate a child in society and legitimate society’s demands on the child.” Sara Ruddick, "The Idea of Fatherhood," in Feminism and Families, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). P. 211.

65 Stella Bruzzi, Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood (London: BFI Publishing, 2005). P. 55.

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replace this paternal lack, playing at authority, attempting to assume the position of the Other. Instead, however, he truly desires recognition from the authority figure of the Law, authority lost with the collapse of the paternal structure of the family. Frank’s play with various fantasy roles is instead influenced by images of authority that he observes on TV.66 In the burgeoning era of the television and image, and arguably of postmodernity, Frank’s professional ‘training’ consists of mimicking medical shows for his role as a doctor, legal programmes in his next ‘career’ as a lawyer, James Bond films in order to adopt a certain style and demeanour. In lieu of a father figure and the familial Law, Frank instead elevates such popular culture icons to ‘father figures’, a postmodern introjection into the Oedipal trajectory.

Assuming the identity of symbolically authoritative figures perverts the Law. Yet, by positioning himself ‘outside’ Law, flaunting his transgressions, Frank is ultimately validating the ‘master’ structure. The taunt of ‘catch me if you can’ communicates Frank’s desire that the Law recognise his deviancy. Such desire is articulated in the film by Frank’s desperate request that his father command him to stop his deceptions – “Tell me to stop!” Frank demands. But his father, out of work and out of family, is adrift – he does not wield the paternal mastery that Frank desires. Frank’s desire is recognition from, and prohibition by, the Law, and the attainment of family marks the fantasised reintegration into the symbolic order. The film’s rapprochement with fantasy, family, transgression and authority is effected through Frank’s dance with the FBI, a fantasy of prohibition enacted through deviance. Through his desperate cry to be ‘caught’, Frank illustrates, as Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright point out in their discussion of Žižek, that

the fantasmatic scene is not a transgression, but a support. Oddly enough, the fantasy does not stage the breaking of the Law, but rather the establishing of it. This is why fantasy ‘is in its very notion, close to perversion’, since the pervert is always staging a total severity of the Law, wanting the Law to illumine him fully.67

66 The important role of the television within the familial and domestic scene is considered in more detail in Chapter Two.

67 Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright, "Introductory Notes," in The Žižek Reader, ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). P. 88.

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Frank’s fantasy of the Law ‘illuminating him fully’ is enacted by his emotional vacillation between the film’s two father figures. The recognition that Frank desires, the detection of his deviance, is only possible through Carl, as representative of the Law, literal and Symbolic. Fundamental to Frank’s fantasy of the family dynamic, being ‘caught’ in turns fleshes out Frank’s lack of the punitive Father, the commander of the Law. The ‘original’ father is unable to acknowledge and condemn Frank’s perversion of the Law, he therefore cannot ‘illumine’ him, to enact the ‘fantasmatic scene’. Carl, however, responds to Frank’s taunt, ultimately ‘catching’ Frank, subjecting him to the literal Law of the Father, which affects the emotional resolution necessary to popular narrative film.

In Frank’s surrender to Carl and a punitive prison sentence, he severs attachment to his charlatan identities, and, in doing so, assents to the new family of Carl and the FBI. Frank inevitably ‘defers’ to the Law, as predicted by Carl in one of their Christmas Eve discussions about the method of Frank’s ‘game’:

Carl: “The truth is, I knew it was you. Now maybe I didn’t get the cuffs on you, but I knew.” [in reference to Frank’s earlier evasion of arrest] Frank: “Ah, people only know what you tell them, Carl.” Carl: “Well then, tell me this… How did you know I wouldn’t look in your wallet?” Frank: “The same reason the Yankees always win. Nobody can keep their eyes off the pinstripes” Carl: “The Yankees win because they have Mickey Mantle. No one ever bets on the uniform.” Frank chuckles: “You sure about that, Carl?” Carl: “I’ll tell you what I am sure of. You’re going to get caught. One way or another. It’s a mathematical fact. It’s, it’s like Vegas. The House always wins.”

The film organises this inevitable surrender to ‘the House’ through the dynamic of fantasy and desire structured by the investments in the symbolic family. Carl, speaking as the ‘House’ that always wins, embodies Frank’s fantasised relation to the missing Father and authoritarian structures.68 The significance of the film’s two

68 Bill Nichols argues regarding the paternal relationship between the son and the Law that “[t]he son’s body, as the complete but still not fully mature body of the male, is the site where man is made, or unmade. The son must take his place in relation to the Law; he will become its agent, or its object”. Bill Nichols, "Sons at the Brink of Manhood: Utopian Moments in Male Subjectivity," East-West Film Journal 1, no. 4 (1989). P. 34.

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fathers, Frank sr. and Carl, can be interpreted in terms of the law of the Father, whereby the Father denies pleasure by enforcing the incest taboo. Ideally, ‘removal’ of the obstacle of the authoritarian Father, expressed through the metaphor of parricide, ‘permits’ the denied pleasure.

Such ‘parricide’, however, fails to remove this ‘ultimate’ obstacle; in Catch Me If You Can, the elimination of the inadequate, weak Father, Frank sr., allows the ascendancy of the authoritarian, punitive Father through the figure of Carl. As Žižek explains, after ‘parricide’

enjoyment is not brought finally within our reach. Quite the contrary – the dead father turns out to be stronger than the living one. After the parricide, the former reigns as the name-of-the-father, the agent of the Symbolic Law that irrevocably precludes access to the forbidden fruit of enjoyment.69

Upon learning of the literal death of his father, Frank escapes custody, once more daring Carl to ‘catch him if he can’. The Father dead and enjoyment now ‘accessible’, Frank proceeds to the home of his mother. But she has a new husband, and the Law of the Father reigns stronger than before – the police promptly arrive to prevent this final rapprochement with the (maternal) family fantasy. As Bruzzi states, [t]hrough death the real father can become the symbolic father.”70 Frank surrenders to the inescapable Father, who ‘irrevocably precludes enjoyment’, prohibiting both play and pursuit. The film’s ‘resolution’ in the conclusion of the chase occurs when desire stops circulating, when lack is ‘completed’ and the Law is established, fixing Frank in the symbolic, as constructed through Frank’s final attainment of family, proudly announced at the conclusion of the film.

Yet, this subjection to the paternal authority of the Law is troubled by the continued possibility of play and fantasy, of deviance beyond the structures of the family. Kenneth MacKinnon points out that “[i]f closures seem forced, the gaps in the cogency of the belief systems which are patched up at the movie’s end may have been

69 Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. P. 24-5.

70 Bruzzi, Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood. P. 21.

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made, and may still remain, embarrassingly visible when the narrative is done.”71 The film’s captions neatly conclude the narrative with the tale of his successful career at the FBI, as well as his happy family life and his own assumption of the duties of the paternal patriarch – he marries, and has two sons. Crime and deviance are contained within the dispiriting grey office of the FBI building, the files piling up on Frank’s desk. Yet, this closure is marked by the temptation of flight; left to his own devices one weekend, a pilot’s uniform calls to him from a costume shop. His near escape is filmed in an airport terminal, Frank is centred within the curving tunnel walls, diffused lighting glows in the mostly empty scene, evoke freedom and fantasy, as contrasted to the prosaic FBI office.72 Frank walks swiftly through the tunnel, trying to ignore Hanratty. But this time, Hanratty lets him fly, he gestures to the empty corridor, “look, nobody’s chasing you.” The superficial postmodern style of the majority of the film revels in Frank’s deviancy, and the familial closure of Frank’s office job, his return to respectability, can only just contain the allure of postmodern play, the fantasy of enjoyment beyond the Law of the Father. As Žižek suggests, “the Symbolic itself opens up the wound it professes to heal.”73

‘Freud’s Robots’: Artificial Intelligence: A.I.

In the post-apocalyptic world of A.I., global warming has restricted population growth, and licenses for reproduction are strictly monitored. The satisfaction of the parental imperitive has become a distant fantasy, and human labour is supplemented by ‘mecha’, or sophisticated robots. In this world lacking children, the mecha engineer, Professor Hobby, manufactures David, a robot-child that will love, that will ‘complete’ the desires of lonely potential parents craving the affection of a son or daughter in a society devoid of reproduction. The standard robots in circulation are

71 Kenneth MacKinnon, "The Family in Hollywood Melodrama: Actual or Ideal," Journal of Gender Studies 13, no. 1 (2004). P. 33.

72 This scene is an extension of the film’s construction of Frank’s and Hanratty’s characters. As Pomerance observes, “Spielberg’s camera continually … focus[es] on Frank the performer and leav[es] Hanratty to seem ‘genuine’ and ‘stable’.” Pomerance, "Nothing Sacred: Modernity and Performance in Catch Me If You Can." P. 230.

73 Slavoj Žižek, "A Hair of the Dog That Bit You," in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994). P. 66.

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designed to perform certain activities, but lack independent will, desire and personality. They are programmed and mechanical – supplementing human existence in overtly practical ways. While they provide ‘love’, they offer a practical, functional, physical love – the more esoteric nature of love with its patterns of need and desire are not ‘programmed’ into these machines. Hobby instead envisions a mechanical child, that, with love as the key, will develop beyond its programming and love, desire, dream; in effect, by introducing the capacity to love and desire (for its ‘mother’, in this case), the robot ‘child’ will be transformed into a ‘true’ child with a subconscious. The prototype robot, David, ‘becomes’ a child through the process of imprinting, when a chain of words is recited to him. Through the imprinting process, the robot moves from wooden, obedient machine to devoted child with the capacity to love and desire. The key to this ‘child’s’ humanity is an ability to love (the mother), and the consequent capacity to suffer grief, loss and unfulfilled desire.

Placed with a family grieving for their sick and comatose child, Martin, family life does not work out for David. The recovery of the biological child throws David’s mecha identity into sharp relief, and David is abandoned in the forest to fend for himself. Inspired by the Pinocchio story, David decides that becoming a ‘real’ boy is the only way to regain his mother’s love, and embarks on a quest for the ‘blue fairy’. Upon the ‘completion’ of his unsatisfying quest for origins – where he discovers his ‘father’, Professor Hobby, surrounded by many boxed copies of Davids, and realises that his origins are no more than a place of manufacture74 – he is left frozen underwater, staring at the Coney Island figure of the Blue Fairy for 2000 years, in constant, futile prayer to become a real boy. He is retrieved by the archaeologists of the future, David’s own highly evolved mecha descendents, in a frozen world after the extinction of the human race. In a narrative sleight of hand, these mecha are able to grant resolution to David’s quest to return to his mother, bringing Monica back to life, to tell David ‘that she loves him, that she always loved him’ – but only for one day. The two artificial constructions end the day in an Oedipal embrace, eyes closed in death or dreams.

74 The discovery of the Davids, the endless copies of the self, and David’s subsequent despair and suicidal fall into the ocean, recalls Freud’s discussion of the double and the uncanny: “from having been an assurance of immortality, [the double] becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” Sigmund Freud, "'the Uncanny'," in Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). P. 357.

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The first act of A.I. commences when Professor Hobby’s prototype, David, is launched on grieving parents, Henry and Monica. Their child, Martin, has been comatose for five years, while awaiting a cure. Monica herself is in a suspended state of loss, unable to truly mourn for her son. By inserting David into the role of substitute child, the film points out that the object of desire is arbitrary; in the case of Monica, the loss of the specific object (Martin) is offset by an (approximate) surrogate. This process of replacement is shadowed in the film by the conclusion whereby the Mother herself becomes ‘an approximate surrogate’ for the desiring son. Monica’s desire (as well as David’s) stems from a lack that longs to be satiated with the desire of the other, in other words, the desire to be desired. As Elizabeth Grosz points out, “desire is a fundamental lack, a hole in being that can be satisfied only by one ‘thing’ – another(’s) desire. Each self-conscious subject desires the desire of the other as its object.”75 In Monica’s case, Martin’s comatose state frustrates her narcissistic desire to be his object of desire, in this case, constituted through Monica’s status as a mother. Consequently, a replacement ‘child’ stands in for the original lost object, one that desires her mother status, and therefore structurally constructs her as Mother. In this sense, David is Monica’s narcissistic fantasy of a child, one that completes the structural absence of ‘child’ in her existence. Žižek argues that

any object can function as the object-cause of desire – insofar as the power of fascination it exerts is not its immediate property but results from its place in the structure, we must, by structural necessity, fall prey to the illusion that the power of fascination belongs to the object as such.76

Monica’s proclaimed desire is Martin, her specific (yet absent) object; she initially denies that any object/mecha can fill the structural place of her own child. The ‘replacement’ of the child for Monica is paralleled by Hobby’s construction of David which creates a robot image of his dead son. David is “recreated in a more ideal form (programmable, immortal, repairable, and infinitely replicable)”.77 Hobby’s fantasy

75 Elizabeth Grosz, Jaques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1990). P. 64.

76 Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. P. 33.

77 Gabriele Weinberger, "Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: Millennial Mother and Son," West Virginia University Philological Papers 49 (2002). P. 104.

87 child robot attempts to fill the structural gap through the excessive over-production of simulacra of the deceased; Monica replaces her biological child with a mecha replica. Monica is initially repelled by David, by this robot who/that looks and acts exactly as a young boy; she struggles with the concept, with the possibility of redirecting her desire to a replacement object. She sobs to Henry: “I can’t accept this. There is no substitute for your own child!” When Henry attempts to pacify her by suggesting returning David to the factory, she responds: “I don’t know what to do.” Monica is repelled by the concept of David, but also by her own need and longing for the possibility of ‘substitution’. After her passionate outburst, she murmurs softly and longingly “did you see his face, he’s so real.” Monica cannot negotiate his mecha status with his resemblance to a ‘real boy’; the difficulty Monica has differentiating between robot child and real child is based upon the need to complete her structural identity as ‘mother’. She looks off into the middle distance, bites her lower lip, and murmurs longingly, “A child”. Her identity as ‘mother’ is necessarily predicated upon the presence of ‘child’. Although the object of desire is arbitrary, as Žižek suggests, Monica ‘fall prey to the illusion’. The David robot looks like a child, he can be her child, and thereby supplement her identity as mother, fill her lack. But David’s robotic nature foregrounds these structural workings of the family, inserting a sense of unease and the uncanny into the familial processes.

In order to ‘activate’ the robot, Monica imprints David into the symbolic, language, the other, into desire, loss and narrative – most significantly through the close communion of their names – mimicking the Oedipal trajectory of the family. David enters the symbolic realm, the law-of-the-father, through this imprinting chain. And from robot, with no desires, where language is merely a series of signifier to signified pre-programming, David suddenly enters a state of lack, where language now signifies the ultimate separation from the object of desire – while their names follow on from each other, they are always separated. David’s newly found desire for the mother is emphasised by the contrast to the earlier ‘game’ of hide and seek he plays with Monica. Frustrated by his presence, Monica puts him in a cupboard, much as the supertoy Teddy is stored high up in a closet. But the un-imprinted David has no anxiety about this separation, no awareness of lack and desire – he remains stationary

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in the cupboard until Monica returns to him.78 It is only in the linguistic structuring of their names through the imprinting chain that David discovers his separation from the mother, discovers the foundational loss of unity that precipitates desire. And in this state where the law-of-the-father reigns over all, Henry, previously a neutral, and somewhat bland character, suddenly becomes an oppressive, threatening, ‘castrating’ presence who stands between David and his mother.

The imminent danger that Henry now fears is not so much David’s potential physical threat, but the undermining of the family. Henry asks his wife “how is he worth the risk to you, to Martin, to us, as a family?” Such a ‘child’ as David, unable to reproduce himself through children or pass on the family name, endangers the status of the family and threatens the status of Child as (reproductive) future, as both a social and biological ideal of (paternal) regeneration. David’s artificiality is threatening because it is stagnant – he will not grow up, he has ‘no future’, he will always be devoted to his mummy, and will never complete the Oedipal narrative. Hobby has created the ‘perfect’ child: “caught in a freeze frame, always loving, never ill, never changing.” David’s entry into the Symbolic cannot be completed as there always remains the primal (and irreversibly ‘programmed) Oedipal attachment to the mother, thereby permanently suspending progression toward the Father. The ambiguities posed by Monica’s structural mothering (of a machine), and that machine’s Oedipal obsession represents the film’s key point of anxiety; unique familial psychology and biology have been simulated by a technologically constructed object. Bourdieu argues that the privileged position of familial ideology stems from its role in both social and biological reproduction, facilitating the maintenance of an ideological status quo:

This privilege [of the normative family] is, in reality, one of the major conditions of the accumulation and transmission of economic, cultural and symbolic privileges. The family plays a decisive role in the maintenance of the social order, through social as well as biological reproduction, i.e.

78 In the scene where David does discover Monica, on the toilet, she is reading Freud’s Women, signaling the film’s knowing engage with its explicitly Oedipal narrative. Tim Kreider notes the placement of book in this scene, Tim Kreider, "Review: Artificial Intelligence: A.I.," Film Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2003). PP. 34-5.

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reproduction of the structure of the social space and social relations... It is the main subject of reproduction strategies.79

While temporarily effective as a familial placebo maintaining the appearance of ‘social order’, David is forever and uncannily only a simulacra of a child – he is not biological and he has no birthday – a violation of the normative discourses of family. As Carolyn Jess-Cooke points out, “Spielberg’s previous flirtations with Oedipal complexes… are noticeably developed in this film into full-blown speculations on the construction of the subconscious and portraits of maternity as a point of origin in an age where the ‘original’ is purportedly nowhere to be found.”80 In Catch Me if You Can, the various permutations of Frank’s personalities are resolved into final title captions integrating him into conventional structures of the family; A.I., on the other hand, refuses this investment in the ‘original’, and the originary role of family in narrative.

A.I.’s mise-en-scène explicitly constructs David’s difference and uncanniness within the family home. As the ‘family’ gather for dinner, the scene is shot from above, looking down at the trio; the camera angle reinforces between the place settings, and the alienation that suffuses these ‘domestic’ scenes. David, a machine unable to eat, mimics the table manners of Monica and Henry, accentuating his own uncanniness, as well as ‘making strange’ the rituals of the family. As Andrew Gordon observes,

[t]he notion of David as a ghost double who does not really fit in the family is reinforced by repeated visual motifs of his separation from Monica and Henry: shots are deliberately distorted or seen through distorting glass, or he is isolated from them within the frame, or… his image is doubled in reflections in glass, polished surfaces, or mirrors.81

Visually and structurally, David is excluded, his status as mechanical object at odds with the organic and psychological imperatives of the family. David cannot transfer

79 Bourdieu, "On the Family as a Realized Category." P. 23.

80 Jess-Cooke, "Virtualizing the Real: Sequelization and Secondary Memory in Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A.I.." P. 348.

81 Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 234.

90 allegiance from the mother to the f/Father, and consequently cannot submit to the Law of the Father. This static state of childhood, that will never beget any children of its own, is the ultimate threat to the virility, reproductivity, and fertility that the family signifies.

Depictions of the future inevitably express contemporary anxieties. As such, the film’s futuristic setting of environmental ‘apocalypse’ also has a greater resonance in depicting the anxieties about the future of the family and of cultural regeneration. For Monica, David steps into the structural position of child (temporarily) vacated by Martin. The framing narrative of the film, however, invests the figure of the Child with much greater symbolic potency. The restrictions on reproduction have created a world where children are rare, where fertility and reproduction are denied. The conclusion of the film explicitly reveals the implications of this ‘sterile’ culture – a correspondingly ‘barren’ world of ice and machines. The ‘lack’ of children is indicative of a much greater structural absence in this futuristic human/machine culture, and Monica’s grief and Henry’s anxiety are emblematic of the investment in the image of the Child, and the fertility of human ‘destiny’. Edelman argues that “the figure of the Child enact[s] a logic of repetition that fixes identity through identification with the future of the social order.”82 Yet David as a robot yet with the appearance of a c/Child confuses such cultural investments in reproduction and the future. The anxiety induced by a technological world lacking reproduction is indicative of a significant structural absence, which threatens a world of no children, of ‘no future’. The politics of the (reproductive) future and the symbol of the Child that Monica and Henry are so invested in are at the centre of the symbolic structure of society that A.I.’s post-apocalyptic world menaces. The ambiguity, the ambivalence, and the anxiety channelled through the prism of the family and the android stems from its vision of a ‘truly technological future’ as opposed to the desperate call for a ‘truly human future’, which reverberates throughout the film. David’s inability to repress his Oedipal desire for the mother and to progress to the Symbolic echoes this anxiety of a society that cannot reproduce itself, either biologically, or culturally. Monica and David’s hyper-investment in children and familial ideology mimics the anxieties of their non-reproductive society, channelled into this problematic figure of

82 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. P. 25.

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the Child, symbolic of the future, and yet, in David, simultaneously representing the sterility of this culture, an ultimate threat to the imperative of Family.

The crisis point in David’s family is precipitated by the miracle return of Martin as the true ‘child of the body’, bearer of the biological and social future, further illuminating the conflict between nature and the android ‘threat’. With Martin’s return, the ‘real’ versus ‘toy’, blood versus electricity, dichotomy that structures the film is foregrounded. The presence of the ‘real’ son exposes David (the not-son). As Sterritt points out,

[t]his change renders David superfluous in the family’s balance of psychodynamic power; and worse, it makes his own uncanny stain more conspicuous and disquieting than before. Yesterday he was an indispensable place-holder for the family’s procreational urge; today he is a surplus and an excess, the not-quite-living-image who has regained the power to live under his own steam.83

Ironically, Martin, the sickly flesh and blood child, is himself a liminal figure between orga and mecha, an evocative reminder of physical vulnerability and the threat of human extinction, and the future ascendancy of the technological; as Nigel Morris notes, “Martin’s mobility by means of techno-trousers… blurs boundaries […] between humans and automata.”84 Martin invokes, particularly through his weakness, the flesh and blood dynamic that underpins the film’s premise – that the more ‘primal’ and ‘naturally’ familial link of flesh is threatened by the ‘artificial’. David’s presence disturbs the ‘natural’ familial state consolidated by the biological child, and Martin ultimately trumps the machine-child. Creating an uncomfortable juxtaposition between original child and his now superfluous replacement, Martin’s return, however, emphasises how permeable the biological family has become to the technological, a precursor to the film’s conclusion where the biological has been superseded by the mechanical.

83 David Sterritt, "Spielberg, Iconophobia, and the Mimetic Uncanny," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 1 (2009). P. 58.

84 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 304.

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While the film insistently invests pathos in its mecha characters, the film simultaneously emphasises the intrusion of the technological into the biological family. In one scene, Martin goads David into eating spinach, which breaks his circuitry and causes him to shut down. The scene shifts from sit-com style brotherly one-up-manship to horror as David’s face grotesquely sags, his electronics seemingly shorting out. The resulting trip to the doctor is a return to his place of manufacture, and David is opened up as the technicians vacuum up the offending spinach. Monica, playing the good mother, attempts to comfort her son. Yet it is David who comforts Monica: “its OK mommy, it doesn’t hurt.” She gasps and moves away, disturbed by this physical confirmation of difference, that her family’s biology has not been replicated through this mechanical son.85 The technicians confirm David’s position in the hierarchy of orga and mecha, “Spinach is for people, rabbits, and Popeye. Not robo-boys.” Throughout the film, empathic privileging of David’s humanity is always swiftly counteracted by scenes emphasizing his uncanny mechanical status.86 This unease is exacerbated at Martin’s birthday party,87 where curious young boys surround David, eager to establish the boundaries of self and other, orga and mecha. Grasping fingers tweak at David’s shorts as they try to discover what is beneath them, in a scene vaguely reminiscent of innocent Gertie querying Elliot’s assumption of E.T’s masculinity. Threatened, David hides behind Martin and drags him into the swimming pool, where Martin struggles for life, but David, composed of “a hundred miles of fibre”, sinks heavily to the bottom, arms outstretched, no need to breathe. The artificial is violently exposed and the children’s desire to establish self/other, orga/mecha binaries is satisfied; David’s precarious position within the Family is irrevocably undermined.

85 Monica does, however, return to David’s ‘bedside’ to hold his hand. It is this moment, as the camera cuts to the watching Martin that precipitates Martin’s extreme jealously and desire to destroy David, and claim the mother for himself.

86 Scott Loren notes that “[t]he three most characteristic manifestations of the uncanny in fiction are present in David. He is at once an automaton, a doppelgänger and the dead returned.” Loren, "Mechanical Humanity, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Android: The Posthuman Subject in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Artificial Intelligence: A.I.." P. 221.

87 Martin’s birthday, as a signifier of his biological link to the family, is significant to the film, particularly when contrasted to the fact that David has no birthday, and that he cannot remember what Martin callously describes as his ‘build-day’.

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David is (technological) ‘excess’ to the ‘true and natural’ family. When the changeling/substitute is uncovered, it must be removed in order to preserve (the illusion of) the natural family. In order to purify the home of this incursion of the ‘artificial’, David must be evicted; as Sterritt remarks, David’s rejection represents the “expulsion of an alien presence from the threatened body of the family, and the ejection of an anomalous intruder from the communal corpus.”88 When David, after being abandoned in the forest, is caught by the Flesh Fair, the film illustrates its most powerful representation of cultural anxieties about the breakdown of structuring binaries of blood and electricity that have ‘corrupted’ the family. The Flesh Fair’s primal celebration of orga superiority (designated by possession of flesh and blood) is a working-class expression of anxiety about mecha replacement of previously human labour, and the threat posed to the boundaries of the biological.89 Unregistered mecha are rounded up and publicly destroyed in various brutal and visceral ways: dismembered by chainsaws, exploded, or destroyed by acid for the ecstatic crowd’s entertainment. The ritual destruction of the mecha by the orga signifies nostalgia for clear boundaries between the natural and the mechanical. The Flesh Fair’s violent expression of boundary establishment is an extension of earlier concerns about the natural and authentic family. The macro ideals of the Flesh Fair correlate with the familial level; Monica and Henry’s ideal (impossible) family is free from the taint of ‘electricity’ and ‘artificiality’ – a natural family, or, rather, a natural(ised) vision of family. Rather than the Child signifying fertility and the reproductive future, the mecha/David instead signifies sterility, a cessation of time, reproduction of family, both biological and cultural. Jess-Cooke points out, “[t]o orga, mecha signify death, or the death of originality, and thus the death of humanity.”90 As the fairground announcer fervently protests: “We are alive, and this is a celebration of life! And this is commitment to a truly human future!” with an ironic emphasis on the future of ‘humanity’. Yet the David robot complicates these designated binaries – the

88 Sterritt, "Spielberg, Iconophobia, and the Mimetic Uncanny." P. 52.

89 This scene in particular provokes some interesting points in terms of class consciousness and parallels to concerns about immigrant workforces. However, this analysis focuses on the film’s preoccupation with the biological ‘real’ and the ‘false’ mechanical, and a class reading is not considered in detail. Although, arguably, such discourses powerfully intersect with the idea of boundaries and the ‘other’ that class anxieties evoke.

90 Jess-Cooke, "Virtualizing the Real: Sequelization and Secondary Memory in Steven Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence: A.I.." P. 356.

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almost-c/Child disrupts the divide of blood or electricity. The image of the Child, and its signification in the familial/biological economy is potent enough to disturb the orga/mecha binary.

As an almost-c/Child, ‘reality’ is tantalisingly close for David, just as artificiality haunts the (apparent) biological. If Monica could only recognise David as a child, through genuine love for him, then, David desperately believes, he could affect the Pinocchio-like transformation into a ‘real boy’ – not through a miraculous transformation of his circuitry, but through the processes of familial and cultural recognition, hailed into the Symbolic. “If you love me, I will be so real for you,” he protests as he is abandoned by his (step) mother, fairy tale-style in the forest. ‘Programmed’ always to return to the mother, David, inspired by the Blue Fairy of the Pinocchio story, begins his quest to become a ‘real’ boy and regain his mother’s love. The film’s destabilisation of established norms of truth and narrative, real and artificial are channelled through David’s quest, a collision and fusion of ‘flat fact’ with ‘fairy tale’. The strict classification of ‘artificiality’ is undermined by the android’s desire to be loved and incorporated into the ‘biological’ family, and concurrently, the family’s permeability to the artificial. David, inspired by fairy tale, by the possibility of ‘reality’ through immersion within narrative, pleads with Monica:

David: “If Pinocchio became a real boy, and if I become a real boy, can I come home?” Monica: “That’s just a story” David: “But a story tells what happens.” Monica: “Stories are not real! You’re not real!”

Monica denies that such narratives are true, and instead recoils to her own truth – the natural(ised) vision of family, free from the taint of ‘electricity’ and ‘artificiality’, ‘reality’ rather than narrative. After his abandonment, David searches the super computer Dr Know, amalgamating the search categories of ‘flat fact’ with ‘fairy tale’, which leads him to a piece of Yeats poetry.91 His search for identity, origins and

91 The poem is William Butler Yeats’ “The Stolen Child”. The stanza cited is: “Come away O human child To the waters and the wild With a fairy hand in hand

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family can only be achieved through an understanding of the collusion between facts and story, science and poetry. As David explores the world, truths are revealed within stories, and narratives create and form the world. This idea reaches its pinnacle in the concluding scenes, when David’s very existence become an ‘origins’ narrative of the super-mecha, 2000 years into the future, and technology is subsumed into fairy tale. The film charts the ‘evolution’ from Gigolo Joe, the sex-bot, who scoffs at the human capacity to “believe what cannot be seen, or measured” to the super-mecha at the conclusion of the film, who have elevated David to the place of mythology, of biblical origins. Ironically, the non-reproductive almost-c/Child becomes the mythological father to his own ‘evolutionary descendents’.

The film pushes its exploration of ‘artificiality’ and the future of the ‘natural’ family most powerfully in the final scene in the post-apocalyptic world of the machine. The conclusion reconstructs the home, the mother, and the fantasy maternal union that David has desired for over 2000 years. Monica is replicated/cloned for only one day by the advanced super-mecha; but she is clearly a fantasy Mother, never the mother from David’s actual experience. At the end of this fairy-tale sequence where David and Monica share a perfect day, Monica drifts into an enchanted sleep and, as David lies next to his mother in bed, in a blissful Oedipal embrace, “for the first time in his life, [David] went to that place where dreams are born.” Lester Friedman suggests that “[i]n this film, the human desire for an emotional bond can be fulfilled only via technology.”92 This can be seen initially thought Monica’s desire for an emotional rapport with a child, granted through David, and book-ended by David’s desire for mother love supplied only by an artificial Monica. Arguably, however, the completion of fantasy does not equate to fulfilment, a point expressed through the film’s ambiguous conclusion. Technology merely promises, or suggests, a fantasy of fulfillment – the film’s apparent resolution creates a feeling of emotional disorientation. There is the viewing pleasure generated from familial harmony and a (false) resolution, yet a sensation of dissatisfaction. The narrative stages David’s fulfilment, but emphasises its very construction, its role as story, putting into sharp

For the world’s more full of weeping Than you can understand”

92 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 44.

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relief that we do not desire the end of desire, but its ‘endlessness’. The ultimate end point of David’s quest leads to both death and satiation, foregrounding the processes of narrative and resolution.

Significantly, David finally becomes ‘real/dead/dreaming’ at the point that his mother is no more than a technological fantasy-replication of the original, and as Kathleen McConnell suggests, “as nobody knows what ‘real means, in the end David is as real as real can be.”93 In this film, humanity is not more real than mecha, and the mechas are never more real than their orga ‘counterparts’, throwing the construction of the family as fantasy into sharp relief. The Monica that satisfies David’s craving for love and maternal union in the final scene is a fantastical projection of David’s desire, not the ‘original’ flawed mother who abandoned him. This version of Monica is free of her husband, son, or any other duties, an artificial fantasy mother that can dedicate every moment to her son, and unconditionally tell him that she loves him. David’s reunion with the mother is a closed circuit, an incestuous family moment that resists socialisation, resists the future, closing out David’s own mecha descendents. The camera pulls away from the final scene, emphasising the isolation of the house and the two dreaming/dead figures within, forming a counterpoint to the final shot of Catch Me if You, where Frank and Hanratty are surrounded by the swirling movement of other office workers, having abandoned the maternal fantasy, and having been socialised into prosaic ‘midwestern respectability.’ In contrast, the unheimlich house of A.I.’s conclusion suggests the fantasy nature of David’s maternal union; in this strange, long-lost fantastical ‘home’ reproduced by the sympathetic supermecha, there does not seem to be an outside – literally or ideologically. David finally possesses the fantasy mother, the Oedipal dream, but only as a technological construct, through the intervention of the advanced super-mecha. In A.I. the family is realised as an ambiguous construction, not as Henry’s natural, biological, and ultimately, impossible, ideal.

93 Kathleen McConnell, "Creating People for Popular Consumption: Echoes of Pygmalion and 'The Rape of the Lock' in Artificial Intelligence: A.I.," Journal of Popular Culture 40, no. 4 (2007). P. 692.

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David’s desire is revealed to be for the fantasy mother, rather than ‘reality’: “fantasy manipulates a proximity to the maternal Thing.”94 The final act’s reliance on the narrator takes the plot to the level of fairy tale; the film grants David his ultimate desire, but in doing so, reveals its very impossibility. David/the audience finally hears those words he/we longed for, the maternal declaration of love, but they are always on the level of the artificial/fairy tale, the fantasy that maintains the proper distance from the object of desire. For David, it leads him to the world of dreams, the contrivance of the fairy tale; he “gets to spend one perfect day basking in the radiance of maternal plenitude. If not quite a real boy, he achieves an idealized emotional harmony we humans unconsciously crave but can never fully realize.”95 The disparity between the fantasy of the conclusion and the knowledge of reality/tenuousness of fantasy looms over the film – that satisfaction can only ever be temporary. And that ultimately, satisfaction leads to ‘lack of lack’. The end creates a feeling of emotional disorientation – there is the pleasure generated from family harmony, yet a sense of exposure. The Freudian conclusion of David blissfully drifting off to sleep/death next to his dead mother is frustratingly ambiguous because it attempts to resolve impossible lack.

A.I.’s depiction of David’s problematic ‘attainment’ of (the incestuous object of) desire disrupts the ‘expected’ tears of separation, or the symbolic resolution that melodrama would deploy, instead insisting on the problem of satisfied desire and reunion. The film foregrounds the uncanniness that is at the heart of home, and the union with the mother, the Maternal Thing, is atypically achieved. Paul Arthur observes of A.I.’s conclusion:

[a]s is common in Spielberg films, the risks entailed in producing this closure are considerable, and the contradictions arising from it speak powerfully, if inadvertently, not only to metaphysical themes that pervade his entire career, but to anxieties at large in current cinema, and by extension, contemporary society.96

94 Boucher, "The Law as a Thing: Žižek and the Graph of Desire." P. 33.

95 Paul Arthur, "Movie of the Moment: A.I. Artificial Intelligence," Film Comment 37, no. 4 (2001). P. 22.

96 Ibid. P. 22.

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The perfect image of a mother dreamed up by a robotic child can only exist in a fairy tale fantasy. Yet this ‘happy ending’ of family, and the ‘pleasure’ of familial unification dissatisfies. While “[o]ne of Spielberg’s favourite motifs has been the happy family situation, and [in A.I.] he achieves his most perfect expression of this”,97 at the same time, Spielberg takes this happy ending away by virtue of its very (impossible) perfection. The vision of maternal reunion is only a dream, a fantasy, a fabrication, and ultimately, only an ideological function of social and biological reproduction. David cries desperately when Monica is abandoning him, “if you love me, I’ll be so real for you,” and by the conclusion of the film, with her declaration of love, he becomes as ‘real’ as possible, through his dreams/death.

Love is the film’s ‘truth’, but is ultimately undermined by the artificiality of the ending – not just that the end becomes artificial as it is taken to fairy tale extreme, but all the remaining characters are artificial. Monica can only love him when she herself is an overtly fantisised construct. Dag Sødholt remarks that

an undercurrent of escapism and illusion murmurs beneath it all, whispering that it is just an idyllised situation, an unreal family paradise staged and played out by artificial beings. Our awareness of these two conflicting emotions, joy in happiness and sadness in the unattainability of it, makes the sequence even more resonant.98

Unlike Frank in Catch Me if You Can, David does not progress to culture and the law of the Symbolic, but instead ‘regresses’ to the world of dreams, the maternal, the Real. By the conclusion of the film, only the consoling ‘family’ of super-mecha remain as an attachment to culture and language through the final fairy tale. The sentimental ending is simultaneously the overt undermining of the sentiment, a comment on the artificiality, the narrative, and the constructedness of the family. As Charles Burnetts observes, “the scene is a self-conscious master class in the

97 Dag Sødtholt, "Warning: Sentimentality!," Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema 27 (2003). Online, no pagination.

98 Ibid. Online, no pagination. The difficulty of the undermined sentimentality of the ‘conclusion’ left critics perplexed. As Tim Kreider considers, “[i]t’s not clear whether [Spielberg] failed in an effort to make us feel good about his ‘feel-good’ movie, or, more bravely, refrained from trying to make us feel good”. Kreider, "Review: Artificial Intelligence: A.I.." P. 33. Also see P. 37. Morris argues that the film “undermines its apparent premises and ironises the pleasures”. Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 314.

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sentimental”.99 This ambivalence lies beneath Spielberg’s familial resolutions; Jim’s belated turn toward his mother, when she does not know his name; Peter Banning’s insistence that to live is the greatest adventure, but his turn to family necessitates the relinquishing of Neverland and fantasy;100 and Frank’s lawful and familial respectability comes at the cost of postmodern play.

Conclusion: Artificial Resolution

Frank’s desire in Catch Me if You Can to recover and repair his broken home is at first glance, thematically complementary to A.I. in its evocation of the lost child’s sentimental quest for re-union with family and home. Both films address the themes that recur throughout Spielberg’s work – a preoccupation with the Oedipal desires of childhood and parenting through his representations of family.

Yet the films differ in their ‘resolution’ of this Oedipal crisis in significant ways. A.I.’s conclusion grants David the maternal embrace of dreams, death, the Real, rather than the narrative trajectory toward the symbolic and the Law of the Father that structures Catch Me if You Can. The super-mechas artificially reconstruct the (always) lost mother/maternal object, bringing David’s narrative to its perversely unsatisfying fairy tale conclusion. As opposed to the conclusion of Catch Me if You Can, where the camera pulls away from Frank and Hanratty in their drab office cubicle, concluding with captioning which foregrounds the implied satisfaction of family life and submission to the symbolic Law, the camera in A.I. pulls away from an artificial house, where a robot boy achieves Freudian maternal bliss through reunion with his artificially reconstructed mother. Both films are motivated by a desire to return ‘home’, and in both, the ‘attainment’ and conceptualisation of home are complicated and conflicted. However, David’s long desired ‘return home’ is an evasion of the paternal realm of the Law that structures Frank’s journey.

99 Charles Burnetts, "Steven Spielberg's 'Feelgood' Endings and Sentimentality," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 1 (2009). P. 86.

100 William Beard also notes that in Hook “we see the blissfully happy ending haunted by an intimation of its own falseness, a climactic vision of perfect accord and redemptive transformation whose underlying doubts are expressed in its own histrionic insistence.” Beard, "A.I. Or, the Agony of Steven Spielberg." Online, no pagination.

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Unlike the narrative movement toward the prohibitive paternal figure that prevents Frank’s (re)union with his mother in Catch Me if You Can, there is no paternal prohibition in A.I.’s erasure of Henry and Hobby. David’s jouissance results in Symbolic death (literally in the psychoanalytic sense) as David goes to the ‘place where dreams are born’. The film represents the failure of fantasy to shield David from the maternal Thing. In Catch Me if You Can, Frank, underneath his multiple identities, is preoccupied by fantasies of the ‘harmonious’ family and a return to the maternal home. It is only when he is ‘caught’ and submits to the Law/Father that he also relinquishes the maternal body of enjoyment, and can therefore commit to (paternal) law. Frank, as Nigel Morris observes,

completes his transference to Carl as father figure, welcomes arrest and subsequently subsumes himself, under Carl’s mentorship, into the FBI’s surrogate family, the Symbolic, the Law – and, as the closing titles explain, family life, Midwestern respectability and millionairehood: the American Dream.101

David, on the other hand, remains frozen in time for 2000 years in his single-minded attempt to arrest history and narrative, to return to the mother: a (programmed) refusal of the paternal and symbolic Law. But the two films share a preoccupation with the desired return ‘home’ to the mother. Although Frank eventually succumbs to the Law, it is only as a result of Carl’s successful ‘prohibition’ of the maternal. Despite his best attempts, including a return to her homeland, Frank is excluded from the warm maternal domestic sphere. In contrast, A.I. replicates this maternal rejection, but then permits the maternal reunion – satisfying David’s desire. Both films use a fundamental Oedipal narrative, yet David’s illicit maternal satisfaction provide a counterpoint to Frank’s eventual ‘Midwestern respectability’.

Frank, while desiring the return to the mother, is simultaneously obsessed by his father and symbolic recognition – but he can really only achieve this ‘goal’ when he

101 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 342.

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accepts exile from his mother and her world.102 The films are linked through the narrative motivation of family, although through different formulations of their fantasies of reunification, absorption, acceptance and law. For Frank, the Law is a solution to the ambiguities of desire, his restless play with identity, and his uneasy relationship to the social order. As Todd McGowan argues of fantasy, desire and the Law,

[o]ne way to retreat from desire is to turn to the Law, to identify with the Law as a bulwark against desire. Whereas fantasy offers an imaginary answer to desire’s question, the Law attempts to arrest the process of questioning, along with the disturbance it provokes… It observes desire in an effort to keep it to a minimum, to eliminate its disruptive effects on the functioning of the social order.103

Catch Me if You Can articulates first a significant disruption and attempted denial of the Law before Frank’s final capitulation, when he is ‘caught’ because his desire must be curtailed. In one of the final scenes, Frank stands, confused, in the fantastical stylised corridor that represent his attempts to escape from Hanratty who hovers behind his shoulder, to escape from the Law of the Father. Standing between Carl and the glowing, curved hallway, Frank must ‘retreat from his desire’. Bronfen argues that “[t]he official law defining the subject produces both a symbolic protective fiction and its uncanny, phantomatic counternarrative, the latter aimed toward dissolution.”104 Rather than a turn to the fantasy mise-en-scène, the uncanny, and Bronfen’s dissolution of identity into the slooping, glowing corridor, Frank, unlike David, adopts the world of work, fatherhood, a ‘symbolic protective fiction’ and a role in the maintenance of the Law. Frank ‘rejects’ the mother and the flight/fantasy in order to accept the father, the Law, and ultimately, Fatherhood and Family.

102 The nationalities of the parents, and Frank’s conflicted relationship to his countries of origin suggest the complexity of the familial metaphor. Discourse of the familial nation/national family will be considered in depth in Chapter Four.

103 McGowan, "Finding Ourselves on a Lost Highway: David Lynch's Lesson in Fantasy." P. 57.

104 Elisabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004). P. 242.

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David, in his frozen state of childhood, cannot duplicate Frank’s Oedipal narrative; he cannot assume the Law of the Father, hence his constant desire for union with the mother. In contrast to Frank, David is not obsessed by the father – he rejects both Henry and Hobby. A.I. represents ‘family’ as total (maternal) absorption, taking David’s desire to its logical conclusion, to the point that he irrevocably, enters the ‘world of dreams’, the key point of difference between the two films. David rejects the Law of the Father in favour of merger with the maternal. David’s desire is not curtailed by a substitutive prohibitive (paternal Symbolic) fantasy – instead A.I.’s conclusion represents the problematic attainment of desire in the incestuous maternal embrace – a figuration of the death drive lurking within the familial Symbolic.

Through David’s turn to the mother and desire, his denial of the symbolic and the reproductive future, A.I. is a rejection of paternal law, more significantly potent in a post-apocalyptic environment that itself threatens the family, reproduction and the very future itself. David represents a child with no future, no reproduction, when symbolically the “the child [should] evoke[] a stable, generational future”.105 Consequently, paternal authority figured through Henry rejects David, and the threat that he poses to normalised family structures, and the ‘fertility’ drive of self- replication that underpins the ideology of family, of Henry’s own cultural and biological future. The repellent creepiness of A.I. results from the refusal of Oedipal progress; the (non-biological) father cannot enforce the incest taboo against the child’s (programmed) desire for the mother.106 Frank, on the other hand, is accepted by Hanratty, and justifies this trust by acceding to the replication of the family and its ideology. Family as paternal authority is affirmed in Catch Me if You Can, while postmodernism, fantasy and the mother are marginalised. Family in A.I., however, is reduced to artificial (postmodern) reproduction, and is salvaged only problematically through the next generation mecha. Rather than affirming ‘reality’ and the symbolic

105 Harwood, Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema. P. 127.

106 The mise-en-scène and general tone of the film also substantially contributes to this thematic ‘creepiness’. James Naremore notes in the final scene particularly, although also applicable to the all of the ‘domestic’ scenes, that “[s]omething uncanny inflects everything – a feeling of ‘un-homeliness,’ as if we could sense ghostly futurist robots designed by CGI somewhere off in the distance, looking down upon David and his mother, who are themselves artificial.” James Naremore, "Love and Death in A.I. Artificial Intelligence," Michigan Quarterly Review 44, no. 2 (2005). P. 280.

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Law, A.I. descends into simulacra, replication, repetition and fairy tale, refusing the usual (as in Catch Me if You Can) narrative trajectory of authenticity.

A.I. foregrounds its status as narrative, whereas Catch Me if You Can elides its own narrative play by trumpeting its ‘true story’ and ‘biographical’ origins. While in general across his oeuvre, Spielberg’s familial resolutions tend to (overtly) ‘solve’ narrative crisis, A.I. is unique in its privileging of family ‘as resolution’ and its simultaneous denial of family as closure. The two films form a trajectory – from Catch Me if You Can’s apparent resolution to an expression of its failure in A.I. David’s narrative cannot properly be integrated into the film’s voiceover and images, concluding with an unsatisfying camera movement away from a ‘dreaming’ robot in the (artificial) maternal embrace. Such a failure is also suggested in Empire of the Sun’s final cut from almost pure resolution as Jamie/Jim closes his eyes to hold his mother, to the image of the coffin/case floating, lost and abandoned on the river, a reminder of death and the failure of ‘resolution’. As is specifically foregrounded in the conclusion to A.I, which speaks to the greater complexity and ambivalence inherent to familial resolutions, Spielberg is not simply a sentimental or manipulative director – his representations of the family are worthy of substantial analysis. The manifest emotional failure in A.I is an overt representation of the problematics of desire and fantasy that inscribe all (always-ambivalent) familial resolutions.

This persistent ambivalence about ‘family’ and its place within narrative resolution is further expressed in the conclusion to the apocalypse narrative and the ideological confusion that marks the A.I.’s ‘truly electronic future’. The film emphasises the destruction of mankind while at the same time replacing mankind with the ‘fertile’ androids.107 Such ambivalence in the representation of the future of humanity and its emblem of the Child suggests both the apocalyptic death drive to destroy108 and the

107 The Oedipal anxieties surrounding the Child that cannot mimic his father are powerfully linked to the film’s apocalyptic narrative. As Vivian Sobchack notes of Oedipal anxieties, “if the child is figured as at the expense of the father, then patriarchy is threatened; if father is figured as powerful at the expense of his child, then paternity is threatened. In both cases, the traditional and conceivable future is threatened”. Vivian Sobchack, "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange," in The Dread of Difference, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, Texas, 1996). P. 156.

108 As discussed by Baudrillard, “the death drive, according to Freud, is precisely this nostalgia for a state before the appearance of individuality and sexual differentiation, a state in which we lived before

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incessant investment in reproduction and the future. While it would seem the ‘family of man’ has failed, at the same time the ‘children’ of man (the robots) inherit the earth – the biological family becomes extinct, yet the future’s non-reproductive robots are still self-replicating. The persistence of the family ideal and generational evolution endures. Through this replacement of biology with electricity, A.I. explicitly reveals the cultural and political investment in reproductivity and replication; as Spielberg’s Jurassic Park also illustrates, ‘life will find a way’ - even if this life is robotic or cloned. As in that film, where the all-female dinosaurs ultimately reproduce, so does David become, in a sense, the ‘father’ of the next generation of mecha. As Glaister argues of the futuristic super-mecha, it is “the creatures’ descent from the mecha and not their mechanicalness per se that is important.”109 Through David’s exploration of the world, ‘truth’ is revealed through stories that create and form the world through the cultural narratives of religion and mythology, the melding of ‘flat fact’ and fairy tale. And further into the (electronic) future, the mecha too ‘evolve’ this ability to blend fact and fairy tale; they become a technology with myths, narratives, history, and significantly, and with a sense of generation and family. The super-mecha of the apocalyptic future elevate David to mythological status, an ancestor of biblical origins, a formative fairy tale of this new mecha culture.110 The realised sterility of the human race is compensated through these future ‘families’ of mecha. Despite the film’s extinction of the human race 2000 years into the technological future, Spielberg’s narrative cannot eradicate discursive dependence upon ancestry and familial metaphors.

we became mortal and distinct from one another.” Jean Baudrillard, “The Final Solution” in The Vital Illusion, ed. Julia Witwer (New York, Columbia University Press, 2000). P. 6, quoted in Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. P. 61. Interestingly, the super-mecha of the film’s conclusion appear to have overcome this ‘problem’ of individuality and differentiation, apparently sharing information and emotion at a touch.

109 Stephen M. Glaister, "Saving A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: Philosophical Aspects of Spielberg's Neglected Robo-Epic," Bright Lights Film Journal 48 (2005). Online, no pagination.

110 Of the ‘original Apocalypse’, Jameson notes that it “includes both catastrophe and fulfilment, the end of the world and the inauguration of Christ on earth, Utopia and the extinction of the human race all at once.” Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London and New York: Verso, 2005). P. 199.

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Chapter Two The Lost World of ‘Home’: Suburbia, Family Ghosts, and Alienation in Domesticity

The camera pans down from the night sky, terminating on the unusual juxtaposition of a spaceship nestled in a misty forest grove and, in the background, the lights of thousands of suburban homes stretch into the distance. From this strange spacecraft, small, squat extra-terrestrials enter the idyllic fairy-tale-like redwoods, their botanist hands investigating the foliage, the subjective camera work sharing their wonder at the towering trees. Straying further into the forest, away from his home, safety and his family, E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial’s eponymous hero, is lured to his earthly adventures. The camera moves toward the edge of the tree line and, as the audience looks on through an ‘alien’ point of view, the glowing lights of night-time suburbia sprawls in front of him, waiting. The music matches the camera work’s fascination, majestically rising as the focus moves toward the attractive glow beyond the forest. But the gentle, curious music is quickly shattered by the invasive, masculine voices and intrusive vehicles of the scientists, whose sudden arrival forces E.T’s compatriots to abandon him on Earth, and thus take the audience out of the forest, into one of those warm, waiting suburban homes.

Alan Nadel points out that a film’s “establishing shot is the vital cue to stabilise the continuity disrupted by the manipulation of time and space endemic to filmmaking… the establishing shot is the representation of the Establishment, in that it presents the unchallenged assumptions necessary to allow the scene to unfold.”1 The opening shots of E.T. set up both a familiar filmic world, and introduce the strange and foreign; by presenting these images through the subjective gaze of the E.T. moving from sky, through forest, to looking down on a suburban world, the film ‘alienates’ easy assumptions about the ubiquitous representation of suburbia. In the subjective camera movement, the film makes a specific point about its own mise-en-scène and its affective heart. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and Spielberg’s films in general, do not take their suburban milieu for granted. As Robert Beuka argues, suburbia in film,

1 Alan Nadel, Flatlining on the : Cultural Narratives in the Films of President Reagan's America (New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers UP, 1997). P. 143.

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television and literary representation functions not merely as simple backdrop but as “dynamic, often defining elements of their narratives.”2 The dream house in the suburbs, the well-appointed family home, the idyll of domesticity and contentment are the primary ideological building blocks of ‘everyday’ (western nuclear, and almost exclusively white, family) life, fundamental to the varied representations that shape popular culture. Yet, as considered within this chapter, all is not well in Spielberg’s suburbs, and the recuperation of home is conflicted and frequently fails, a much neglected aspect of his albeit sentimental imagery of familial homes.

The suburb has become synonymous with the American dream – it is the milieu within which circulate the desires and dilemmas inherent in this dominant discourse. Often conceptualised throughout popular culture as perfect fantasy and/or stifling nightmare, suburbia, and the congruent conceptualisation of ‘home’, are omnipresent organising principles of contemporary American film and narrative. Such cultural narratives empower the images of domesticity and suburban lives that (notoriously) frame and structure Spielberg’s films and narratives of family. Furthering the arguments of Chapter One and its discussion of the irresolution within the familial dynamic in a psychoanalytic sense, this analysis considers how the representation of the home, the suburbs and (gendered, patriarchal) domesticity play out through Spielberg’s familial narratives. The home is the ideological location of familial conflict and resolution, and rather than the classic binary of suburban heaven and hell, Spielberg’s home are ‘fantasy-scapes’ in which vacillate imagery of both the redemption of the family and its destruction. As the site of normalising practices surrounding domesticity and Spielberg’s persistent privileging of male subjectivity, and significantly, as the location of the familial reproduction of the familial future, these suburban utopias also manifests an ever-present uncanny, the death drive within suburbia.

Spielberg’s familial representations are dependent upon mediatised depictions of suburban homes, a predominantly white middle-class image, and the apparent divide between ‘private’ and ‘public’ spaces that structure such imagery. Representations of

2 Robert Beuka, Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). P. 2.

107 home and suburbs are particularly reliant upon their ‘nostalgic origins’ located in the fifties, the period when the suburban growth boomed and televised/mediatised images of the suburbs swelled in popularity, perpetuating, yet also problematising, the ubiquitous construction and reproduction of family (ideologies) that inhabit these homes. Further, James B. Mitchell declares that “[w]e can supplement Robert Fishman’s assertion that suburbia is ‘the collective creation of the Anglo-Saxon middle-class: the bourgeois utopia’ by pointing out that the fantasy of the nuclear family attends this creation”.3 And, as J. John Palen points out, “[t]he line between home itself and the idealization of the family was blurred.”4 The filmic representation of (the ideal of) the ‘private’ home is vital to the construction of familial fantasies and is pivotal to how families become the centre of conflict, contradiction and ideological reification in contemporary American culture and society.

The suburb is the most popular dwelling environment in the United States – a reality that is difficult to dissociate from its multiple and varying representations and fantasies. In its idealised form, the suburb is generally comprised of white nuclear families living in independent, free-standing houses in lower density (middle-class) population-clusters on the outskirts of built-up urban areas. While the suburb has its origins as far back as the eighteenth century, it was in the post-World War II era that suburban expansion truly burgeoned, in conjunction with the revival of traditional gender roles.5 Mary Beth Haralovich notes that “[a]n ideal white and middle-class

3 James B. Mitchell, "Cul-De-Sac Nightmares: Representations of Californian Suburbia in Science Fiction During the 1950s and '60s," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2003). P.121, quoting Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1987). P. x.

4 J. John Palen, The Suburbs (New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Inc, 1995). P. 70.

5 As Patricia Mellencamp describes suburban expansion in the fifties, “suburbia spread by the development of fifty million low-technology, single family homes – separate, private spaces connected by electricity, radio and telephones”. Patricia Mellencamp, "Domestic Scenes," East-West Film Journal 1, no. 4 (1989). P. 150. There are vast amounts of literature on the subject of suburbia, and suburbia and film. For a discussion of the economics of suburban history, see, particularly, PP. 90-91, Jack Boozer Jr., "Entrepreneurs and 'Family Values' in the Postwar Film," in Authority and Transgression in Literature and Film, ed. Bonnie Braendlin and Hans Braendlin (Gainsville: University Press of , 1996). For histories and discussions of the ‘suburban phenomenon’, through society and culture, as well as the politics of representation, see Robert Beuka, "'Cue the Sun' Soundings from Millennial Suburbia," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2003), Beuka, Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century Fiction and Film, Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia, Udo J. Hebel, "American Suburbia: History, Ideologies, Visual and Literary Representation," in Visual Culture in the American Studies Classroom, ed. Udo J. Hebel and Martina Kohl (Vienna, Austria: U.S. Embassy Teacher Academy, 2005), Palen,

108 homelife was a primary means of reconstituting and re-socialising the American family after World War II.”6 Familial and suburban investment stimulated a significant economic transformation of the cultural environment, creating a new set of (marketable) desires, spaces, and ideals, circulating around the concept of the nuclear family existing in discrete, ‘private’ houses. Jessica Blaustein suggests that

[i]n response to increasing commercialization, emerging technologies of publicity, and altogether new public spheres which challenged existing boundaries around class, ethnicity, and geography, privacy emerged as a self-conscious principle and the boundaries around certain familial enclosures and bodies became more defensive. If interiority was held up as an ideal, in other words, it was because outsides were felt more intensely.7

Parallel to the ‘urban exodus’, also referred to as the white flight from urban ethnic enclaves to the suburbs, was the significant expansion of public space and media penetration, and conversely an increased emphasis on ‘privacy’. The ‘discrete’ house, the ‘independent’ family, and the ‘separation of the spheres’ became more important in the context of a broadening public, commercial and mediatised space through increased participation in a world opening up through media and communications. The suburb and the discrete family home enhanced a sense of interiors, of private spaces, the privileged location of the home as ‘haven in a heartless world’.8

The Suburbs, Richard Porton, "American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares," Cineaste 20, no. 1 (1993), Roger Silverstone, ed., Visions of Suburbia (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), David A. Wilt, "Suburbia," in The Columbia Companion to American History on Film: How the Movies Have Portrayed the American Past, ed. Peter C. Rollins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). For a discussion of discourses of family, domesticity and the suburban ideal in the Cold War, and their significance to the construction of the nation, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

6 Mary Beth Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 2 (1989). PP. 61-2. In the dominant, ideal, vision of suburbia, as Hebel describes, “[t]he suburban home is the sphere where the family prospers, where the mother reigns supreme as the loving and caring ‘homemaker’, where the father recovers after a day of work in a possibly hostile world, and where the children grow up to become valuable citizens of a wholesome American nation.” Hebel, "American Suburbia: History, Ideologies, Visual and Literary Representation." P. 187.

7 Jessica Blaustein, "Counterprivates: An Appeal to Rethink Suburban Interiority," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2003). P. 43.

8 See Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

109 The generic ‘family space’ of home in film is typically imagined in popular culture traditions with (white) parents – father at work and mother in the kitchen, minding the children and the family pet. As Haralovich notes, “[t]he suburban dream house underscored [the] homogenous definition of the suburban family… designed to display class attributes and reinforce gender-specific functions of domestic space.”9 Within the suburban ideal, such domestic norms shaped the home as a haven of normalcy; in Jessica Blaustein’s words, “to be normal, wholesome and happy was to be ensconced in an isolated sphere of domesticity”.10 Such ideologies of suburban white domesticity and gendered space are visualised through Spielberg’s filmic representation and popular images. However, while the ‘political unconscious’ of the suburban home simultaneously conforms to strictures of media-tised familial normalcy, such images are repeatedly fractured and undermined as suggestions of sexualised and racial ‘deviance’ and economic insecurities knock on the door.

The suburb, today’s collective home, is for much of the movie-going population, also the home of yesterday, a nostalgic place ‘remembered’ through children’s eyes and television images, particularly those created in the fifties and sixties.11 These fantasy suburbs emerge not only from specific individual recollections of suburbia, but through culturally inflected memories and remembered representations, through sit- coms and films, magazines and television – shared fantasy images of the suburban dream.12 Familial representations and domesticity are ideologically constructed

9 Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker." PP. 66. Also discussing the normative gender divisions of the spheres, Estella Tincknell points out that “the public sphere has conventionally been understood as a masculine domain: the space where politics, history and economics are supposedly made and where men, in particular, are produced as subjects. The private, feminine sphere was where ‘the family’ was located – enclosed, domestic, ahistorical and timeless.” Estella Tincknell, Mediating the Family: Gender, Culture and Representation (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005). P. 2.

10 Blaustein, "Counterprivates: An Appeal to Rethink Suburban Interiority." P. 44.

11 This relation to our desire for the nostalgic media image, and the media image’s hold upon our desire, is explicit in Catch Me If You Can, where Frank’s desire for the perfect, yet always lost ‘sit- com’ family motivates his larcenous fantasy world. Frank exemplifies this elision between ‘reality’ and televised existence through the frequent confusion of ‘lived experience’ and the mediatised (fantasied) television images that structures Frank’s fantasies and his sense of loss.

12 As Sobchack observes, “[i]ndeed, ‘50s television small towns and suburban neighbourhoods are the home base for nearly all the films of Spielberg and associates, functioning as an overdetermined sign of ‘nostalgia-in-itself’ – that is, a nostalgia with an always-already nostalgized referent.” Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). P. 274. The plastic fifties small town represented in Indiana Jones and the

110 within the nostalgic milieu of the American Dream; Beuka suggests that common media signifiers of the suburb evoke a sense of ‘pastness’:

Mere mention of the word ‘suburbia’… will call to mind for most Americans a familiar string of images – the grid of identical houses on identical lots, the smoking barbecue, the swimming pool, etc. – loaded signifiers that, taken together, connote, both the middle-class ‘American dream’ as it was promulgated by and celebrated in the postwar years… such images seem drawn from an increasingly distant past, with ‘suburbia’ and ‘the ‘50s’ occupying a shared space in the cultural imagination13

‘Drawn from an increasingly distant past’ as it has been envisioned through the media, the fifties suburban ideal is a (utopian) ideology, a powerful media influence within contemporary suburban life. The suburb is framed by images that are always already seen by a ‘tele-literate’ audience that constructs the suburb through the generic media imagery. The suburbs and their residents have become recognisable stereotypes in contemporary sitcoms, films and other media. At their most nostalgic and sentimental, these ubiquitous representations draw on the forms and images of such fifties and sixties sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. The imagery from such television shows of the detached home, the nuclear family, with the bread-winning father, domestic goddess mother, and children growing up in white, middle-class comfort that mark these sit-coms have become the iconic referents of suburban familial representation. As Beuka points out, however, “all was never quite right with the image of suburban domesticity presented on television in the ‘50s.”14 Even so, such familiar imagery is central to the suburban worlds that Spielberg creates; the American dream of the suburbs has been mass produced and returned to the screen so often, that the media image is the most powerful icon of this dream accessible to many. Even scathing critiques of the suburban ideal defer to this

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, discussed in the introduction, is a knowing postmodern deconstruction of the suburban ideal so frequently invoked by Spielberg – even parodying the ‘nostalgia-in-itself’ that such imagery suggests.

13 Beuka, "'Cue the Sun' Soundings from Millennial Suburbia." P. 156.

14 Robert Beuka, "'Just One Word... Plastics': Suburban Malaise, Masculinity, and the Oedipal Drive," Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, no. 1 (2000). P. 14-5.

111 ubiquitous, standardised imagery. These fantasies and nightmares come into existence, and are maintained, through media saturation.15

Spielberg consistently returns to the every-man (very occasionally, every-woman) and the ‘normal’ family, replicating a familiar image of suburbia and home, recognisable from either personal experience or from countless repetitions of such highly mediated images. The cultural narratives channelled by Spielberg create and sustain an image of ‘family’ that is at once instantly familiar to his (American and western) audience, yet simultaneously a creation, a fantasy fabrication of home, domesticity and suburbia. Furthering the concept that the suburban landscape is constructed as much through fantasy and desire as through bricks, , clipped lawns and swimming pools, Beuka, drawing on Jameson’s theories of postmodernism, suggests that,

if, as Jameson argues, nostalgia films on the whole train us to ‘consume the past in the form of glossy images’ then it is also worth noting that the nostalgia mode in these suburban films confirms the extent to which this terrain has been, since the postwar years, very much an imagined environment, a landscape of the mind.16

The representation of the suburban milieu is deeply embedded in continual nostalgic investments, fantasies that comprise the ways in which landscapes, and in particular the American dreamscape of the suburb is repetitively invented and reinvented. The scenario whereby the suburb is located within a binary of positives and negatives is unproductive – it is the location in fantasy, the positioning of ‘home’ as a location of desire, that yields a more complex understanding of how the suburbs function within cultural and familial discourses, and the dynamic of mise-en-scène, fantasy and ideology that structure Spielberg’s affective narratives.

Home is the heart of Spielberg’s filmic ideology and mise-en-scène – the rows of suburban tract housing, the rooms messy with dishes and children’s playthings, are imbued with overwhelming, if conflicted, emotional value. The suburban family

15 Beuka, "'Cue the Sun' Soundings from Millennial Suburbia." P. 158-9.

16 Ibid. p. 156. Referencing Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). P. 287.

112 dwelling is never simply a ‘house’: Dolores Hayden suggests that “whoever speaks of housing must also speak of home; the word means both the physical space and the nurturing that takes place there.”17 Within both their actual and representational history, these suburbs have become permanently intertwined with ‘home’, and that term’s concurrent fantasies and anxieties. As R. F. Selcer notes, “[t]he fact that home cannot be readily identified is probably why it has been the subject of so many movies… there is a mythology that surrounds the concept of the home.”18 As such, homes and families, while idealised and revered, are also fraught with emotional ambivalence, and, at times, even hostility in those Spielberg’s films that narrate both domestic escapes and affecting homecomings.

The construction of the home is mediated by its discursive and affective power; the ideal ‘home’ is not cemented within material real estate. The (frequently male) fantasies and anxieties that Spielberg turns and returns to function within their sedimented material conditions of existence – the practical elements of the films’ mise en scene of house and suburb – but are also powerfully anchored in the psychoanalytic premise of the word ‘home’. As Chase and Shaw argue, the “home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place but rather a state of mind.”19 And in her work on the link between the narrative conceptualisation of home to fantasies of an original, impossible ‘home’ without loss, a thematic which resonates throughut Spielberg’s films, Bronfen further points out that

cinematic narratives, particularly when they are concerned with concepts of the home, are inscribed by a nostalgia for an untainted sense of belonging, and the impossibility of achieving that is a also a catalyst for fantasies about recuperation and healing.20

17 Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream, P. 63, 109; quoted in Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker." P. 67. The phrase, a ‘place like home’, in this idealised sense beyond mere house or dwelling is enhanced by this concept of ‘nurturing’.

18 R. F. Selcer, "Home Sweet Movies: From Tara to Oz and Home Again," Journal of Popular Film and Television 18, no. 2 (1990). P. 54.

19 Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, "The Dimensions of Nostalgia," in The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia, ed. Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989). P. 1.

20 Elisabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004). P. 21.

113

Perhaps because of such nostalgic construction of his homes and suburbs, a nostalgia which induces both that primary loss and longing for ‘untainted’ belonging, Spielberg is a ‘master’ of evoking this familiar suburban world and the cosy comforts of home. Suzanne Vromen notes that “[t]hinking of home… yearning for it – is an essential aspect of the human condition, one that has come to be called nostalgia.”21 Yet Spielberg’s nostalgic visions of suburbia and home life are also multi-faceted and frequently deeply contradictory. His nostalgic home are at times sentimental and hokey, or alternatively, insightful and inspirational, as well as threatening, horrific and claustrophobic, and potentially all within the same text. Augmented by considerable nostalgia, however, representation of home, suburbia and family are enhanced by a cultural milieu where the values of family and domesticity are perceived to be in decline, where feminist critiques have, in some senses, challenged the ‘foundational’ structures of the family and threatened the domestic basis of masculine paternal authority.

Many social critics refer to ‘suburbia’ in a pejorative sense. As Matthew Burke argues, “the average Western suburban landscape [is portrayed] as a conformist, soul- less, cultural desert where life behind the picket fences is undoubtedly dysfunctional. The most common depictions are of the vacuousness of suburban landscapes… the facades of the average suburbanite”.22 Throughout Spielberg’s films, on the other hand, the suburban world is both an ideal, yet also, to some degree, this ‘vacuous cultural desert’. Home may be represented as ‘where the heart is’ and as a desperately desired ‘haven in a heartless world’, but the suburb is simultaneously also depicted as a stifling site of domestic and gendered repression, an inhibitor of freedom and signifier of social conformity, claustrophobic social and private space.

21 Suzanne Vromen, "The Ambiguity of Nostalgia," Yivo Annual 21 (1993). P. 69. And in addition to nostalgia, the home becomes part of sacred ritual, as well as projecting an image of the national imaginary, ideas that are touched on in Chapters Three and Four on religion and the nation. In his analysis of religious discourse and manifestations, Mircea Eliade argues that “houses are held to be at the Center of the World and, on the microcosmic scale, to reproduce the universe.” Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W.R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1961). P. 43.

22 Matthew Burke, "Fortress Dystopia: Representations of Gated Communities in Contemporary Fiction," Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 24, no. 1/2 (2001). This negative representation of the suburbs is also discussed by Porton, "American Dreams, Suburban Nightmares." P. 115.

114 In this sense, the uncanny, the sense of home, but ‘not-quite’ home, heimlich, yet simultaneously unheimlich, is channelled through Spielberg films, interrogating rather than replicating the reductive binaries of domestic dreams and suburban nightmares. As Bronfen notes, “what the uncanny articulates is an originary fissure in what is believed to be familiar.”23 The heimlich always carries within it the unheimlich, representations of which necessarily emerge from within even the most ‘sentimental and hokey’ depictions of home and family life.

From Spielberg’s first blockbuster, Jaws, to his more recent War of the Worlds, the ‘threatened’ ideals of home, domesticity, and the role of masculinity and fatherhood are woven throughout his narratives. When these standard stereotypes come under either ideological or physical challenge, the uncanny of the home emerges. As Stephen Keanne suggests, in reference to Freud’s work on the uncanny:

Certainly, heimlich can be seen as the familiar, the tame, intimacy, friendliness and comfort, belonging to the house or family. But, the second significant meaning of hemilich becomes that of concealment. In this more customary sense, heimlich contains unheimlich because to conceal is the exact opposite of making familiar, the first definition. Thus, unheimlich is the hidden core of heimlich.24

In such a manner, the opening sequence introducing Elliot and his family in E.T. suggests this preoccupation with the heimlich images of a ‘familial’ suburban family, but the intrusion of the alien simultaneously introduces the unheimlich beneath; the glowing suburban sprawl in E.T. is rendered uncanny by the foreground image of the little space ship and the subjective tilting camera that follows the alien point of view, ‘making strange’ the familiar scene. Spielberg depicts such internal complexity throughout his films, evoking the dreams, desires, and (concealed) nightmares that structure perceptions of home, suburbs and experiences of domesticity, suggested

23 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. p. 23. In his seminal discussion of the doubling in the uncanny, discussed by Bronfen, Freud states that “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” Sigmund Freud, "'The Uncanny'," in Penguin Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). P. 340.

24 Stephen Keanne, "Imaginary Homelands: Notes on Heimat and Heimlich," Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1997). P. 84, referencing Freud, "'The Uncanny'." PP. 342-7. Freud discusses the linguistic meanings of heimlich and unheimlich, and how they are confused and conflated, vital to its meaning suggesting both familiarity and concealment.

115 through the alien contained within Elliot. Bronfen further argues that “[f]antasies shaped by the notion of home thus preserve the uncanniness that inextricably resides in the familiar to the end… any conceptualisation of origins is always already displaced, even as they nostalgically produce protective fictions in response to this ineradicable fissure.”25 The fantasies that comprise the Spielbergian construction (and deconstruction) of the home and the suburban milieu are always infused with this uncanniness and anxiety: why E.T. is pulled to the glowing lights of Elliot’s family home, and yet why he must, necessarily, leave the suburbs.

Spielberg’s evocation of everyday clutter, chores and squabbling emulates images of comfortable domesticity and the experience of the ‘everyman’ at home.26 The loving and nostalgic recreation of suburban life and domesticity is, however, accompanied by brutal reminders that homes can be broken down and violated, a reminder of the fragility of any utopic manifestation. The generation of loss sustains (and creates) intensity through narrative movement from heimlich to unheimlich, from nostalgic images of home, family and domesticity to the emergence of the uncanny and violence. Lurking within the ideal of the home is the implicit desire to destroy that domestic utopia. While Spielberg’s homes are places of plenitude and homely domestic clutter, such excess also provokes unease about lack and loss; the lavish homes of the suburbs evoke the inverse anxiety of the American dream, of homelessness, loss, and a sense of not belonging; the discovering that literally, there is no place like home.27 The always-already uncanny dimension of the home suggests that the ideal of security always presages loss. Such overwhelming anxieties are endemic within this cultural milieu; as Douglas Kellner argues, during the eighties in

25 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 26.

26 Elsaesser points out that “the setting of the family melodrama is almost by definition the middle- class home, filled with objects”. Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishers, 1987). P. 371.

27 See Chapter Two “Home – There’s No Place Like It: The Wizard of Oz” in Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema.

116 particular, the house, the home, and the nuclear family was increasingly perceived as vulnerable and threatened, even as it was deemed more valuable and treasured.28

This ever-present threat of ‘domestic failure’ and the uncanny implicit in suburban imagery suggests rebellion against, or anxiety about, the normalising rituals of family and home. Jessica Blaustein argues that the ‘regulatory’ power of the domestic ideal has a discernable effect on the way that everyday life is experienced:

Few deny that the dream falls short, that sometimes (if not most of the time) this home sweet home isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But… the ideal still performs regulatory and disciplinary functions: a wide range of existing familial formations are largely defined in relation to it. And if they fail, they are damned as dysfunctional.29

Such disciplinary discourses of home and family reify the fantasy of suburb and home – provided that the fantasy is understood as both that of possession and that of destruction, the symptomatic eruption of the anti-American dream to counter the discursive power of an unattainable domestic mythology. The desires invested in fantasies of suburbs and home life are motivated by both the desire to possess, and, simultaneously, the desire to destroy – to dissociate from the consuming ‘dysfunctions’ of domesticity in the suburbs. Such troubled convergences between desires for suburban assimilation and suburban destruction both trigger and sanction the nostalgia that consistently pervades Spielberg’s narratives and imagery. While domesticity and the suburbs are all-pervasive discourses, the ‘disciplinary’ system of these collective ideologies of (paternal) responsibility and authority consequently provokes an alternative fantasy, the drive for its destruction.

The apparent fantasy homes, suburbia and domesticity powerfully connect to the family as symbolic of a utopian future, as touched upon in Chapter One. As proliferating normative cultural assumptions, such fantasies politically and culturally venerate the family because they signify future generations, producing and

28 Douglas Kellner, "Poltergeists, Gender, and Class in the Age of Reagan and Bush," in The Hidden Foundation: Cinema and the Question of Class, ed. David E. James and Rick Berg (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996). P. 225.

29 Blaustein, "Counterprivates: An Appeal to Rethink Suburban Interiority." P. 40. Italics added.

117 reproducing the Child – the location of innocence, the assurance of heternormativity and the concurrent reassurance of the reproductivity of the human race, both biologically and socially. As Haralovich points out, “The home is a space… for family cohesion, a guarantee that children can be raised in the image of their parents.”30 The American dream and convergent political and cultural structures are defined by the restrictions and valorisation inherent to reproductive ‘futurism’ and its underpinning ideological familialism. The desire to destroy the home, implied in the carnivorous, glorified destruction in the Jurassic Park films; or the anxiety of ‘not- being-quite at home’ in the pervasive uncanny of David’s döppelganger house in A.I.; or Frank’s repetitively unsuccessful attempts to integrate into family life, corrupt the sit-com image of home – these Spielberg representations of the family and domesticity speak to a prevailing anxiety about just how swiftly idealised images fall apart. Building upon the discussion in Chapter One, this chapter proposes that the home is both ideal and material investment, motivated by the Child and the symbolic Law channelled through the structuring discourses of the family and its reliance on the ‘future’. The alternative ‘drive’ towards ‘no future’ nonetheless shadows this ideal of home; the “cultural narratives valued for parroting the regulatory fantasy of reproductive futurism” contain, as Edelman argues, “the structuring mechanism of a death drive within its life-affirming thematics”.31 The discourse of a genealogical and political future implicit within the reproductive family is always undercut with such images of destruction and collapse, the death drive as the alternative; David’s pathological turn toward the mother, stasis and death, and a rejection of time, paternal law, and a biological and social future.

Such suburban and domestic vulnerability is exposed in varying ways in Spielberg’s significant suburban films, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Poltergeist, and Duel, as they all share a fear of the family breaking apart and the potential loss of domestic comfort and suburban affluence. While all three can be located amongst Spielberg’s ‘fantasy’ films, they are also the most adept at conveying images of suburban domesticity, of a home deliberately familiar. Yet these representations persistently rely on the elision

30 Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker." P. 65.

31 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). P. 117.

118 of these familiar discourses with the uncanny, violence, absence and destruction. The overtly fantastical plots of aliens, ghosts and killer trucks are structurally reliant upon this realistic and accessible background tableau – as is widely recognised, the unheimlich emerges from the everyday.

The little, lost, homeless, alien of the opening sequence of E.T: The Extraterrestrial finally makes his way to the suburban home of Elliot, Elliot’s big brother, little sister, and their unhappily divorced working mother. In E.T., the fatherless Elliot discovers a strange amalgamation of friend, father and child, a fantasy response to paternal absence. The narrative of Elliot’s determined effort to return E.T. to his home and family is paralleled by the film’s re-imagining of the fractured suburban family. Throughout the film, the absent father maintains a constant presence over the (incomplete) family, creating the sentimental backdrop to the ‘child meets alien’ narrative, focusing on the anxieties of a family without paternal guidance through the almost holy intervention of a friendly and fatherly alien. 32 The materialisation of the alien allows Elliot to channel the strangeness of his (maternal) home into a fantasy of empowerment that enables Elliot to reconstitute that home, and come to terms with the loss inherent in it. Significantly, the arrival of E.T. precipitates the entry of the empathic paternal figure of the scientist Keys, framed within the family in the final farewell sequence that excises the alien spaceship from the image of the suburban family.

As opposed to the more muted representation of the uncanny within E.T., the suburban dream is explicitly and violently attacked in Poltergeist. A horror-ghost story, Poltergeist is preoccupied by the ideals of domesticity, home and the suburbs, with particular attention to gendered space, female sexuality and threatened

32 E.T. has attracted a wide variety of interpretations and criticisms, including analysis of this suggested ‘holy intervention’. Ilsa J. Bick broadly summarises the critiques attached to the film: “E.T. has been analyzed from the perspective of the fairy tale, Jungian archetype, and Christian allegory; as both emblematic of and divergent from the ‘new’ American family melodramas (films where the biological nuclear family is no longer extant and a quest is undertaken for its replacement by a new, surrogate, and largely ‘other’ family); as an ‘odyssey of loss’ and the renunciation of magical thought; as an example of Reagan-age cinema and ‘Reaganite’ entertainment (a cinema that can neither criticize nor affirm its culture); and as part of the generic conflation of alienated patriarchy voluntarily or forcibly removed from the domestic space into the figure of the alienated and redemptive child-hero (or childlike adult).” Ilsa J. Bick, "The Look Back in E.T.," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002). PP. 71-2.

119 masculinity. The fantasy of domestic destruction subtends the narrative of Poltergeist; the family is subject to an increasingly violent haunting, significantly emanating from the television in the family room. This plot line is structured by simultaneous revelations about father Steve’s involvement in the development of their idyllic suburban neighbourhood. It is significant that in this film, parallel to the cosy images of family life and domesticity, the imagery repeatedly insists on the penetrability of the suburban realm of domesticity and the pervasive sense of the unheimlich within the Freeling home. The family eventually evacuates the suburbs, as the corrupted ‘home’ literally implodes, vanishing into the night sky.

This film, however, is an interesting case of a ‘Spielberg film’ that has not been directed by Spielberg. Poltergeist was officially directed by Tobe Hooper, with the written by Spielberg, and is the focus of considerable debate as to whether is can be considered a ‘Spielberg film.’ While useful to some degree, analysis claiming the film as solely Hooper’s does not take into consideration the narrative anxieties, ambivalence about narrative closure and ideology, and the representation of the family that mark Spielberg’s films. According to such criteria, Poltergeist, scripted, conceptualised and influenced by Spielberg, can be considered a Spielberg film. On the other hand, based on an in-depth comparative statistical analysis of camera angles and other techniques using E.T. and Jurassic Park as case studies, Buckland comes to the conclusion that Poltergeist should be classed as a Hooper film.33 The main point, for the purposes of this discussion, however, is not so much

33 For this discussion, see Chapter Seven in Warren Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster (New York: Continuum, 2006). Buckland addresses the problem of ‘who really directed Poltergeist’ through a statistical style analysis: “[t]hrough a shot-by- shot analysis, [using] statistical methods to compare and contrast Poltergeist to a selection of Hooper’s and Spielberg’s other films.” P. 155. This enabled Buckland to see how Poltergeist conformed and deviated from each director’s ‘usual style’. Buckland uses Spielberg’s E.T. and Jurassic Park, and Hooper’s Salem’s Lot (1979) and The Funhouse (1981), and looks at average angles of shots, shot duration, length and number of shots in a scene, camera movement and the use of shot/reverse shot. Thirty minutes of a film is considered a representative sample. However, while this sort of statistical analysis is helpful in some regards, there are many flaws. Firstly, such a small sample is not necessarily representative, as well as using a film (Jurassic Park) that was filmed eleven years after the film in dispute. And arguably, considering the divergent narratives and subject materials of the films chosen, different styles of filming would not be unusual – in fact, Spielberg is somewhat of a chameleon in adapting his style to his subject matter. Buckland’s sample of E.T., for example, is problematic, as the film was deliberately shot to induce a child-like experience, or nostalgia, with low, child-height shots. In addition, Hooper’s Salem’s Lot “is a made-for-TV miniseries”, and would consequently have radically different production values and alternative styles suitable for television, as opposed to a feature film for the cinema. For further discussion of Spielberg’s technical involvement

120 to question Buckland’s insights, or to claim Poltergeist stylistically as a Spielberg film, but to consider it thematically and ideologically as a Spielberg project, particularly in terms of the film’s preoccupation with the family and the ‘Spielbergian suburb’, as discussed in this chapter. As Buckland himself claims, “internal authorship can be located in the thematic consistencies across [Spielberg’s] films”.34 It is these thematic preoccupations with family, home, and suburbia that have emerged in the screenplay, as well as directorial input, that mean that, for the purposes of this analysis, Poltergeist will be considered a Spielberg film.

Unlike E.T. and Poltergeist, both set within the suburbs, and explicitly preoccupied by the day-to-day mise-en-scène of suburban home life, Spielberg’s made-for- television movie, Duel, grants very little viewing time to the family of his harassed protagonist. Yet it is the predominantly off-screen space of the domestic scene and suburbia that establishes the context for David Mann’s duel, and his ‘duality’. Leaving his ‘typical’ suburban home, Mann across the Californian desert for an important business meeting. On his way, he antagonises an ominous, faceless truck driver, whose deadly games on the highway throw Mann back to the ‘jungle’ of man against man in a struggle for masculinity, in which the dark shadow of the truck driver’s cold and angry violence is contrasted to the mousy timidity of the ‘henpecked’ suburban commuter. Significantly, their battle is implicitly premised upon Mann’s marital problems, and the suggestion of a stifling suburban domesticity. This imagery is contrasted to the open road and broad western skies that stage Mann’s assumption of masculine authority, an open expanse that seems to manifest an incarnation of the monstrous maternal that plagues him within suburbia, andd must be conquered. After his triumph over the truck, Mann significantly does not return to the depicted claustrophobia of home, children and nagging wife, but remains looking out

with the film, see Andrew Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). PP. 93-4.

34 Warren Buckland, "The Role of the Auteur in the Age of the Blockbuster: Steven Spielberg and Dream Works," in Movie Blockbusters, ed. Julian Stringer (London, England: Routledge, 2003). P. 91. He lists these ‘thematic consistencies’ as “uplifting themes such as love, friendship, and childhood fantasies, themes about contact with the unknown, in extraordinary situations, the individual who loses control of his life, the individual separated from his home, isolation (particularly the child’s sense of isolation and abandonment by the father); and the serious moral and political themes as found in his later films.” Buckland goes on to outline Spielberg’s ‘internal authorship’ through his use of mise-en-scène and cinematic narration, supplementing these claims.

121 over the expanse of the desert, with a final turn toward the menacing truck. The Western hero turns away from the domesticating homestead to new, masculine frontiers. The domestic off-screen space of home and suburbia works as a tangible presence throughout the film, despite its marginal amount of screen time.

Duel represents the anti-family and anti-suburbia tradition observable in many texts: as Robert Beuka claims, “[a]lmost without fail, the major novels, stories, and films chronicling suburban life have envisioned suburbia as a contrived, dispiriting, and alienating place.”35 Spielberg, however, also invests his suburban creations/fantasies, such as E.T and Poltergeist, with the appeal of warmth and abundance, with the sentiment (as well as the nightmare) of home. However, within such representations, Spielberg simultaneously suggests ambivalence regarding suburbia – the cosiness and comfort of home life and ‘creature comforts’ converge with attendant anxieties of home ownership and the struggle to maintain family and lifestyle, as well as the clichés of boredom and conformity that stigmatise the suburb. Even E.T., one of his more sentimental suburban films, is rife with such anxiety, as the film simultaneously attempts to consolidate the suburban dream with the desire to return ‘home’. Spielberg’s suburbs are not dismissed, but instead affectionately ‘created’, reviled at times, yet also loved as the ‘family home’ and the American dream.

The films discussed in this chapter, E.T. and Poltergeist in particular, may be the most accomplished and obvious of Spielberg’s ‘suburban’ films, but they are by no means the only ones that depend on such imagery of home, meaning that the arguments discussed in this chapter can be pertinently applied to other films. Certainly, the majority of Spielberg’s films rely on the representation of suburban domesticity or the power of ‘home’, from films as diverse as Jaws and (1985) to Minority Report and Amistad.36 These films evoke threatened family livelihoods and homes, exploiting fears of loss and instability, or depict failed suburban family lives and

35 Beuka, "'Cue the Sun' Soundings from Millennial Suburbia." P. 154.

36 Produced by Spielberg, The Goonies (1985) is an early film for which he is credited with the story concept, rather than as director. He did not direct or detail the script, so although relevant in this scenario as one of Spielberg’s representations of the home and the suburb under threat, it does not feature in any detail in this discussion.

122 ensuing grimy urban dystopias and the destruction of family and home.37 In general, Spielberg films are highly reliant upon images and ideals of domesticity and home.38 E.T., Poltergeist and Duel are, however, more directly dependent on such imagery in order to explicate their narratives of fantasy and loss and gendered anxieties about the home. Persistently, in Spielberg’s films, the home is a space of male/paternal subjectivity and the ‘private home’ is a patriarchal space, however, this dynamic is considerably conflicted. Specifically in the films discussed, different forms of paternal authority and rapprochements with domesticity are represented: the father who runs in Duel, the absent father in E.T., and the father who stays and saves his family in Poltergeist. And all three are preoccupied by representations of problematic maternal and (particularly) paternal figures, by narratives of families that are disintegrating in the suburbs, providing a ‘realistic/familiar’ backdrop to the overt fantastic spectacle, highlighting the convergence between the films’ fantasy and allegories of social trauma, threatened masculinity, and an anxiety about the ‘everyday’ fantasy-scape of home and suburbia.

Domestic Off-Screen Space in Duel: ‘not the boss in my house’

A black screen opens Duel, with only the sounds of an opening car door and the turn of an engine, the camera then pulls away from the driveway of a normal and ‘familiar’ house, commencing the film’s journey from suburbia to ‘the west’. The camera fixed to the front of the car prioritises and universalises Mann’s perspective. But significantly, we cannot actually identify Mann, or even his car, a problematic positioning which intimates a level of the uncanny in the subjective perspective, alienating the viewer from the familiar. This sense of alienation is enhanced through the subject positioning of the car, as opposed to the expected driver – all that locates us is the sound of the engine, along with street noises and the innocuous chatter of the car radio as the camera pulls up at stop signs, or accelerates from traffic lights. As the

37 A.I. and Catch Me if You Can also rely on similar invocations of home, suburbs and domesticity. A.I. critically plays with the of corrupting and destroying the dream in order to endow it with greater affect and to interrogate the limitations of such investments and desires. Catch Me If You Can is structured by nostalgia and sentiment predicated upon images of home, domesticity and suburban white middle-class existence.

38 Such imagery is also significant to a discussion of national homes and familial nations discussed in Chapter Four.

123 camera glides through these scenes – the driver, although manifest in the film’s point of view, is conspicuously absent. The camera winds its way through the suburbs, to inner city traffic congestion, out into the town’s outskirts, before reaching the open roads and Californian desert. As Nigel Morris observes, these contrasting settings shape the film’s conflict: the darkness of the opening moments “represents domesticity from which a frame opens – spreading over the screen and encompassing the spectator – onto the panoramic West: a landscape of intense light where desperate men engage in one-to-one struggles.”39 Once out on the desert highways, Mann finds himself the ‘random’ victim of a menacing truck (driver) that stalks him and his small sedan, trying to crush him and push his car off the road at high speeds.

This simple narrative functions simply as a thriller, or horror film, but, as Gordon notes, while “[t]here are many ways of viewing this primal confrontation of man and machine because the monster truck is a floating signifier as polysemous as the shark in Jaws, nevertheless… any thriller that reaches us on more than a visceral level must have a psychological dimension”.40 The film’s opening scene of the generic company man’s movement from suburbs to the West, from family to killer truck, structures the film, and is motivated by the disruption and transgression of the suburban domestic norms that emerge from Mann’s narrative, while his name further emphasises the trials and tribulations of ‘man’. Although the home, Mann’s wife and two children are far away from Mann’s ‘duel’ with a homicidal truck, the strictures of domesticity sustain emotional intensity as well as the suspense.41

Duel was initially produced as a telemovie, but the strong response to the film resulted in some reshooting and additions to the narrative in order to lengthen the film

39 Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007). P. 21.

40 Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 13. Gordon discusses, among the many possible readings of Duel, the problematic representations of threatening women in the film, noting that the truck is “sexually ambivalent” and that “the truck combines the internalized persecuting imagoes of both sexes and both parents: it is both persecuting phallus and smothering breasts.” P. 25.

41 As Mark Gallagher argues, “[m]ost action films negotiate domestic and family concerns by mapping those issues cursorily onto the active, public, masculine sphere.” Mark Gallagher, "I Married Rambo: Spectacle and Melodrama in the Hollywood Action Film," in Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharret (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999). P. 214.

124 for a cinematic release.42 Significantly, two of the additional sections are the ones that considerably flesh out Mann’s domestic life; the opening segment that moves the car from the suburbs to the West and Mann’s phone call and argument with his wife. One scene where Mann is nearly pushed into a speeding train by the violent truck merely adds to the duel between the ‘characters’, while the final added scene where Mann attempts and fails to help a school bus exacerbates the representation of Mann’s powerlessness and emasculation, while the truck instead comes to their rescue.43 This school bus section, in addition to scenes that locate Mann, and arguably, ‘man’, in relation to the suburban marital home, adds to the film’s conceptual framework of domestic and masculine anxiety. Satisfied with most of the additions, Buckland, however, argues that “…in relation to [the phonecall to Mann’s wife]… I agree with the critics who argue that this scene, showing Mann’s wife on the phone, is superfluous. For me, this scene makes the film uneven, because the audience is taken out of Mann’s immediate environment.”44 While this scene might disrupt the narrative on a cinematic mise-en-scène level, this disruption serves to expand the range of meanings of the truck’s abrupt entrance into Mann’s bland domestic sphere. Temporarily shifting the camera to Mann’s suburbia invokes the genre contrast between the Western style stand-off – the broad expanse of the frontier landscape in the bright afternoon light – in comparison to the darkened, stifling rooms of Mann’s home that express a sense of claustrophobia and entrapment.45 In this sense, despite

42 The original television version aired November 13, 1971 in the States, and was later expanded from 73 minutes to 88 minutess with four added scenes to make it a feature length film. A narrative voice- over was also added. Lester D Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). P. 127-8.

43 Buckland, Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the Contemporary Hollywood Blockbuster. P. 75.

44 Ibid. P. 75.

45 As David Lusted argues of the Western genre, “the claustrophobic, closed world of melodrama [is contrasted] to the open landscape of the romance Western… central characters are torn between private, internalised emotional conflicts and public expressions of direct action.” David Lusted, "Social Class and the Western as Male Melodrama," in The Book of Westerns, ed. Ian and Douglas Pye Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1996). P. 72. For a discussion of the generic tropes of the Western, and an overview of the literature, see Douglas Pye, "Introduction: Criticism and the Western," in The Book of Westerns, ed. Ian and Douglas Pye Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1996), Douglas Pye, "The Collapse of Fantasy: Masculinity in the Westerns of Anthony Mann," in The Book of Westerns, ed. Ian Cameron and Douglas Pye (New York: Continuum, 1996). For a discussion of the Western and the narrative structure of myth, see Will Wright, "The Structure of Myth [Extract], Myth as a Social Action [and] Individuals and Values: The Classic Plot," in Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K.J. Shepherdson (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). For a discussion of the religious tropes of the Western, see Michael T. Marsden, "Western Films: America's Secularized Religion," in Movies as Artifacts: Cultural Criticism

125 the disruption of the film’s cinematic consistency, the addition of this scene emphasises the film’s thematic portrayal of domestic anxiety and masculine impotence.

It is important to remember, however, that these added scenes in the version analysed here do not transform the film from a straight thriller/horror film; instead they make these anxieties of domesticity, masculinity and the family more explicit. While Joâo Gonçalves describes the premise of the film as the “story of a boy-man experiencing the pains of growing into a full man before the world’s inherent violence”,46 this position ignores the film’s trajectory toward a violent response based on the generic (patriarchal) values of the Western, which explicitly coincide with a critique of the suburbanised Mann/man and the confines of the family. In the significant additional scene when Mann phones his wife, their conflict over authority is carefully framed to emphasise the ascendancy of the domestic, and simultaneously diminish Mann in terms of his masculinity and marital power and structurally within the shot. While Mann is on the phone, he initially attempts to dominate his space, putting his foot up on the table and imposing himself in the frame; a very large woman, however, forces him to move as she bustles past him to dominate the foreground of the shot. Mann is consequently diminished in the background while the fat lady dominates the shot’s action; she opens a dryer door, and begins to remove her laundry, allowing the circular dryer door to frame Mann as he weakly argues with his wife in the background.47

Contrary to Gonçalves’ argument that the tanker attacks “for no plausible reason”,48 the film links the truck’s appearance to Mann’s domestic situation. As Gordon

of Popular Film, ed. Michael T. Marsden, John G. Nachbar, and Sam L. Grogg (: Nelson Hall, 1982).

46 Joâo Carlos Gonçalves, "Steven Spielberg's Duel: Experience on the Road," Estudos Anglo- Americanos 19-24 (1995). P. 186.

47 Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 23. Morris also discusses the image of Mann/man through the dryer ‘lens’. Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 24.

48 Gonçalves, "Steven Spielberg's Duel: Experience on the Road." P. 185.

126 recognises, Mann “feels like less of a man because he is dominated by women.”49 The framing and blocking in this scene establishes these ongoing anxieties through the structure of the images; the two spheres of domestic femininity and masculine action are causally linked to the sudden apparition of the tanker. Mann finishes his discussion with his wife, who tersely prompts him to be home in time to meet his mother – another reminder of female authority. And upon returning to his car, he is once again a small and insignificant figure within the high angled shot, as the massive and ominous truck dominates the majority of the image, a potential, threatening manifestation of the monstrous maternal, alluded to in the phonecall.

The opening scenes that introduce the film’s antagonists establish most clearly the problem out of which this ‘duel’ between domesticity and the open road emerges. Throughout the drive from the suburbs, through town and out onto the open road, Mann is still not revealed to the camera. The first glimpse of Mann, and not long after, the killer truck, occurs significantly in the context of a radio discussion about the gender trouble within domestic authority, the problematics of being the man of the house, yet no longer the head of the household. In a radio ‘joke’ about a census survey and gender problems, the presenter plays as agitated who turns to the state for the answer to his masculine and familial anxieties:

Well, I just wanna say, I don’t mind being counted as an American, I’m one of the silent majority… Now the question was, are you the head of the family, well, quite frankly, the day I married that woman that unfortunately I have been married to for the last twenty five years… well I lost the possession as head of the family. You see what I do, I stay home, I hate working, going out and seeing people, getting involved in the rat race. So she works, and I do the housework, and take care of the babies and things like that, so I was wondering, you wanted honest answers…

During the radio chatter, the camera initially follows the car in long shot as it drives through the desert, and then cuts to the interior, and slowly pans up to focus on Mann’s eyes, framed in the rear view mirror. The camera then quickly cuts to the radio, indicating the significance of the conversation and Mann’s attention, and then cuts back to the shot of Mann’s face. Significantly, this sequence, in conjunction with

49 Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 21.

127 the radio, precipitates the film’s first shot of its protagonist, thereby framing him in the context of the troubled man on the radio, and the dialogue’s fraught gender politics. The camera reveals only a portion of Mann’s face through a reflection in the rear view mirror, before finally granting the audience a centring close up of Mann’s face and hands on the steering wheel as he drives alone on the highway.

As the camera establishes Mann/man, the presenter on the radio continues to discuss his anxieties about masculinity within the family:

…but then I thought, that’s being dishonest, I’m really not the head of the family, I’m the man of the family, although there are people in the neighbourhood who question that, nevertheless, I was wondering, how should I answer that question?

With this chatter in the background, it is at this moment that the threatening truck first appears, belching sickening fumes of smoke, and inhibiting Mann’s progress along the highway. As he overtakes the truck the rear view mirror framing of Mann’s face is frequently substituted by repeated cuts to the mirror that frame the menacing, looming truck. The editing shifts the camera between the original, ‘universal’ perspective identifying Mann, and then introduces the overt threat that looms in front of him, while the background radio chatter counterpoints Mann’s fight for masculine and domestic authority.50

By removing Mann from the suburbs to the ‘blank, wild space’ of the desert, Spielberg detaches him from the domesticating, ‘feminising’ home of his wife and children, adopting the classic genre tropes of Western (and its open spaces of the anti- family) to structure the ‘duel’. Mann is located in the primal ‘man against man’ ‘jungle’ to do battle and reassert his masculinity – specifically in contrast to the feminine spaces of the home. As Gordon notes of Duel,

the […] conflict is posed in terms of the codes of the classic Western movie: the Easterner, a pale city fellow who lives by the rule of law, becomes a man

50 In addition to the anxieties of masculinity and domesticity, Neil Sinyard also notes “the shadowy class theme… where an unmistakeably proletarian truck menaces a genteel, middle-class vehicle”. Neil Sinyard, The Films of Steven Spielberg (London: Bison Books, 1986). P. 17. As with the shark in Jaws, the antagonist of Duel is open to varying and frequently conflicting interpretation.

128 only after winning a showdown with a Westerner, a rugged individualist and outlaw bred in the anarchy of the frontier. The Easterner must adopt the ruthless methods of the Westerner to defeat him51.

In addition to these Western tropes and binary structures observed by Gordon, the invoked mise-en-scène of a ‘confining’ domesticity, while only peripherally imagined throughout the film, is also part of the necessary tableau of the film’s appropriation of the Western genre that structures this powerful evocation of masculinity under threat. The nightmare of the desert combat is premised upon a foundation of the nightmare of (feminised) domestic passivity.52 As the editing of the telling introductory radio conversation makes clear, Mann must struggle to overcome both challenges – the truck and confining domesticity – which actually function as one and the same. The camera flicks from framing Mann in the mirror, to positioning the truck’s reflection looming behind Mann as he speeds past; the man on the radio continues on the topic of his wife: “I’m afraid of her you see.” The menacing truck is revealed at the same time as Mann, the truck is not simply a crazed and angry driver, but a symptom of Mann’s (man’s) problematic relationship to masculinity and domesticity a manifestation or projection of a mutated form of femininity that Mann must duel and conquer.53

The title, however, suggests a double meaning, both duel and dual; the tanker is an expression of Mann’s anxiety and latent violence. As Gordon suggests, “the truck represents his own psychic projection and … the threat it symbolizes has a peculiar personal urgency for Mann.”54 The film frequently suggests that the truck is symptomatic of Mann’s failing sanity and growing paranoia. The subjective camera

51 Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 17.

52 This specifically masculine anxiety in Duel is an ongoing tradition of expressing familial anxiety through action and adventure films. As Yvonne Tasker discusses, “[t]he foregrounding of familial themes in recent action films is not simply a matter of revering a benevolent paternalism at the expense of women. Fantasies of escape and empowerment, which permeate and even structure so many action films, frame an increasingly explicit voicing of familial themes and concerns.” Yvonne Tasker, "The Family in Action," in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London; New York: Routledge, 2004). P. 265.

53 Both Gordon and Friedman point out the significance of the radio programme to the ensuing conflict between Mann and the truck. See Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 129 and Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 23.

54 Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. P. 25.

129 work is contrasted to the ignorance and amusement of bystanders who cannot and will not help him, as they cannot even recognise a threat in the menacing tanker. Gonçalves notes that “[i]t is somehow his personal battle and cannot be shared.”55 This visualisation of Mann’s personal duel and his duality with the truck is expressed through the mirrors that repeatedly reflect Mann and the truck into the camera, which work to confuse Mann’s identity and his inability to control, or ‘domesticate’ the image contained within. The repetitive use of Mann’s reflection, as well as the image of the truck within the mirror suggests problematic subject formation, an interpretation assisted by Lacan’s theorisation of the mirror stage. As Lacan formulates, the look in the mirror stage, initially by the child in early development, provides a false sense of control over its own apparently coherent reflection, a false identification, a misidentification with this stable image that does not ‘reflect’ internal fragmentation. In the rear view mirror to which Mann continually turns, it is unpredictable as to what will be seen, Mann’s sweaty, spectacled face, or the dark, faceless presence of the truck; the mirror in Duel expresses the problematic subject formation, a gross misidentification of self, that actually suggests Mann’s fragmentation.

Duel, in contrast to the typical narrative trajectory, does not grant an identity to the truck (driver), does not satisfy the narrative demands of reducing the unseen to the seen, does not create a fantasy of authority, revealing only images of shoes, hands, and the omnipresence of the truck. McGowan argues that Duel rejects the typical narrative use of fantasy to resolve the ambiguity of the gaze, of the question of what the other wants, pointing out that films “such as Duel… make us aware of the Real, the gap within the symbolic order, as they encircle it. They expose the Real of the gaze through its absence.”56 As McGowan continues, “on the one hand, fantasy domesticates the gaze by locating it within a scenario or structure of meaning, on the other hand, fantasy threatens to expose the limitations of the ideological edifice that employs it.”57 Duel creates meaning premised on the ambiguity of the tanker, its

55 Gonçalves, "Steven Spielberg's Duel: Experience on the Road." P. 187.

56 Todd McGowan, "Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes," Cinema Journal 42, no. 3 (2003). P. 36.

57 Ibid. P. 40.

130 resistance to Mann’s vision and authoritative gaze, a symptom erupting from his frustrated question to his wife: “now, what is that s’posed to mean?” The film makes powerful use of off-screen space – the truck is always waiting around a corner, or materialising unexpectedly, its headlights bursting through the darkness of a tunnel to frustrate Mann’s surveillance of his landscape. In the final frantic sequence of the chase, Mann repeatedly looks over his shoulder, attempting to recoup visual authority over the tanker rather than rely on the rear view mirror. The dark presence of the truck suggests the impossibility of the gaze, of (visual) mastery, it is structured as a traumatic symptom of the domesticating fantasy.

Consequently, the repeated use of the rear view mirror suggests that the truck is both the monstrous maternal, as well as Mann himself, signifying his conflicted relationship with domestic entrapment and impotence. These anxieties of masculinity and authority that structure the film are expressed through Mann/man’s duality with the truck’s sadism, Mann’s symptom. Replicating this duality in the final fight, the driver is ‘visualised’ by the camera from similar point-of-view shots, and similar shots images of hands on steering wheels, boots on brakes and the changing of gears that privileged Mann throughout the film.58 In this final confrontation, the tanker smashes into Mann’s abandoned red sedan and they finally latch together in a violent collision; with an uncanny death cry, their duel concludes as the two vehicles descend over the cliff edge.

The problematic duality, however, is not resolved so neatly. While Mann’s victory over the truck would seem the film’s logical endpoint, the conclusion instead lingers on the ‘victorious’ Mann as he hovers by the cliff edge. He initially leaps for joy at his ultimate elimination of the truck, but quickly slows down, then breaks down into hysterical sobs, and seats himself by the cliff, overlooking the truck’s ‘corpse’. As Bronfen observes, the uncanny always inhabits the ideal of home, “proclaim[ing] the impossibility of externalizing what is considered to be foreign, insisting instead on the intimate quality of the unfamiliar. This means that a safe withdrawal from the uncanny is equally impossible.”59 Mann is unable to go home, instead fixated by this

58 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 30.

59 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 23.

131 site of his encounter with the uncanny, the violent symptom of his domesticity. Consequently unable to leave the site of his ‘victory’, Mann remains on cliff’s edge, stationary between his choices of the open roads of the West and the confines of the home. The images merge from the bright afternoon sunshine, to the rich reds and oranges of the setting sun, as Mann sits on the cliff above the truck’s ‘carcass’, pensively throwing bits of grass and rock into the chasm. The credits roll over his silhouetted form and the unseen, ambiguous truck driver is replaced by the indistinct shape of Mann. Despite the apparent victory, Mann cannot tear himself away from his antagonist: as Morris notes of the film, “[t]he threat, conventionally defeated, escapes mastery. Excess meaning remains: doubt whether what it represents, unspecified, has been contained.”60 The refusal to go home, to represent the typically ‘Spielbergian’ homecoming, indicates a profound ambivalence about such domestic returns. As Bronfen further remarks in her discussion of the Western and the frontier home, and specifically The Searchers, “home remains a place of anticipation, a possibility, a goal to achieve, without becoming an actual condition of cohabitation.”61 The place that the home has in the structure of narrative becomes in itself the final space of anxiety in the film’s refusal to conclude with the achievement of that ultimate homecoming.

Consequently, despite Mann’s triumph, there can be no easy return to the domestic scene. Mann’s violent duel with the truck that is always suddenly appearing in the rear view mirror, and his reluctance to walk away from its twitching corpse, disturbs the structural place of the home and the family within the traditional narrative. The ambivalence of the not-quite-victory – Mann’s hysterical triumph, and simultaneous refusal to return home – invokes Edelman’s points on the queer refusal of the cultural demands of family-oriented suburban domesticity; “the death drive refuses identity or the absolute privilege of any goal. Such a goal, such an end, could never be ‘it’; achieved, it could never satisfy.”62 The film does not attempt such false ‘satisfaction’

60 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 21.

61 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 119. See The Searchers, 1956, John Ford (dir.).

62 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. P. 22.

132 of homecoming, instead Mann refuses the home and the family – his attention and that of the audience remains fixated upon the truck, upon death and stasis. Like his generic precedents from the Western, Mann does not return home to his waiting wife, children and mother in suburban California, but instead is left, mute and stationary, in the darkening spaces of the desert.

Alienation in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial – The Suburbs Become Home

The spaces of the home in Duel are visualised as tight and cramped, suggestive of Mann’s domestic claustrophobia and evoking his alienation, while his wife is shot from a slightly low angle, and the camera follows her movements, emphasising her domination and authority within that space. The subtext of specifically suburban anxiety in Duel surfaces in these cuts from the expanses and bright sun of the West to the artificial light and closeness of the suburban home when Mann quarrels with his terse aproned wife over the phone, while children play at her feet. Mann’s continual progress away from this image, toward the waiting truck that figures his destruction/salvation, is predicated upon these suburban constructs of family and home. Unlike the Manns’ home, the domestic spaces of E.T. are constructed specifically through a child’s eyes, as an environment over which Elliot nominally maintains control and authority. Filmed from a child’s height/perspective to evoke childhood nostalgia, children cycle through the wide streets and across the mowed lawns of their neighbours, kings of their little realm, while the children play with familiar toys, and sleep under Star Wars blankets. The film’s nostalgia is heightened through a remembered ‘child-like’ access to fantasy, empowering the nostalgic investments into such filmed suburban space.63

As with Duel, there is an ‘outside’ to the domestic space in E.T., although imagined in more lyrical terms; long shots emphasise the grandeur of the forest on the edge of suburbia, and music swells majestically as E.T. and Elliot contemplate the vastness of space. While Duel presents escape from the family, home and suburbia, the external spaces in E.T. work in an alternative fashion, opening them up to work as ‘home’ as

63 Vromen discusses the historical evolution of the concept of nostalgia, pointing out that “[g]radually it came to mean the yearning for childhood itself” and that “nostalgia came to symbolize the separation from one’s ideal.” Vromen, "The Ambiguity of Nostalgia." P. 70.

133 well, overcoming the initial alienation of both the spaceship, and the amorphous image of suburbia as E.T.’s spaceship zips across the starry sky to soaring music and rapturous farewells. The film is preoccupied by the transformation of Elliot/E.T.’s ‘material’ house to a place of belonging, a home, through the familial relationship between Elliot and E.T, which is then translated into the proper paternal and scientific figure of Keys.64 The finale’s extra-terrestrial wind, the glowing lights, the soaring music, and the pathos of the family’s farewell present a fantasy of E.T.’s own familial return that simultaneously enables Elliot’s newly visualised home life. As Elliot and E.T. say their goodbyes to each other, the rest of Elliot’s family observe on the periphery, with Keys now standing in for the lost father, framed within the new family portrait. Elliot has reassembled his broken family under a paternal framework, but this necessitate the sacrifice of the fantasy father, who returns to the skies, to his transcendental, heavenly, home. Even within the sentiment and pathos, the special effects of cinema, and soaring music, there remains ambivalence about this finale that requires the sacrifice of the ‘Imaginary’ friend. As opposed to focusing on a paternal figure who moves away from the home, as in Duel, E.T. is concerned with replacing this figure within the symbolic network through E.T and then finally through the suggested interpolation of Keys into the family, recovering (an image of) the broken suburban dream.

As the premier ‘fantasist of the suburbs’, a reputation particularly forged through such films as E.T. and its child’s eye view of the home and surrounding cul-de-sacs, Spielberg is frequently characterised in terms of his ‘sentimental’ suburban creations, as opposed to ‘cynical’ depictions of suburban malaise. Recurrent ‘attacks’ on, or dismissals of the suburban film such as E.T. are in themselves interesting, parallel to the disapproval of the popular tastes of the ‘common man’. Although recovering maligned Spielberg films for critical academic analysis, Lester Friedman also invokes such rhetoric in his interpretation of the privileged mise-en-scène so significant to E.T.’s emotional affect. He characterises Spielberg’s suburban homes as cold and

64 As Marina Heung observes about the refiguring and survival of the familial ideal, and specifically commenting on E.T. and its preoccupation with father figures, “[o]ne of the last shots of the film suggests that the basic lesson of E.T. is not the rejection of the family at all, for as Elliot watches the departure of E.T.’s spaceship, behind him stands Keys…This man, another potential father figure, now stands with his arms around Elliot’s mother”. Marina Heung, "Why E.T. Must Go Home: The New Family in American Cinema," Journal of Popular Film and Television 11, no. 2 (1983). P. 84.

134 stifling, depicting Spielberg as a critic of suburbia and its place in the American dream:

Spielberg’s suburbia is characterized by dissonant chaos, flat landscapes, tract housing, tasteless interiors, battling siblings, mindless television programs and polyester clothing. Such settings hardly express warmth, creativity, or joy; instead, they debilitate the imaginations of the inhabitants. Even though Spielberg crams his sets with products emblematic of tangible abundance, his films criticize this debasement of the American dream rather than endorse its cold affluence.65

While such a reading is applicable to Duel, the ‘chaos’ and ‘tasteless interiors’, the squabbling and noise of children, contrary to Friedman, can also alternatively be simultaneously interpreted as foregrounding the allure of the suburbs and the families within – the suburb as fantasy-scape. The mise-en-scène of E.T. – where teenage boys argue over Dungeons & , and the younger brother longs to join in, the detail of the mother preparing and serving dinner, unpacking the groceries, the depictions of toys and appliances, potato chip packets and chocolate bars, familial interactions and mown lawns – contribute to the sense of familiarity that E.T. evokes. And such detail consequently permits an enhanced sense of loss at the corruption of this fantasy of home and family – the structural buttress of the f/Father is missing. Although the suburbs are certainly the subject of critique in Spielberg’s films, as Friedman notes in the ‘cold and dissonant’ tone discernable at times, they are also alternatively sentimentalised and celebrated, and are subject to both idealistic fantasies, and escapist fantasies of their destruction.

In the opening sequence of E.T., the home and suburbs are staged through an ‘alienated’ eagle eye point of view, which looks down upon the indistinguishable lights of suburbia, but then swiftly moves to the individualised home, and the specific lives of the family comprising that home. In this sense, Spielberg’s imagery revolves around homes not mere houses, and, implicitly, the (impossible) process, or always incomplete process, of transforming the material to the transcendental, in that the ‘home’ becomes a signifier of ‘belonging’.66 It is this desired sense of belonging with

65 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 33.

66 This idea of belonging and home suggests religious and spiritual discourses. Millicent Lenz argues that E.T. “represents the attempt to merge religious myth and scientific fact; it is grappling with

135 which E.T. is so heavily invested. While ‘normal’ domesticity may not actually exist in practice, the ideal of normality has significant discursive power67 and is potently channelled through the representations of E.T.’s familial space. The construction of home and family, while frequently ambivalent and conflicted, is, however, vital to narrative trajectory.

Elliot’s two-storey home in the suburbs (almost) replicates the idealised image of the family – but his father is in Mexico, having run off with the secretary. The home has become a maternal space, implicitly corrupted by the paternal absence which looms over the family, eventually manifesting in the form of E.T. Even as E.T. longs to go home, so too does Elliot long for his (always-lost) normalised suburban existence and attendant nuclear family, constructing a nostalgic desire for the suburb. The waist- high (child-eye) point of view camera angles which track Elliot/E.T. as they traverse the home invokes a sentimental nostalgia for lost objects, for the lost innocence of childhood. These images of childhood are powerfully contrasted to the adult world of authority and science, the patriarchal and the Symbolic, through the phallic potency of the keys that jangle on the waist of E(lliot)T’s pursuer, who will eventually catch him, if he can – which of course, he/they covertly desire. In their covert operation to find, analyse and control the alien, (a scientific approach, opposed by the overarching theme of hearth and home), the film’s faceless scientists use their high-tech surveillance equipment to eavesdrop on conversations throughout Elliot’s suburb, diminishing maternal authority over domestic space. As Sarah Harwood observes in her reading of E.T., “the house has been represented throughout as a female domain but control has been exercised over it by constant surveillance and self-regulation.”68 The scientists observe couples arguing, and children discussing their homework, the generic suburban chatter of individual families, before focusing in on Elliot’s family,

ultimate questions, religious questions, in a context of interplanetary vision, at the same time ‘humanizing space’. If it is possible to ‘phone home’ as E.T. does across light years, then space can be comprehended in human terms as our ‘larger home’.” Millicent Lenz, "E.T.: A Cosmic Myth for Space-Age Children," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 8, no. 2 (1983). P. 5. Spielberg and his deployment of mythical, spiritual and religious discourse is discussed in more detail in Chapter Three.

67 Blaustein, "Counterprivates: An Appeal to Rethink Suburban Interiority." P. 40.

68 Sarah Harwood, Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). P. 166.

136 a process paralleling the narrative trajectory of the film – from the macro view of the suburbs, to the particularised family home. The varying suburban voices merge and crackle together, with no particular identity, as the camera focuses on an unidentified hand that scrolls through the faceless suburbs. But upon the scientist’s discovery of the target conversation, the camera cuts to Elliot and Michael in the garage.

This scene, inflected with the uncanny through the ominous surveillance of the scientists, cuts to the traumatic core of the narrative – paternal loss and the broken family home. Elliot and Michael, in their quest to reunite E.T. with his family, discover their father’s abandoned shirt, still smelling of his aftershave. They pause and reminisce: “remember when he used to take us out to the ball game, take us to the movies. We’d have popcorn fights.” These memories are structured first through Michael’s observation that E.T is beginning to look ill, and Elliot’s protestation and use of the plural pronoun, that “we’re fine.” Elliot’s health is thematically linked to the absence of the father that the fantasy substitute can only attempt to cover. Further, this scene, with its emphasis on pathos and sentimentality, is structured by surveillance; the listening scientists in the black van are envisioned in dark shadow and accompanied by ominous music. This intrusive nature of the scientist is signified in an earlier scene. A panorama shot of the suburban scene from the surrounding hills is ‘made strange’ through a stretching of the image as the camera pulls back and simultaneously widens the image over the vista – disorienting, almost Hitchcockian camera work emphasised by the swelling of ominous music.69 Foreshadowed by this distortion of the suburban vision, the scientists walk into the shot with their loud and intrusive beeping equipment and snapping cameras as they survey the homes in front of them. These suburbs are marked by this permeability, invoking the threat to the fantasy of home that persistently corrupts the film’s idealisation of home and family.

The fantasy of returning ‘home’ shared by both E.T and Elliot is intimately tied to the discourses of father figures around which the characters revolve; the narrative

69 The unease suggested by this camera work is part of the thematic anxieties of family and ‘home’ that structure the film. As Anthony Magistrale observes “[b]ehind the backdrop of romance and fantasy, there is a pervasive element of desperation that propels Elliot through his adventure. Elliot’s own nostalgic longing for the former, more complete family unit he once shared, is echoed in E.T.’s interstellar quest for transportation ‘home’.” Anthony Magistrale, "Innocence Unrewarded: A Note on E.T. and the Myth of Adolescence," Science-Fiction Studies 11, no. 2 [33] (1984). P. 225.

137 trajectory to fill the lack created by the absent father. The snapshot of the local households creates a wide-ranging image of the suburb and its lives, in which E.T. discovers a loving family, even as he evokes a paean to his own distant home. The children’s understanding of this fervent desire, premised upon their own loss, forms the emotional, although conflicted, core of the film. The attempt to return E.T. to his home, to reunite him with his family, is paralleled by Elliot and Michael’s own loss, foregrounding the paternal vacuum that structures the film, and the sentiment invested in the fantasy creature that mitigates this loss, yet also prefigures threat to the home. The extreme popularity of the film70 illustrates the effectiveness of this lack and nostalgia evoked by this intertwining of fantasies of home and fatherhood through one of the core elements of American ideology: the ‘quintessential’ suburban home that, in this case, is not quite ‘right’ even as it evokes its lost normality. This move toward the f/Father and the symbolic Law is, however, predominantly threatening, as invoked by the intrusive, authoritative scientist figures watching and invading the home. The movement toward the Father necessitates the sacrifice of the Imaginary friend.

These conflicted thematics are explicitly represented in the scene where Mary reads Peter Pan to Gertie; hiding in the cupboard with Elliot, E.T. is transfixed by the story of Tink, Pan, and the importance of believing in fairies. They angle the closet slats to absorb the warmly lit scene covetously – a desired return to the mother that constructs the home in terms of the maternal. This sequence privileges a sentimental image of perfect maternal love and domestic bliss, yet simultaneously evokes further ‘alienation’ as Elliot and E.T. only voyeuristically observe from the darkened closet. Paralleling their covert surveillance, the film cross cuts to the threatening scientists lurking outside on the darkened street, closeted away in their vans, listening to the neighbourhood but never part of it. Such editing aligns both sets of voyeurs in their estrangement from the maternal fantasy, emphasising the alienated status of Elliot/E.T in their desire to attain the fantasy union of family and home. This sequence contrasts to a later scene, where both E.T. and Elliot, sick and dying, are being treated by Keys and his team of scientists and doctors, who tell Keys that there is “complete coherence and synchronisation of brainwave activity between subjects.” As Keys reaches to the

70 As Steve Ryfle describes it, “the movie became an instant phenomenon upon its 1982 release [and] reigned as the all-time box-office champion for a decade.” Steve Ryfle, "E.T. At Twenty," Creative Screenwriting 9, no. 2 (2002). P. 6.

138 prone boy, to hold his hand, Elliot looks up at Keys, one of the few times the face of any adult male is screened. And as Keys smiles back at Elliot, the brainwaves ‘desynchronise’. This moment signifies Elliot’s movement from desire for the maternal fairy tale to the symbolic world of the Father. A movement which coincides with E.T.’s (symbolic) death, the sacrificing of the Imaginary friend.

Unpacking the ambivalence and contradiction within Spielberg’s domestic worlds, it is possible to see how these suburban spaces are depicted as ‘home’, albeit a home that is of course, like ‘suburbia’, always an ambiguous, conflicted and difficult term. Understanding the significance of the suburb as home rather than affirming a one- dimensional dismissal of suburban ‘coldness’ opens a conceptualisation of suburbia as it has become a cultural fantasy, explicating the desires that structures home and family. It is this conceptualisation of home, suburbia, and domestic familialism that is vital to understanding how E.T.’s movement from his own heavenly home, through the liminal space of the fairy tale forest, to being warmly ensconced within suburbia with its ‘familiar’ domestic mess functions both in this specific film as well as on a larger cultural terrain. Spielberg’s cruel and/or loving, sometimes ambivalent, depictions of the suburban lifestyle entails both emotional investment and sacrifice, the pleasurable nostalgia always infers loss, and the home’s inherent uncanny precludes E.T.’s/Elliot’s belonging.

‘The grass grows greener on every side’: Avoiding Binaries in the Fantasy Suburb of Poltergeist

Poltergeist is a narrative of the suburbs and the lives within them, and the film goes to great efforts to establish the normalcy of its family. But beyond this veneer of idealised normalcy, Poltergeist suggests anxieties about paternal authority, sexuality, conservative politics, and class. As Banash and Enns point out of the film’s social and familial politics, “irony seems encoded in the very choices of writer and director. Written by Steven Spielberg, a shameless sentimentalizer of suburbia, the film was directed by Tobe Hooper, best known for [cult horror film] The Texas Chain Saw

139 Massacre.”71 Consequently, the film foregrounds the (Spielbergian) happy family and the idyllic suburban existence across a bright weekend, only to absorb this world within the (Tobe Hooper-style) horror that befalls the family. It is important to note, however, that to reduce each director’s influence to a particular side of this ‘binary’ is to perpetuate the reductive clichés that limit Spielberg criticism; the horror genre and its elements of the uncanny within the family and suburbia is very much a Spielberg trope, and that of many depictions the home. As Bronfen notes,

Fantasies shaped by notions of home thus preserve the uncanniness that inextricably resides in the familiar to the end and point out that any conceptualisation of origins is always already displaced, even as they nostalgically produce protective fictions in response to this eradicable fissure.72

On one hand, Spielberg portrays the ‘white’-washed stereotype – the leafy green suburb, with white picket fences, and happy home-makers. At its extreme, this is the Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver ideal, nostalgically familiar to the tele- literate. On the other hand, Spielberg also accedes to the critics’ perspective of the suburb, albeit still heavily reliant upon televised images.

As a horror/ghost story, Poltergeist foregrounds this binary conflict through the violence and the uncanny that lurk within the suburban mise-en-scène Spielberg details. Yet the conceptualisation of suburban ‘hell’ or ‘heaven’ is necessarily reliant upon its ‘other’ term – when he invokes one side of the binary, Spielberg is necessarily invoking its ‘shadow’. His two 1982 releases are often considered in these very terms; E.T. is the idyllic dream of suburban restitution, while Poltergeist depicts the nightmare ‘inherent’ to this suburban fantasy.73 Importantly, both films

71 David Banash and Anthony Enns, "Introduction: Suburbia," Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 3 (2003). P. 3 The famous horror film involves an encounter between five young people and a cannibal family in rural Texas. See The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, 1974, Tobe Hooper (dir.).

72 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 26.

73 For a discussion of the relationship between E.T. and Poltergeist, see particularly the newspaper article, Michiko Kakutani, "The Two Faces of Spielberg - Horror Vs. Hope," , May 30. 1982. Also see Andrew Gordon’s discussion of Spielberg’s suburban trilogy in Chapters Three, Four and Five of Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg. And also Andrew Gordon, "Poltergeist: Divorce American Style," in Eighth International Conference on Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Frederico Pereira (Lisbon: Inst. Superior de

140 rely on the generic conventions of the other to construct their prevailing ideology. Scrutinising the analytical reliance upon such binaries, Banash and Enns argue that “it is vital that we critically consider the phenomenon of suburbanization in more complex terms than the one-dimensional, populist utopia or mass culture nightmare it too often remains in our imagination.”74 Indeed, rather than looking at Spielberg’s ‘heaven and hell’ films of suburbia in this light alone, the films must be analysed in terms of how they intervene in such a binary, what these films are doing that does not necessarily fit into classic “binary modes of thinking about the suburban landscape”75 and instead stimulate more complex discussion of suburbia as a fantasy-scape.

The conceptual function of the binary, however, is vital to deciphering how the suburb works as part of the West’s cultural fantasy, understanding how closely linked the suburb is to ideals of family and domestic life, and to, on the larger scale, dreams of national identity.76 Banash and Enns point out that

[t]he extremism of critically polarized images of suburbia in critical texts, and the ironic sublation of those images in our fictional imagination, testifies to the power of these planned communities, their utopian aspirations, and their often horrifying reality.77

Spielberg does not present the suburb as a realised fantasy, but instead as a desired place for ‘everyday’ aspirational Americans, enhanced by the ubiquitous fantasy spaces which the suburb always already occupies. As James B. Mitchell points out in his discussion of science-fiction films and Californian suburban development, “[p]ost World War II California, with its seemingly irreconcilable contradictions… proffered

Psicologia Aplicada, 1992). Douglas Kellner also discusses Poltergeist in the context of E.T. See Kellner, "Poltergeists, Gender, and Class in the Age of Reagan and Bush." PP. 220-1.

74 Banash and Enns, "Introduction: Suburbia." P. 6.

75 Beuka, "'Cue the Sun' Soundings from Millennial Suburbia." P. 164.

76 These ideas about national identity will be further discussed in Chapter Four.

77 Banash and Enns, "Introduction: Suburbia." P. 3. Banash and Enns continue, “Yet while these images make for powerful fictions, they tend to occlude the complex realities of everyday life in suburbia.”

141 to Americans a real and fantastic space upon which they could map their desire.”78 Throughout representation, however, the suburb is also a space where all such desires can be lost, and is, consequently, a site of fear and anxiety. This ever-present sense of loss and the potential of the uncanny is a constant undercurrent to the fantasy construction of the home, and the home’s contemporary local of the suburb, as discussed through E.T. While most of Spielberg’s films betray this sense of the uncanny, it is particularly pervasive in his suburban films where the cosy ‘reality’ of home is permeated by both sentimental fantasy and ever-present discontent.79

Even as he valorises and sentimentalises the suburban dream, Spielberg powerfully evokes its flipside, radically threatening and challenging this idealisation – the family home in Poltergeist implodes and vanishes at the conclusion of the film. The troubled home life represented in Duel seems to provoke the monstrous apparition of a murderous truck, while Elliot’s broken family can only be ‘saved’ by the divine intervention of a visiting alien. The nostalgic ideal of the home is a more powerful fantasy when it is threatened or destroyed, when the artificial binary of good suburb/bad suburb becomes blurred. Poltergeist is Spielberg’s most obvious example of this conflation of suburban ideal and nightmare, of reproductive futurism and the undercurrent of the death drive.80 The opening sequence establishes the film’s juxtaposition of both aspects of the suburban binary. After the first ominous scene, where the American national anthem plays over extreme close-ups of blurred

78 Mitchell, "Cul-De-Sac Nightmares: Representations of Californian Suburbia in Science Fiction During the 1950s and '60s." P. 116. Mitchell points out that the conflicted space of California during this period was “simultaneously one of the nations most developed and most agricultural regions”.

79 These suburban anxieties structure E.T. and Poltergeist. Alleviated by fantasies of transcendence, the anxieties of divorce and unemployment that underlie E.T. are made grotesque and horrific in Poltergeist. As Kellner argues more broadly of the whole Poltergeist series, it “negotiates middle-class fears and insecurities concerning race, gender and class in the contemporary era.” Kellner, "Poltergeists, Gender, and Class in the Age of Reagan and Bush." P. 219. Such fears emerge in our culture’s representation of the most dominant and familiar home environments. Such anxieties are also evident in E.T. where Mary, as a working mother, is left ignorant of her children’s activities, even though they occur right before of her. E.T. exploits anxieties about lost children and threats to the suburban house, threats realised by the onslaught of ‘alien’-like scientists and plastic sheeting that occupy and pollute her home, an assault upon the sanctity of the home. Also see Gordon, "Poltergeist: Divorce American Style."

80 Banash and Enns argue that Poltergeist “functions by juxtaposing images of suburban plenitude and sentimentalized domestic bliss with scenes of horror. Here, suburbia is powerfully depicted as both an impossibly idyllic space for domestic pleasures and a horrifying architecture constructed through greed and founded on a disrespect of the sacred.” Banash and Enns, "Introduction: Suburbia." P. 3.

142 television pixels, and little Carol-Anne has a disquieting one-way conversation with the ‘TV people’, Poltergeist cuts to an aerial establishing shot of the suburbs during the day, soothingly cheery music in the background. The camera slowly moves into the streets, where children play on the curb, cyclists move in lazy circles, and folk go about their everyday business. Trailing a man on a bicycle as he brings some beer to his waiting friends, the camera brings the viewer to a group of men clustered in front of a football match, moving the perspective from an abstracted view of tract housing into the heart of one of these many houses and the social relations within – a heart which is, significantly, reliant upon television as medium for social organisation (and conflict).

While Spielberg resorts to the representational ‘shortcuts’ of ‘binaries’, imagining both ‘extremist’ elements in the same text significantly complicates domestic imagery. Rather than privileging one term or the other, the suburban landscapes that Spielberg creates are rife with contradictions and intrusions into apparent domestic bliss, evocations of both fantasies and anxieties. While abstracted from ‘everyday’ suburban reality, the binaries that replicate ‘suburbia’ within this simplistic and limiting dichotomy still have a powerful and salient presence in cultural representation. The binary of the ‘perfect suburb’ versus ‘suburban hell’ holds a powerful place within the cultural imaginary, furthering a fantasy whereby desire is approached, nearly attained, yet perpetually denied, thwarted by the uncanny always imminent within the ideal of home. Attainment of the idealised fantasy suburb will always be impeded by the necessary (uncanny) ‘hell suburb’ which comprises the ‘other’ within the suburban binary. Poltergeist is explicit in its investment in both modes of representation, foregrounding the presence of the uncanny that underlies the representation of the ‘home’.

This uncanny comes to the fore through the film’s representation of the house/home within the suburb. The suburban house becomes a home through ideals, dreams, desires, and cultural significance. The trappings of domesticity and its attendant ideologies bring material bricks and mortar to life via the dream of ‘feathering the nest’. Poltergeist invests in domestic desire and reifying the nuclear family, the domestic ‘protective fictions’, yet is still subject to the uncanny that permeates the home, an uncanny that is more pronounced than, although present, in E.T. In a scene

143 that suggests the doppelgänger uncanny, translated into the suburbs, real estate agent Steve shows a couple a for-sale replica of his own home, at which the young man comments, “I can’t tell one house from the other.” This sequence in the show home commences with a fade from the Freeling household (immediately after the first overt demonstration from the poltergeists) and then cuts to the exact same kitchen, shot from the exact same angle, of the display ‘home’ on the real estate circuit. Significantly, this moment that expresses the uncanny similarity of the two houses occurs concurrent to the emergence of the poltergeists – the homey kitchen scene is corrupted by the ghosts moving the furniture, but also by the appearance of the doppelgänger version of the family home. The traits of the suburbs are tacitly connected to the Freeling haunting.

The house Steve shows the couple does not yet have the ‘heart’, the individuality of the Freeling’s, as the potential buyer explicitly puts it, “the lived-in look” that exorcises the uncanniness of home. The scene directs attention to the processes of constructing the home, of fabricating domesticity, as well as insinuating the problematic of the ‘monochrome suburb’, as Steve says to the couple; “In a couple of months, you’re not going to be able to tell phase one from phase three from…” He trails off, unable to complete his thought about the lack of variation within suburbia. Steve instead enthuses that each house is essentially a blank slate upon which every homeowner can craft an individual ‘dream home’. This ‘blank’ house is filmed in a duller, colder light, affecting a marked contrast between Dianne’s ‘cosy’ kitchen and the replica kitchen of the show-home. The home comes to stand in for the familial desire for domesticity and aspirations of individuality. The young couple desire possession of the (national) dream of domesticity – to make over in their own image. Yet these desires are also ‘made strange’ in the film through the emergence of the poltergeists. The blank house on the market, linked to the aspirational American dreams of the suburbanite, represents the conflation of the otherwise distinct discourses of the private family and the public market. Rayna Rapp argues in her discussion of gender, family and the economics of the home, that

144 [t]he cultural distinction between love and money corresponds to the distinction between private family life and work life outside the home. The two are experienced as opposite; in fact they are interpenetrating.81

In contrast to the empty, ‘personality-less’ structure of bricks and mortar, Dianne appears to have fulfilled the fantasy of domestic wholeness, whereby the house has become representative of family and home. It is the privileged construction of this domestic idyll that subsequently permits, during the latter haunting, the evocation of the uncanny that the home always-already contains. The film illustrates how such ideals are replicated, continually regenerated, and concurrently, that the home therefore always vulnerable to the uncanny of the doppelgänger.

‘They’re here’: The Penetration of the Public/Private Home in Poltergeist

Spielberg’s representations of the ‘everyman/every-family’ exclude a vast proportion of the population, while privileging the white middle-class family, of mother, father, and children (as do the majority of other media portrayal of family and suburbia).82 Yet Spielberg’s suburbia films do not completely replicate this logic of the white nuclear family. While the suburbs may appear monochromatic, or be overtly represented as such as one part of the typical representative binary, they are not immune to the racial diversity of the United States and variations of economic strata. Significantly, the supernatural invasion is presaged by an invasion of real world ‘others’.83 Such ‘intrusions’ into Poltergeist’s otherwise introspective and suburban

81 Rayna Rapp, "Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes toward an Understanding of Ideology," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barry Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York and London: Longman, 1982). P. 173.

82 Interestingly, Nina Leibman suggests that the middle-class family “can be focused upon exclusively as a social unit because its only true contact with outsiders comes in the form either of paying clients or customers or of the family members being paying clients or customers themselves.” This privileging of the middle-class is as opposed to the upper-class (with frequent interactions with servants, employees) and working class (concerns beyond the family and the home). Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). P. 234.

83 Andrew Gordon notes that “the poltergeists are associated with a team of male construction workers who invade the home and harass the women.” Gordon, "Poltergeist: Divorce American Style." P. 180. Kellner also notes that the poltergeists “represent fear of race and otherness, and… can be read as fear of racial invasion and destruction of middle-class utopia. The monsters in Poltergeist appear as a radical otherness to white middle-class ‘normality’ and stand in for fear of other classes and races.” Kellner, "Poltergeists, Gender, and Class in the Age of Reagan and Bush." P. 227.

145 narrative materialise in the form of the ‘ethnic’ labourers working on the backyard pool. In possession of their ‘dream home’, the Freeling family is comfortable and affluent; they are in the process of putting in a swimming pool, another significant cultural marker of the fantasy suburban family.84 In contrast, the workers indicate their ‘peripheral’ status within this affluent suburb, making lewd gestures at Dana, the teenage daughter.85 While seemingly marginal to the narrative, this overt and uninhibited sexuality prefigures a later scene of Dianne’s suggested sexual assault. Further, one of the labourers reaches through the kitchen window to grab some food and Dianne’s coffee, a precursor to the poltergeists’ later ‘home invasion’ and the violation of (female) space, as well as the violation of the white male prerogative to preserve the ‘unpenetrated sanctity’ of the home. The aggressive sexuality and the explicit ‘intrusion’ of the men suggests greater anxieties regarding class and race in the United States, correlating to the poltergeists’ parallel invasion of the Freeling home, a further breakdown of the representative binaries within which the film operates.86

Otherness in suburbia is not only represented by the workers digging the swimming pool, but the parapsychologists called to assist the Freelings who also represent an alternative to the so familiar ‘sit-com ideal’ propagated by the Freeling family. Dr. Lesh, the older, female paranormal investigator is unmarried and admits that she is a bit of a social pariah, calling herself ‘irresponsible’ for her career choices as she gulps from a flask. Her two assistants, Ryan, an African American, and Marty, a white man, further suggest a racialised reading which intervenes in the traditional (mediatised) depiction of the affluent (white) suburb. After a night of horrific ghostly experiences in the house, Marty ‘will not come back’; Dr. Lesh, Ryan and the beleaguered Freelings are left to adapt to this disruption of the ideal suburban norm.

84 Beuka discusses the symbolic importance of the swimming pool in the suburbs, describing it as the “jewel of the suburban backyard.” Beuka, Suburbianation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century Fiction and Film. P. 141.

85 And yet these ‘peripheral’ labourers are digging the big hole in the garden from which will surface the desecrated dead – they are digging up the ‘truth’ that lies beneath the suburban image.

86 In Biddy Martin’s and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s discussion of the home, they note the “tension between the desire for home, for synchrony, for sameness, and the realization of the repressions and violence that make home, harmony and sameness imaginable, and that enforce it”. Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Feminist Politics: What's Home Got to Do with It?," in Feminist Studies, Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). P. 208.

146 Poltergeist offers an oblique critique of the disciplinary role of the white fantasy of the suburb through the portrayal of minorities and the interruption of white suburban norms, even as the film (attempts to) re-habilitate the ideal. It is highly significant in Poltergeist that the ghost invasion is facilitated by the television that talks to Carol- Anne and prefigured by the incursion of the ‘ethnic’ working class within the suburb.87 The film explicitly links television and the media to the subsequent invasion of the home and the subsequent violation of the (white) nuclear family’s ‘unmediated’ purity.88

Significantly, Poltergeist’s horror narrative circulates around the ‘interpenetrating’ role of the television and the invasion of capital into the home – stimulating deep- seated anxieties about family, media, capitalism, suburbia, and the American dream. As Lynn Spigel observes, “[t]elevision was caught in a contradictory movement between private and public worlds”.89 Further, David notes that “precisely in so far as broadcasting articulates the public and private spheres, it is at the same time a potentially ‘dangerous’ force, in need of regulation; it disrupts or transgresses the

87 Rob Latham argues that “[m]ore than any other movie in the Spielberg canon, Poltergeist at least suggests the price of exclusion upon which the suburban idyll is based – in the sacred land cynically expropriated from an ethnic minority by the designers of the subdivision”. Rob Latham, "Subterranean Suburbia: Underneath the Smalltown Myth in the Two Versions of Invaders from Mars," Science Fiction Studies 22 (1995). P. 203. Interestingly, Latham mistakes the vengeful graveyard as that of the horror film staple, ‘the Indian Burial ground.’ The relocated graveyard in Poltergeist does not, however, have specifically Native American origins – this mis-reading of the film is also apparent in Adrian Schober, Posssessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film: Contrary States (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004). P. 25.

88 There are other important Spielberg digressions on the white, middle class motif. The Color Purple suggests a possible counter ‘balance’ to the white sitcom family argument. Also, in the unconventional family of Jurassic Park 2: The Lost World, Kelly is the black daughter of a white man, another significant deviation from the otherwise whitened approach to families throughout Spielberg’s films. However, while Spielberg attempts liberal representations of families, his suburban family homes are usually normatively white.

89 Lynn Spigel, "The Suburban Home Companion: Television and the Neighbourhood Ideal in Postwar America," in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colima and Jennifer Bloomer (Princeton, NJ: 1992). P. 188. Spigel expands on her discussion of the media and the suburbs in Lynn Spigel, Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001). Also contributing a nuanced discussion of the role of the television in the suburbs, see Silverstone, ed., Visions of Suburbia. PP. 9-11. Also see Chapter Three ‘The Third Sphere: Television’s Romance with the Family’, in Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

147 boundaries of the family household and its ‘private universe’.”90 Poltergeist positions the family television as the original source of the spectral invasion of the home and the ‘corruption’ of the family. The opening scene is filmed in disorienting extreme close-up, the ominous pixels and the American national anthem on late-night television portend the ghostly invasion of the Freeling home; ‘they’re here’, announces little Carol-Anne. At the film’s conclusion, the battered family straggle into a motel, fleeing their suburb. Television’s formulaic ideal, the family and home in the suburbs, has become corrupted by the end of the film (although it was always ‘compromised’). Observed from outside their motel room, the Freelings, in a fit of technoparanoia, banish the television in an attempt to exclude its intrusive ‘power’ from the sacred, private world of the home and family. Even the camera does not follow them into this space, as they close the door firmly behind them. The camera tracks back from the closed door, across the darkened car park and the neon lights, a stark contrast to the opening sequence moving through sunny afternoon suburbia.

The film’s thematic of poltergeists bursting through the television set represents a visceral manifestation of the destruction of the boundaries between private and public, at the same time undermining the boundaries between life and death. Poltergeist cannot contain this (mediated) vision of suburbia that is structured by both a privileged ideal, and its counterpoint of violence and abduction. The conclusion of the film necessitates the destruction of the home, exile from the suburbs, and the expulsion of the television. While the family reject the television, however, it is apparent that the idealisation of them as a family throughout the film is intimately founded upon the norms and cultural narratives perpetuated through film and television. And while the Freelings attempt to expel such influences, to purify the family, ultimately, as James B. Mitchell argues, “‘suburbanity’ is at its heart a performance, the script of which can be gleaned from media culture.” 91 Regardless of whether the Freelings reject the television, the media apparatus of sitcoms, films, and magazines proliferate the American dream and the cultural fantasies that structure

90 David Morley, Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies, (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). P. 257. Quoted in Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, "Zombie TV," Post Identity 2, no. 2 (1999). Online, no pagination.

91 Mitchell, "Cul-De-Sac Nightmares: Representations of Californian Suburbia in Science Fiction During the 1950s and '60s." P.123.

148 representations of family and the suburbs. While Poltergeist critiques the role of the media in the daily life of the family, inevitably, the suburban family is a (postmodern) performance whereby the disciplinary functions of the (media) ideal direct the domestic ‘role-playing’.

The Gendered Home – ‘Ask Dad’

As part of mediatised role-playing, representations of the home and the family are highly gendered and such gendered discourses are at the heart of the narrative conflict in Poltergeist’s representation of the home and the suburbs. With young Carol-Anne and the maternal Dianne, the supernatural manifestations are initially benevolent and playful, yet this benevolence implies a privileging of female spaces and revolt against masculine authority. The ghosts speak first to Carol-Anne through late-night television static, suggesting the threat of invasion, the breakdown of the public and private divide, but also the instability of gendered spaces connoted by the television’s ability to penetrate the domestic space. The poltergeists later ‘publicly’ appear at the kitchen table one morning, as Dianne prepares breakfast for the children. Minor conflict breaks out between the siblings, and in an appeal to traditional authority within the family, the children start repetitively chanting ‘ask dad’. In a sudden and violent response, the ghosts break Robbie’s glass, abruptly ending their chanting. While the shattered glass could be a mere domestic accident, the chosen moment suggests an imbalance within the paternal order that the ghostly presence destabilises. In this attack upon the suburb and the domestic home, the ghosts undermine the fabric of American middle-class assumptions; yet, significantly the reformed hippy Dianne and her young daughter initially ‘relate’ to these ghosts. While the poltergeists are ‘vengeful’ enemies of this suburban world, in the initial stages of the haunting they are revealingly aligned with the women of the household and with domestic, familial spaces, rebelling against the dictum to ‘ask dad’.

The film replicates the traditional gendering of space throughout the home; studies, workrooms, sheds and particularly areas external to the home are for men, while for women, there is the dining room, kitchen and living room. Dianne is filmed within the home and garden, only ever going as far as next door to talk to her cold and

149 unfriendly neighbours. Women’s space is family space – men’s space is separate.92 Significantly, it is the kitchen, woman’s space, that is the scene of the first overt poltergeist presence; interestingly, there is no aggression; in fact, the event is almost (positively) sexual. Dianne allows the ghosts to pull her across the linoleum floor, describing it as a pleasurable feeing: “it’s like, it’s like there’s this tickling, you know, right in here,” she gestures at her belly, “and it starts to pull you. The tickling pulls you. And all of a sudden, its like there’s no air except you can breathe.” Upon Steve’s arrival home from work, she begs him to keep an open mind, but the ghosts once again respond with violence to the suggestion of masculine domestic authority.

This first, positive experience of the ghosts directly contrasts to one of the film’s later scenes, an intimate moment showing the sensual Dianne taking a bath. The trajectory of the film moves from a covert representation of female pleasure to an explicit depiction of attempted rape. The scene of Dianne’s bath initially opens the possibility of woman’s space – visualising Dianne relaxing, as opposed to spaces where ‘her’ space is also that of the family. The scene, however, is distinctly uncanny, permeated by an imminent sense of violation and voyeurism; the suggestion of watching ghosts disturbs the potential tranquility. After her bath, Dianne relaxes in bed, in the about- to-be transgressed ‘privacy’ of her bedroom. The poltergeists begin phase two of their attack, attempting to pull off Dianne’s shirt, and dragging the half naked woman across the bedroom walls and roof before she is able to break free. Like the first encounter in the kitchen, this sexually-charged scene, suggestive of rape rather than female sexual pleasure, occurs during Steve’s absence. The private, female space of the home is invaded and violated, while the isolated domesticity of the suburban home is penetrable and corrupted. Despite the ‘happy’ ending in which the family survives and comes through the violence together, the image of idealised private domesticity fails. And this failure is most powerfully visualised by the attack on gendered spaces, particularly the female spaces, of the home, and realised through the abduction of little Carol-Anne.

While Dianne, and her embodiment of sacrificial motherhood is the overt heart of the film, discourses of paternal authority form a compelling subtext. The psychic,

92 See Haralovich, "Sitcoms and Suburbs: Positioning the 1950s Homemaker." PP. 77.

150 Tangina, asks the family who disciplines the children, and after a ‘new age’ debate about the equality of parenting and shared responsibilities, Steve ‘confesses’ to the traditional disciplinary role, already revealed through his children’s chant to ‘ask dad’. Tangina demands that he assert his authority and command his daughter in their attempts to rescue her from the clutches of the poltergeists. While Dianne may actually recover the child from a hell dimension, Steve, by stepping into the position of paternal disciplinarian, affects control over the situation. His masculinity, potentially undermined by his wife’s determination and implicit power within the domestic space, is reasserted. This authority is further reinforced by Steve returning to the house in time to rescue his family and, ultimately, by ejecting the television in the final scene. Despite the deviance and violence of the poltergeists that undermines the home and the familial hierarchy, the film reinstates Steve’s paternal authority within the family. Tellingly, the action narrative establishes precedence over domestic sympathies, assimilating gender critique into a traditional familial structure. Poltergeist suggests a powerful male authority within the nuclear family, yet also a sympathetic feminist appeal to abolish patriarchal traditions. Simultaneously, however, the film visualises the return of ascendant masculinity through Steve’s assumption of a disciplinary paternal voice. An ideological ambivalence suffuses the film’s construction of gender and domesticity.

While Dianne and her daughter might be the objects of the supernatural attack, the established cause of the haunting lies with the ‘public’ commerce of men. Their suburban community has been built upon a displaced graveyard – while the headstones were moved, the bodies were not, in effect leaving the dead homeless and dispossessed. Steve is the successful breadwinner of the family, and his association with the real estate market and the corruption of the sacred in its quest for profit initiates the attacks, according to the logic of the film. However, the relationship between Dianne’s and the larger, economic conditions of the ‘poltergeist reprisal’ is also not innocent. While seemingly peripheral to this economic subtext, the homemaker is, in fact, deeply embedded within the economy of the home, an ideal that comes with a price. As Haralovich argues about the position of the fifties ‘housewife’ in the ‘social’ sphere:

151 The middle-class homemaker was an important basis of this social economy – so much so that it was necessary to define her in contradictions which held her in a limited social place. In her value to the economy, the homemaker was at once central and marginal. She was marginal in that she was positioned within the home, constituting the value of her labor outside of the means of production. Yet she was also central to the economy in that her function as a homemaker was the subject of consumer product design and marketing, the basis of an industry.93

The suburban ‘housewife’ is at the crossroads of public and private space. Confined to the house and the fantasies of suburban domestic interiorities, to the ‘private’ spaces of the home and family, she was also part of wider ideologies, a desired ‘asset’ in the promotion of the American dream.94 While the ‘private’, female spaces of the home are often held to be ‘sacred’, off-limits to the politics and corruption of the ‘public sphere’, the housewife and her domicile occupy this cross point position in the nexus of public and private, home and nation. Dianne, the dedicated homemaker, mother and housewife is at the heart of this ambivalence in Poltergeist. While Spielberg is a ‘sentimentalist’ of the suburbs and the home, such attacks on the housewife, the implicit culpability suggested within his otherwise fantastic idylls of the suburban dream, as envisioned in Poltergeist, is an overt representation of Spielberg’s ambivalence towards domesticity, the home and the family.

The suburb, at the interface of the domestic dream of community and private families, is also a phenomenon motivated by profit. Poltergeist explicitly represents this presence of capital in the suburb through the depiction of the real estate agent and Steve’s boss, Mr Teague, who, driven by the bottom line, cuts corners in his provision of suburban dream homes, a process initially benefiting the Freelings, before this moral corruption of the family surfaces. The contrast between the transcendent ideal of belonging and cold hard cash structures the narrative. The ‘invasion’ of capital into the home and the hypocrisy behind suburban affluence is directly tied to the ‘invasion’ of the poltergeists that eventually destroy the house and wreak havoc in the neighbourhood. Moral culpability is deflected onto the corrupt Mr Teague, who,

93 Ibid. P. 61.

94 Such discourses also link the idea of family as a ‘national duty’ in order to sustain economic development, as well as to keep the nation(al family) strong, an idea which will be developed further in Chapter Four.

152 sobbing in front of the house acknowledge his guilt, his part in the corruption of the family ‘home’ by the market, signified by the festering corpses that break through the floor of the home, and herd a panicked Dianne into the half-completed swimming pool. The buying, selling and construction of the American dream through the real estate industry, as depicted so violently in Poltergeist, comprises both the suburban fantasy and the brutal nightmare of aggressive capitalism that lurks within the dream of suburban comfort.

Implosion: The Death Drive of the Suburban Home

However, perhaps this ‘dream of suburbia’ that preoccupies Poltergeist is (also) that of destruction, of the fantasy of the abducted Child, and of the ultimate eradication of the Family Home. Fantasy, as discussed by Žižek, stages the subject’s desire; such staging is not to be mistaken as the attainment of the object of desire, but as the act of desiring the object.95 In this sense, it is possible to understand the function of the ‘binary’ fantasy in this suburban milieu, constructing the ‘dream’ and the opposing dream of ‘loss’ – the ‘nightmare’ through which the fantasy thereby never ‘attains’ the object, sustaining perpetual desire. As McGowan argues, “[t]he objet petit a [the unattainable object of desire]… motivates the subject’s desire, but this desire is not a desire to encounter this object. On the contrary, desire wants to sustain itself as desire.”96 Poltergeist stages the fantasy ‘attainment’ of suburban happiness and domestic bliss, yet at the same time gleefully maintains a proper distance from that ‘fantasised object’ through a narrative of dispossession, loss and child abduction. The fantasy of domestic bliss is the desiring, rather than the supposed ‘satisfaction’ of desire, as suggested by the conflicted conclusion to A.I. Despite the desired and attained material ‘creature comforts’ of the suburbs, a ‘fantasy’ of dissatisfaction permeates Spielberg’s films. The manifestation of the binary codes of suburban representation suggests this oscillation around the fantasy of home, and the always deferred pleasure of home through destruction, loss and separation. Bronfen argues that “only the actual loss of one’s home can safely distance one from the dangerous

95 Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1991). P. 9.

96 McGowan, "Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes." P. 34.

153 vortex at the heart of the home, even while in fantasy one can enjoy its traumatic resilience.”97 The poltergeists of suburban affluence and satisfaction present the opposing ‘death drive’ of the suburban fantasy, the annihilation of ‘bliss’ articulated through the traumatic loss of the Child and the destruction of the house. Poltergeist stages the binary opposite to the ‘reproductive futurism’ signified by the figure of the Child, the suburban family and its place in the social order.98

In keeping with this investment in familial ‘futurism’ (and its implicit ‘binary’ opposite of death, violence, abandonment and entropy) in Poltergeist and E.T., (Duel is more overt in its preoccupation with the death drive and anti-suburbia) Spielberg’s mise-en-scène creates an atmosphere of reverence and warmth around the home and the family, recreating small details through the clutter and presence of domestic knick knacks, appliances, and children’s toys, while the interaction of parents with children is sentimentally emphasised. Yet, throughout Poltergeist particularly, intimate moments between Dianne Freeling and her young daughter Carol-Anne are imbued with tenderness and love but also frequently carry ominous suggestions of death.99 Dianne’s discovery of Carol-Anne’s dead canary is a precurser to the dead who will swamp the Freeling home. About to flush the little corpse down the toilet, the camera focuses on the portentous shadow of the dead bird with a heady pause, before Carol- Anne’s intrusion, and the subsequent burial ritual for the little creature. Carol-Anne sadly packs into a tobacco box casket a photo of herself, her brother, Robbie, and their pet dog. That the family is so intimately tied to this small death then takes on greater connotations when is buried in the family garden. The small hole dug in the back yard, already a graveyard and already defiled by the swimming pool excavations, is a synecdoche of the spectre of the improper burial and death that perversely structures the gentle maternal scene between Dianne and Carol-Anne. The otherwise touching burial scene is marred by the older sister’s sarcasm, Robbie’s ghoulish desire to see a future rotten corpse, and the golden retriever’s immediate

97 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 61.

98 See Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive.

99 As Jeffrey Weinstock observes, “the home and the graveyard are geographically juxtaposed. Maximal proximity is achieved between the living and the dead as home and graveyard are equated [there is only a] porous barrier separating the living from the dead”. Weinstock, "Zombie TV." Online, no pagination.

154 attempts to unearth, and presumably devour, the little body. These discourses of the Child/future and death/stasis are simultaneously prefigured by the figure of sweet little blonde Carol Anne and her uncanny relationship with the poltergeists. The domestic warmth and a sentimental valorisation of the Child also betrays the presence of death in the home, undercutting the reproductive futurism and the nostalgic innocence of the Child of the kind also represented in A.I.

The ‘light’ and the ‘dark’ within Poltergeist shade the two different perspectives on the suburban environment. Together, they betray a revealing portrait of the suburban imagination – one is the dream, one is the nightmare – but they are both a textual mediations of the cultural fantasies of the ‘burbs and beyond. Spielberg employs these standard binary templates of suburban middle-class ideals to enrich his narratives, while also emphasising the tensions inherent to familial discourse. In Poltergeist, the family’s fragile domestic existence fractures under a variety of strains, allegorically represented through the poltergeists, which abduct a c/Child of the family, metaphorically attempt the rape of the mother, and directly play out fears of loss of the home. The film is an expression of the inadequacies of the symbolic to negotiate the familial fantasy and the (uncanny) home.

The film’s overt rejection of the capitalist corruption represented by Teague, and the final expulsion of the television works (nostalgically) to allude to an ideal of home that excludes capital, and consequently adulates a vision of family that is free of the penetrating, corrupting influence of economics and television. The carefully constructed, bright and sunny mise-en-scène of the home at the beginning of the film is contrasted the external images of the bleak motel that the family flee to late at night. The loss of home is powerfully linked to discourses that stress the ‘loss’ of the fantasy private family, depicted in earlier film and television. The Freelings’ loss is also a greater cultural loss of an impossible fantasy that never existed, except in a (televised) cultural imagination.

The logical endpoint to the private family and the ‘detached’ suburban home in Poltergeist is radically envisaged by the response of the angry house. The home literally implodes into itself, vanishing before the suburban community’s eyes, leaving an empty, barren scar amongst the suburban houses, an unassimilated

155 remainder within the suburban symbolic of regimented rows of tract housing, expelling the family to a dark ‘nowhere’. Throughout the narrative, the family, in response to the poltergeists, withdraw into their detached suburban ideal transformed into a nightmare: Steve stops showing up to work, the children stop attending school. Steve and Dianne cannot enter their neighbour’s house, nor will their neighbours, despite Dianne’s desperation in the final scene, enter the haunted house to save the threatened children. The house’s final act in front of the horrified community is to implode, vanishing forever, ‘detaching’ entirely from the suburb, the ultimate, pathological expression of the ‘private home’. Overtly, the film deflects blame to the capitalist and corrupt Teague, as well as the penetrative powers of the television. Poltergeist, however, cannot completely discount the culpability that arises from the very ideal of the detached and private familial home, that very home that eventually falls to corruption and entropy, allowing the Freeling to maintain a safe distance from ‘home’. In this final scene, Poltergeist imagines the radical implosion of the home resulting from the structure of an ‘ideal’ family that ‘detaches’ from public life.

Conclusion: Not Quite Home Yet

The performance of familial normalcy enacts a disciplinary role in the ideological construction and experience of the family, the suburbs and home. The family becomes a (social) reality because it is collectively recognised as natural and inevitable – a cultural and collective performance of normality.100 Yet, anxieties and the uncanny, the persistence sense of ‘not quite home’, continually erupt from such representations of normality. The depiction of both fantasies and nightmares symbolically intervene in collective ‘problems’, and then confer a symbolic resolution. And, as Žižek would argue, such intervention permits forbidden access to the hidden uncanny at the heart of narrative conflict and resolution. Žižek suggests that narrative “emerges in order to resolve some fundamental antagonism by rearranging its terms into a temporal succession. It is thus the very form of narrative which bears witness to some repressed antagonism.”101 As such, Mann fails to return

100 See Pierre Bourdieu, "On the Family as a Realized Category," Theory, Culture and Society 13, no. 3 (1996).

101 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997). P. 10-11. Italics in original.

156 to his family home, instead contemplating his assumption of (non-domesticated) masculinity within the (non-suburban) wild frontier; the Freelings expel the invasive TV that destabilise the public/private dynamic, watch the destruction of home, and flee the suburbs; while E.T returns to his heavenly ‘home’, escaping symbolic Law and the Scientist while the introduction of the fatherly Keys (potentially) substitutes for Elliot’s loss of both natural father and the paternal alien.102

The three films discussed in this chapter are preoccupied by three different types of fatherhood (and only one detailed imagination of motherhood), a Spielbergian preoccupation with male subjectivity and authority within the home, mediated firstly through Duel’s reluctant father, through E.T.’s focus on the child, and then, in Poltergeist, through the a more complete construction of the maternal figure within the suburban home. Most specifically, these visualisations of domesticity are structured by their relationship to paternal authority, whether that be Mann’s hesitant fatherhood, E.T as the child’s fantasy paternal substitute in lieu of the absent father, or Steve, the suburban father who rescues his family and removes them from the suburbs. Significantly, Poltergeist’s Steve is the only father who stays with his family, he is the rescuing father who is a blend of nurturing and authoritarian – indeed, Steve recovers the paternal authority as he leaves the corrupted suburb, shoving the television outside, and firmly shutting the door. These conflicted families concentrate the struggles of the suburbs, the dilemmas of domesticity, and the contradictions of ‘home’ that varyingly inform Spielberg’s narratives and his rapprochement with conflicted family and gender ideologies.

The sentiment and nostalgic tenderness of these films’ representations of suburbia suggest that, as according to the homily, ‘there is no place like home’, yet they also

102 In the case of Poltergeist, the restitution of the family is a necessary counterbalance to the destruction of the home. Significantly, this familial salvation is not achieved in Close Encounters, (discussed in Chapter Three) where the dissolution of the family is celebrated, in direct conflict with ‘typical’ Spielbergian sentiment. As discussed, this subtext, however, shadows all of Spielberg’s narratives and the discourse of the home. In E.T., the alien’s departure cathartically resolves paternal abandonment – Elliot lets E.T go granting him authority over the paternal abandonment – yet the film cannot cure the initial paternal loss and disruption of the home ideal. And Duel and Jaws regenerate masculinity, yet remain in conflict with paternal domesticity – both films significantly do not reveal the imperilled man’s homecoming.

157 uncannily suggest that there can never be a place like (the fantasised) home.103 Spielberg’s suburbs are represented as not simply utopic or dystopic, but as a conglomeration of both, a text upon which we read domestic dreams and aspirations as well as fears, anxieties and frustrations. The traditional reverence for hearth and home that is a staple of Hollywood and its representations of suburbia is consistently conflicted in Spielberg’s films, despite the prevalent view of Spielberg as a shameless sentimentaliser of the home, family and suburbs. Rather than merely re-establishing typically conservative and repetitive images of suburban homes, it is the workings of desire and fantasy that thread through his narratives, both supporting and undermining accepted doctrines of suburban domesticity that are significant to understanding the potency of family and all of its attendant trappings in popular and political culture. They imagine both a ‘fantastic’ flight from, and/or a return to the home, but are always marked by the recurring preoccupation with that family home. The staging of popular desires through these media-tised fantasies of the American Dream reveal how these desires both attract and repel in the urge to possess this dream and the concurrent drive to destroy it.

More often than not in Spielberg’s films, although not in Duel, representations of aggression toward domesticity are cathartically resolved by the return to the glorified and (sometimes) reconstituted home. For instance, as can be seen in another Spielberg trajectory, both Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park capitalise on concluding scenes of seeming domestic resolution. Cathartic resolution, the seemingly inevitable domestic reunion, is driven by “the ‘ideology of home’: refuge, rest, and satisfaction.”104 The rapprochement between narrative action and domestic ‘passivity’ finds its expression in Spielberg’s suburban images, in which masculinity is redeemed through the spectacle of familial recuperation. Narratives of death, destruction and fear in conjunction with ideologies of home and its connotations of refuge and safety are invested with greater potency. Consequently, the attempted recovery of the family and/or the loss of the home and the suburbs carries significant

103 See Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema.

104 Richard Daniels, "Scattered Remarks on the Ideology of Home," The Minnesota Review 58-60 (2003). P. 187.

158 ideological weight, even as such resolutions are still permeated by both pleasure in the domestic and in its destruction. As Bronfen contends,

we need stories about the successful achievement of the sense of being at home and at the same time obliquely articulate that even while their fantasy scenarios fill an originary sense of lack in plenitude, the traumatic core of dislocation can never be fully erased.105

Spielberg’s films tap into nostalgic images, as they have been imagined and represented, yet the very deployment of nostalgia ‘articulates’ that narrative fantasy that cannot fully ‘paper the cracks’ of this ‘trauma’ and inherent dislocation. As Edelman argues, nostalgia works in a cyclical manner, promoting the idealisation of the past, and projecting this nostalgia into the political and representational strategies that work to configure (an ideal of) the future: “we’re held in thrall by a future continually deferred by time itself, constrained to pursue a dream of a day when today and tomorrow are one.” And he further points out that “fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future.”106 The fantasy past is corrective, desired in the present, and, as it cannot be (re)created now and is forever past and lost, it is ultimately utopian, reliant upon dreams of a (nostalgic) future. Yet these sentimental and idealised representations of home continually manifest the traumatic core, Edelman’s ‘anti-futurist death drive’ that threatens and fascinates Spielberg’s suburban inhabitants.

The attainment of the desired object, the fulfilment of ‘lack’ and the replenishment of loss, threatens the end point of desire, the cessation of narrative action and ‘submission’ to domestic ‘stasis’. The satisfaction of desire is not the true goal of desire, within any such satisfaction always remains the ‘desire for desire’. As a ‘shameless sentimentaliser’ of the suburbs, Spielberg is therefore concurrently

105 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 21. On this general point of such fantasy resolutions in relation to the always-uncanny of home, Bronfen further argues that “fantasy work satisfies precisely because it produces protective fictions to ward off traumatic knowledge about the uncanniness that lies at the heart of all worldly emplacement. However, the happiness achieved at the end of a cinematic narrative – notably the return to a familiar place, to the protection of the family or the successful couple building – as well as the pleasure such resolution affords the spectator, remains aporic, for these narratives inevitably also render visible the fissure written into any notion of recuperation of home.” P. 25.

106 Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. P. 30-1.

159 preoccupied with destroying, invading and violating the home. The ghostly presence that propels itself from the television, hovering over the sleeping couple in their marital bed; the white sheeting covering and distorting the suburban home, and the sirens and scientific equipment that constrain the family in E.T.; or the allure of dripping oil and the spinning wheels that keep Mann from returning to the embrace of his wife, Spielberg’s homes and suburbs are not just havens, but simultaneously places of anxiety and discontent – a traumatic core lies within their idealisation.107

Whether troubling domestic imagery, or invoking nostalgia and sentimental affect, Spielberg’s suburban representations express the fantastical dream and the destructive death drive that structure the overt idealism of the suburban home and family. Narratives of violence and the manner in which they reverberate through the potent ideology of home still reveal a significant cultural investment in the home as redemptive, and often regenerative. Daniels points out that “[a]ccording to Freud, ‘the dwelling-house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging, for which… man still longs, and in which he was safe and at ease’.”108 As such, the return to home, and the ‘conquering of the anti-futurist death drive’ reinforces familial imagery, suggestions of childbirth, reproduction, futurism. Through the narrative imposition of loss and destruction around this ‘first lodging’ for which ‘man still longs’, Spielberg’s continual evocation and corruption of the ideal of home prolongs desire and defers the moment of domestic satiation. Affective investments in the representation of home and family indicate a desired return, the cathartic endpoint whereby ‘belonging’ and return is attained. The (ideals) of family and the home must be threatened, even permanently lost, in order to sustain the lack that creates desire and is fundamental to empowering ideology of home and family venerated in cultural discourse. Even cathartic resolution retains traces of the uncanny and trauma – the scar in the suburban symbolic that E.T.’s fantastical glowing finger can only superficially heal; the gaping hole left in the tract housing of Poltergeist’s Cuesta Verda; and the stasis that leaves David Mann staring lost and confused as the sun goes

107 As discussed earlier, beyond the films most specifically discussed here, the emotional eulogising of the return to the home is considerably complicated in other Spielberg films, particularly Raiders of the Lost Ark, Amistad, and A.I., among others.

108 Daniels, "Scattered Remarks on the Ideology of Home." P. 187, citing Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, Trans. James Strachey, (New York: Norton, 1962). P. 38.

160 down, stuck between the abject corpse of the truck before him and the home life that cannot possibly assimilate their violent duel/dual.

161 Chapter Three A Leap of Faith: What Lies Beneath the Word of the Father? Representing God, Religion and the Family

A large group of young people have gathered on the beach to drink and smoke drugs; a young woman flirtatiously looks at a young man over the smouldering fire, inviting him to follow her. They run along the sand dunes, as she teasingly calls for him to catch her. Young, promiscuous sex is promised, and the man obligingly, albeit drunkenly, chases her. The young woman strips off her clothes and runs into the water, daring her paramour to follow her, he laughs, but does not, and instead he collapses onto the sand, drunkenly passing out. The woman is left alone in the water, and the promised titillation of the scene is transformed into danger and horror, as the viewer is granted a ‘shark’s eye’ view of her unwitting vulnerability. The promiscuous young woman is then terrifyingly ripped apart by the demonic unseen shark in the dark waters of Amity, in the iconic, ‘primal’ incident from Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster, Jaws.1

This visceral introductory scene from Jaws suggests an alignment between the shark and the patriarchal structures of Amity’s Every Town; the promiscuous woman is punished for her transgressions against small town American family values.2 As John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett argue, “[j]ust as in the Garden of Eden story, the

1 There are some significant differences between Spielberg’s film and that of the original Peter Benchley novel. In the book, Brody does not have his ‘fear of the water’ that is so important to the film. He is also the Amity local, rather than the man from the ‘big bad city’, who has come to find peace in the sleepy small town. Through this ‘fear of water’ the movie version emphasises the film’s preoccupation with a decline in masculine authority. Further, in this version, Brody has attempted to walk away from his (lawful) responsibilities to fight crime and corruption in his ‘escape’ to Amity. Positioning Brody as an outsider and his wife as a local in the film thereby aligns Ellen with Amity and the threatened small town American values, and consequently intensifies Brody’s imperative to save the town, the family and masculinity. Brody’s shark hunting comrade Hooper also does not have an affair with Ellen, as in the novel. See Peter Benchley, Jaws (London: Pan Books, 1974).

2 The ‘floating signifier’ of the shark has precipitated multiple different analyses, Lester Friedman gives a summary of all the different and varied interpretations that have been applied to Jaws, including: literary, Freudian, feminist, Marxist, nationalistic, historical, ecological, generational, economic, moralistic, legalistic, class, personal, psychological, sociological, genre. For a brief description of these approaches, see Lester D Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). P.163-4. As E. M. Mazur and Kate McCarthy point out, a “story whose meaning is fixed and universally agreed upon is not… a myth; the potency and longevity of myths lie in their ability to mean different things to different people in different historical settings.” Eric Michael Mazur and Kate McCarthy, eds., God in the Details: American Religion in Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001). P. 20.

corruption of Amity’s inhabitants justifies the shark’s disruption.”3 Consequently, while the film is not overtly religious, the mythic invocation of the demonic through the shark appeals to powerful and evocative binaries that structure religious narrative and mythology.4 Lawrence and Jewett point out that “sexual improprieties provoke natural disasters, from which only the pure and faithful will escape. The retributive principle is Deuteronomic: sin brings disaster, while virtue brings success and escape from disaster.”5 There is an overwhelming cultural significance that such a biblical rationale of sin and virtue plays in the narratives that society tells itself, as such narratives are permeated by the potent imagery that religious discourse still retains even in apparently secular cultures and representations. On this aspect of Spielberg, William Beard argues that his films are suffused with

a fervent idealism, a craving for a pure and perfect form of living, and [consequently also] accompanied by a corresponding anxiety, rising at times to hysteria, at the fear that the vision of a perfect world is not realizable, or is not strong enough to overcome the forces of darkness which range from laziness to predatory greed and violence.6

The darkness in Jaws is not confined to punishment of female extramarital sex, as in the film’s first scene, but, instead, its presence in the town augurs a much greater role, mediating between the depiction of corruption and the ‘fervent desire for an idealised form of living’.7 The presence of the shark is a symptom of the ‘crumbling’ social structures depicted in the town, and the shark’s ultimate destruction permits an

3 John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett, The Myth of the American (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdman, 2002). P. 318.

4 Carolyn Bliss describes myth as “not ‘true’ or ‘false’ in the empirically demonstrable sense. Rather, they [as are religious narratives] are vehicles of belief, hope, fear, development and change.” Carolyn Bliss, "The Mythology of the Family: Three Texts of Popular Australian Culture," New Literatures Review 18 (1989). P. 60.

5 Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero. P. 315.

6 Beard goes on to point out that “[o]f course the phenomenon is a broad one, and needs to be seen properly as an aspect of mainstream American culture.” William Beard, "A.I. Or, the Agony of Steven Spielberg," CineAction 66 (2005). Online, no pagination.

7 Peter Biskind suggests that “[i]t is helpful to ask of each of the shark’s victims: why is he or she killed, and not someone else? In some instances, like the case of young Alex Kintner, there doesn’t seem to be a particular reason.” Peter Biskind, "Jaws: Between the Teeth," Jump Cut 26 (1975). Online, no pagination. However, the death of the young boy, and the subsequent attack on Brody’s own children arguably signal a major breakdown of the familial structures of the town, or at least significant anxieties the security of such structures.

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exorcism of the town’s (masculine and paternal) failings, and makes the beach safe for America’s families again – a movement from sin to (paternal) virtue and triumph.

The shark’s annihilation restores the lapsed patriarchal role of the town’s sheriff and family man, chief Brody; the ‘virtue’ that enables ‘success and escape’ is that of reinvigorated paternal masculinity and the defence of the home and family. Brody’s initial incompetence and timid approach to ‘governing’, his reluctance to assume his place as Father (of the community) – succinctly suggested by his fear of the water in a coastal town – empowers the corrupt but strong fathers, the local Mayor and the shark in the small town’s waters.8 Through the exorcism of the shark and Brody’s triumph, the film privileges Brody’s spectacular rediscovery of masculinity and his protective role within the family and within the idealised American town. The emergence of the demonic shark, the ‘force of darkness’, precipitates the unveiling of the uncanny within the small town that threatens to destroy the ideal of the ‘perfect world’; after Brody’s discovery of the shark attack, mundane small town gossip and problems are rendered irrelevant. As Christopher Hauke observes, “it is the very brightness of the suburban reality – as if there are no shadows – that produces the huge shadow of the shark that looms over Amity”.9 Along a sun-drenched street, Brody walks through the town, the camera following him, framing him in white picket fences and pink roses, emphasising the marginal small town activities occur around him – but Spielberg reconfigures the cute small town as a place of menace and intrigue that belies family values. As in Duel, where the ‘car’s eye view’ alienates us from the prosaic, the normal, the homey, the camera obsessively follows Brody’s frantic movement through the suddenly alienating and uncanny town. Through Jaws’ invocation of ‘universal archetypes’, the mythic destruction of the dark other that lies not so well repressed under the water structures the telos of Brody’s narrative. This summoning of the repressed consequently permits the exorcism of small town

8 As José Días Cuesta observes, “Brody is totally unable as a father who must look after his children: deprived of his authority by Amity’s mayor.” José Díaz-Cuesta, "A Reconstructive Analysis of the Masculinities Represented in Steven Spielberg's Jaws," B. A. S.: British and American Studies/Revista de Studii Britanice si Americane 9 (2003). P. 184.

9 Christopher Hauke, "'Let's Go Back to Finding out Who We Are?': Men, Unheimlich, and Returning Home in the Films of Steven Spielberg," in Jung and Film: Post-Jungian Takes on the Moving Image, ed. Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister (Hove, East Sussex and New York: Brunmer-Routledge, 2001). P. 157.

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community imperfections that structure the film’s latent anxieties. This ritualised destruction of the demonic thereby allows ‘the world to be made anew’ and the fractured boundaries that hold it together to be reinforced.10 Binary privileges are reinstated, and the sacred family is again safe from the demonic.

Shifting from the apparent ‘private’ manifestation of the family in Spielberg’s films, this second section of the analysis differs by considering how the metaphor of family plays out through significant cultural discourses, in this chapter, specifically that of religion, furthering the discussion of Spielberg’s varying representations and uses of the family. As Chapter Two’s discussion of the home argued, there is a constant failure to rid the family of the ‘uncanny’, which is subsequently battled by a turn to religious imagery that ‘papers the cracks’ of the death drive. Spielberg’s use of what Friedman describes as ‘vernacular religion’11 – a dispersed sense of spirituality and myth without explicit recourse to institutionalised religion – is fundamental to his film’s mobilisation of faith, family haven, and a sense of spiritual belonging. Significantly for this use of ‘vernacular religion’, family discourses and Judeo- Christian religious ideologies are reciprocally reliant upon the other; the family on earth imitates that of the Holy family of God, while the family of God replicates the paternalistic authority of the f/Father structures the (traditional) family. As such, familial representations are validated through their association with religious images and narratives, and therefore these intertwined discourses are significant to understanding how familial representations are articulated in Spielberg’s films. The religious inflections on Spielberg’s families suggests a narrative movement toward a desired ‘transcendence’ of the family. However, such transcendence is always

10 See Mircea Eliade and his discussion of myth and ritual; Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. W.R. Trask (New York: Harper, 1961).

11 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. PP. 39-46. Friedman points out that detailed religious readings of Spielberg are not the point, as “[h]is work is not doctrinaire; it is broader, more general, and more diffuse”. P. 42. Catherine Albanese also discusses ‘vernacular religion’; “[a]s a linguistic form, the vernacular is… in a broad sense always creole. That is, it always pieces and patches together its universe of meaning, appropriating terms, inflections, and structurations from numerous overlapping contexts and using them as so many ad hoc tools to order and express, to connect inner with outer, and to return to inner again. … the mass culture rendition of popular religion becomes a dominating context shaping the emergence of religious vernaculars.” Catherine L. Albanese, "Religion and American Popular Culture: An Introductory Essay," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1996). P. 740.

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necessarily corrupted, for the earthly family can only ever be a proxy for the Father God or heavenly maternal sublimation.

Although Spielberg’s films are rarely overtly religious, the ways they structure the family in opposition to the threatening and the demonic situates the family within mythic and religious discourses. Reinhold Zwick argues that “[e]ven if their focus is secular, films like to play with the thoughts and image arsenals of religious denominations and thereby achieve – at least on the surface – the (pseudo)-religious, (pseudo-)mythical touch”.12 In the case of Jaws, the deployment of mythic tropes surrounding the demonic shark animate the film’s affect and ideology. Patriarchal familial patterns in Jaws are reinforced by their positioning relative to the demonic shark; the shark threatens, yet at the same time, illuminates and justifies these values. It is on Brody’s watch that the sexually uninhibited young people have their beach party, but it is the shark that highlights the danger that such moral erosion threatens. The shark’s subsequent targets (children, and families on a sunny day) are significantly ‘closer to home’,13 and more generally expressed in the threat to the community’s socio-economic structure. Jaws – and some other Spielberg films, for example, Poltergeist, Duel, and Jurassic Park, even the parodic Indiana Jones films – are structurally reliant upon this mythic conflict between the demonic and the divine, a classic trope of the horror genre. For the divine to be invoked, it must be (affectively) contrasted to its demonic antithesis.

However, in Spielberg’s narratives, there is not merely contrast between the evil shark/Nazi/ghost/truck/dinosaur, and the ‘sacred’ home with its (religiously sanctioned) family unit, but the films manifest the emergence of this mythic dark other to ‘maintain’ idealised familial purity that are at the core of Spielberg’s narratives.14 The demonic threat enables a reinvigorated and subsequently deified

12 Reinhold Zwick, "The Problem of Evil in Contemporary Film," in New Image in Religious Film, ed. John R. May (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997). P. 80.

13 The shark’s threat to the family is established by its devouring of the young boy, but the desire for this form of food – the Child – is affirmed through the ‘no-fail’ bait that Quint provides as a lure for the shark: the (morally repugnant) dolphin foetus that represents the consumption of innocence, of the future that the group are attempting to restore in their hunt and destruction of the shark.

14 As Tony Barta points out in his discussion of the representation of Nazis in film, “[v]irtually from the beginning… inhabited a kind of fantasy made for the cinema… Since the Nazis could not 166

family, where previously cowed patriarchal f/Fathers (attempt to) reassert and redeem themselves. Brody blows up the shark and jumps into the water, saving the town from corruption and the Bad Fathers; Jurassic Park’s Dr Grant rescues the children from the T-Rex, and commits to his heteronormative reproductive relationship. And in its invocation of the demonic, Poltergeist utilises the emotional and narrative short cuts of religious imagery; where the demonic resides, so too does the divine. The ‘confused’ ghosts guided to ‘the light’ express the primal religious battle between good and evil.

By virtue of such narratives of destabilisation, the mobilisation of powerful and evocative religious narratives and binaries serves to supplement these often fractured and contradictory ideologies inherent in family and patriarchy. In the binary dynamic, the family image, contrasted to the abject and the demonic, effects a powerful Manichean dualism, and thereby associates the traditional family and traditional masculinity with the divinely sanctioned. Spielberg’s horror films inscribe the family and religious deification as a discursive short cut into their narratives.15 As W. Richard Comstock observes, “religion has functioned in American films chiefly as a store of venerable symbols through which to express and validate some of the central values informing American life.”16 Religious binaries, the discourses deeply embedded within cultural narratives and symbols, are used to shore up ideals of masculinity, family and community, even though Jaws, and other Spielberg films, rarely directly foreground religion. To use Lester Friedman’s term, through the potent use of ‘vernacular religion,’ the frequently used cultural tropes of religious narratives, Spielberg films are able to mobilise affective and ideological power. Of course, built into the project is the ever-present failure to fully recover such

be heroes, their mythic power was tapped as a metaphor for evil.” Tony Barta, "Film Nazis: The Great Escape," in Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, ed. Tony Barta (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998). P. 138.

15 For an overview of how mainstream horror films relate to conservative patriarchal values, see Linda Williams, "Melodrama Revised," in Reconfiguring Film Genres: Theory and History, ed. Nicke Browne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), Tony Williams, Hearths of Darkness: The Family in the American Horror Film (Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), Tony Williams, "Trying to Survive on the Darker Side of Horror: 1980s Family Horror," in The Dread of Difference, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996).

16 Richard W. Comstock, "Religious Transcendence and the Horizons of Culture: Observations on the Role of Religion in American Film," Revue Française D'études Américaines 6, no. 12 (1981). P. 275-6.

167 ideologies through the resolution of narrative conflict. Such ‘conclusions’ can resolve the anxiety of the demonic threat only to a certain extent. The manifestation of religious iconography animates particular discourses that aid in the ‘papering of the cracks’ that emerge from narratives of violence and loss, from the ambivalence between sentiment and destruction that structures the representation of the family and from a cultural death drive, as discussed in the previous chapters.

Religion and myth are concepts that are notoriously hard to define and grasp.17 Myth criticism, particularly applicable to an analysis of the ‘archetypal evil’ in Duel or Jaws,18 takes a more ‘universal’ approach to the study of religion. Unlike theology, which tends to focus on traditional and more particular definitions, ‘mythology’ facilitates a much broader definition of religion. The analysis of (apparently) universal archetypes, symbols, and rituals expands the study of religion by opening up ways of interpreting religious tropes.19 Undoubtedly, the problem with such a perspective is the concept of ‘universality’. As Conrad Ostwalt points out, “myth criticism tends to be ahistorical and psychological and ignores the political and social dimensions of religion.”20 Mythological analysis of religious discourse must be tempered with an understanding of how ideology, history and society affect modes of representation.21

17 For a discussion of definitions and the relevant literature and philosophies, see Chapter Two, ‘The Definition of Religion’ and Chapter Three, ‘Myths about Myths’, in John Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals (New York: New York University Press, 2003).

18 For discussion on Jaws and archetypal analysis, Jane E. Caputi, "Jaws as Patriarchal Myth," Journal of Popular Film 6 (1978), Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, "Integrating Ideology and Archetype in Rhetorical Criticism, Part 2: A Case Study of Jaws," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002), Jonathan Lemkin, "Archetypal Landscapes and Jaws," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002). Caputi considers how the archetypes of Jaws relate to sexualised and patriarchal discourses evident in the film.

19 Conrad Ostwalt, "Religion & Popular Movies," Journal of Religion and Film 2, no. 3 (1998). Also see Joel W. Martin and Conrad Ostwalt, eds., Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1995).

20 Ostwalt, "Religion & Popular Movies." Online, no pagination.

21 Myth, religion and theology and their uses in analyzing film are the objects of Ostwalt and Martin’s editorial introduction to their book of collected essays, Screening the Sacred. See Martin and Ostwalt, eds., Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film. For another detailed discussion of the intersections of film and religion, see Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals.

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In discussing films that do not explicitly appeal to traditional biblical narratives or overt religious themes, it is necessary to consider the way in which religious discourse functions outside institutional structures. Spielberg’s persistent suggestion of spirituality through the invocation of myth and religion is a core element of the affective power of his films. Peter Krämer notes of Spielberg’s films,

Spielberg is a modern myth maker… [his] fantasy adventures have brought a contemporary perspective and cutting edge technology to the fairy tales, myths and religious tales which underpin (not only) western civilisation, and [he has] updated these stories for the late twentieth century, and indeed the twenty-first century.22

As Robert Pope more generally argues of the potency of religious discourse in film, “religion, or at least the religious questions of origins, meaning and destiny in life, have maintained their potency in contemporary culture even when the popularity of institutional religion has declined.”23 The prevalence of religion, beyond ‘the church’, remains significant; it has infiltrated cultural narratives and modes of meaning-making, not so much conceived in contemporary culture as religion, but as faith, or a simply a sense of the sacred. While religious discourse is absorbed into such ‘transcendental’ concepts as life and death, good and evil, meaning and origin, it remains irrevocably bound to the traditional culture and ideologies by which it has been practiced and historically shaped. It is the preoccupation with the transcendental, and its roots and manifestations as they are ideologically constructed through culture that is so significant to an analysis of familial discourses. The cultural emphasis on the transcendental, the ‘object’ of religious pursuit, is reliant upon a belief in ‘Truth’, faith in something beyond a profane existence. Religion is the (ideological) shape that this faith, the desire for Truth and the transcendental, takes to represent such abstractions, and, consequently, the animation of religious tropes in narrative is a powerful affective and ideological tool.24 In these terms, Friedman’s

22 Peter Krämer, "Steven Spielberg," in Fifty Contemporary Filmmakers, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London: Routledge, 2002). P. 321.

23 Robert Pope, Salvation in Celluloid: Theology, Imagination and Film (London: T&T Clark, 2007). P. 1.

24 As Melanie J. Wright notes, “religion is… a narrative producing mechanism… [religion and film] seek in differing ways to make manifest the unrepresentable.” Melanie J. Wright, Religion and Film: An Introduction (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007). P. 4.

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‘vernacular religion’ – the mobilisation of a sense of the sacred, detached from religious and theological specificities – is useful in considering Spielberg’s gestures toward faith, spirituality and religion in terms of familial discourse.

Spielberg’s films and their familial images are ‘authenticated’ through association with religious metaphors and narratives, and consequently, how such discourses are intertwined with ideologies and practices of the family is significant to understanding how familial representations are articulated. As Comstock notes, religion’s “primary role [in film] has been to serve as a symbolic vehicle through which the harshness of the opposition of values prevalent in the culture might be mitigated and some sort of symbolic mediation… be achieved.”25 And while religion, and the imagery of the Holy Family in film has been widely researched, the ways in which religious imagery inflects purportedly secular images of film families has not been considered to a great extent. However, religious discourse supplements family imagery in contemporary popular culture generally, and in certain Spielberg’s films specifically. Roy M. Anker notes of Spielberg’s approach to faith that

[a]t their best, Spielberg’s dramas display the deepest human longings for love – trust, care, affection, and delight with others and God – all that we pour into the notion of home, both personal and cosmic… This very craving for relational mutuality and ‘at-homeness’ that is a large part of the image of God forged onto the human psyche… this drama of psyche and soul recalls everyone’s deep longing to find the haven (and heaven) of home, the ever elusive realm of complete and unconditional love that completes the hungry human soul.26

As Anker suggests, family and religion, and the desire for home and belonging, are inescapably bound together, in the sense that religious ‘wholeness’ and familial ‘wholeness’ share similar discursive traits: the practices of ‘family’ and home are bound up in the conceptual struggles of ‘life and death, good and evil, meaning and origin, past and future’. Religious discourses provide ‘the Family’ with the tools and

25 Comstock, "Religious Transcendence and the Horizons of Culture: Observations on the Role of Religion in American Film." P. 276.

26 Roy M. Anker, Catching the Light: Looking for God in the Movies (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2004). P. 304.

170 metaphors in which to mobilise these ‘fundamental’ and transcendent concepts which structure ideals of the family and home within culture.

Spielberg’s massive popularity, his ‘brand name’ status is partially due to an ability to communicate with the audience through this ‘vernacular religion’ that permeates culture. As Paul Heelas observes, “the religious has become less obviously religious, the secular less obviously secular.”27 So, without necessarily being specifically religious, and thereby ‘alienating’ to a contemporary audience, Spielberg’s quasi- religious narratives resonate through a broad audience familiar with a sense (or sentiment) of spirituality, religious themes, images and narratives. And as Western cultural products, the religious discourse that empowers Spielberg films refers to Judeo-Christian traditions and biblical imagery.28 Anker argues that Spielberg’s redemptive tales – the move from despair to a full life, the salvation and (re)attainment of faith and purpose, are stories that

immediately become quasi-religious, at least parables of the contours of religious experience: their religious nature become full-blown in the overtly religious trappings with which Spielberg dresses his stories… he steeps his tales in traditional Jewish-Christian story and imagery, freighting his tales with religious heft even when audiences do not recognize the nature of the cinematic substance that moves them.29

27 Paul Heelas, "Introduction: On Differentiation and Dedifferentiation," in Religion, Modernity, and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1998). P. 3. Or, as Diane Apostolos- Cappadona notes, “a secularized society without a publicly avowed ecclesiastical or biblical faith may still be deemed and/or interpreted as religious.” Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, "From Eve to the Virgin and Back Again: The Image of Woman in Contemporary (Religious) Film," in New Image in Religious Film, ed. John R. May (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997). P. 111.

28 The dominant familial and religious discourse in contemporary popular culture is that of Judeo- Christian traditions. As John W. Miller argues (in his defense of the dominance of father imagery and the need for Father-based religion), in “biblical religion (and consequently Western religion) worship rises to a solitary, transcendent, benevolent Father.” John W. Miller, "In Defence of Monotheistic Father Religion," Journal of Religion and Health 21, no. 1 (1982). P. 62. And in a discussion of melodrama and its relationship to ‘sacred myth’, David Grimsted describes the central ‘sacred myth’ as “the Judeo-Christian tradition of Eden, fall, and restoration, the evil within being, as always in melodrama, externalized into the villains who bedevil the virtuous.” He further claims that “[m]ost melodramas make gestures of verbal or symbolic reference to this [Judeo-Christian] mythology – Eden, gardens, serpents, crosses, rebirth”. David Grimsted, "Vigilante Chronicle: The Politics of Melodrama Brought to Life," in Melodrama: Stage, Picture Screen, ed. Jodi Bratten, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994). P.200.

29 Anker, Catching the Light: Looking for God in the Movies. P. 273. Anker goes on to note that “Spielberg dramatizes what it is like to encounter the divine up close and personal. Indeed, he manages to suggest the ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of the divine, and from those we get… the ‘feeling of content’ of the characters’ experience of the holy. This is no small accomplishment, and this kind of cinematic effectiveness is Spielberg’s particular gift”. P. 273. 171

It is this emotional affect, facilitated through the ‘religious trappings’ that are so frequent, familiar and potent within western Judeo-Christian culture, that needs to be examined in Spielberg’s narratives generally, and his representations of the family in particular. The ‘religious heft’ that resonates through his narratives and cinematic structures are complicated by Spielberg’s ever-present familial imagery, where faith and family collude and collide. While the family is deified by religious ‘trappings’, the family is nonetheless inevitably ‘of earth.’ Religious discourse ‘sanctifies’ the earthly family, while the reciprocal idea of the family as ‘divine’ made ‘flesh’ is reinforced by the translation of ‘God’s family’ into the accessible family structure. Ostwalt suggests of “our secular society’s appropriation of religion”, that “while our culture is substantively secular, we legitimize it with a façade of religion”,30 particularly through the myths and traditions of Judeo-Christianity which persistently erupt throughout popular culture. By adapting the resonance of such traditions, secular images appropriate inherent cultural authority, legitimating particular associated images and ideologies. In its simplest transformation, the happy ‘biological and sociological’ family becomes the ‘Happy Holy Family’.31

Due to correlations between representations of family and the biblical family, the narratives and myths of Judeo-Christianity are particularly apt for a consideration of familial discourse, for while the family is reliant upon religious structures and traditions, the metaphors of the Christian religious mythology are dependent upon those of the nuclear family.32 Specifically, Christianity is symbolically organised

30 Conrad Ostwalt, "Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn," Journal of Religion and Film 4, no. 1 (2000). Online, no pagination. Ostwalt, in another essay, further argues that “while secularization might blur the boundaries between the sacred and the secular, secularization does not necessarily destroy religion. … cultural forms perceived to be secular might very well address religious questions and tap the religious sensibility”. Conrad Ostwalt, "Visions of the End. Secular Apocalypse in Recent Hollywood Film," Journal of Religion and Film 2, no. 1 (1998). Online, no pagination.

31 Of the role of the father, Stella Bruzzi notes that “[t]he absent father can all too easily be misrecognised as the perfect, powerful father whose presence will eventually stabilise and complete the family unit. The problem with the glorified absent father is that he all to uncritically becomes an imaginary evocation, a fantasy figure who fills an emotional and psychological lack.” Stella Bruzzi, Bringing up Daddy: Fatherhood and Masculinity in Post-War Hollywood (London: BFI Publishing, 2005). P. 7. And within Holy Family formulation, the role of the missing, albeit idealised father suggests the invocation of God as absent, fantasised, perfect f/Father.

32 Howard Eilberg-Schwartz observes that, according to Freud “[m]onotheism… is the first religion to recognize the father behind the image of God.” Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, "Homoeroticism and the 172

around a particular form of the family – the patriarchal family – that is a potent metaphor describing the relationship of worshippers with their God. Sarah Hayden notes that “[i]n the Strict Father model of the family, there is a natural order of dominance in the world. God is dominant over people; people are dominant over nature; men are dominant over women; and adults are dominant over children.”33 The deployment of such Christian metaphors through the family is highly significant to the ways in which family, religion and film interact to support and empower cultural narratives, film imagery and film affect that structure representations of the family. Religion is sanctioned through the use of the family - “society’s holiest institution”34 – and simultaneously, family imagery is discursively privileged by its relation to the religious metaphor. These two powerful ideologies – the familial and the religious – are mutually reliant upon each other.35

Western monotheistic religious narratives are significantly structured through the family model; the figures of God, Joseph, Jesus, and the maternal Virgin Mary simultaneously reinforce the family unit while the model’s familial structure maintains such religious narratives. Adele Reinhartz, in her discussion of the cinematic “Happy Holy Family of Mary, Joseph and Jesus”, notes that such representations systematically replicate gendered familial roles; that the on-screen holy family “stay[s] well within the boundaries of traditional theology and

Father God: An Unthought in Freud's Moses and Monotheism," American Imago 51, no. 1 (1994). P. 129.

33 Sara Hayden, "Family Metaphors and the Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care through the Million Mom March," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003). P. 199. Hayden is also using Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). P. 81.

34 Donna Minkowitz “Family Values? No Thanks”, The Advocate, June 16, 1992, p. 17, quoted in Dana Heller, Family Plots: The De-Oedipalization of Popular Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). P. 147.

35 Henry Abramovitch argues that at the beginning of the twentieth century, “the father played a central role in both psychology and religion. ‘God the Father’ was the dominant metaphor in Western religion, and in new depth psychology, the castrating or Oedipal Father was seen as the major force in the development of personality. Moreover, it was argued that an individual’s emotional attitude toward religion was a reflection of and consolation for one’s relationship with a personal father.” Henry Abramovitch, "Images of the 'Father' in Psychology and Religion," in Role of the Father in Child Development, ed. Michael Lamb (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997). P. 19.

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conservative family values.”36 She goes on to note that the “portrayal of the Happy Holy Family thus plays upon competing notions: the perfection of the Holy Family into which the Savior was born… and the contemporary idealization of the family as the social unit which shapes each of us.”37 The affective resonance of this ‘ultimate’, transcendental familial unit cannot be underestimated. In a similar vein, Friedman notes that “myth critics see the presence of … [father] figures as conforming to ritualistic narrative patterns, while those invoking religious archetypes explicate them as a desire to reaffirm spiritual faith in heavenly fathers.”38 God in such narratives becomes the f/Father; and conversely, the father becomes deified, a powerful endorsement of (patriarchal) assumptions of paternal authority within the family. As Reinhartz notes:

Jesus stands out among his fellow biopic heroes for one salient reason: God is his father… for Christianity, as well as for other monotheistic religions, God is not visible. For Christians, it is Jesus who brings corporeality to the divine, as the Word made flesh (John 1:14). God’s presence in the narrative and his role as Jesus’ father can be shown only indirectly.39

The ‘father’ is subsumed into metaphors of (religious) paternity and kinship that translate the ‘divine into flesh’.40 Such analogies are also, although not so obviously, significant in films that do not directly address the specific ‘biblical’ characters of the ‘Happy Holy Family’, but, nonetheless, invoke this powerful discourse.

36 Adele Reinhartz, "The Happy Holy Family in the Jesus Film Genre," in On the Cutting Edge: The Study of Women in Biblical Worlds, ed. Alice Bach and Jane Schaberg (New York, NY: Continuum 2004). P. 96.

37 Ibid. P. 96.

38 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 96.

39 Reinhartz, "The Happy Holy Family in the Jesus Film Genre." P. 98. Emphasis added. Reinhartz predominantly discusses films that contain explicit depictions of the biblical narrative and the biblical family. Spielberg’s mobilisation of the ‘Happy Holy Family’ and the paternal God imagery is considerably more indirect.

40 According to Miguel Bassols and Germán L. Garcia et al., “Lacan has emphasized that the path that leads from theology to atheism shows the Christian God… to be a radical articulation of kinship: a symbolic Kinship of the Father, the Son and Love.” Miguel Bassols, Germán L. Garcia, and R. M. Calvet i Romani with E. Berenguer, E. Guilana, V. Palomera, and E. Paskuan, "On Blasphemy: Religion and Psychological Structure," in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994). P. 191.

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The cross-pollination between the imagery of the family and the discourse of the Family-of-God continually materialises throughout popular culture, and in Spielberg’s films, where religious imagery consistently enhances their affective potency. The representation of the family, whether through film, politics, various media forms, and a multiplicity of cultural products, is bound up in an ideological process of naturalisation, in many cases, facilitated by the mobilisation of accessible religious and mythic discourses. As Comstock points out regarding popular film, “religious elements are deliberately used to validate the prevailing political values of the society.”41 Further, through the invocation of the sacred and the transcendental, religion and myth avoid being grounded in history, and, as a consequence, historically situated and contextual discourses become naturalised.42 In William Beard’s discussion of the qualities that Spielberg’s films share with the idealistic and sentimental films of Capra and Disney, he suggests:

One thing that might distinguish the Capra/Disney/Spielberg sub-group is what we might call a battle of faith. The realization, or failure, of the idealist enterprise is founded in an internal, spiritual landscape – it is a battle between belief and its enemy doubt. Obviously there is a religious overtone to such a scenario… But it is especially noteworthy that even when… the project is a social and national one, and calls for the radical recasting of political and commercial institutions, it is always grounded in the socially virtual realm of spiritual faith.43

The translation of specifically material problems into those of faith and spirituality effects a movement from the prosaic family/suburb to a fantasised sense of greater unity; the idealisation of the home as belonging, and the fervent faith in the heavenly family are intimately connected. Throughout varying genres and their (melodramatic) adaptations and appropriations, Spielberg’s films persistently invoke themes of religion and transcendence, yet there are concrete ideological aspects to such

41 Comstock, "Religious Transcendence and the Horizons of Culture: Observations on the Role of Religion in American Film." P. 279.

42 In addition, Conrad E. Ostwalt argues that “[s]ecularization… actually encourages a return of religion to ordinary life, leaving religion more powerful, diffused and omnipresent.” Martin and Ostwalt, eds., Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film. P. 159.

43 Beard, "A.I. Or, the Agony of Steven Spielberg." Online, no pagination. Such political aspects also emphasise that religious and familial values are intertwined with those of the nation, the focus of Chapter Four.

175 representations of ‘spiritual faith’. It is through Spielberg’s pervasive use of vernacular religion that many of the most significant discourses surrounding the family are confronted. Religious imagery frequently intersects with Spielberg’s continual concerns and preoccupations with postmodernism and nostalgia, with the demonic, with gender politics and the f/Father, with the apocalyptic and the future, and with the place that the family holds within such discourses.

Beyond his horror/thriller films – structurally reliant upon the mythic and the demonic to shore up ideals of family, faith and community – the most notably religious of Spielberg’s films are his science fiction ‘alien messiah’ films. Capitalising on the narratives and imagery of the Christian tradition, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are the most-cited examples of this rapprochement with ‘otherworldliness’ and familial struggles.44 Spielberg’s preoccupation with the ‘alien messiah’ trope has continued, with the release of the fourth Indiana Jones film in 2008, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which once again equates the extra-terrestrial with transcendent knowledge, power, and ultimately spiritual faith.45 For these films, religion and the invocation of transcendence is linked to Judeo-Christian narratives, and are invoked in order to further validate, and frequently to sentimentalise, the ideology of the family and to provide an affective resolution to narrative conflict and contradiction. Encounters with aliens in these films, as opposed to encounters with

44 For example, Roy M. Anker notes in his discussion of the religious imagery in Close Encounters that “[p]roviding some theological wiggle room for himself, Spielberg doesn’t quite deify the aliens; but he does carefully use major images and trappings of the Jewish-Christian tradition that validate occasions of divine revelation, all those palpable displays that traditionally accompany revelations of the divine: light, thunder, fire, and flame, searing light within light, wind, earth-shakings, iridescence to the nth power.” Anker also notes that in E.T. Elliot is portrayed “with a sort of wondering tenderness, full of longing for what is now gone (the physical presence of his father) but also for lost innocence and faith in the goodness of this world.” Anker, Catching the Light: Looking for God in the Movies. P. 293-4. On E.T., Peter Hasenberg notes that it is a “fantasy about a Christ-like extraterrestrial redeemer, a child’s dream of God.” Peter Hasenberg, "The 'Religious' in Film: From King of Kings to The Fisher King," in New Image in Religious Film, ed. John R. May (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1997). P. 50. Also see Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals. P. 194-201. For a thorough discussion of E.T.’s religious allegory, see Donald R. Mott and Cheryl McCalllister Saunders, Steven Spielberg (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986). PP. 125-128. Also see Frank P. Tomasulo, "The Gospel According to Spielberg in E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18, no. 3 (2001). For a summary of the religious allusions of E.T., see Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007). P. 94.

45 Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, in contrast, represents aliens more as the ‘demonic’ evil – they are much more alien in their depiction and attempt to violently colonise earth. These alien/machine figures signify apocalypse and the potential death of the species, the ‘demonic’ counterpart, the death drive, of such mythic discourses opposed to the benevolent aliens of E.T., Close Encounters, and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

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the demonic, are an engagement with the divine and the numinous, a transformative experience that promises transcendence.46 In the case of E.T. and Skull, a revitalised spiritual family eventuates, yet in an interesting contrast, the family of Close Encounters is actually superseded by the film’s religious transcendence as the protagonist ‘ascends to the heavens’ abandoning suburbia and his family – an Oedipal return rather than an assumption of (familial) Law and the Symbolic .

While Close Encounters, like Jaws and Duel, uses the horror motif, it transforms its evocation of terror into the sublime. Its central protagonist, Roy Neary, is a blue- collar worker, living in the suburbs, when a ‘close encounter’ with an alien space- craft changes his life, and he is no longer able to continue his comfortable domestic existence with his wife, Ronnie, and their two sons. As with the films discussed in the previous chapter, Close Encounters is preoccupied by the concerns of the suburbs, the domestic and the (uncanny of the) home. Roy struggles to assimilate his out-of- world/religious experience with the mundane requirements of everyday life, as his wife desperately tries to return him to mashed potatoes and Saturday movies with the kids. Across America, other people, too, have been awoken from their suburban slumber, and they make their way, following their calling, to where the aliens will descend to earth. The horror of animated toys and electrical equipment that terrifies single mother Gillian instead transfixes her young son, Barrie, as he leaves his house to head toward the fairy lights. Roy too, leaves his family and home, and perseveres through many obstacles, including a military blockade, until he reaches the landing site, where in a blaze of powerful music and blinding lights, he is welcomed aboard, and ascends with his alien gods to the stars. Close Encounters is a melange of genres, significantly blending the traditionally ‘female’ oriented melodrama with action, suspense and horror in order to facilitate Roy’s final apotheosis. Once again, contrary to the argument that Spielberg is a simple sentimentaliser of the suburbs, Close

46 Hugh Ruppersburg, "The Alien Messiah in Recent Science Fiction Film," The Journal of Popular Film and Television 14, no. 4 (1987). Ruppersburgh points out that the alien messiah, although superficially alien, is inspired by the Christian mythos. Although, he goes on “behind the Christian mythic pattern loom other mythic presences… World mythologies offer many such tales. But these classical sources are not so accessible to the popular mind as Christian myth, which gives the messiah figure in these films the power and attraction it possesses. In whatever form, the messiah is an expression of transcendence, from the first stage of vulnerability and closure to the second stage of transcendence and openness.” P. 160-1. For more on the sacred and the alien, also see Carol Schwartz Ellis, "With Eyes Uplifted: Space Aliens as Sky Gods," in Liquid Metal: The Science Fiction Film Reader, ed. Sean Redmond (New York: Wallflower, 2004).

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Encounters actually represents a profound antagonism toward ideals of the family, as Roy abandons his own family in his vocation, his search for something that ‘means something’. The invocation of religious metaphors in this film is inscribed through the aliens, who represent an alternative, heavenly family and a maternal return to childlike innocence and to Roy’s Imaginary friends.

A more ‘traditional’ women’s film or melodrama – Spielberg’ 1985 film, The Color Purple, an adaptation of Alice Walker’s popular novel (1982) – also relies heavily upon intersecting discourses of family and religion. This film is one of Spielberg’s most significant representations of religion, and, unlike Close Encounters, demonstrates a movement toward the ideological and Symbolic conventions or paternal and religious discourse of the familial representation. The narrative follows the stories of Celie and Nettie, two African American sisters in the early twentieth century, who are separated when Celie is married to the abusive Mister. Downtrodden and mistreated throughout her marriage, Celie ultimately stands up to her victimiser and his legacy of patriarchal bullying, empowered by her lesbian love affair with singer Shug (although this relationship is substantially marginalised in contrast to in the novel – reduced to a chaste kiss).47 It is this moment of triumphant female empowerment that sustains the narrative. Celie’s growing self-awareness leads to an eventual reunion with her stolen children, apparent products of incest taken from her at their birth by their (and Celie’s) father, and a reunion with her sister, Nettie, who moved to Africa as a missionary. While, at first glance, Celie’s narrative promotes female empowerment and radically challenges traditional patriarchal models of the family, Shug’s parallel sub-narrative and her estrangement from her preacher father reinvigorates such norms. The Color Purple mobilises religious discourses, imagery and sentimentality in order to empower family and ideals of the Father-God, even as the narrative ostensibly argues for liberation from such normative values.

47 The Color Purple must be understood in terms of the film’s critical contexts of race, class, and sexuality, as well as a consideration of Spielberg and Walker’s translation from book to film. In this analysis, however, the relationship of the family ideal to that of religious imagery and discourse is the primary focus.

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Spielberg’s other overtly religious films are the Indiana Jones series. The light- hearted postmodern approach to superficial adventure narratives, however, masks the films’ ideological investments in family and religion. Despite their veneer of humour and self-referentiality, the films represent traditional familial values through their mobilisation of religious narratives and imagery. The series includes Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as well as the revival of the popular format in 2008 with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The first and third films, Raiders and Crusade, are concerned with specifically Judeo-Christian artefacts and the spiritual illumination of the hero, Indiana Jones.48 The figure of Indiana Jones is assembled as an icon of renewed masculinity, a ‘reborn’ figure, whose archaeological quests do more than uncover relics of history, but lead to spiritual truths and revelations. In many ways, the character of Indy represents the quintessential male; he is strong, active, knowledgeable – but it is his ‘conversion’ to faith and his recovery of family, in conjunction with his fight against the ‘forces of evil’,49 that affirms his masculinity.50 Further, the numinous – that which lies beyond the material value and surface of Indy’s quest objects – is the heart of the films. But an ability to contain such representation necessarily lead to failure, and the power of the object is compressed into familial, specifically paternal, representations.

In the first film of the series, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones, recruited by US Army Intelligence in 1938, attempts to recover the ‘lost Ark’, believed to have held the and to possess phenomenally dangerous powers. Accompanying Indy is his former lover, , who holds the key to the Ark’s location. They race against the Nazis, who seek the Ark to satisfy Hitler’s

48 The second film of the series, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom involves an Indian cultural artefact, the Shankara Stone. The blatantly imperialist, and frequently racist, narrative is discussed more appropriately in the fourth chapter on the family and national/imperial discourses. The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull provides an interesting intersection of the two ‘genres’ of the Indy films. The power of the Crystal Skull is beyond any ‘earthly’ artefact, representing transcendental knowledge, power and absolute truth. But Skull also blends these ideals of transcendence with the imperial nationalistic narratives that are relevant to all Indy films, though particularly to Temple. And, interestingly in this final film (for now), when the Crystal Skull ‘illuminates’ its followers, Indy discovers fatherhood and marital happiness.

49 Once again, representations of the ‘demonic’ are necessary in order to illuminate the divine.

50 This narrative arc also affirms Indy’s American-ness, and his status as a national f/Father.

179 reported greed for religious artefacts, as well as its potential to facilitate global domination. Throughout both Raiders and Crusade, the Nazis are essentially symbolic shortcuts representing evil, (ravenous sharks in military uniform), their presence thereby confers religious righteousness on Indy and the US.51 Raiders’ battle of ‘good versus evil’ concludes on a deserted island when Belloq, Indy’s archaeological rival and Manichean counterpart, triumphantly opens the casket, only for the awesome power of God to destroy him and his Nazi army because of their greed and impiety. The ‘wrath of God’ spares Indy and Marion as they refuse to look upon the ‘true power’ of God. Interestingly, however, the film’s ambiguous open- ended conclusion is problematic with its generic formula; the typically familial resolution, the heteronormative relationship, uncomfortably overrides the suggestion of an incomplete action narrative. The government acquires the Ark, while Indy must be satisfied with Marion’s domestic claims and a heteronormative union.

The third film of the series, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, is more overtly a family romance – heterosexual romance is marginalised in favour of Indy’s recuperation of the father/son relationship. It works in a very similar way to Raiders, with some small but significant differences in its relationship to God, the f/Father and the forbidden sublime. Indy’s initial desire is simply to rescue his kidnapped father, rather than to embark on an archaeological or religious quest. It is only through the recovery of the paternal relationship that Indy discovers the and concurrently rediscovers spiritual/family values. In contrast to Raiders, Indy’s love interest is marginalised and demonised: the traitorous Dr. Elsa Schneider is allied with the Nazis. Indy and his companions traverse the Middle East, striving to claim the Grail before the Nazis can use it for their own ‘evil purposes’. As with the Jaws binary, the evil of the Nazis is defeated by the hand of God, while Indy and his allies are spared, allowing the preservation of the sanctified familial relationship and the recovery of community from the (in this case, global Nazi) demonic. In Crusade, as

51 But what is evil? Žižek suggests that “[e]vil is another name for the ‘death drive’, for the fixation on some Thing that derails our customary life circuit.” And further, that “insofar as we are ‘human’, in a sense we always already have chosen Evil.” Slavoj Žižek, "A Hair of the Dog That Bit You," in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994). P. 49-50. Raiders is structured by the two opposing archaeologists – the good and the bad – but the film makes clear that the two are not so very different, and Indy is frequently marked by the ‘evil’ of Belloq.

180 opposed to Raiders, residual religious and familial anxieties are alleviated. Domesticating women are absent, leaving the father-son family, religion and action in harmony. The friction between the romance/domestic plots and action-adventure narratives is resolved, specifically through the alignment of paternal family values and spiritual illumination. The quest for the Holy Grail is a quest for the f/Father and familial reunification. The family facilitates and validates Indy’s conversion to belief, and conversely the goal of religion becomes the father (as well as the Father). In this film, religion and the family become one, and the conclusion of the film attempts to rewrite uncertainty about Truth, family and f/Father through religious myth.

Spielberg’s reliance upon religious imagery and religious narratives, however, extends beyond these examples and his notable ‘gentle alien’ films, and arguably plays a role in almost all of his films. Such concepts are extremely potent in other films – for example, Temple of Doom, Schindler’s List, Amistad, and Always, and other films evoke tropes of religious and mythic discourses – as demonstrated in the opening analysis of the familial/demonic binary in Jaws. However, as well as Spielberg’s ‘alien messiah’ films – specifically addressed in this chapter through Close Encounters – the Indiana Jones films and The Color Purple are amongst the most explicit examples of the mobilisation of religious metaphor and discourse within popular film, and specifically throughout Spielberg’s representations of the family, suggesting alternative considerations of this manifestation of the familial narrative. So, in Close Encounters, religious imagery effects Roy’s escape from material ‘domesticity’ to the transcendent and divine, but significantly through the imagery of the womb/maternal embrace of the mothership, while The Color Purple mediates between the perverse father and the Father God as salvation; and finally, the two Indiana Jones films substitute this ideal of the Father-God and the sublime through the representation of the paternal figure and the material object. This discussion consequently considers conflicting representations of religion and its supporting imagery and narratives in these four films, and how these discourses are at the intersection of conflicting and supporting tropes of religion, spirituality and the imagery of the family.

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Melodramatic Masculinity in (Domestic) Space – Mashed Potatoes and Spirituality

Spielberg’s most overt narrative that does not locate its sentimental ‘heart’ within paternal familial consolidation, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, significantly, does not even invest in cathartic sadness over the lost family, instead absolving loss through religious imagery. The narrative replaces the idealised family reconciliation with a spiritual fantasy of the alien and space travel – Roy’s Oedipal crisis leads him to the mothership, coded as a return to the original, maternal sense of ‘belonging’, thereby mitigating the film’s representation of social ruin and familial breakdown. Despite Spielberg’s reputation as a fantasist of the suburbs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind initially evokes these sentimental and melodramatic visions of domesticity, only to relish in their destruction and abandonment through the actions of the ostensible hero. Discussion of this film consequently builds considerably on the analysis of the home, domestic imagery and the role of suburbia, addressed in Chapter Two. Roy Neary represents the ‘flipside’ of the feminist gender upheaval of the seventies; rather than concentrating on the discontented housewife, the film imagines Roy’s home and suburbs as a trap for masculinity – an alternative ‘male melodrama’. The film’s use of both the melodrama and science fiction genre also reflects the mediation between Roy’s household banality and the heavenly sublime that structures the narrative and its religious/domestic imagery. The aliens of Close Encounters implant a ‘calling’ into their chosen followers, and the film’s final ascension into the heavens is imbued with heavily religious overtones as Roy transcends the domestic grind and the burdens of family life. Roy’s remarkable escape into space and the very singularity of the alien visitation affectively elides an otherwise problematic abandonment of family and home.

Hugh Ruppersburgh suggests that the phenomenon of the ‘alien messiah’ relates to “the inability to find coherent meaning in the modern world.” Consequently, the “alien messiah serves to resolve these problems, at least imaginatively, to replace despair with hope and purpose, to provide resolution in a world where solution seems impossible.”52 Particularly in Close Encounters (and E.T.), where suburbia and

52 Ruppersburg, "The Alien Messiah in Recent Science Fiction Film." P. 160. 182

domestic life seem all-encompassing, the arrival of the otherworldly alien suggests, as Ruppersburgh argues, the desire to “look beyond the human for salvation… invoke[s] a messiah figure, whose numinous, suprahuman qualities offer solace and inspiration to a humanity threatened by technology and the banality of human life.”53 In the specific case of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the look ‘beyond’ the human toward salvation is a narrative movement away from the family and the anxiety of the home. Spielberg’s narratives and mise-en-scène translate the spaces of the home and the suburbs into narratives apposite to suburban masculine concerns, rewriting such concerns through a more ‘masculine’ template, adopting ‘feminine’ melodramatic tropes. Yet, through this deployment of melodramatic tropes, these representations are fraught with ambivalence and anxieties, which in Close Encounters are structured through a conflict between material domesticity and visions of transcendence, between a suburban mise-en-scène and grandiose special effects.

In Close Encounters, the inherent irresolvable conflict at the heart of the domestic melodrama is literally translated to a /affect, eliding the problematic domestic conflict that the generic resolution (always) struggles to contain.54 In the final scene, Roy stands, face uplifted to the stars, as the lights of the spacecraft dominate the screen. Music overwhelms the scene, and the amassed gathering of people congregate around the glowing space craft, faces all turned towards the deified alien figures as they emerge at the landing site.55 It is, however, important to remember that melodramatic resolution is always contrived; as Linda Williams observes, “one of the key features of melodrama is its compulsion to ‘reconcile the

53 Ibid. P. 160. Ruppersburgh argues that in Close Encounters the aliens “seem quite eager to play the messianic role. And as if to underscore their mission, they choose to carry up into space a man who has lost his family and job struggling to prove that he actually saw them. He is a man searching for meaning, for a faith, which the aliens provide by carrying him aloft.” P.162. Arguably, the term ‘lost’ can be disputed; rather, Roy Neary has actually left his family. In the case of Close Encounters, the family is actually undermined by the search for faith.

54 As Thomas Elsaesser notes of the melodrama, “there seems to be a radical ambiguity attached to the melodrama… [it] would appear to function either subversively or as escapism”. Thomas Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama," in Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishers, 1987). P. 354.

55 While a priest leads the potential space recruits in prayer, this overt representation of religion is actually less important than the images of transcendence and the deification of the aliens.

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irreconcilable’.”56 Hence the explicitly fantasy/action resolutions are a translation of these generic anxieties into their resolution within an alternative genre. Roy’s quasi- religious science fiction sublimation of his family and marital problems (as too the generic melodramatic resolution) obfuscates the domestic conflict through a ‘narrative sleight-of-hand.’57 This ‘sleight of hand’ is empowered by an overwhelming recourse to religious imagery. The numinous blue light glows around him, obscuring his face and the details of the aliens as Roy ascends to the space craft. He raises his arms, Christ-like, transported by the aliens, who have chosen him for his devotion and faith. The camera pulls away from the gathering of onlookers, their faces lifted in reverence, witnessing Roy’s ‘rapture’. As Sobchack points out,

Alien-ated emotional trancendence becomes objectified in the transcendental, loving alien, and the alien-ated experience of ‘rapture’or ‘religious transport’ is narrativized literally – as human beings are ecstatically ‘carried away’ in body and spirit, as ‘religious transport’ is effected by ‘alien transportation.’ Indeed, many critics have pointed… to the religious motifs associated with so many of the mainstream SF films: the arrival of various alien Messiahs, the transcendental nature of special effects that manifest miracles rather than science, the emphasis on faith and love as cure-all.58

Yet the film’s emphasis on ‘love and faith’ is, remarkably for Spielberg, achieved through the excision of the family. ‘Belonging’ is explicitly located outside the home. Although the film is frequently linked to E.T. (what would have happened if one of Close Encounters’ aliens stayed on earth?) the film is also suggestive of Poltergeist, where the home is destroyed and the suburb corrupted. Yet, unlike in Poltergeist, where the family remains intact, Close Encounters visualises the destruction of the family in order for Roy to achieve his heavenly home and his ultimate sense of belonging. This problematic departure from familial sentiment is reflected in the film’s generic conflict between narrative progression, action and spectacle, and the

56 Williams, "Melodrama Revised." P. 75.

57 Tom Lutz, "Men's Tears and the Roles of Melodrama," in Boys Don't Cry?: Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U. S., ed. Milette Shamir and Jennifer Travis (New York, NY: Columbia UP, 2002). P. 199, quoting Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking and the (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981). P. 86.

58 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000). P. 288.

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traditional familial dilemmas of melodrama,59 which are then resolved though religious motifs and affective .

Generically complex, Close Encounters takes melodramatic themes of marital problems, family and the home, and situates them within Roy’s journey to join the UFOs (religiously inflected science fiction); the fear and havoc that the aliens create in their contact with earth’s residents (horror); and the rejection of the family in favour of new frontiers (the western). Although the film explicitly appropriates these genres, the narrative is formally structured by the emotional characterisations and exaggerated frictions within the family. As Linda Williams warns in her appraisal of the melodrama: “the virility of action [should not] fool us into thinking it is not melodramatic.”60 The play with genre expresses a rapprochement between ‘male’ narrative and the traditional female mise-en-scène of the suburbs and domesticity; between action and passivity; between wife Ronnie’s attempts to ‘keep up appearances’ and Roy’s conflict with the military and their attempts to conceal ‘the truth’. This genre slippage expands the melodramatic field in order to interrogate the suburban and the domestic – in particular opening this space to masculine concerns, replacing narratives of motherhood with anxieties about the domestic responsibilities of fatherhood and the often seemingly contradictory tropes of active and individualistic masculinity.

According to the doctrines of ‘male-oriented’ genres such as the western, masculinity, in order to be truly masculine, must assert itself as independent from feminising and domesticating influences, from the realm of the suburban home. Masculine authority is, however, premised on a discourse of ‘the head of the household’. Maintaining authority requires submission to the Law, to the structures of the Symbolic inherent in domesticity, ‘fatherhood’ and family. The domestic is therefore a necessary term for masculine authority in contrast to the tropes of the anti-domestic and independent

59 In general terms, in relation to the action and adventure genre, Yvonne Tasker points out that “what is at issues in the staging of familial and other bonds of loyalty is an insistent and intense opposition between the perils and pleasures of freedom (physical exhilaration; potential isolation) on one hand and responsibility (limits placed on physical activity; the intensity of romantic love or comradeship) on the other.” Yvonne Tasker, "The Family in Action," in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London; New York: Routledge, 2004). P. 254.

60 Williams, "Melodrama Revised." P. 57.

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male. As Beuka pertinently asks, “one wonders about these curious connections between the suburban landscape and a heightened cultural sense of imperilled masculinity.”61 Consequently, the home is a conflicted site of paternal authority and submission, which is why it is the appropriate location for irresolvable melodramatic conflict and gender trouble. Even as Spielberg articulates the tropes of the western and the action/adventure genres, he is also preoccupied with renegotiating domestic space as masculine space – particularly exploring the anxieties of paternal authority. Fathers must prove not only their masculinity, but also their ‘femininity’, their ability to manage the site of fatherhood/parenthood, to assimilate the contradictions of the action narrative and the melodramatic. As Jane Shattuc notes, according to Mulvey, “melodrama is still centrally defined by its method of ‘working certain contradictions through to the surface and representing them in aesthetic form’.”62 How can Roy walk the cramped rooms of his lower middle-class bungalow, and also ‘hit the road’ to journey toward transcendental fulfilment? How can he take his sons to mini-golf yet assert his independence through his ‘religious’ quest? The impossibility inherent in masculine domestic conflict – paternal authority premised within the family, yet an ideal of masculinity structured around individualism – cannot be resolved, and is instead channelled into fantastical narrative closure, to the ‘religious transport’ and the turn to the heavens. The irresolvable conflicts that structure the melodrama of the film, the pleasures and constraints of suburban and familial discourses, are foregrounded in Close Encounters by the seeming spiritual calling to a religious quest.

The melodramatic woman’s film is constituted by Manichean character polarisation, sentimentality and pathos, and also has some significant stylistic features such as, as Christine Gledhill notes, “recourse to gestural, visual and musical excess”.63 Justine and Lesley Johnson-Lloyd, however, note the importance of the juxtaposition of this

61 Robert Beuka, "'Just One Word... Plastics': Suburban Malaise, Masculinity, and the Oedipal Drive," Journal of Popular Film and Television 28, no. 1 (2000). P. 15.

62 Jane Shattuc, "Having a Good Cry over The Color Purple: The Problem of Affect and Imperialism in Feminist Theory," in Melodrama: Stage Picture Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London, England: BFI, 1994). P. 147; quoting Laura Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama”, PP. 75-9 in Christine Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film (London: BFI Publishers, 1987).

63 Gledhill, ed., Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film. P. 30.

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excess of emotional and stylistic affect to the representation of the ‘ordinary’ in the structure of the melodrama:

melodrama works through an opposition between romance and the ordinary, its structure of feeling begins with the material of everyday life and expands and hyperbolises emotions contained within it. This opposition produces the emotional economy of melodrama, and foregrounds its modes of storytelling in everyday life.64

Spielberg relies on these traditional formal, narrative and emotional codes of melodrama and woman’s films, yet in Close Encounters of the Third Kind this ‘romance’ comes foremost through splicing the overt domestic and suburban concerns with the fantastical tropes of science fiction, horror, and westerns. In Close Encounters, “the fantastic unmasks the conventionality of the everyday.”65 The site of heightened emotions and domestic narratives, the claustrophobic suburban home becomes the stage, and ultimately, the point of departure, for Roy’s domestic anxieties. Through such generic fusion, Spielberg reformats the genre to ‘men’s melodrama’, where dramatic ‘resolution’ (of the problematic domestic mise-en-scène) is staged through action or fantasy genre tropes rather than within the domestic. As Mark Gallagher points out, “the Hollywood action film proffers conventional narratives of male mastery but modifies these narratives through reliance on other generic languages, particularly those central to comedy and melodrama.”66 Friedman further argues that

64 Justine and Lesley Johnson Lloyd, "The Three Faces of Eve: The Post-War Housewife, Melodrama and Home," Feminist Media Studies 3, no. 1 (2003). P. 11. Emphasis added.

65 Lynn Spigel, "From Domestic Space to Outer Space: The 1960s Fantastic Family Sit-Com," in Close Encoutners: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Constance Penley, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). P. 291 Spigel is specifically discussing fantasy and science fiction sit-coms.

66 Mark Gallagher, "I Married Rambo: Spectacle and Melodrama in the Hollywood Action Film," in Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharret (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999). P. 200. Gallagher goes on to point out that “[t]he action film’s emphasis on spectacle, rhythm of action, spatial properties, performance and music links the genre to melodrama, both in its narrative structure and its formal properties.” P. 209. This point about the structural similarities of the melodrama and the action film is also made by Martin Fradley, "Maximus Melodramaticus: Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema," in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), Yvonne Tasker, "Introduction: Action and Adventure Cinema," in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

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[a]t first, yoking the melodrama (dominated by women, emotional situations, and domestic issues) with the action/adventure film (dominated by men, physical escapades, and external conflicts) would seem implausible. After all, the action cinema inevitably locates its adventurous hero far from the concerns of everyday life, often in the romanticized past or an exotic location, while melodrama situates its conflicted heroine securely in the mundane world of hearth and home. Yet the two share some tantalizing connections. Extreme physical and violent actions are not inherently antithetical to melodrama: they generate the suffering crucial for strong, empathetic viewer responses.67

‘Resolution’, however, of the conflict between representations of ‘male mastery’ and the confines of the suburban mise-en-scène are, in Close Encounters, only resolved through recourse to overwhelming special affects and their intimations of religious salvation. Religious imagery and effects, in this case, represent the ‘solution’ to the anxieties of Spielberg’s generic splicing of the domestic melodrama with a focus on masculinity through , explorative, action-adventure genre structure of Roy’s journey, and how Spielberg produces his emotional affect.

Laura Mulvey argues that within film, “two functions emerge, one celebrating integration into society though marriage, and the other celebrating resistance to social standards and responsibilities, above all, those of marriage and the family, the sphere represented by women.”68 The ostensible thriller, Duel, is impelled by this resistance to domesticity and the home, and the exploration of the anti-home – the metaphorical ‘jungle’, the site of masculine redemption – as opposed to the confining domestic spaces of the suburbs. Yet, as with all binary constructions, one extreme is reliant on the other to maintain its discursive effect. Duel cannot resolve this crisis; Mann is left static, neither able to venture into the jungle, nor return to the home. On the other hand, Close Encounters turns to the special effects/affects69 of Roy’s quasi-religious transcendence with the alien other from the material domestic conflict of the suburbs, enacting a desired resolution, or sublimation, that Duel cannot represent. This

67 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 64.

68 Laura Mulvey, “Afterthoughts… Inspired by Duel in the Sun”, Framework, 15-17: 1981, P. 18, quoted in Steve Neale, "Masculinty as Spectacle: Reflections on Men and Mainstream Cinema," in Screening the Male: Masculinity in Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark (London and New York: Routledge, 1993). P. 15.

69 See Chapter Four ‘Postfuturism’ in Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film.

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spiritual ascension to the aliens and to the heavenly stars works not only as a domestic escape, but as a return to the maternal body, the mothership. Roy’s turn away from the paternal Symbolic is a dissolution of the detailed domestic mise-en-scène that dominates the film – the glowing lights encompass his body as he makes his way into the ship, before vanishing, effaced from the world.70 Through the intense music, lighting, the reverential gathering which ‘witnesses’ Roy ascension as the chosen one, the domestic and the Oedipal crisis which dominates the film is resolved.

As Close Encounters demonstrates, the cultural and political reliance upon the family as an icon of social cohesion is repeatedly fractured and prone to failure. In Close Encounters, marital problems are expressed through conflict about the division of space in scenes of domestic discontent between husband and wife, which Roy then translates to a movement toward actual space and the dissolutions of boundaries and restrictions, a movement toward new frontiers, a new ‘home’. The constricted spaces of the Neary household, the overlapping dialogue, arguments and domestic squabbles indicate an anxiety about, as Charlene Engel notes,

communication and its limitations, language and its possibilities; and it is about the ineffable things which are beyond speech or imaging – things having to do with emotion and yearning, things touching upon the spiritual and the supernatural… the film is about breaking down barriers – national, linguistic, physical, and bureaucratic – in pursuit of knowledge.71

It is through the (spiritual) transcendence of these barriers and frontiers that the film effects its escape from the melodramatic conflict. Fairchild argues that the film literally becomes a conflict between domestic spaces and the space of the heavens: “suddenly for Neary, suburban space gives way to outer space. There is a way out.”72

70 As Sobchack discusses the science fiction genre, “sublimation seems the dominant strategy of the traditional science fiction film. Libidinal energy is transferred into the creation of wondrous special effects and is displayed and condensed into drama of technological (re)production or grand-scale destruction or both.” Vivian Sobchack, "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange," in The Dread of Difference, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, Texas, 1996). P. 144.

71 Charlene Engel, "Language and the Music of the Spheres: Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Literature/Film Quarterly 24, no. 4 (2002). P. 376.

72 B. H. Fairchild, "An Event Sociologique: Close Encounters," Journal of Popular Film 6, no. 4 (1978). P. 344. Sobchack also notes this switch from “material abundance” and “clutter” to the 189

The movement to the vast, mostly unpopulated plains near the Devil’s Tower, and ultimately to outer space and the embrace of the alien, are predicated upon the gendered and domestic spatial conflict that becomes evident from Roy’s introductory scene. At the beginning of the film, wife Ronnie responds angrily to Roy’s mess having moved onto ‘her’ table in the family living area: “Roy,” she ‘nags’, “what is all this stuff on my table? I thought I told you this was for my stuff. I mean, you can have that table. I don’t want this stuff on my breakfast table.” Over the course of the film, the domestic space is increasingly commandeered by Roy, by his toys, papers and many ‘things’, and later by his obsession with the aliens and his close encounter. Foregrounded in the shot as Ronnie fusses in the background, Roy does not acknowledge Ronnie’s complaint, and continues to read the paper, to play with his toy trains, and inadequately help his son with homework. This ‘alienation’ from his family is completed by his eventual abandonment of the home in his movement away from the material trappings of suburban domesticity. Represented in Roy’s growing conflict between his family and the desired transcendent alien mothership is, as Bronfen observes generally of the ambivalence of the home, that “the difference between the desire for belonging and the knowledge that any real conditions of habitation can never fully fulfil this desire.”73

Roy attempts to completely ‘master’ the home, to transform the inadequate home into a representation of an idealised sense of belonging manifested in his vision of Devil’s Tower. He transports plants, mud and bricks from the outside into his home, corrupting and destroying the sanctity of the (family) room in his search for an escape from the film’s vision of restrictive domesticity.74 Creating his Devil’s Tower sculpture requires a total ‘takeover’ of the domestic space, evoking an assault on this (female) domain. Terrifying his wife, he violently throws a brick through the kitchen

“undeveloped spaces of sky and western landscape.” Sobchack, "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange." P. 158.

73 Elisabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004). P. 79.

74 Murray Pomerance observes this scene, pointing out that as Roy looks out into suburbia, besieged within his home, that he sees “through the masking pretence of the social order… The hero deconstructs the received vision of things – a home, a neighbour, a nice lawn – substituting a vision of things as they are – bricks, mortar, furniture, living beings, more bricks, land.” Murray Pomerance, "The Man-Boys of Steven Spielberg," in Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth, ed. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward, Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television Series (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2005). P. 149. 190

window in his fervour to realise his fantasy of new frontiers and masculine individualism. Roy’s urge to escape the encumbrance of the material is conveyed through this traditionally melodramatic mise-en-scène of clutter, even claustrophobia – Roy must overcome the restrictions of Ronny’s ‘imposed’ domesticity, building his phallic representation of Devil’s Tower75 in the family room and simultaneously expelling the family from the house and conquering domestic territory. As Fairchild notes, Neary “turn[s] his world (his house, his possessions) inside out.”76 As the family move through the house, the filming is cramped by hallways and small bathrooms, parents and children passing each other, and moving through and over and between so much constricting stuff. Close Encounters is an unusual Spielberg example of explicitly foregrounding the anxieties of domesticity that suffuse his films, constructing a claustrophobic family, a home, and a vision of domesticity that must be escaped.77

While domesticity is not ‘bad’, it is the very materiality of Roy’s existence, enhanced by the cluttered mise-en-scène, that emphasises the permanent disjuncture between the actual house/suburbs/wife/children as opposed to the idealised home which offers the promise of the original belonging and the transcendental call of heavenly outer space and the mystical aliens. As Bronfen argues:

insofar as ‘home’ serves as the trope for the desire to achieve an infallible condition of belonging – of being perfectly at one with oneself, one’s community, one’s geographical habitation, one’s culture – failure is always written into the project.78

75 Robert Torry interestingly argues that “[t]he Tower… evokes the role of the paternal phallus in Jacques Lacan’s account of the Oedipal drama, which functions as the signifier of the Oedipal ‘resolution’, of the situating of the subject within the intersubjective realm of language and the displacement of desire from its original object (the mother) onto a realm of substitute objects.” Robert Torry, "Politics and Parousia in Close Encounters of the Third Kind," Literature/Film Quarterly 19, no. 3 (1991). P. 194.

76 Fairchild, "An Event Sociologique: Close Encounters." P. 345. Emphasis in original.

77 As argued, domesticity and the family is always problematic and conflicted – Close Encounters, however, is unique as a Spielberg film for its overt movement away from family and home.

78 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 69.

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This inevitable failure is transcended through Roy’s calling, the religious vocation that strikes him and leads him to the aliens and his final joyous immersion into unlimited space; as Fairchild describes “[m]oving from the closed, limited spaces of the beginning – the world of small rooms, small yards, fences, the shoulders of a narrow highway – to the vastness of the Wyoming countryside and, of course, the eternal depths of the night sky”.79 After conquering domestic space, and carving (sculpting) his domestic independence and his phallic masculine authority,80 Roy Neary literally ascends to the skies, deserting his home and family, a narrative endorsed by the apparitions of the ‘angelic’ aliens. Andrew Gordon suggests that the film

regresses to a primitive or preoedipal stage where the boundaries between reality and fantasy, the animate and the inanimate, mother and child, self and not-self are fluid. This breakdown of boundaries is experienced… as a feeling of oceanic bliss akin to religious ecstasy81.

Roy’s dream of escape to the ‘spaces’ of the mothership is actualised as a dream of immersion into a space that no longer has boundaries, restrictions or repressive demands, an escape from the Symbolic law of the domestic represented by Ronnie and her breakfast table. The final ascension to the stars resolves the film’s preoccupation with irresolvable domestic spatial concerns, and the anxieties ‘entrapment’ and ‘disempowerment’ of masculinity within the home.

In contrast to the privileged sentimental domesticity of E.T and Poltergeist, the suburban family disintegrates in Close Encounters, without any investment in nostalgia and a sense of loss. Roy loses his job, and his dreams become increasingly ‘alien’ to his family’s more material needs and expectations. As Nigel Morris argues, “[h]e drifts… from unsatisfactory suburban existence (collapsed marriage, unemployment) into fantasy, his sustaining object of desire.”82 The more that Roy’s

79 Fairchild, "An Event Sociologique: Close Encounters." P. 344.

80 Note that while Gillian too is preoccupied by the vision of Devil’s Tower, her artistic impressions remain two-dimensional drawings, rather than the man-sized sculpture that Roy creates.

81 Andrew Gordon, Empire of Dreams: The Science Fiction and Fantasy Films of Steven Spielberg (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008). P. 61.

82 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 14. 192

family life dissolves and the house closes (implodes?) in on him, the more the film invests in his growing vocation of spiritual/religious ascension to the stars. Roy frantically sculpts another Devil’s Tower from his mashed potatoes, while murmuring ‘this means something’, a meaning he frustratingly cannot communicate to himself or his family. Tightly framed by the family around the kitchen table in this scene, the elevation of the prosaic suburban mashed potatoes to the level of the spiritual – a sculpted representation of his religious calling – is both a representation of his spiritual calling, but also a comment on the failure of domesticity. John C. Lyden comments that the “infinite cannot be filmed, but the finite can be… it will express its true longing, in all its misery and imperfection, for the infinite.”83 Roy repeatedly attempts to re-form his material environment – from the potatoes, to shaving cream, to finally the home itself – into the image of the ineffable. But manifesting such a vision within the confines of the suburban house is impossible – the ‘infinite cannot be filmed’.84

Roy destroys the material (and therefore imperfect) object of desire, his family and his home, in order to facilitate his search for a better home, the perfect ‘space’ of immersion within the new deified family, the mothership that transcends the bounds of the earthly suburb, his ‘nagging’ wife, disrespectful children and dissatisfying job. In a sense, similar to that of David’s final embrace with his mother and rejection of the Symbolic, Roy’s “voyage is … a kind of symbolic suicide.”85 Looking beyond the overt narrative of Roy’s ‘spiritual’ ascendance to the skies with the alien visitors, the film is an allegory of divorce and unemployment, betraying the fragility and the ‘alienation’ (an alienation particularly associated with a masculinity entrapped by

83 Lyden, Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals. P. 26.

84 The juxtaposition between the ineffable and the prosaic mashed potatoes at the dinner table is characteristic of the melodrama, which is “iconographically fixed by the claustrophobic atmosphere of the bourgeois home… reinforced stylistically by a complex handling of space in interiors… to the point where the world seems totally predetermined… This marks another recurrent feature… that of desire focusing on the unattainable object.” Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama." P. 372. Particularly relevant to Roy’s struggle between his domestic life and his ‘close encounters’, Gallagher also observes that the melodrama “operates according to social norms, but it exaggerates social conventions to expose the artifice and limitations of prevailing codes of behaviour.” Gallagher, "I Married Rambo: Spectacle and Melodrama in the Hollywood Action Film." P. 211.

85 Ryan Gilbey, It Don't Worry Me: The Revolutionary American Films of the Seventies (New York: Faber and Faber Inc., 2003). P. 87.

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domesticity duties and fatherhood) that characterises the treasured dream of the suburban family. Close Encounters imagines a fantasy whereby the burdens of fatherhood are transcended through the vision of the alien mothership and space frontiers which supersede the preceding familial anxieties. Roy navigates a fantasy escape from the claustrophobic, inhibiting family to the ‘maternal body’, to stasis and a rejection of the future, an inversion of Peter Banning’s final rejection of his inner Hook.86 As Robert Torry points out, “[j]ust as the alien interventions initially seem threatening… Neary’s estrangement from his family evokes at first a sense of loss and danger which is transformed, in the final sequence, into a revelation of ultimate recuperation and achieved plenitude.”87 The Nearys’ suburban life dissolves and material anxieties are sublimated into powerful spiritual tropes, soaring music, blinding lights, from which Roy emerges as the chosen one. He becomes a child once again through his religious ‘conversion’, placing his trust and his future in his new-found omniscient deities that transport him to a new, heavenly home. As Sobchack observes of Close Encounters,

It initiates a new iconography of beatific human wonder, editorially linking affect to effect. Heads tilted, eyes gazing upward with childish openness and unfearful expectancy – this is the human face of transcendence whose emotion is enacted by what it sees… The alien carousel of a spaceship is not built on principles of economy and rationality, but as a material apotheosis of good feeling, and its presence euphorically fulfils and objectively resolves Roy Neary’s intense and incompatible desire both to regain his lost patriarchal power and become a born again child.88

The anxieties of home, belonging and suburbia are negotiated through Roy’s domestic breakdown and transcendence, and are effected through melodramatic conventions and religious imagery; yet this transcendence, and the shift to the action/science fiction genre, leaves traces of its original trauma in the static conventions of the

86 Sobchack suggests that in the science fiction films, “there is no resolution of patriarchal crisis that is not patently fantastic – and no fantastic resolution that does not annihilate any real imagination of the future in its nostalgic retreat to outer space and other time of an impossible past. … symbolically enact[ing] the death of the future.” Sobchack, "Bringing It All Back Home: Family Economy and Generic Exchange." P. 159.

87 Torry, "Politics and Parousia in Close Encounters of the Third Kind." P. 194.

88 Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film. P. 284.

194 melodrama and its constrictive mise-en-scène.89 As Roy ascends to the stars, leaving behind all his worldly concerns, his romantic companion, Jillian, like Ronnie, is left behind, holding the c/Child. Domestic anxieties, however, cannot be completely elided from the film, despite its powerful special effect/affect of religious translation to the heavens.

The Color Purple and the Shadow of Incest – Obscene Fathers and Father-Gods

As opposed to Close Encounters’ displacement of the family in favour of Roy’s spiritual (albeit still Oedipally familial) assent, Spielberg’s The Color Purple is preoccupied with alternative visions of the father and the family under the (proper) father, the Father God. While the film was criticised for its representation of African- American fathers,90 these obscene or even ‘absent’ representations conversely articulate a return to the ‘proper’ family and father – culturally, biologically and religiously. This movement toward a paternal familial discourse is facilitated by the alignment of the good father with the proper Father-God, animating interdependent discourses of God the Father and the deified father that stem from imagery of the Happy Holy Family. The narrative structures a turn from the abusive and incestuous

89 The soaring music of the finale’s special effects arguably continue the melodrama tradition, which can almost be defined by its emotive use of music, as described by Elsaesser, “[c]onsidered as an expressive code, melodrama might therefore be described as a particular form of dramatic mise-en- scène, characterized by a dynamic use of spatial and musical categories, as opposed to intellectual or literary ones.” Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama." P. 359.

90 Significantly, the family in The Color Purple is a black family, as opposed to the generally normative representation of white families in Spielberg and much of popular culture. A black women’s story, and negative depictions of black masculinity, problematically directed by a white man, is the focus of some important and insightful work. See, for example, Cheryl B. Butler, "The Color Purple Controversy: Black Woman Spectatorship," Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice 13, no. 3-4 (1991), Gerald Early, "The Color Purple as Everybody's Protest Art," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002), Jill Terry, "The Same River Twice: Signifying The Color Purple," Critical Survey 12, no. 3 (2000). Jacqueline Bobo has produced some interesting reception studies, considering both the controversial critical reception of the film, as well as interviewing black female viewers about their specific responses to the film. See Jacqueline Bobo, "Reading through the Text: The Black Woman as Audience," in Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (London: Routledge, 1993), Jacqueline Bobo, "Sifting through the Controversy: Reading The Color Purple," Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 12, no. 2 (39) (1989), Jacqueline Bobo, "The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers," in The Audience Studies Reader, ed. Will Brooker and Deborah Jermyn (London, England: Routledge, 2003). There is also a problematic class dimension to The Color Purple, as well as to the debates surrounding the representation of the black family; this important area of scholarship, however, is not the focus of this discussion, which instead examines the film’s representation of fathers in terms ofpowerful (Judeo-Christian) religious discourse.

195 father through the redemption of deviance and the reunion of the family, a reunion which is empowered through strongly sentimental and affective film techniques and recourse to religious metaphors. Rather than ‘opening’ the idea of the traditional family, The Color Purple instead reverts to such discourse, predominantly through affective and sentimental imagery privileging familial, paternal and religious reunion.

The deviant core of The Color Purple is Shug, a bisexual nightclub singer, sexually involved with both Celie and Celie’s husband, Mister.91 The free-spirited Shug is, however, haunted by her alienation from her father, her family and her Church. Shug is notably estranged from her preacher-father (a significant film addition not present in the original novel) and her final affective reunion with the f/Father figure is naturalised and sentimentalised through visual motifs and powerful music.92 This return is intimated during her introduction into the narrative. Although Shug is a powerful and sexually independent woman, she is also characterised as a lost and abandoned child in need of nurturance, most particularly paternal care. She arrives at Mister’s door, unwell and disoriented, and snaps angrily at Mister’s attempts to help: “You crazy? I don’t need no weak little boy can’t say no to his daddy hanging on me. I need me a man! You hear! A man!” While the film revels in her deviance and commanding sexuality, Shug is also constructed by her problematic relationship to, and desire for, paternal authority and the ‘proper’ family, which is represented

91 The lesbian subtext is subtle in contrast to the novel. However, despite strong criticism, the lesbian reading still exists, although reduced to a chaste kiss and the classic Hollywood (and Spielbergian) cut away from the depiction of sex. However, while Shug’s sexual relationships with men are narratively foregrounded over the implied relationship with Celie, their emotional relationship is still a central concern of the film. For a discussion of the representation of lesbianism in the film, as well as the novel, see María Frías, "The Walker-Spielberg Tandem and Lesbianism in The Color Purple: '[Spielberg] Don't Like It Dirty'," BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies 9 (1998), Jan Whitt, "What Happened to Celie and Idgie? 'Apparitional Lesbians' in American Film," Studies in Popular Culture 27, no. 3 (2005). Frías argues that “[w]hile Walker’s lesbian story is transgressive, subversive, and full of explicit lesbian connotations, Spielberg’s adaptation trivializes lesbian desire, denies its visibility, and marginalizes its protagonism by providing an excessively chaste reading. In other words, Shug’s and Celie’s complex homoerotic story is reduced to a single ambiguous scene that avoids any explicit lesbian suggestion.” P. 53-4. Frías does, however, acknowledge the effect of industry and the desire to produce a popularly acceptable and profitable film, that, in 1985, most likely precluded explicit lesbianism. P. 54.

92 Significantly, Shug’s father was not a part of the original Alice Walker novel, and was only included in the adaptation to the screen. Critical analysis has been done on the translation of book to film, and on Spielberg’s many failings in this regard. This particular analysis, however, will analyse the film as an independent text. For a discussion of the translation from novel to film, see Joan Digby, "From Walker to Spielberg: Transformations of The Color Purple," in Novel Images: Literature in Performance, ed. Peter Reynolds (London: Routledge, 1993).

196 significantly through her preacher father, manifesting the film’s use of the paternal Father-God metaphor. In their first bonding sequence, the enamoured Celie shyly asks Shug if she has any children. This is an intimate scene, Shug relaxes in the bathtub as Celie looks after her, washing and brushing her hair, but this mise-en-scène of female closeness is alternatively structured by Shug’s relationship to men and fathers. She responds, “yeah. They with my ma and pa. [she looks sad] never knowed a child to come out right unless there’s a man around. Children gots to have a pa. Your pa love you? My pa love me [she states proudly] my pa still love me, except he don’t know it. He don’t know it…” She trails off and starts to cry. As Shug’s introductory scene, her authority over the submissive Mister and her sexual performances and command over her audiences are paralleled to her sorrow about her absent preacher father, and the resulting powerlessness this evokes. This desire for paternal authority sets up one of the film’s narrative strands: the idea of the prodigal child – she has been lost to her family, to her father, to respectable society, to God. Can she be found? After Shug’s initial lesbian turn toward Celie with her radical attitude toward sexuality, family and God, Shug returns to men, husbands, fathers, the church and The Father, emotively visualised in the film’s penultimate scene.

While the film is primarily structured through the domestically abused Celie’s point of view, Shug is the continual point of return for the fascinated Celie. As Celie wonders “what life like for her, and why sometimes she get so sad? So sad, just like me”, the camera follows Shug, modestly dressed, walking down the road. The film cuts to a man sweeping the floor of the church, singing hymns, and then pans to include Shug silhouetted in the doorway. The singing stops, but the sweeping continues. Shug hesitantly starts talking, “How you been? … I been sick, maybe you heard. But I feels better now. I been staying with Albert and Celie.” The man still ignores her, but seats himself with cold expression, foregrounded in the shot, while Shug stands behind, excluded on the edge of the frame. She continues, “Place brings back memories. I used to stand right over there, watching you. Best preacher in the world. The way you’d make your voice rise and fall when you turned a phrase.” There is then a cut to a centring shot of Shug, as she implores her father, “the way you looked in your blue suit. Girls cutting their eyes at you, something to see.” The cut to his hunched back, adamantly refusing to acknowledge her, adds considerable poignancy to the scene, while Shug is framed solitary and isolated in the church. In a 197 moment foretelling the film’s later paternal and religious reunion, Shug conflates her father and her God, as she continues to remember her childhood, and her memories of the paternal deity: “You’d smile at us and say: ‘ladies, God is trying to tell you something, if you please.’ And we sang, sang our hearts out.” But her father does not respond, instead he stands up and walks away. Shug acknowledges: “It’s alright. I know you can’t say nothing to me anymore because things are so different. Just thought I’d stop and say hello.” Her father closes the door without having said a word to his daughter, and the film cuts to Shug closing the church door behind her. This cut to Shug establishes her emotional trajectory throughout the film, from deviant to repentant prodigal child, embraced by her preacher father and the swelling religious song of the church choir. The sequence also constructs the parallels between Celie’s and Shug’s sorrow: Shug is sad ‘just like me’, due to her conflicted relationship with the paternal figure, which both narrative strands move to resolve.

Shug’s continual movement throughout the film is toward respectability, always constructed in terms of her problematic relationship to her f/Father and the church. In one scene, Shug goes to collect the mail, even though Celie tells her to wait for Mister. As she stands by the mail box, her preacher father drives past, and Shug desperately rushes up crying, “I’s married now”, flashing her wedding ring, only to be ignored. However, significantly, this is the point when Shug discovers the letters to Celie from her lost sister, Nettie. The broken father-daughter situation catalyses the reunion of the sisters, as well as the film’s final paternal redemption which structures not just Shug’s narrative, but Celie’s, and the familial completeness that absorbs the film’s trajectory. In a visually powerful long shot, Celie and Shug wade through a field of purple flowers, recalling an image of Celie and her beloved sister playing together, a prelapsarian image before incest and the obscene father fractured the family. In an oblique reference to this prior scene, the discuss love, and longing, and God. Shug, her voice clear in voice over, states, “More than anything, God love admiration… I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.” Celie asks in response, “Are you saying it just wanna be loved like it say in the bible?” Shug tellingly answers, “yeah, Celie, everything wanna be loved. Us sing and dance and holler, just trying to be loved.” In the context of Shug’s repeated efforts to repair her fractured relationship with her father, this conversation, explicitly about love and God, conflates Shug’s ‘singing and 198

dancing and hollering’ for the love of God to that of her earlier wistful attempts to attract her father’s attention. As Carol Dole explains,

the effect of the scene is not to explore Celie’s changing conception of God… but to emphasize Shug’s longing for her father. Shug’s explanation in the novel that God/everything ‘want to be loved’ is placed in a context in the film that suggests that the discontented Shug is really speaking of her own desire to be loved by her godly father.93

Dole also points out that “the conversation about God takes place while the women cross a field of flowers so relentlessly lavender that the mise en scene overwhelms the dialogue.” This mise-en-scène of lush purple links the conceptualisation of God to images of familial union – both of Celie’s and Nettie’s prelapsarian familial experiences, but also the future reunion of Shug and her ‘godly father’, a visual elision of God, Father, and family. This elision is further reinforced in the subsequent scene, where through ‘singing and dancing and hollering’ Shug finally returns to her father, mid-sermon, in order to elicit his love and forgiveness. Dole notes that “[i]n finally embracing her father, the film’s Shug is simultaneously embracing ‘the representation of the Christian white father-God explicitly repudiated’ in Walker’s novel.”94

Shug’s reunion with her ‘lost father’ is an emotive and highly sentimentalised sequence animated by the film’s evocation of the ‘prodigal child’ narrative, and through the melodramatically affective assimilation of Shug’s jazz to the gospel choir.95 The movement of Shug from her embrace of ‘sisterhood’ toward the f/Father is structured through opposing religious motifs. Significantly, as argued by Miguel Bassols and Germán L. Garcia et al., “sin itself… must carry the shadow of the divine; it must carry a negative ‘numinous value’ indicating a plus somewhere else.”96

93 Carol M. Dole, "The Return of the Father in Spielberg's The Color Purple," Literature Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1996). P. 15.

94 Ibid. P. 15, quoting Molly Hite, The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1989). P. 115.

95 The gospel choir as an aspect of African American church-going practices is important in this scene in the sense of its powerful imagery and sound, which further emphasises Shug’s assimilation into the church and her reunion with her father.

96 Bassols, Garcia, and with E. Berenguer, "On Blasphemy: Religion and Psychological Structure." P. 194. 199

The film is framed by such a dynamic of sin and redemption, the juke joint singing that blends into the Church choir. This scene begins with Mister sitting on his balcony, with the remote strains of Shug’s ‘Sister’ song (an ode to Celie) in the background. The film then cuts to the church, where Shug’s father is attempting to preach, despite the distant interference of the juke joint’s sinful Sunday revelry. The gospel choir begins singing in order to regain the worshippers’ attention and the film then inititates a montage between the juke joint and the church. Eventually Shug, distressed by the church choir’s intrusion into the juke joint, ceases singing her sensual tribute to Celie and their ‘sisterhood’. Yet she regains her joy in singing as she joins her voice with the choir, and leads her own sinful ‘congregation’ to the church. The montage is structured by the preaching of the minister/Father: “all of us been prodigal children one time or another! And I tell you children its possible for the lord to drive you home”. As Carol Dole comments, “however dissonant it may be, this extravaganza accomplishes two important functions: it masks the lack of narrative logic for the sudden reconciliation of father and daughter, and it provides an emotional uplift to ratify the importance of patriarchy.”97 The thematic juxtaposition between the church and the juke joint, between the saved and the sinners, is consolidated through the expressive and sentimental authority evoked by the church choir: “speak lord, speak to me. I was so blind, I was so low, until you spoke to me. Well maybe God is trying to tell you something.” The singing of this verse continues until Shug is standing before her father, singing gospel directly to him, a powerful image of the conflation of the father and God the Father.

Despite the suggestions of a radical restructuring of the familial dynamic through Celie’s rebellion against the repressive Mister, Shug, as the film’s deviant character,

97 Dole, "The Return of the Father in Spielberg's The Color Purple." P. 14. Dole goes on to note the significant ideological difference between film and novel; “[t]his same scene [of father-daughter reconciliation] accomplishes a second goal as well: to defuse the novel’s potentially controversial rejection of traditional Christianity. Celie’s denial of God in the novel – a denial based on her realization that ‘the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgiful and lowdown’ – might be explained away as a natural result of her anger at men. But Shug’s feminist and pantheistic religion, to which Celie is converted, is more potentially troubling to a resolutely Judeo-Christian culture. In rejecting the biblical ‘old white man’ image of God, and the Bible along with it, Shug directly challenges both white and male hegemony and traditional Christianity. She also scorns religious ritual, asking Celie, ‘Have you ever found God in church? I never did’.” P. 15. Referencing Alice Walker, The Color Purple, (New York: Pocket Books, 1985). P. 201-2.

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moves into a conventional heterosexual marriage and returns to the embrace of the father. Shug’s apology for her ‘sins’ to her father are poignantly mediated by the evocation of the potent narrative of the prodigal child, and the rousing African American gospel as the juke joint crowd join their voices with the singers from the church. Shug’s (implicit) lesbian love song to Celie becomes assimilated into a hymn to both her father and the Father. And paralleled to Shug’s return to the church and the embrace of the f/Father is Celie’s triumphant independence from the abusive Mister and the reclamation of her children and her biological identity. These interdependent narratives subsequently privilege a certain form of fatherhood (the forgiving Preacher Father), even as it rejects the Obscene Father represented by Mister. The binary of obscene father opposed to the proper father permits and endorses a religiously sanctified version of paternity in contrast to the narrative’s dominating imagery of violent paternal figures who victimise Celie.

Imagery of the happy Holy Family is recovered through the film’s sentimental emphasis on the prodigal child motif, foregrounding the hierarchical structures of children faithful to the (paternal) God that structures the film’s narratives. Shug’s return to the paternal preacher’s embrace is paralleled through the return of Adam and Olivia to their mother Celie, and to the original family home. Significantly, through the contrivances of melodrama, Celie’s children, although taken to Africa, had never strayed too far from family; Nettie joins the children’s adoptive parents, missionaries, Corrine and Samuel, and as she describes it in one of her letters, they are “sanctified religious and very good to me.” And as she continues to inform Celie,

their children sent by God are your children, and they are being brought up in love. And now God has sent me to watch over them, to protect and cherish them, to lavish all the love I feel for you on them. It’s a miracle isn’t it? And no doubt impossible for you to believe. Olivia and Adam are with me, all growing up together, a family…

The final scene facilitates the eventual reunion between the sisters and the lost children, validating the happy Holy Family, now possible through melodramatic resolution. Shug is reunited with the proper Father and sutured into the religious discourse of the child under the paternal God, while the bad father (Mister) is expelled from the proper family. What makes this excision of the Bad Father significant is the

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narrative’s last-minute revelation that Celie’s incestuous father was only her step- father, a discovery that redeems the status of the father and saves the family from incest: Celie narrates, “My children – not my sister and brother. Pa – not Pa.” The Obscene Father is cast out and Celie learns that her own children are not the products of incest, redeeming the family from violation by the greatest taboo.

The initial representation of the ‘family’ home as cold, dark, and a place of pain and loss is transformed in this final scene to its representation as a place of intense sentiment. The final soaring long shots of the colourful reunion of Celie with her lost sister, and now grown children, brightly attired in vibrant ‘African’ clothing, are visualised through wide-angle images of the fields and lush afternoon light. The film explicitly excludes Mister from this moment – he observes from afar, but is not included in the scene. The film’s narrative moves towards the proper f/Father through Shug’s embrace of religion and (familial) moral codes, and the deus ex machina discovery that the incestuous (step) father is not the real f/Father. Celie’s narrative of independence from her abusive family, both the violent Mister and the incestuous father, allows the final representation of the Happy Holy (and non-incestuous) family. Salvation from incest permits an untainted future, both culturally through Shug’s religious salvation and biologically through Celie’s redemption from a corrupted family geneology.98

A Radio to God? Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: Postmodernism, Religious Nostalgia and the (Impossible) Father-God

While the parodic nature of Indiana Jones and his B-film adventures and the serious representations of religion, spirituality, God and the family appear to be categorically opposed, these Spielberg adventure films cohere around a remarkably stable set of religious tropes in relation to the family. The Indiana Jones films consistently ask not to be taken seriously, self-consciously evoking stereotypical characters and apparent McGuffin props to trigger special effects, action narratives and comedic one-liners.

98 Through the family’s connection toAfrica, Spielberg grounds the nation (the US) in prehistory via Africa – a discourse that is also relevant to Amistad, discussed in Chapter Four. With the return of Celie’s children, the conflict between the African Americans and the Africans are resolved by Nettie’s reintegration into her biological and national families.

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Yet the appeal of the films is structured around familiar characters and their relationships to traditional Western religious icons and discourses, discourses that cannot be dismissed as simply amusing postmodern pastiche. Scenes centered upon the unique significance of particular artefacts in Raiders and Crusade catalyse familiar, predominantly religious, symbols and narratives which articulate the films’ discourses of patriarchal/religious familial traditions. Mircea Eliade argues that seemingly archaic religious archetypes are still relevant in a modern secular culture as religious narratives and symbols; while they are not consciously recognised or fully understood, they still impart connotations and messages, recognisable to what Jameson would term, society’s ‘political unconscious.’ Eliade argues that “even the most desacralised existence still preserves traces of a religious valorisation of the world.”99 Historic and religious symbols such as the Ark in Raiders and the Grail in Crusade draw upon these ‘traces’ of religion that suffuse Western cultural narratives and history. Religious iconography is a potent ideological tool, both structurally and affectively throughout the films. While the Ark and the Grail are deployed self- referentially and ironically, the religious and cultural investment in such iconic artefacts still lends the narrative greater force, in tandem with the filmic apotheosis of Indy developed through his characterisation in relation to the paternal and heteronormative family. Powerful images from religious mythology lead to assumptions of ‘divine right’, and sustain interdependent discourses of family and patriarchy. Such structures are empowered by the ideologies already intrinsic to such religious tropes as well as the narrative impetus of the films.

The mytho-religious narratives of Raiders and Crusade are also significant to an understanding of the debates surrounding our time’s sense of history and the much- feared ‘postmodern’ deconstruction of traditional family, religion and mythology. The influence of such debates within film and political culture manifests a desire for an established meta-narrative of History and Religion, a narrative affirming Truth, while the films paradoxically also display a preoccupation with postmodern aesthetics and play. The resultant quasi-mythological and highly religious narratives of American empowerment resonate with the films’ (postmodern) nostalgia for ‘nineteen thirties feel’ imperialism. Jameson notes that the postmodern practice of pastiche is

99 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. P. 23.

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often accompanied by a nostalgia for the ‘past’ as “the lost object of desire”.100 The obvious stylistic debt the Indiana Jones films owe to its B-movie sources exemplifies contemporary postmodern influences and a concurrent nostalgia for the image and ‘feeling of pastness’, a desire for ‘lost authenticity’, which is where religious discourse intervenes.

Significantly, in Raiders, the Judeo-Christian artefact of the Ark is explicitly linked to the power (the word) of God, as opposed to the South American fertility idol that is coveted at the beginning of the film.101 This ‘tribal’ artefact merely evokes the ‘superstitions’ of a ‘primitive’ people, and is easily dismissed after the initial sequence; the Ark, on the other hand, is explicitly deemed by Indy’s colleague Brody, to be “like nothing [Indy’s] ever gone after before.” While Jonathan Rosenbaum claims that “[t]he Ark itself is a McGuffin prop”,102 suggesting that the Ark is a simple plot device with little intrinsic meaning, it can alternatively be argued that the narrative invests considerable significance in the Ark. It is not merely the film’s ‘McGuffin prop’ that catalyses the action, but is revealed as a religious artefact/weapon of tremendous power in its own right,103 or more accurately, as a trace of God the Father in the profane world.

The religious narrative of the film is instrumental in empowering the familial imagery that is vital to the film’s narrative momentum and emotional logic. Indy’s quasi- girlfriend, Marion, is repeatedly linked to domesticity and to the ties of the family. Significantly, she is the daughter of Indy’s now deceased mentor/father figure, Abner

100 Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," New Left Review 146 (1984). PP. 66-7.

101 For a thorough discussion of the problematic imperial discourses inherent to the films’ depictions of ‘western acquisitiveness’ in the developing world, see Mark Moss, "Indiana Jones and the Museums of Imperialism," Popular Culture Review 12, no. 2 (2001).

102 Jonathon Rosenbaum, "Raiders of the Lost Ark," in Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). P. 220.

103 Andrew Gordon, "Science-Fiction and Fantasy Film Criticism: The Case of Lucas and Spielberg," Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2, no. 2 (1989). P. 121 In addition, Lane Roth describes the “Ark [as] a manifestation of the sacred.” Lane Roth, "Raiders of the Lost Archetype: The Quest and the Shadow," Studies in the Humanities 10, no. 1 (1983). P. 17. The term ‘MacGuffin’ was used by to describe the ‘arbitrary’ object that impelled the narrative through the characters’ desires to attain it.

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Ravenwood, the powerful dead f/Father whose obsession had been recovery of the Ark, an obsession now passed on to Indy via the daughter. Indy’s quest is both that of the ‘father’ as well as that of the Father/God/Ark. As Andrew Gordon notes, “the dual quest of Indiana Jones – for the Ark and for his old love Marian Ravenwood – can be understood on one level as an oedipal quest which enacts ambivalent desires both to rebel against the father and to be reconciled with him.”104 The paternal relationship between Indy and Ravenwood deteriorated due to Indy’s seduction of the then teenaged Marion, an act that symbolically killed the father. Consequently, the return to the Ark quest is a return to and an absolution of this primal moment, recovering the father through the icon that represents the authority of the Father-God role. The Ark is the chalice that contained the Ten Commandments, the written word of the Laws of God, the ultimate f/Father. As Gordon continues, “[t]he Ark is connected with… the father (Abner Ravenwood, Moses, the Ten Commandments, the power of God…)”.105 In rescuing the Ark and Marion from the hands of evil (the Nazis), Indy completes this quest of the ‘father’, and achieves a return to the proper paternal relationship.

Further, throughout most of the film, Marion is equated to the Ark (the Law of the Father) and to the lost f/Father. Indy’s and the film’s confusion between the Ark and Marion is clearly demonstrated when Indy, moments after discovering the location of the elusive Ark, finds Marion, tied up in a tent at the Egyptian dig site. His first instincts to rescue her, as any proper hero would, are tempered by thoughts of the Ark. He re-gags Marion, and leaves her to the mercies of her kidnappers. As Indy uncovers the Ark, the film cuts to Marion and her abductor, maintaining the equation between the girl and the sacred object. Indy’s attempted acquisition of the Ark is intercut by Belloq’s (Indy’s ‘dark shadow’ and nemesis106) attempted seduction of Marion. Belloq dresses Marion in a pretty dress, lustfully watching her in the mirror,

104 Andrew Gordon, "Raiders of the Lost Ark: Totem and Taboo," Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 32, no. 3 (1991). P. 257.

105 Ibid. P. 264.

106 Frank Tomasulo argues that “Belloq serves a dual role: he is both Bad father and the Doppelgänger. As a bad father, his initial dialogue with our hero exemplifies the position of power (especially with regard to the Mother) noted by Freud in the family romance: ‘Again we see there is nothing you possess which I cannot take away’.” Frank P. Tomasulo, "Mr. Jones Goes to Washington: Myth and Religion in Raiders of the Lost Ark," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 7 (1982). P. 333.

205 and tries to get her drunk in order to seduce her. Edited into these scenes, Indy reverentially caresses the Ark while wiping away the dust and lifting it from its dusty tomb. Indy’s possession of the Ark is thwarted at the last second, and Belloq fails to seduce Marion. Yet, as Belloq finally claims the long awaited Ark, he loses Marion as the Nazis throw her into the Well of Souls with Indy. The montage between the two men as they approach the object of their desire explicitly expresses the equivalence constructed between Marion and the Ark – one repeatedly stands in for another as the primal object of the father’s quest and the Father-God. Supplementing the authority of the (now dead) father with the always-authority of God (and his written Law, entombed within the Ark) evokes the ‘lost innocence’ of childhood, when mere fathers were omnipotent Gods. Raiders allows Indy to re-establish a proper relation to both the violated daughter, and the disrespected f/Father, through the mutual rescue of Marion and the Ark from the bad father, Belloq.

Both Indy films under discussion here reveal a preoccupation with passing the woman between father and son/Father and Son; the patriarchal exchange of the woman reinforces the bond between the men. In Raiders, this movement bolsters the religious authority assumed by the transfer of the Ark into the rightful hands of the son, Indy. Likewise, Marion is passed from father Ravenwood to Indy. Rightful possession of the religious artefact is paralleled by the romance narrative and generic union of the heteronormative couple, underpinned by the structures of the patriarchal family. Although the next two films, Temple and Crusade, ignore the Ravenwood plotline, the recent fourth film, Crystal Skull, continues this unresolved narrative, belying the series’ episodic B-movie origins, by returning Marion to Indy, while he is fully ensconced as a family man with the discovery of their son. This cross-film story-line ensures that the over-arching narrative supports the family structure – a conclusion to the narrative that commenced with the son’s assumption of the father’s obsession with the paternal word of the Father God.

The ‘parent as God’ dynamic is a powerful, formative theme, emergent from familial and religious cultural traditions. Through religion, the lost omnipotence of the childhood father is replaced with God as Father, who in such religious discourse will always be omnipotent over his ‘always children’. This replacement of the ‘lost’ authoritative father with a transcendental God and the Law of the Father is powerfully 206

nostalgic. Indy’s preoccupation with completing the unfinished quests of his father (figures) is bound up with symbols of the lost father/God’s continued omnipotence. The powerful religious significance of the Ark as the Law of God signifies this continual, deified (and reified) authority within the film.107 In one striking image in Raiders, as Indy and his hired local labourers covertly dig up the lost city of Tanis in search of the Ark, lightening cracks in the background, silhouetting Indy looming authoritatively above his workers. Such images recall descriptions of the Ark’s power, “lightening, fire, power of God, etc,” explicitly connecting Indy with the divine word of God and sanctioning his power.

Problematic conflict, however, between these action narratives and the romantic heteronormative narrative of familial and social assimilation is foregrounded at the conclusion of Raiders. While women are necessary to define and maintain patriarchal authority, this masculinity is characterised by individualism and independence (particularly independence from women and domesticity). As compared to the subsequent films in the series, Raiders’ ‘resolution’ is markedly conflicted between its heteronormative resolution and the film’s predominant adventure quest. Much to Indy’s discomfort and anxiety at the conclusion of the film, the Ark is given into the dubious safe keeping of the US army, and in so doing, the film disrupts the convergence of the romance plot and the action plot. While the majority of the film aligns Marion and the Ark and merges the quest for the religious object with that for the romantic object, Raiders’ conclusion undermines this dual narrative process by splitting the two in the final scene.

After surviving the blast (from God) that wipes out the Nazis, Marion and Indy clutch at each other in relief. The image then shifts to frame in the foreground, as the Ark glows golden in the background. Marion and the Ark are finally in the same shot, but the luminous Ark dominates the image. In the next shot, Indy disputes the confiscation of the Ark by government authority: “the money’s fine – the situation is totally unacceptable.” The bureaucrat stresses, however, that “the Ark is somewhere

107 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull also works in this manner – Mutt becomes involved in the final quest of his father figure that leads him to his real father, Indy. The quest takes both Mutt and Indy to the proper paternal relationship, as well as to a position of proper distance from transcendental knowledge incarnate in the alien Crystal Skulls, a proper distance that villain, Irina Spalko, like Belloq before her, does not respect.

207 very safe.” The camera circles around the table, until it hovers over Indy’s shoulder, granting authority to his point of view, as the bureaucrat emphasises that “top men” are now researching the Ark. Indy stalks away from the encounter, not pausing for the waiting Marion. She chases after him, as he mutters: “fools, bureaucratic fools, they don’t know what they’ve got there.” Marion smiles up at Indy, not concerned by the loss of the Ark: “Well, I know what I’ve got here.” Reluctantly, Indy offers Marion his arm as they walk away, but does not look at her again; instead, he purses his lips and looks over his shoulder, hesitant to leave the Ark with the government. While the music swells with the apparent resolution, this film only offers a romantic resolution and an unsatisfactory resolution to the adventure. Domesticity with Marion beckons Indy, but she no longer represents the Ark and the sexualised adventure quest, and is consequently a less compelling figure. Domesticity is not possible when the father’s quest has yet to be satisfactorily completed. From representing the lost father and being objectified as symbolic of the acquisition of the Ark, in this final scene Marion becomes representative of domestication and social responsibility. Even as the mythic plot facilitates Indy’s preoccupation with family through the Law of the Father, the final scene suggest anxiety about ‘familial stagnation’ and the responsibilities of domesticity. The reward for the lone action hero is social prestige and attainment of the women; however, this narrative of domesticity undermines Indy’s ability to act free of familial constraints, as Marion clings possessively to his arm.

As opposed to Marion’s explicitly familial construction in relation to the Ark (the word of God) and the Ravenwood geneology, femme fatale Elsa in Crusade signifies a rupture between the son and the f/Father, rather than a link; she embodies brazen sexuality, rather than contained, chaste Family. Crusade’s preoccupation with the father and the Father-God is explored through the devious, sexualised character of Elsa, who subverts traditional familial authority, invoking anxiety about the chaotic, sexualised female, as well as eliminating Raiders’ conflict between action and domestic narratives. In succumbing to Elsa’s seductions, Indy problematically relinquishes his independent power and his judgement, permitting the ‘predatory’ sexual female to fracture the patriarchal structures of the family. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett point out that “chaotic, female sources of evil must be

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ripped apart for the sake of an orderly Eden.”108 Significantly, Elsa seduces Indy after their rooms have been raided (an act she herself performed), at precisely the moment when Indy should be utilising his investigative capacities and manifesting his role as action-hero. Through the sexual conquest of both Indy and, interestingly, his father, Elsa corrupts the patriarchal family – in order to find the Grail Jones sr. and Jones jr. must rediscover their faith, their family and both must reject the deviant female who disrupts such relationships. The Grail and its symbolic recovery facilitate the privileging of patriarchal and religious imagery of family and f/Father against Elsa’s deviance and Indy’s sexual impurity. In this sense, Crusade is more strongly religious, and simultaneously more explicitly family(father)-oriented than the more ambiguous conclusion to Raiders.

In Raiders, Indy redeems his earlier sexual corruption of the young Marion by maintaining his purity throughout his quest for the Ark, yet significantly, does not do so in Crusade. As Lawrence and Jewett point out, the “monomythic hero usually renounces sexuality because redemptive obligations cannot be integrated with normal sexual responsibilities.”109 Not only does Elsa’s seduction undermine the hero’s action, but her manipulation of Indy threatens the sanctity of the family by destabilising patriarchal hierarchies. When Indy is later told by a threatening Nazi that he will kill Elsa unless Indy hands over the precious Grail diary, Indy accedes to Elsa’s pleas for help, rather than listening to the advice of his father, warning him that she is a traitorous Nazi. She smirks upon her release, “I’m sorry, Indy, but you should have listened to your father”, a lesson that Indy takes to heart, a lesson which is, of course, key to the recovery of the Grail and ultimately to Indy’s religious awakening. Her femme fatale characterisation empowers the familial/religious authority that requires her excision. She is the sexualised, traitorous Eve character, grasping at the forbidden object; where Marion faithfully obeys Indy edict to close her eyes “no matter what”, Elsa instead, as Indy clutches her hand over the gaping chasm, struggles further into the abyss, as she fatally reaches for the Grail. Familial and obedient Marion, as opposed to sexualised and traitorous Elsa, is suitable because she stands in for Indy’s attempted recovery of the father figure, for the Ark, and the

108 Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero. P. 321.

109 Ibid. P. 320.

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Father-God. Instead, in Crusade, upon the death of the sexually aggressive career woman Elsa, the father/son pair, as opposed to the male/female romance, defines Indy’s family. Through the ‘illumination’ of the Grail, Indy and Dr. Jones Sr. are reconciled and the family reunited; with the sacrificial death of Elsa, this new patriarchal family excludes women. Instead, the hero is joined by his father, Dr. Jones, , the westernised Arab man, and Marcus, the English sidekick. Indy rides off into the sunset with his reinvigorated, woman-free, imperial family.110

While Purple appeals to religious discourse through its melodramatic sentiment, overtly sumptuous and constructed mise-en-scène, and the characters’ paternal return and familial empowerment, Raiders and Crusade have a more complex acknowledgment of and yet a simultaneous, postmodern disavowal of their preoccupation with family, God and truth. In Purple, truth is constructed through Celie’s voice-over and the film’s final paternal return to the f/Father and purification of the family. Indy’s narratives, however, are marked by an anxiety about the construction of ‘truth’, and its mediation through religious discourse and familial authority. Early in Raiders, the film introduces the film’s overriding preoccupation with truth, fact and mythology in the university classroom, where Indy warns his pupils of “one of the great dangers of archaeology… folklore.” Indy’s doctrine of ‘fact’ posed against the perils of mythology is proven mistaken, however, when he later discovers the spiritual 'truth' at the heart of cultural and religious narratives. The narrative’s representation of the ‘indisputable’ power of God and the Ark validates the religious and mythological discourses at the heart of the film, even as Indy is returned to the embrace of the family.111 When Indy commences his quest for the Ark, he dismisses warnings of a ‘more than physical’ danger, arguing that the Ark is nothing but an object of archaeological significance, a simple historical artefact. Just in time, however, Indy conquers his intellectual cynicism and, with renewed spiritual understanding, saves the Ark, the world, and the girl. The lives of the virtuous are

110 For a discussion of the representation of masculinity in action films, and the varying roles of women within the genre, see Yvonne Tasker, Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre, and the Action Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

111 It is interesting that while Indy and Marion save themselves by ‘not looking’, the audience is granted a privileged view of the spectacular power of God, imagined through, what was for the time, impressive special effects. It is important that the audience can look upon these images in order to validate the truth and power of this vision.

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spared, the heteronormative relationship is sanctified, and the unworthy are struck down by the wrath of God.

The Indiana Jones films are deeply embedded within ideological discourses of history and the (re)shaping of modern religion. The significance of ‘postmodern destabilisation’ of established hierarchies such as the (traditional) family, and the church as the site of religious power has been a point of anxiety and ambiguity in film and popular culture. While postmodernity has arguably undermined religious and authoritative sites of power, it is also important to consider the ways in which culture has changed, adapted and even at times co-opted such ‘challenges’ in remarkable ways, as exemplified by the derivative Indy film pastiches. While the ‘location’ of a traditional sense of belonging and authentication (assisted by institutions, traditions, families) have changed to some degree, the power of the drive to belong and to connect still plays out in a more diffused, delocalised sense. Spielberg’s films harness both the religious traditions and familial discourses of contemporary culture perhaps even more powerfully because of the rising influence, or ‘anxiety’ of ‘the postmodern’. Competing economies of mythological meta-narrative and postmodern pastiche are deployed throughout Raiders and Crusade.

Destabilising the security invested in 'historical objectivity', 'truth' and ‘transcendent meaning', postmodern tropes undermine mythologies foundational to contemporary culture, and as these Indy films reveal, of particular concern is the Christian mythology. Consequently, calls for a ‘return to traditional values’ can be interpreted as resistance to purportedly destabilising postmodern discourses, emphasising a popular desire to ground identity within history, myth, religion and socio-cultural 'traditions’. Daniel Walkowitz suggests that

‘the crisis in history’, all the talk about ‘truth’, ‘facts’, and the [historian’s] descent into ‘radical subjectivity’ reflects a broader political instability and economic crisis in late capitalist societies. Disorder and instability have created a search for authority, for Facts, Objectivity, Order.112

112 Daniel J. Walkowitz, "Re-Screening the Past: Subversion Narratives and the Politics of History," in Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, ed. Tony Barta (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998). P. 53.

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Throughout the Indy films, postmodern self-reflexivity and parodic laughter is contradicted by the films’ mythology, which is absorbed in a search for truth, order, meaning, authority, and objective fact. Significant religious artefacts become material signifiers of spiritual truth and the Law of the Father. The quest to attain the Ark/Grail before the Nazis is metaphorically a quest to possess, interpret and consequently control (and to learn his proper relationship to) transcendental religious powers. In these films, history and religion are not one postmodern ‘discourse’ amongst a multiplicity of alternative discourses; instead, vast mytho-historical stories dominate. Empowered through such significant objects of Judeo-Christianity, contemporary spirituality is realised, possessed and reborn.

Postmodernity is intertwined with nostalgic desires for ‘traditional values’ – the lost fantasy family of Freud’s family romance – imperilled and in dire need of resurrection. Despite Indy's initial scepticism about the authenticity of his various quests — about the spiritual 'truth' of the Ark, or the divine worth of the Grail — both films conclude by endorsing the supreme Godly power of the central artefact and, in doing so, foreground the religious and familial ideology that the postmodern façade of the films otherwise undermine. In fact, the use of postmodern play and self- referentiality – the B-movie veneer – serves to ‘distract’ from the otherwise powerful discourses of religion and patriarchy that the films present. Belief in the Ark and the potency of mythic spirituality is privileged while the use of pastiche is entertainment on the path to ‘enlightenment’ and ‘illumination’. Contrary to the implications of the postmodern tropes deployed throughout the film, grand narratives of mythology and religion are upheld. The quest to achieve a significant object plays with both the traditional external hierarchies of the church and family, but also localises such quests within the self: Truth as the ‘transcendent Other’ is affirmed beyond the self. As Roy Anker suggests, the quest, or ‘self-discovery’, narrative in many Spielberg films surpasses

anything human experience itself contains. It is unambiguously otherwordly, and while it is beautiful and not carnal, the connection that transpires in this flash is immediate and compelling, as is the certainty that somehow ‘this is it,’ that is, this is what the deepest self most wants in a darkly forbidding world… The gist of the matter is that human life requires something from beyond life itself, some force from a half-magical, out-of- this-world realm to save the woebegone individual self. The distinctive note 212

in Spielberg is the extent to which he persistently locates the home for which his heroes search in a relationship with a transcendent Other.113

While Indy establishes a proper relationship with the dead Ravenwood father and the transcendent power of God, this paternal-religious communion is also paralleled by his movement toward the heteronormative domestic resolution, the dreamt-of fulfilment within the ‘home’. The final familial resolution powerfully connects Indy’s newly discovered spirituality, which saves him at the last second, with his refusal to look upon the awesome power of God unleashed from the Ark.

Mircea Eliade argues in his seminal discussion of the sacred and profane that sacred space provides an orientation, a fixed point where ‘the world’ begins, where the world (the symbolic order) “acquire[s] orientation in the chaos of homogeneity”.114 It is to this point that Spielberg narratives move; amongst the splintering discourses of family and religion, the sacred ideal of home provides an idealised point through which, in this case, Indy the cynical bachelor becomes Indy the faithful family man.115 Profane space, in Eliade’s discussion, on the other hand, as experienced by the non-religious,

maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status… There is no longer any world… only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral places in which man moves.116

The fixed, oriented spaces of the sacred have been destabilised by the dispersive dynamic of postmodernity: the threatened sanctity of the home that Indy is constantly leaving for his exotic adventures, the violated father-son relationship with Ravenwood, the dubious nature of the Ark or the Grail, to Indy – no more than another materially-valuable artefact. Indy commences his narratives firmly

113 Anker, Catching the Light: Looking for God in the Movies. P. 271-3.

114 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. P. 23.

115 Indy’s final transformation to fully inhabiting his position within the symbolic order as husband and father, however, arguably takes another three films, into the conclusion of Crystal Skull. At the end of Skull, Indy teasingly holds off on bequeathing his symbol of masculinity, the iconic , to his son Mutt, as he leaves the church with Marion, now his proper wife.

116 Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. P. 23-4.

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ensconced within Eliade’s profane ‘fragmented universe’. Within these shifting, ‘amorphous’ postmodern self-awareness and modes of pastiched representations, the family, the home and light of religious truth through a paternal God function as the stabilising point of narrative resolution. As Bronfen suggests, “home remains a place of anticipation, a goal to achieve”.117 The parallel mobilisation of a nostalgic religious ethos and postmodern ‘play’ is a substantial element of the affective ‘vernacular religion’ of Spielberg’s films. Religion affirms truth within the postmodern milieu and style of the Indy films: the artefacts become material signifiers of History and spiritual Truth/Religion, and the resurrection of the family concurrent to these quests for religious artefacts also cast the same sacred light upon the family and ideals of home.

Considering the presence of both discourses – that of postmodern plurality, and that of religious truth – the recurrent postmodern pastiche discernable in Spielberg films can be viewed as an important rapprochement with ideologies of religion and truth. In a deconstructed and postmodern world, meta-narratives of traditional mythologised religious ideals, cohesive families and traditional domesticity have a nostalgic appeal. Religion is a ‘search for meaning’ – family is often posited as a site of this meaning – and consequently the two discourses reinforce each other. This is an important aspect of Raiders, but becomes most apparent in Crusade, where the search for the Grail and God become an explicit recovery of the paternal relationship. As Susan Aronstein points out: “To seek the Grail is to seek God and a single ultimate meaning, and the Grail, variously defined, becomes a symbol through which a text confirms the natural (indeed divine) rightness of its ideology.”118 ‘Divine rightness’ is transferred from Indy’s choice of the correct cup from a plethora of potential grails to his use of its divine power to heal his father, and, of course, most significantly, to heal their troubled relationship. As Aronstein continues, “the search for the father and the Search for the Grail are one and the same.”119 In Crusade, the narrative trajectory towards God colludes with the salvation of the paternal family.

117 Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. P. 119.

118 Susan Aronstein, "'Not Exactly a Knight': Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the Indiana Jones Trilogy," Cinema Journal 34, no. 4 (1995). P. 5.

119 Ibid. P. 21.

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The narratives’ investment in religious and paternal discourses is supplemented by the actualisation of the formidable power of God. Attempts to disavow transcendental imagery through postmodern irony collapse with the films’ visceral and literal display of the ‘Ten Commandments’ and the Cup of Christ. History is suffused by ‘God’, while attendant ideologies and the uncritical privileging of paternal and familial discourses prevail through the validation of the untouchable Law of God. As Lane Roth argues about Raiders:

Unlike the jungle idol [of the film’s introductory scene], icon of an unidentified religion, the Ark is assigned a biblical reference recognizable to the principle characters and the film audience as well. The Ark represents the archetypal ultimate weapon, Pandora’s Box, and symbol of transcendence.120

Of course, transcendence cannot ‘truly’ be screened or visualised, but the films suggest a recurring preoccupation with the attempt to grasp the always-impossible ‘symbol’ of the ‘real’, to expose the ultimate law of God that lies beneath the lid of the Ark that is, of course, excluded from symbolic circulation. By investing the Ark with this potency of the unrepresentable, of God, of that which cannot be looked upon, the film validates its ideological discourses whereby God’s Will (the unknowable Real) has become God’s Word (the ideological and Symbolic) on earth. This appearance of ‘God’ at the conclusion of Raiders naturalises God and the film’s religious narratives, and the religious narratives likewise affirm Indy’s masculine and paternal ideological construction.

Upon the opening of the Ark, a transcendental other materialises, saving the heterosexual couple and eviscerating the evil Nazis. Yet even so, Belloq sighs in ecstatic wonder - “it’s beautiful” – and screams in horror at the hideous beauty of the Power that is exposed beneath the written word of God. This ‘power’ is represented simultaneously as pure (white, feminine) beauty and simultaneously as a repulsive rotting hag. Žižek’s discussion of the ‘real’ and the symbolic is particularly apt for

120 Roth, "Raiders of the Lost Archetype: The Quest and the Shadow." P. 16.

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interpreting Raider’s representation of the power of God and the horror/beauty that accompanies the Ten Commandments, the ultimate icon of the Law of the Father:

the Real is not only death but also life: not only the pale frozen lifeless immobility but ‘the flesh from which everything exudes,’ the life substance in its mucous palpitation. In other words, the Freudian duality of life and death drives is not a symbolic opposition, but a tension, and antagonism, inherent to the presymbolic Real. As Lacan points out over and over again, the very notion of life is alien to the symbolic order. And the name of this substance that proves a traumatic shock for the symbolic universe is of course enjoyment.121

The death that awaits Belloq momentarily permits his uninhibited transgressive enjoyment; he has peeled away the surface structure of the symbolic order, and running his hands through the sandy, unformed contents of the Ark, he sees briefly the beauty/horror inherent in the law of God before his earthly body melts with this overload of transcendent ‘enjoyment’.122 On the other hand, Indy orders Marion to close her eyes, no matter what, a denial of this jouissance. As both death and life, the Ark’s ‘contents’ imply the ‘untouchable’ and the ‘unimaginable’ that lies beneath the Symbolic Word of God. As Friedman observes, “the Ark is the physical manifestation of the Heavenly Father, whose power… transcends human comprehension.”123 Indy and Marion close their eyes against this ‘appearance’ from beyond the ‘Word of God’; this manifestation is beyond the human, the earthly, the merely symbolic. God is beyond human comprehension, and must not be looked upon. Instead, Indy is aligned with the knowledge and the word of God as it ‘manifests’ in the symbolic realm, while Belloq is majestically destroyed by his profane enjoyment of the real (of God). Importantly, the Ark destroys Belloq, Indy’s acknowledged dark shadow, the ‘Hook’ to Indy’s ‘Peter’. Belloq is consumed in the

121 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York and London: Routledge, 2001). P. 22.

122 Belloq’s desecration of the vessel that holds the Word of God is a moment of blasphemy. On blasphemy, Mark Bracher suggests that “the Symbolic Other (… the concept of God) has failed to incorporate all of the Real. More specifically, what blasphemy aims at is the jouissance that is not accounted for by the legal positions and linguistic categories constituting the Symbolic order.” Mark Bracher, "Introduction," in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. Mark Bracher, et al. (New York and London: New York University Press, 1994). P. 11.

123 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 97.

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seductive embrace of the ethereal ghosts of the Ark, while Indy and Marion are preserved for a domestic and heteronormative relationship.

A preoccupation with the Word of God also structures Crusade. During Indy’s dangerous recovery of the Grail, both he and his father desperately quote significant phrases from the Grail diary, as Indy walks the path of God. It is only by working in unison with his father and the ‘words of God’ that Indy is successfully able to negotiate the deadly booby traps on the path to the Grail. In one key scene, Indy must spell out the name of God – Jehovah, or in Latin, Iehovah – or else fall into an impossible gaping chasm. It is ever-present death, the abyss that lies beneath, that structures the Symbolic and the paternal word of God. Once again, the film makes clear that beneath the name of God is a terrifying nothingness, the Real that underpins the Symbolic Word. Jones sr. desperately attempts to communicate with his son the correct spelling which will ensure that Indy walks the path of God. The montage between Indy and his father as they negotiate the tests together on the way to the Grail visually and ideologically obviates the horror of this gaping chasm of nothingness through the paternal relationship. The film repeatedly affirms the alignment of Indy’s father with the omniscient. In this manner, as Friedman points out, “the Holy Grail becomes more important as a connection to Indy’s father than as a religious or historical relic.”124 Further, it is the religious ‘trace’ of the Grail and its relation to the ultimate Father that reinforces its mediatory role in the (paternal) family. Moral and spiritual authority is bestowed upon familial, patriarchal figures.125 Religious discourse strengthens the relation to the f/Father, and, significantly, they are inseparable – one narrative does not override the other but, instead, they are interdependent in the creation of meaning and sentiment in the film, unlike the case in Raiders where the familial narrative and the religious recovery have an uneasy co- dependence. Indy’s adventures grant him renewed attachment to paternal family loyalties and a spiritual understanding of religion and the Grail; on the other hand, Elsa’s ambitious greed to possess the Grail at any cost necessitates her excision from the family. Avoiding the frightening abjection that consumes the traitorous Walter

124 Ibid. P. 84.

125 But, in the case of Crusade, this spiritual authority comes at the cost of the ‘greedy self-serving female’ who is expelled from the family. This dynamic is also explicit in Temple, where the evil Kali threatens the family and the national family, discussed in more detail in Chapter Four.

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Donovan, Indy maintains his footing on the name of God through his redemption, his leap of faith. The spiritual reclamation of the Grail (and the death of Elsa) affirms the religious healing of the paternal familial bond, even as Jones’ fatal chest wound sizzles and closes over under the water of the retrieved Grail. Indy’s final words of the film are to his father: he salutes, “Yes, Sir!”

The discovery of the Grail and the Ark, as the completion of the father’s/mentor’s unfinished quests, signifies the alignment of the Law of the Father/God with Indy. By completing these quests, and through his understanding of the power of the Word, and more significantly, of the ‘real’, the ‘presymbolic’ that lies beneath the Word, Indy is positioned as the rightful heir, the son as the keeper on this power of God. It is significant that the opposed archaeologists have opposing approaches to their ‘objects’ – Belloq and Elsa long to harness the power for themselves, whereas Indy ultimately seeks to maintain the ‘proper’ distance between himself and the sacred object. Friedman observes that in the Indiana Jones films

Those who perish seek secular gain, whether monetary profit, governmental dominance, or personal power. Jones and his allies survive because they ultimately recognize the power of the divine within the artefacts. Although Indiana fails to retain possession of these objects, he finds personal fulfilment and spiritual illumination.126

Arguably, while the films have certain avaricious characters who seek the artefacts for personal gain, as Friedman suggests, these villains are, in addition, Indy’s archaeological ‘shadows’. Belloq and Elsa do not want the objects for any material purposes, but rather to connect with and possess the ‘the power of God’ that these objects contain. Indy, on the other hand, tempted as he is by this suggested jouissance, settles for the proper substitute object – in Raiders, he possesses the daughter, who stands in for the Ark, the father, and the Father; likewise, in Crusade, he turns from the Grail to his father, a reclamation of the f/Father relationship. The films sublimate the ecstasy and horror that resides beneath the symbolic veneer of the Ark and the Grail, providing the proper fantasy and Oedipal substitution to these traumatic manifestations of the Real.

126 Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 83. 218

Conclusion: Chasms and Symbols

Throughout his films, Spielberg expresses the sublime through invocation of the divine and the Real; but, inevitably, the father has to stand in for the Father-God. Consequently, throughout popular culture and its representation of the father in general, father imagery – even when conflicted through absence or irresponsibility – has a powerful and unique narrative presence. Spielberg’s preoccupation with mythic meta-narratives of religion and spirituality represent an intricate rapprochement with such potent paternal familial discourse and religion. In a deconstructed and ‘cynical’ postmodern world, such meta-narratives of mythologised religious ideals, an idealised authoritative paternal substitution for uncertainty, have a tempting, nostalgic appeal. Analysing the films’ rhetoric suggests that postmodern play is only a superficial coating, obscuring a desire for an authoritative, biblical Voice: “a transmitter, a radio for speaking to God”, as Indy discovers in the lost Ark. Spielberg’s films are permeated with nostalgia for lost authority and familial wholeness and belonging, an idealised ‘prelapsarian’ state prior to the anxieties ‘triggered’ by the apparent postmodern influx of the profane – a lush purple field of children at play prior to the incestuous corruption of the obscene father. Blends of self-reference and unashamed sentimentality, his films are a melange of mythic discourses preoccupied by ideologies of the patriarchal family and paternalistic religion, and haunted by the gaping chasms that lurk beneath their Symbolic authority.

Despite the films’ shared preoccupations with spirituality and the problematic representation of the f/Father, they all have manifestly different approaches to the Real of God and the Symbolic of the f/Father. In The Color Purple, the biological familial authority of the father and the cultural status of the family is restored through the excision of the obscene incestuous father and the return of the now biologically pure children to their mother and homeland. In conjunction with the return of the prodigal child, the narrative manifests the embrace of proper Symbolic paternal authority represented through Shug’s preacher father, and his alignment with the Father-God. In contrast to this return to the properly symbolic representations of paternal authority, Close Encounters represents a rejection of the family, instead emphasising a numinous and otherworldly experience. Roy rejects the symbolic substitution of the father for the Father-God, a position that he fails to embody, and 219 instead fantasises his assimilation into the abyss, the blissful spiritual ascension (to the maternal body). And through Indy’s powerful, apotheosised character, the Indy films reinvest in meta-narratives of religion and filial duty to the father and family. Emphasising Indy’s authority, he is ultimately ‘designated by God’ to receive the Ark and the Grail, or rather their representation within the symbolic as the law, as paternal authority. The films value the symbolic representation of God through the image of the father, as opposed to the allure of the abyss and the glorious death that Belloq succumbs to. This glorious death also claims Elsa as she reaches for the forbidden Grail and vanishes into the darkness of the newly created crevice; she does not turn toward Indy’s outstretched hand and thereby maintain the proper distance from the real of God. In their ‘representation’ of the power of God, the films turn from the impossible depiction of the Real to the paternal figure as substitution, from the chasm to the arms of the f/Father.

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Chapter Four Saving Private Families? Fatherlands, Motherlands, and the National Imaginary

At the close of Spielberg’s 1979 comedy-, 1941, Ward Douglas appropriates some heavy artillery and aims the gun barrel at the enemy in a crazed and single- minded effort to defend his home, family and nation from the Japanese submarine lurking off the coast of California. He is not fazed that his house lies in the way of a good shot, and without hesitation shoots, his hapless wife only just removing herself from the line of fire in the knick of time. While the Japanese lurking off the Californian coastline would apparently present the clearest threat to the nation during the course of the chaotic night, it is, instead, from within the white middle-class suburban comfort of the Douglas family that the greatest disruption emerges. The Japanese do not retreat before the incompetent defence of the US military and Ward Douglas; rather, they leave with a sense of satisfaction and honour from a job well done, believing that they have successfully assaulted ‘Hollywood’. A panorama shot of the house the next morning reveals the Douglas family home literally turned inside out; their kitsch middle-class suburban lounge furniture relocated outside, now draped with snoring military personnel. The house itself obviously needs more repair than the bundle of two-by-fours that Ward cheerily carts across the screen. Evoking the Christmas spirit with a pompous, patriotic speech to a bemused General Stillwell, the patriarch then hammers a wreath to his front door. Yet, after all Ward’s single- minded efforts to protect his family, his home, and his country, the house and its foundations are so weakened that the building literally falls off the cliff in front of his horrified family. Ward is, as Nigel Morris comments, the “solid citizen [who] destroys by stages the home that symbolises everything he considers his duty to defend.”1 General Stilwell, with a last glance at the chaotic scene of the destroyed house, the squabbling family, his own men in disarray, and the now safe and peaceful Pacific Ocean, sighs, “It’s going to be a long war.”

In addition to the family-inflected religious discourses that were discussed in Chapter Three, the conceptualisation of the national home and the nation as family is one of

1 Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007). P. 65.

the most significant manifestations of the familial metaphor in popular culture. This discussion considers the way that the ‘family’ emerges within the nation imaginary – how ideologies of family, home and nation are conflated and mutually reinforce each other, as well as frequently diverge from each other. The public manifestation of the family discussed in this second part of the thesis continues to builds on the scaffolding of psychoanalysis and the conflicted dynamic of ‘home’ established in the first section of the thesis. However, the separate arguments about religion and nation in Chapters Three and Four do not so much build on each other, as continue to paint a picture of the ubiquity of family imagery within cultural narratives, and in this specific chapter, this imagery’s significance to the very conceptualisation of national identity, global politics, history and systems of governance.

Despite significant commentary critiquing a supposedly simplistic nationalism or patriotism in his films,2 Spielberg frequently expresses considerable ambivalence about the omnipresence of the national family, and the intersections between national identity, family and the domestic home. As in the final scene of 1941, he does not merely replicate metaphors of family and nation but plays with and parodies them. This satirical closing scene from 1941 expresses some of the unease and anxiety in the ideology that connects the family home with the homeland, suggesting the precariously (un)balanced nature of this link when the house literally slides down the cliff after the father’s exaggerated efforts to secure it from an external enemy. The integrity of the home is undermined, but significantly, the origins of destruction emerge from within. While the Japanese antagonists are equally incompetent, most of the damage eventuates from over-charged sexualities, ill-considered patriotic homeland defence, and over-enthusiastic patriarchal motivations. As Morris notes, “conflict, frustration and aggression invert the Norman Rockwell idealisation of

2 This response to Spielberg’s ‘simplistic’ representations of nationalism and patriotism is particularly the case in regards to Saving Private Ryan and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. See, for example, Albert Auster, "Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism," Journal of Popular Film and Television 30, no. 2 (2002). Frank P. Tomasulo, "Empire of the Gun: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and American Chauvinism," in The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Film in the Nineties, ed. Jon Lewis (New York, NY: New York University Press, 2001). Robert Entman and Francis Seymour, "Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Close Encounters with the Third Reich," Jump Cut 18 (1978), Catherine Gunther Kodat, "Saving Private Property: Steven Spielberg's American Dreamworks," Representations 71 (2000), Simon McBurney, "Touching History: Private Ryan and the Filming of War," Brick 62 (1999), Tony Williams, "Close Encounters of the Authoritarian Kind," Wide Angle: A Film Quarterly of Theory, Criticism, and Practice 5, no. 4 (1983).

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suburban life”,3 and, concurrently, invert the representation of the national family that is supported by such a suburban ideal. While 1941 is widely identified as being an uncharacteristic (and unpopular) Spielberg film,4 as well as a rare foray into overt satire, it provides a pointed commentary on American nationalism, the domestic home, the military, sex, and patriarchal prerogatives – concerns that structure a wide array of Spielberg’s narratives and his representations of family.

Domestic fantasies and ideologies of national identity and homeland are intimately connected to both the institution and the prolific metaphor of the family. As Sara Hayden remarks, “The nation-as-family metaphor has a long history in U.S. politics”.5 And as David Morely more generally argues, we can observe the “the connection between concerns about ‘boundaries’ at both micro (or family) and (or national) macro levels.”6 The metaphors of the patriarchal family resonate throughout the model of the nation-state, a system of representation that in turn naturalises hierarchies of government as well as those of family, (arguably another inflection of the ‘holy family’). The concept of homeland is a powerful ideological component of the ‘family dynamic’ refracted through popular and political culture, played out through interpersonal relationships, civil society and on a national, even global stage. And while national family/familial nation metaphors frequently work to reinforce privileged ideological positions, they also contain substantial ideological ambiguity – love of the family and familial belonging evoke anxieties about loss of identity, gendered independence, and conformity. David T. Mitchell argues that

3 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 70.

4 As Friedman details, 1941 was a critical failure, although not technically a box office disappointment – achieving “respectable worldwide grosses of ninety million dollars.” It was, however, a failure in the context of the profit standards associated with Spielberg. Lester D Friedman, Citizen Spielberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006). P. 191.

5 Sara Hayden, "Family Metaphors and the Nation: Promoting a Politics of Care through the Million Mom March," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 3 (2003). p. 198. For more discussion of these political and representational discourses, also see Michael J. Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

6 David Morley, "Bounded Realms: Household, Family Community, and Nation," in Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York and London: Routledge, 1999). P. 155.

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while both nation and family function as classificatory units of belonging – their fictional underpinnings comprise the crucial foundation that links one by birth to a social structure – they exist in parasitic relation to one another by virtue of a shared desire for a unity that inevitably proves to be illusory and contradictory.7

This conflict and ambivalence of ‘belonging’ within (the fantasy of) family and to the (imagined community of) nation pervades Spielberg’s representations. Spielberg’s films animate the complex intersections of nation and family through imperial adventures, through the patrilineal and cultural power of ancestors and founding fathers, and through fraught questions of loyalty to the (home)land and conflicted desires for familial/national unity.

As discussed in terms of mytho-religious discourse, the father figure, culturally invested with the paternal authority of God, is a significant feature of both familial and religious discourse. Equally, the nation, as understood in Rowland A. Sherrill terms, is a “sacred space… [a] symbolic space, abstraction realised in collective subjectivity, funded by local experience and vaunting imagination, held intact by social faith.”8 Investment in the mytho-religious, either in terms of a holy f/Father, or the construction of sacred nationalised space, and investment in the nation function in similar ways, and are both inflected by the powerful ideology of the family. As Caroline Marvin and David W. Ingle point out in their discussion of ‘civil religion’, “in general in the West the power to compel believers to die passed from Christianity to the nation-state, where it largely remains.”9 The quasi-religious investment in the f/Father is, to some extent, replicated through the authority of the national father (or, occasionally mother) – whether as a character, a historical figure, or the ‘anthropomorphising’ of the nation itself. Further, the significance of the domestic ideal, of the (sacred) home, and the importance of reified gender roles also resonate

7 David T. Mitchell, "National Families and Familial Nations: Communista Americans in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 15, no. 1 (1996). P. 52.

8 Rowland A. Sherrill, "American Sacred Space and the Contest of History," in American Sacred Space, ed. David Chidester and Edward T. Linenthal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). P. 318.

9 Carolyn Marvin and David W. Ingle, "Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64, no. 4 (1996). P. 769.

224 throughout the ‘imagined’ community of the nation,10 a nexus of discourses that reciprocally inform the nation and the Family as ideals. Sherrill points out that “[t]he most empirically local ‘home’ can help make the meaning of the symbolic nation; the sacred nation, in turn, can help supply the meaning made of home.”11 It is these ideas of the nation, the sacred and the home that are illustrated in Ward Douglas’ feverish attempts in 1941 to destroy the enemy in order to protect the idea of the home, if not the literal house; the idealisation, sacralisation, of the (national) home is a significant aspect of the representation of familial nation and the national family imaginary. As Geoff Eley argues,

[n]ations have invariably been imagined through the metaphors of family, thereby replicating the patriarchy and hetero-normative axioms of conventional family forms. National identity’s referents of ‘common descent’, ‘shared lineage’, and ‘the relatedness of community’… had a natural affinity for the languages of family and household. In one recurring chain of associations, women were addressed as mothers of the nation, reproducing its biological future, nurturing the next generations, teaching the ‘mother tongue’ – reproducers rather than producers.12

10 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983).

11 Sherrill, "American Sacred Space and the Contest of History." P. 317. As Ruth Pierson also points out, “[w]hether one reads nationalism as filling the vacuum left by the march of secularization, or as capable of joining forces with religion, nationalism can elevate the nation to the level of divine purpose.” Ruth Roach Pierson, "Nations: Gendered, Racialised, Crossed with Empire," in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000). P. 48.

12 Geoff Eley, "Culture, Gender and Nation," in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000). P. 33. Similarly, George Lakoff also argues that the family metaphor plays “a deep role in our politics – a role so deep that it defines the shape of our politics and the major ideological rift that our nation now faces. And yet, the way we idealise families is central to our politics. In the nation-as-family metaphor, the adult corresponds to the nation, the children corresponds to the adult citizens and the parent corresponds to a national leader.” George Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Ideal (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). P. 66. Such observations about nations, family and gender are also discussed by Ida Blom, "Gender and Nation in International Comparison," in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000), Elleke Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005), Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family," Feminist Review 44 (1993), Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), Alexandra W. Schultheis, Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanlysis and the Nation as Family (New York, N.Y.: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004).

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Ideologies of the nation, discourses of gender, the sacred, and the domestic coalesce and resonate throughout popular culture, resonances that take particularly interesting, and at times contradictory forms in Spielberg’s films and representations of family.

As Benedict Anderson writes in his historical analysis of the formation of nations, “the formal universality of nationality [is] a socio-cultural concept – in the modern world, everyone can, should, will, ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender”.13 Nationality is inscribed at every level - social, political, cultural, and of course, familial. Nations, in Anderson’s historical analysis, are ‘imagined communities’, having been brought into existence by systems of cultural representations.14 The ideological power and significance of representations of the ‘nation’ are conceptualised by Homi Bhabha in terms of narrative, imagination and mythology. Linking the formation of a national ‘imagined community’ to narrative and mythological patterns that dominate discourse is a potent tool for understanding how the nation is figured within film. The symbolic power of the nation, as Bhabha explains it, stems from the traditions of (western) metaphorics and narrative:

Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind’s eye. Such an image of the nation – or narration – might seem impossibly romantic and excessively metaphorical, but it is from those traditions of political thought and literary language that the nation emerges as a powerful historical idea in the west. An idea whose cultural compulsion lies in the impossible unity of the nation as a symbolic force.15

This ‘impossible unity’ of the nation is enabled through representations that construct and establish boundaries, boundaries that are vital to the maintenance of national

13 Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. P. 14. Such statements problematically naturalise the processes of gendering, even as the formation of nations are dissected and critiqued, as observed by Pierson, "Nations: Gendered, Racialised, Crossed with Empire." P. 41.

14 Anderson’s analysis discusses the historical significance of the printing press as a way of reproducing and distributing a sense of nation, of the ‘imagined community. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

15 Homi K. Bhabha “Introduction: Narrating the Nation” in Nation and Narration, ed, Homi K. Bhabha, (New York: Routledge, 1990), P. 1, quoted in David T. Mitchell, "National Families and Familial Nations: Communista Americans in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban." P. 51. Emphasis Mitchell’s.

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familial and domestic ideals. As the final scene of domestic destruction from 1941 illustrates, the threat of foreign invasion facilitates the film’s satirical foregrounding of national ideologies of the family and the domestic. Yet, as the house slips into the sea, the film exposes the ‘impossibility’ of a nation unified through apparently idealised familial imagery, a failure in the conjunction of these seemingly mutually interdependent discourses.

Cultural texts such as films are the means by which national imaginaries are visualised, represented and thereby enable individuals to identify with their larger community. The nation is constructed as an ‘imagined community’ through discourses that invest objects and narratives with ideological potency, shoring up the margins and ideals of the nation. And on a discursive level, nation and family are linked through their ‘biological’ origins – born to a family, as to a nation – privileging symbolic metaphors of shared bloodlines. As described by Lauren Berlant, the ‘National Symbolic’ works through

discursive practices whose reign within a national space produces… the ‘law’ in which the accident of birth within a geographic/political boundary transforms individuals into subjects of a collectively-held history. Its traditional icons, its metaphors, its heroes, its rituals, and its narratives provide an alphabet for a collective consciousness or national subjectivity… This pseudo-genetic condition not only affects profoundly the citizen’s subjective experience of her/his political rights, but also of civil life, private life, the life of the body itself.16

As discussed by Berlant, private life and the family are immersed within the symbolic work of nation building that is premised on a ‘collectively-held history’. This history is a discursive construct that resonates through individual practices, including those of the family in terms of the social and the biological.

Like discourses of the family, the concept of the nation is based upon a history of inherited narratives, cultural attachments and myths reinforced by an (ideology) of genetics, of biology, of generations, and significantly, of gender. Anne McClintock argues on this basis that “nations are not simply phantasmagoria of the mind, but are

16 Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia and Everyday Life, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991). P. 20. Quoted in Ibid. P. 55.

227 historical and institutional practices through which social difference is invented and performed.” She goes on to point out that, “[a]ll nations depend on powerful constructions of gender.”17 Although the national community is ‘imagined’ as Anderson would argue, and constituted through culture, it is also strongly premised on this sense of ‘generational biology’. As the values of the family are inherited, nationality is also passed on through the family (narrative), continually reinforcing a national ‘brotherhood’. The cultural narratives that so strongly promote a communal notion of nation, of ‘impossible unity’, are in many ways rhetorically similar to those that reinforce familial ideologies. McClintock notes that “[n]ations are frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space.” The biological characteristics of the national/familial construct link the homeland as location to birth and reproduction: “[t]he term ‘nation’,” McClintock points out, “derives from ‘natio’: to be born.”18 The ‘symbolic force’ of the (impossible) unity of the family dominates political language and cultural politics, so much so that the language of the nation is deeply embedded into that of the family, and vice versa.19 The naturalisation of the family and the naturalisation of the nation are discursively similar. As nations refer to sons and daughters, so citizens speak of their motherlands, fatherlands, and the fathers and mothers of their nations.

As such, cultural and historical narratives are steeped in the language of founding fathers, suggesting a biological patrilineal link to historical national figures, reinforcing the importance of the intersections between representation of family and nation. As well as an historical link, national and familial biology represents an investment in the future of the nation, whereby the Child signifies both the past and the potential of the (biological and social) nation, and is consequently the object of contested political and cultural discourse. As Robert Teixeira points out in his consideration of Edelman’s argument, the “ordering practices [of the Child and the

17 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 61.

18 Ibid. P. 63.

19 Silke Wenk observes on this naturalisation, that “[t]he nation is constituted as a ‘natural’ unity through linguistic and visual representation, through verbal and non-verbal practices and rituals, which connect the perceptions, emotions and memories of individual with those of the collective, thus signifying belonging.” Silke Wenk, "Gendered Representations of the Nation's Past and Future," in Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2000). P. 63.

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Future] exist at the level of solemn state rituals and everyday life, such that the well- governed family prefigures the order of the nation.”20 However, such ‘ordering practices’ are also exposed through moments of considerable anxiety when such metaphors break down, as in 1941’s broken Californian home and A.I.’s incestous, robotic family and its extinction of the human race. McClintock notes that “[t]he image of the family as the model of social order had so powerful a hold… [that it] express[es]… unease only in terms of biological decay.”21 It is this anxiety about grounding the foundations of the family within the biological that structures the narrative of A.I.; the uncanny non-biological intrusion into the family threatens biological, social, and even national integrity. Although not explicitly invoking discourses of national families, A.I.’s David is a threat precisely because he is an ahistorical object, with no biological past, no connection to forefathers, and no patrilineal potential to bind the c/Child to the family and the national future.22

Debra White-Stanley and Caryl Flinn, in their discussion of movie trends in the nineties, a key period in Spielberg’s filmmaking, point out that “[t]o an extent, children and the family have always been at the symbolic and economic center of the American Dream, but defending them now seemed the means of justifying national self-defense”.23 Arguably, however, this is not a recent phenomenon. In her history of gender and the cold war, Elaine Tyler May highlights the close links between an idealised domesticity and the mutually intertwined ideals of a powerful, yet simultaneously vulnerable and anxious, American nation.24 In a more contemporary

20 Robert Teixeira, "Review: No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive," Graduate Journal of Social Science 6, no. 1 (2006). P. 150.

21 McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. P. 239. McClintock is specifically referring to George Orwell’s metaphor for Britain and his depiction of the British ruling class, which draws “upon a by now well-established figure of degeneration” P. 239. This example is relevant to understanding the rhetoric of the family and nation on a more general level.

22 As discussed in Chapter One, A.I. is quite complicated in how it deals with the past and future ‘familialisation’ of the mecha boy; the film’s narrative is structured around these anxieties evoked by the challenge to familial biology.

23 Debra White-Stanley and Caryl Flinn, "1996: Movies and Homeland Insecurity," in American Cinema of the : Themes and Variations, ed. Chris Holmlund (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008). P. 178.

24 For this interesting historical discussion of national and familial discourses in the Cold War, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988). 229

reincarnation, White-Stanley and Finn further argue in their discussion of the films Ransom and Independence Day that “the image of the child stands in for all that needs protection: the country, fatherhood, virtue itself.”25 Structuring a nationalised ‘imagined community’ around the familial metaphor evokes the protective paternal and maternal roles that embrace the image of the vulnerable Child. In this sense, Edelman’s discussion of the political investment in the reproductive couple is similarly centred around this idealisation of the Child. The Child is a figure that is at once representative of the family and its (biological) future, but also significantly, representative of the cultural, political, and national future of the imagined community – an imagined community that is, it is important to remember, idealised and mythologised.

These frequent cultural representations of the protective (national) family and the vulnerable Child to be saved for the future naturalise and dehistoricise the investments in the nation and the family, separating the family from its ideological moorings. As McClintock elaborates in her history of the nation and the family, the specifically ideological and social form of the family is supported by this mythological ‘timelessness’:

The ‘family’ offered an indispensable metaphoric figure by which hierarchical… social distinctions could be shaped into a single historical genesis narrative. Yet a curious paradox emerges. The family as a metaphor offered a single genesis narrative for national history, while at the same time, the family as an institution became voided of history. As the nineteenth century drew on, the family as an institution was figured as existing, by natural decree, beyond the commodity market, beyond politics, and beyond history proper.26

These ‘timeless’ metaphors of family and the nation are linked through idealised shared histories, shared (genetic) pasts, and shared investments in the family as an institution which is also constructed as natural and universal. As McClintock summarises, “[t]he family trope is important in at least two ways. First the family

25 White-Stanley and Flinn, "1996: Movies and Homeland Insecurity." P. 168.

26 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 63-4. In this discussion McClintock is referencing L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780 – 1850, (London: Hutchinson, 1987).

230 offers a ‘natural’ figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests. Second, it offers a ‘natural’ trope for figuring historic time.”27 This cultural investment in the tropes of (a mythologised) nation finds powerful expression in the family, the Child, and most of all, the reproductivity of the community that is such a powerful, albeit contested, dynamic in Spielberg’s narratives.

This relationship to the naturalisation of a social and national hierarchy is particularly significant in the war film genre, which unites the conceptualisation of ‘organic unity’ to both a national cause (the point of the war) and a ‘domestic’ cause (waiting families, hearth and home, and the ‘future’ for which the troops are fighting). The potency of this metaphor of (familial) duty to the greater national home becomes apparent in the underlying sentiment of the war genre; Marvin and Ingle point out that “[t]he enduringness of any [national] group depends at least partly in the willingness of its members to sacrifice themselves for the life of the group.”28 Films such as Spielberg’s 1941, Saving Private Ryan, Munich, Schindler’s List, and War of the Worlds exemplify these concerns about the ‘life’, or future, of the group/nation/family.29 Ideologies of the threatened nation, family and home come to

27 Ibid. P. 63.

28 Marvin and Ingle, "Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Revisiting Civil Religion." P. 771.

29 War of the Worlds is an interesting translation of H. G. Wells novel, The War of the Worlds, to express the invasion anxieties of post 9/11 America. The alien incursion of the national home precipitates protagonist Ray’s journey to take his children to their mother, his ex-wife. This film represents an intersection of the discourses of threatened homeland and broken family, that, while important, is not covered in this thesis. Significantly, however, like the other films addressed in this chapter, nation, home and identity is figured through ‘the other’ – an evil and radically different ‘other’ in War of the Worlds. There are, however, also some interesting similarities with Jurassic Park – Ray is ‘named’ after the destructive heat ray used by the killer aliens, and he initially shows apathy, if not aggression, to his children, at one point throwing a baseball at his son’s head. Nigel Morris notes the similarity of his name and the classicWells novel’s destructive ‘heat ray’. See Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 353. In the face of the alien threat, however, Ray learns his familial (and national) duty to his children – risking himself to save his daughter, and finally allowing his adolescent son to join the army’s fight against the alien aggressors. In one striking scene initiating Ray’s assumption of the mantle of protective Father, he is reverse birthed – sucked inside an alien tripod through a strangely fleshy orifice – but is ultimately able to destroy the alien with a grenade. Ray’s individual triumph over the cannibalistic womb of the alien presages the global destruction of the nation-invading aliens, and the return of the children to their mother. Yet, as demonstrated in many Spielberg films, this final familial resolution is hollow, and in the final scene, Ray is on the street, alone and excluded from the cathartic family embrace. For discussion of the political dimensions of the film in terms of the nation and family, see Leighton Grist, "Spielberg and Ideology: Nation, Class, Family and War of the Worlds," New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 1 (2009). For a discussion of some of the key ideological differences between Spielberg’s film and Wells’ novel, see Crystal Downing, "Deconstructing : The War of the Worlds on Film," Literature/Film 231

the fore, privileging the negotiation between the salvation of the (American/Western) national ideal and its concurrent reliance upon the familial metaphor.

In Saving Private Ryan, the introductory and concluding framing scenes of the film establish the importance of the family in structuring the war film and its relationship with the nation – a more serious take on these discourses than the irreverent and satirical 1941. The bulk of the film concerns Captain Miller and his squad’s mission to rescue the last surviving son, Private Ryan, of a bereaved mother, grieving on the home-front. Familial concerns are pervasive throughout the film – in the final scene, the elderly Ryan is accompanied by his wife and generations of family. In the war scenes, he is rescued by his brothers-in-arms and the rescue mission is facilitated by the fatherly influence of General George Marshall, as he channels the words of that great American forefather, Abraham Lincoln.30 Family in this film is thus a continual thematic presence: when Ryan struggles to find meaning in his life, to understand the combat deaths of fellow soldiers, he turns to his wife and family, and the children and grandchildren who accompany him to the graveyard – a powerful reminder of the reproductive continuity that structures familial and national discourse. The ‘band of brothers’ that set out to save Ryan, however, dies, one by one on the journey. While Schindler’s List emphasises the importance of saving even one life and the potential of familial reproduction – as confirmed by the surviving generations of Schindler Juden and the final potent link to Israeli nation-building – Saving Private Ryan is more troubled, despite the cathartic resolution of Ryan with his redemptive family and the American flag that fills the screen. The film frequently expresses ambiguity and anxiety about this relationship between family and nation, between the military and the domestic. Why should the lives of eight be risked for the (albeit powerful) public relations exercise of rescuing a distraught mother’s only remaining son? The film’s final apparent nationalist and familial sentiment – as Mrs Ryan assures her husband that he is indeed a good man, and reinforced by the unabashed imposition of the

Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2007), Patrick Parrinder, "Hollywood Versus H. G. Wells," H. G. Wells Newsletter 5, no. 8 (2005).

30 As Sara Ruddick points out in her discussion of fatherhood, pertinent to the narrative of Saving Private Ryan, “[a]s a father protects his children, so a soldier protects his country, a president his people. The mother/wife/citizen honors the protector.” Sara Ruddick, "The Idea of Fatherhood," in Feminism and Families, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). P. 210.

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American flag over the film’s ending – is far from straightforward. Anxiety about the deaths of the soldiers that facilitated Ryan’s homecoming is not alleviated by this final appeal to the flag, patriotism and family; Ryan’s doubt suggests a lingering concern about the fraught relationship between national sacrifice to protect the home front and the patrilineal family.31

31 Saving Private Ryan is one of Spielberg’s most financially and critically successful films, and has also attracted thorough academic consideration, an account of which cannot be fully addressed in this thesis. For discussion of the redemption of a perceived national American crisis through World War II narratives and their importance in (patriotic) collective memory, see Auster, "Saving Private Ryan and American Triumphalism.", Peter Ehrenhaus, "Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan," Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 3 (2001), Marouf Hasian Jr., "Nostalgic Longings, Memories of the 'Good War,' and Cinematic Representations in Saving Private Ryan," Critical Studies in Media Communication 18, no. 3 (2001), Susan A. Owen, "Memory, War and American Identity: Saving Private Ryan as Cinematic Jeremiad," Critical Studies in Media Communication 19, no. 3 (2002). The issue of nationalism, patriotism and the film as overtly and problematically American is discussed by Tomasulo, "Empire of the Gun: Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and American Chauvinism." The film has also been critiqued for its representation of an ‘all-white’ war, which is touched upon by Susan Owen, see PP. 259-60, in Owen, "Memory, War and American Identity: Saving Private Ryan as Cinematic Jeremiad.". Also considered is Spielberg’s use of ‘documentary-style’ filming and the hyper-real representation of war; see Jeanine Basinger, "Translating War: The Combat Film Genre and Saving Private Ryan," Perspectives: American Historical Association Newsletter 36, no. 7 (1998). For a discussion of the significance of affect and the ‘realism’ of Ryan, see Michael Hammond, "Saving Private Ryan's 'Special Affect'," in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London, England: Routledge, 2004). For discussions of the legitimacy of Lincoln’s famed letter to grieving mother Bixby that inspires the film, and other questions of historical accuracy, see Robert Brent Toplin, "Hollywood's D-Day from the Perspective of the 1960s and the 1990s: The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan," Film and History 36, no. 2 (2006). Also, for further discussion of the ‘misrepresentation and manipulation’ of history, see Kodat, "Saving Private Property: Steven Spielberg's American Dreamworks." Kodat also discusses the Bixby letter, see PP. 87-8. On the representation of Jewishness in the film, see Ehrenhaus, "Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan." PP. 325-8. Addressing the disputed question of whether Ryan can be considered pro- or anti-war, see Christopher Caldwell, "Spielberg at War," Commentary 106, no. 4 (1998), Philippa Gates, "'Fighting the Good Fight': The Real and the Moral in the Contemporary Hollywood Combat Film," Quarterly Review of Film and Video 22, no. 4 (2005). Also see Toplin, "Hollywood's D-Day from the Perspective of the 1960s and the 1990s: The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan." PP. 27-8. Marouf Hasian Jr. also considers this issue, Hasian Jr., "Nostalgic Longings, Memories of the 'Good War,' and Cinematic Representations in Saving Private Ryan." For an argument that the film is pro-war, see McBurney, "Touching History: Private Ryan and the Filming of War." For a discussion of Ryan in terms of the war film genre, see John Bodnar, "Saving Private Ryan and Postwar Memory in America," American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (2001), John Hodgkins, "In the Wake of Desert Storm: A Consideration of Modern World War II Films," Journal of Popular Film and Television 30, no. 2 (2002). For an interesting discussion of the ‘home’ and religious imagery of war and nation in Ryan as well as touching on other Spielberg films, see Fred See, "Steven Spielberg and the Holiness of War," Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 60, no. 3 (2004). Sarah Hagelin addresses issues of national politics and vulnerable male bodies, in Sarah Hagelin, "Bleeding Bodies and Post-Cold War Politics," in The War Body on Screen, ed. Karen Randell and Sean Redmond (New York and London: Continuum, 2008). Hilary Harris looks specifically at the intersections of race, whiteness and gender, using queer theory, in her interesting discussion; see Hilary Harris, "Failing 'White Woman': Interrogating the Performance of Respectability," Theatre Journal 52, no. 2 (2000).

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The nation is constructed as the home(land); the ‘flat facts’ of place become in the collective imaginary the ‘imagined community’, the fairy tale of a sacralised home. Such discourses coalesce to generate “the transcendent character of the nation”.32 Yet, the ‘collaboration’ of these powerful discursive constructs is also a significant point of anxiety as the family and the nation, and the ‘safety and security’ of the nurturant home, threaten the oppression of the individual. As Alexandra W. Schultheis argues, “[w]hile the nation as family continues to proliferate through contemporary fiction, that fiction simultaneously regenerates, revises, and subverts the metaphor itself.”33 Ryan’s rescue party protests the logic that sends them into peril for one man, the bereaved mother, and the feared loss of the patrilineal Name of the Father. The film never resolves this dilemma, despite recuperating Ryan’s problematic rescue by virtue of future generations and the American flag. And, as can also be demonstrated by the concluding scene of destruction in 1941, the national home may be central to imperatives to protect the nation, yet also demonstrates a latent fantasy of the demolition of this home. The desire to escape the home and the homogeneity of the suburbs, the anxiety manifested in the nation as ‘mother’ or ‘father’ and the angst of the individual, challenges the simple argument that Spielberg reifies the idealised family, the domestic home, and the patriotic nation.

Many Spielberg (and popular culture texts) overtly represent such preoccupations with the intersections and conflicts of familial ideologies and the national imaginary. It is important to note that films already discussed in detail in previous chapters can also be read in terms of their preoccupations with the pleasures and anxieties of the national family metaphor. In Catch Me if You Can, Frank is torn between the French homeland of his mother, and the idealised America of his father – his ‘career’ as a pilot suggests his wavering between these (gendered, national) poles. His downfall comes upon his return to France, his ‘mother’land, which leads to his capture and extradition to the US. Upon his return to the US he rejects the mother, and submits to

32 Sherrill, "American Sacred Space and the Contest of History." P. 317. As Bronfen also notes in her analysis of the home, “cinematic fantasy epics revolving around an exaggerated sense of the happiness and plenitude of childhood can serve the purpose of an equally exaggerated notion of home as a national and cultural place of belonging.” Elisabeth Bronfen, Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004). P. 92.

33 Schultheis, Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanlysis and the Nation as Family. P. 7

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(American) paternal Law. In addition, the war contexts of Saving Private Ryan and 1941 continually refer to the home front and the family in order to animate their narratives, while recourse to the same ideology underpins the suburban domestic discourses so important to American national identity. Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade focus on adventures in foreign lands, privileging Western religion and the uncritical representation of Western acquisitiveness. The Color Purple, too, is preoccupied with the domestic American family, yet also idealises images of the transnational family; Celie is reunited with her children, who have been raised in the exotic Africa imagined through Nettie’s letters. And while Close Encounters, Poltergeist, and E.T. do not explicitly invoke the national imaginary, their narratives rely on the desires and conflicts of the suburbs and domesticity, ideals which underpin the conceptualisation of the familial American nation premised upon an fantasised ‘home front’ of family and domesticity. Poltergeist explicitly suggests the American national imaginary – in the opening scene, the national Anthem is sung over the distorted tele pixels of soldiers raising the flag over Iwo Jima. And in E.T., Elliot’s father has left his family for Mexico and his mistress, emphasising the paternal and national abandonment of Elliot, an anxiety then subsumed into E.T.’s interstellar arrival. The aliens in Close Encounters specifically make contact with the typical US suburban blue-collar worker and family man that is at the heart of national self- conceptualisation. While all these films, on some level, appeal to both the nation and the family, there are three Spielberg films that very specifically address the ways that familial ideologies and discourses of the nation intersect: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Munich, and Amistad.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the second of the four Indiana Jones films, is preoccupied with what it means to be an American in a foreign land. The film mobilises a global metaphor of family in its representation of Indy’s travels to the ‘third world’. In this narrative, Indy, his sidekick, Short-Round, a young Asian boy, and the very feminine and incompetent songstress, Willie, set out to reunite stolen Indian children with their impoverished families, thereby returning ‘fertility’ to a ‘barren’ land. There are three significant representations of families in this film – the ‘multicultural’ family that Indy creates with Short-Round and Willie, the families of the reunited Indian villagers, and imagery of the global family animated by Indy and the British Empire’s imperial paternalism. National discourses evoked through the

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(pastiched) imperial adventure quest are powerfully reinforced by the intersection of these three differing yet interdependent familial representations. This film represents a significant engagement of the familial metaphor with the national imaginary and masculine anxiety. Although these discourses are present in other Spielberg films, particularly the other Indy films, Temple provides the best case study for this area of discussion: a post-colonial interpretation of the intersection of the family with national rhetoric.

As with most Spielberg films, Munich is overt about its preoccupation with ideas of family and home, yet at the same time reveals a deep ambivalence about the ideological ‘familial attachments’ to homelands, and the consequences of such loyalties. The film’s protagonist, Avner, is a Mossad agent deployed to assassinate the perpetrators of the Palestinian terrorist attack that killed eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic village in Munich, 1972. Unlike the heroic Indy, Avner is specifically represented as ordinary – Spielberg’s typical everyman, a family man. Reluctantly leaving his pregnant wife, Avner travels across the world to complete his ‘quest’; he is sustained at the outset by his devotion to his homeland, and his loyalty to the maternal figure of the Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir. The gendering of the nation, and representation of mothers and mother figures, as well as vaguely ominous father figures, structure Avner’s emotional journey and his relationship to his home, his family and his national duty. Repeatedly, he has his conceptions of the ‘national home’ challenged – by film’s end, he has taken his family into voluntary exile in the US, removing himself from the possessive familial clutch of the motherland. Global political debates aside, this film demonstrates a conflicted and ambivalent representation of the gendered discourses that enscribe the nation through the family metaphor.

Unlike Temple and Munich, which emphasise the nation and its relationship to the family, Amistad is preoccupied by the construction of the nation through the family. The film evokes familial and national metaphors by invoking privileged national histories, founding fathers and ancestors, grounding this familial narrative of the nation and history in biological discourse. The film examines a historical incident in 1839-41 in which a group of illegally captured West Africans destined for slavery in the New World revolt against their Spanish ‘owners’, led by their charismatic leader,

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Cinque. Arrested under American jurisdiction, a legal battle ensues over who, if anyone, has property rights over the captured Africans. The film works hard to respect the cultural integrity of the ‘others’ that it represents, primarily through the emphasis that the film places upon familial discourses that ‘transcend’ the film’s national and racial markers. Cinque and his legal advocate, former president, John Quincy Adams, join forces in their invocation of their ancestors – Cinque by relying on their spiritual help to give him strength, and Adams by relying on the doctrines of the founding ‘fathers’ to inspire his case, as well as on his own biological father, John Adams, second president of the United States. Significantly, although a ‘historical re- enactment’ of an actual situation in antebellum United States, as with all historical films, Amistad’s subject is Spielberg’s contemporary milieu. Through the film’s appropriation and re-presentation of history, Amistad re-constructs the foundations of contemporary America through national-familial discourses.

These films bring to the fore three significant, yet different ways that the discourses of the nation interact with the metaphor of the family. They vary considerably in their style, from postmodern ironic pastiche, through an ambiguous investigation of a contemporary international political problem via history and narrative, to a somewhat didactic historical period piece preoccupied with re-constructing the (familial) origins of the nation. In particular, the representation of the nation and the slave narrative represent an interesting visualisation of the American national relationship to the Other. In fact, all of the films discussed in this chapter are about non-Americans and the construction of their relationship, problematic or otherwise, to American national identity. As such, the emphasis on , on Israel, and the African slave narrative suggest a displacement or disavowal of origins of nation. As David Morley points out, the notion [of] ‘home’… simply cannot be understood except in relation to its outside.”34 This chapter is an analysis of how varying representational and narrative strategies of national rhetoric are animated across Spielberg’s oeuvre and contribute to his conceptualisation of familial discourse. Firstly, through Temple of Doom, this chapter looks at the imperial family, and how the ‘third world’ is constructed as a needy child and, conversely, how ‘first’ world paternal responsibility is constructed in response. Secondly, the analysis of Munich examines the way that the homeland is

34 Morley, "Bounded Realms: Household, Family Community, and Nation." P. 153.

237 represented as a national mother/father, and the power of the patriotic paternal metaphor. Finally, through Amistad, this chapter considers how such familial metaphors functions within the nation – how ‘founding fathers’ and national historical narratives intersect. In all these narratives, family and the nation, the home and the homeland intersect in often conflicting and contradictory ways, yet are also fundamental to familial discourses of biological, national and cultural regeneration and fraught Oedipal and paternal conflicts played out in the national imaginary.

‘You can’t do this to me. I’m an American!’: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, like all the Indy films, signals its pastiched style in its very first image, as the Paramount Productions mountain logo merges into the opening image of the film, an impression on a Chinese drum in the dance hall into which Indy walks. Despite the film’s foregrounding of its own artifice, the predominant rhetoric that the film employs illustrates the intersection of the imperial adventure narrative with discourses of the Imperial Family of Man and the construction of national identity. In this opening scene, after a deal with a Chinese mobster goes wrong, Indy, his accomplice, Short-Round, and the abducted songstress, Willie Scott, flee the city in a freight plane. As the plane soars through the sky, ambiguous locations are replaced by images of Indy’s route superimposed upon a political map of the world. This mapping focalises Indy’s perspective and knowledge of the world through the naming and the delimitation of national borders. The thrilling paranoia of chaotic foreign lands and cities is countered by this rational demonstration of Western cartographic power. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam suggest that

the aura of scientificity inscribed by maps and globes also legitimised colonial narratives about treasure islands… Europe’s ability to map graphically intimated the continent’s potential dominion over the globe… The full tale of transforming the unknown into known is conveyed through titles and captions.35

35 Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London; New York: Routledge, 1994). PP.146-7. Insights into the imperial adventure narrative and its ideological history and manifestations can also be found in John McClure, Late Imperial Romance (London and New York: Verso, 1994).

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Temple is structured by these competing economies of the known and the unknown — the relative safety of the superimposed map is contrasted to dark caverns, oppressive jungles, ancient Indian palaces, and the corrupted Indian families as opposed to Indy’s authoritative, patriarchal presence.36 Significantly, the confidence placed in the mapping of the world is undermined when the pilots, agents of the Chinese mobster, vent the petrol and parachute off the plane, leaving Indy and his companions in ‘no man’s land’, crash-landing ‘somewhere’ in rural India.37

Spielberg’s use of these imperial adventure tropes in his Indiana Jones films is a frequent device in popular film which affirm white American masculinity against the colourful, dangerous and exotic background of ‘otherness’ and the unknown. As Sharon Willis observes of such narrative patterns,

the fantastic popularity of the white male action hero [is] a figure for masculinity in crisis… white masculinity’s endlessly repeated crisis seems to concern its always failed effort to align its ‘significant others’ – the white woman and the man of color – in a meaningful configuration that serves to stabilize its own whiteness and its ‘Americanness’ along with its gender.38

36 While explicitly discussing Temple in this section, such observations are also applicable to the other Indy films, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

37 American stability is imagined within the films as ‘safe’ enclosed spaces: for example the ordered and organised university workplace and home of Indy. These spaces are then contrasted to predominantly outside environments (although also imagined as claustrophobic interiors): the exoticised lands of the other, inhabited by ‘disorganised’ natives and animals and insects explicitly evoking danger and anxiety. Throughout his adventures, Indy must overcome not just hordes of the ‘other’, of Nazis and Thuggees, but also swarms of tarantulas, insects, , rats, and all sorts of ‘exotic and dangerous’ animals.

38 Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham: Duke UP, 1997). P. 20. Willis is specifically referring to the and films, but her thesis is also applicable to the Indiana Jones series, particularly to Temple. In addition, regarding the action film and the construction of white masculinity, Mark Gallagher observes that “[a]ction films tend to present white maleness as sufficient evidence of stable self-identity, in opposition to gender or racial minorities.” Mark Gallagher, "I Married Rambo: Spectacle and Melodrama in the Hollywood Action Film," in Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media, ed. Christopher Sharret (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1999). P. 208. This ‘stability’ is however threatened and fragile in the Indy films, and only shored up toward the conclusion of the narrative.

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What is particularly significant in Temple is – despite its pashiched style39 – the deployment of the global family rhetoric to shore up the ‘crisis’ of American masculinity, ‘aligning’ the unknown within a familiar, and familial, discourse. Indy, as a colonial agent traversing the world, projects Western knowledge and power into these far-flung reaches of empire and reinforces (a sense of) security in a potentially threatening world. The recourse to colonial images and characterisations visualises, defines and consequently reduces the dangers at the periphery of neo-colonial Western authority. Complicating such imagery and at the expense of its own genre, however, the film’s overt pastiche and irony simultaneous destabilises this reading, opening space for contradiction and conflict about the colonialist allegory of the family.

Despite this ambivalence about Indy’s authority opened up by postmodern irony, Temple’s discourses are still permeated by familial imagery, naturalising processes that privilege (neo) colonial paternal authority.40 As McClintock argues in her historical analysis of colonisation and the familial metaphor, “[i]ncreasingly, filiation took an imperial shape, as the cultural invention of the evolutionary Family of Man was projected both on to the national metropolis and the colonial bureaucracy as its natural legitimising shape.”41 This ‘naturalisation’ limits, but does not wholly contain, the anxiety evoked by the exotic, the dangerous, and the alien other on the margins of Western civilisation through this familiarisation/familialisation.42 It is the

39 For a discussion of Temple and its relationship to one of its source films, Gunga Din (1939), see Kaizaad Kotwal, "Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as Virtual Reality: The Orientalist and Colonial Legacies of Gunga Din," Film Journal 1, no. 12 (2005). Also see the discussion of Raiders and Crusade in Chapter Three for more detail about the elisions between postmodern stylistic tropes and metanarratives.

40 As Steve Neale discusses, the adventure narrative’s “links with , imperialism, racism, as well as with traditional ideals of masculinity, run very deep.” Steve Neale, "Action-Adventure as Hollywood Genre," in Action and Adventure Cinema, ed. Yvonne Tasker (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). P. 76. The Indy films’ postmodernist humour arguably only undermines such discourses to a certain extent.

41 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 64.

42 Yet it also must be stressed that, as Edward Said argues, ‘Orientalism’ represents a particular Western discursive construct of the East, and that it “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.” Edward Said, "From Orientalism," in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London: St. Martin's Press, 1996). P. 29. Such representations of the intrepid voyager in India foreground not only Western-centric ideologies, but some of the structures of western ideological construction, of which familial rhetoric is so prominent.

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imperial adventure narrative’s conjunction of paranoia and fascination with the ‘edges’ of empire that impels feats of conquest and acquisition – acquisition funnelled through familial metaphors. As McClintock suggests, liminal spaces are not only negotiated through the cartographic imagination that opens Temple, but also through gendered and familial discourses. Such conceptual negotiations lie at the core of Temple’s ideological potency. In this colonialist rhetoric, there are allies who combat unscrupulous enemies, and, caught in between, innocent Third World peoples to be protected by benevolent (paternal) colonialists. After landing ‘somewhere in India’, Indy and his companions, as though destined, are taken by a mystical shaman to an impoverished village, and greeted as its saviour. During this first meeting with the supplicant villagers, Indy displays inherent knowledge of their suffering and his own paternal superiority; he condescendingly remonstrates against Willie’s horror and disgust at their humble meal: “that’s more food that these people eat in a week; they’re starving… you’re insulting them and you’re embarrassing me.” Channelled in large part through the feminine and hysterical Willie, Temple invokes these anxieties about the margins of empire, but also defines the ‘margins’ of American identity through Indy’s assumption of Western paternal responsibility and patronage. Indy is strong, powerful and knowledgeable in these scenes, moving with ease through the desperate villagers, commanding the centre of the screen, as opposed to numerous and undifferentiated Indians and the ludicrous characteristics of Willie. In Temple, power is reasserted over imperial borderlands through the deployment of familial and, particularly, paternal metaphors applied on a global scale; the paternal father figure, Indy, is the saviour to the child-like and vulnerable Indian peasants.

Temple represents an India populated by children who must be cared for, while the established British colonisers have become too complacent to adequately protect the ‘innocent’ villagers. Of the ‘swarming’ peasants that wail and raise their hands toward Indy, there only seem to be women, children and old men – no young men. Therefore, in accordance with the film’s discourse of paternal authority, the ‘childish’ and disempowered villagers cannot be saviours of themselves.43 As Stam and Shohat argue, this infantilisation of India “posits the political immaturity of colonised or

43 See Elizabeth G. Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender and Generation in 1980's Hollywood Movies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992). Chapter One co-authored with Moishe Postone. P. 31.

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formerly colonised people” and, further, such representations reinforce beliefs that colonised people suffer “an inbred dependence on the leadership of White Europeans.”44 This representation of dependence structures the moral investment in Indy’s quest to recover the Shankara stone and thereby save the village children. Although Indy’s purpose in these ‘foreign’ lands does not commence altruistically, the narrative development requires an investment in Indy’s moral development – his assumption of the paternal role. Aronstein argues that “Indiana’s quest for fortune and glory takes him to a world that exemplifies… the proper relationship between the dominant culture and those not so fortunate, the correct attitude of the ‘white man’ to his ‘burden’.”45 While initially Indy hopes for personal gain, the gaping vacuum left by the inadequacy of British rule forces the American neo-imperialist to step into the breach and to realise his national/paternal responsibility.

Indy reinforces his paternal position and a ‘first world’ paternal national hierarchy by defeating the followers of the dark goddess Kali,46 reclaiming the stolen Shankara stone and returning the treasure to the Indian people. Significantly, Indy’s return of the object is aligned with the return of children and fertility to the land; upon its theft, as the villagers describe it, “the village wells dried up and the river turned to sand. The crops were swallowed by the earth and the animals turned to dust… and they stole [the] children.” By restoring the stone, Indy restores both a future signified by children, and fecundity to the land, as well as positioning Indy as benevolent father, even Father. In doing so, the film constructs his paternal national superiority over both the infantilised villagers rescued by him and the evil Indian cultists whom he defeats. The privileging of the Western subject is constructed through repeated images which portray Indy as the benevolent imperialist; as Hernan and Gordon describe it, “the ideal white self is constructed as powerful, brave, cordial, kind, firm,

44 Stam and Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. P. 140. Emphasis added.

45 Susan Aronstein, "'Not Exactly a Knight': Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the Indiana Jones Trilogy," Cinema Journal 34, no. 4 (1995). P. 10.

46 Kali is actually an important Hindu goddess – the ‘evil’ version depicted in Temple is a Western representation and distortion of the historical/cultural origins of the Indian Goddess. For a discussion of Kali and Temple, see Subramanian Shankar, Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity and the Economy of the Text (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001). PP. 3-4.

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and generous: a natural born leader. Other racial and ethnic groups exist as dependent faithful followers to bolster the grandiose white self-image.”47

These aspects of the generic imperial adventure discussed by Hernan and Gordon are bolstered by the additional resonance of the familial imperial construct; images of the ‘other’ are rendered knowable, ahistoric, and ultimately harmless to the Western subject when they are aligned within the imagined Global Family of Man. The representational recourse to the ‘ahistoric’ is leveraged by the familial metaphor, suggesting a timeless and natural framework through which to understand imperialism and colonisation. While the family (particularly the white middle-class family) is generally signified as timeless and ahistoric, on a global scale in Temple such idealisations affect a further infantilisation of the Indians, while endowing Indy/American masculinity with (white) paternal authority. Naturalised hierarchical national and imperial relations resonate through the naturalised family dynamic. In relation to this rhetorical family, McClintock argues n her analysis of colonial discourses and narrative, that

the family offered an indispensable figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests. Since the subordination of woman to man, and child to adult, was deemed a natural fact, other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature. The family image was thus drawn on to figure hierarchy within unity as an ‘organic’ element of historical progress, and thereby become indispensable for legitimising exclusion and hierarchy within non-familial (affiliative) social formations such as nationalism, liberal individualism, and imperialism. The metaphoric depiction of social hierarchy as natural and familial – the ‘national family’, the global ‘family of nations’, the colony as a ‘family of black children ruled over by a white father’ – thus depended on the prior naturalising of the social subordination of women and children within the domestic sphere.48

The return of the film’s stolen children to their families, and the simultaneous return of fertility to the land further emphasises McClintock’s point about the family and the ideological processes of naturalisation that serve to shore up national hierarchies. It

47 Vera Hernan and Andrew Gordon, Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness (Langham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). P. 34.

48 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 64. Italics in original.

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is, however, the film’s main narrative conflict between Indy and the corrupt Thuggee cult that rhetorically suggests the conflict between the benevolent colonising ‘father’ and his badly behaved ‘brown children’. Prime Minister Chattar Lal of Pankott Palace glibly introduces Captain Blumburtt of the British army to Indy: “The British are so worried about their empire. It makes us all feel like well-cared-for children.” Susan Aronstein argues that at this point, “the audience accepts the prime minister’s implicit irony, [however] as the film progresses this smug acceptance is discredited; the children indeed prove in dire need of care — of protection from their native elders.”49 The film proves that the children are certainly not well cared for – the paternal authority of the British is in decline, and the children are instead turning to the ‘dark’ mother goddess, Kali, in lieu of the ‘stable structures’ lost by the fracturing of the ‘Global Family of Nations’.50

In the film’s concern with imperial paternal authority within/over the Third World, Temple represents conflict between two paternal imperial authorities – the waning British Empire and an ascendant American hegemony. This preoccupation with decadent imperialism and the role of the United States is illustrated throughout Temple, in which the British army, during ‘routine’ checks of its Indian colony, fails to see that its ‘civilising’ mission is unravelling. Deceived by Thuggee insurgents, the British Empire’s best efforts to discipline the ‘rogue’ Indians have failed; they cannot raise their dark, Third World children in their own image.51 As the British have become too incompetent and complacent to adequately protect the ‘innocent’ villagers, Indy must take the imperial project into his own hands. While belatedly the British army comes to his aid to overthrow the cultists, Indy is the obvious successor

49 Aronstein, "'Not Exactly a Knight': Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the Indiana Jones Trilogy." P. 10.

50 Nigel Morris also describes Kali as the ‘Mother-Goddess’, pointing out that “[t]he unrelieved horror at the movie’s heart involves worship of a Mother Goddess, intent on world domination, demanding human sacrifice. The threat to patriarchy, represented by abducting children to slave in mines, is symbolised by prostration of the village’s phallic stone before Kali, the Earth Mother with a devouring furnace between her legs.” Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 107.

51 Thuggees were ‘historically’ a cult of robbers and ritual murderers in India that was suppressed by the British between 1920 and 1940. However, this history is highly disputed. For discussion of the contentious history of the Thuggee cult in Indian colonial discourse, see Shankar, Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity and the Economy of the Text. PP. 28-33. Shankar points out that “[c]ontemporary scholarship … is increasingly skeptical of ‘thuggee’ as described by the British and questions whether such a phenomenon ever really existed.” P. 29.

244 to a dying and inept regime, rejuvenating its operations and revitalising its values.52 The final scene is explicit in its validation of this national familial/paternal discourse. Having saved the villagers’ stolen children, Indy, Willie and their surrogate Chinese son, Short Round – an iconic global family – dominate the centre of the screen as the grateful Indian children swarm past them, in a glut of dozens of reunited families. This image centers the responsible and benevolent family within the frame in this pastiched image from imperial-era filmmaking while the Indian ‘children’ circle this image, showering the family with adulation and gratitude. Indy accepts his responsibilities to ‘others’ and assumes his ‘inheritance’ of the ‘civilising’ British imperial project – the maintenance of a proper paternal authority over the ‘third world’.

As such, the film underscores Indy’s position of privilege and superiority in colonial India, emphasising discourses of the imperial ‘Family of Man’, particularly through the representation of the corrupt, failing and explicitly infantile Indian political structures.53 The palace’s youthful child Maharaja possesses a problematic authority, highlighting and privileging Indy’s ‘natural’ assumption of the paternal mantle. The party first encounter the Maharaja when he presides over a dinner party; he is a prepubescent child, and is dressed in feminine, coloured silk clothing. Having a foreign and feminised child at the head of the table inversely invokes “the invented tradition of the white father at the head of the global Family of Man.”54 His

52 Ibid. P. 32. In terms of the ideological ‘transfer’ of British colonial authority to Indy/United State in the film, Shankar argues that “Temple thus inhabits two sensibilities, colonialist and neocolonialist.” Shankar, Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity and the Economy of the Text. P. 32. In addition, Susan Jeffords, in her chapter “Fathers and Sons: Continuity and Revolution in the Reagan Years”, argues generally that father/son narratives “assert[ed] the primacy of the father/son relationship to the operation of culture as a whole”. P. 65. In particular the son is vital to the political stability of the future, “as fathers and sons pass on stories of national identities, agendas and futures”. P. 90. Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

53 In a historiographical observation on national and family discourses, Ida Blom points out that enlightenment historians and enlightenment philosophers “created theories of development by stages, suggesting that historical change could be understood as a teleological process from the childhood of a culture, through youth to cultural adulthood, or as following cultural stages, where people would change from wild, to barbaric, to half-cultivated, ending up fully cultivated people. Eurocentrism was open and conspicuous in these histories. The fully cultivated peoples were the Europeans.” Blom, "Gender and Nation in International Comparison." P. 20. In the neo-colonial representations of the Indy films, these fully cultivated, or mature adult peoples, are also American.

54 McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. P. 234.

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inappropriateness at the head of the table is emphasised by Willie’s open disappointment with his lack of masculine potency. This lack of sexual interest also serves to further enhance Indy’s paternal masculine authority, and his appropriateness as a sexual partner, immediately reinforced in the subsequent almost-love scene. The (infantilised) Maharaja’s youth and weakness is also a key factor in his submission to the goddess Kali (India’s ‘dark-mother’) and in the internal problems within the land resulting from Kali’s influence.55 The film depicts the Maharaja’s movement, facilitated by Indy and Short Round (the ‘domesticated’ colonised child), from feminine submission to paternal authority, from the pre-Symbolic chanting and moaning in supplication to the dark goddess underground to the Lawful symbolic authority represented by Indy as they emerge into the light. In the rhetoric of the film, Indy occupies the proper role of the father, raising the child in his own image, and empowering colonialist imagery of “paternal fathers ruling benignly over immature children.”56 Such strategies which demonise or infantilise the colonised other also justify Indy’s paternal appropriation of cultural artefacts, economic power and spiritual authority.

Yet, while the film privileges Indy’s male authority, at the same time it registers a significant anxiety about the disruptive, consuming female goddess. The discovery of a secret passage to the underground lair of the Thuggee cult of Kali leads the intrepid heroes into the caverns beneath the palace; these spaces are dark, glowing red, with jagged ‘teeth’ jutting into the tunnel and the caverns, and their indoctrinated occupants are explicitly coded as the monstrous (maternal) feminine,57 headed by the

55 In their discussion of the fantasies and anxieties surrounding the power and the role of the (fantasy) mother, Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto point out that “having a child makes a mother all- powerful or totally powerless… women’s maternal potential requires the desexing of women or enables fully embodied power”. These anxieties are here played out on a national scale between Kali and India. Nancy Chodorow and Susan Contratto, "The Fantasy of a Perfect Mother," in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barry Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York and London: Longman, 1982). P. 61.

56 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 64.

57 Traube and Postone observe of a later scene when Indy and Short Round are trapped in a cavern that starts to compress, complete with lethal spikes to impale them, that it is “a graphic variant of the motif of the ‘toothed vagina’.” Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender and Generation in 1980's Hollywood Movies. Chapter One co-authored with Moishe Postone. P. 36.

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evil, all-consuming, sacrifice-hungry Goddess Kali.58 These scenes of feminine potency provoke “anxiety about female generative authority”,59 an anxiety that precipitates the gesture toward white patriarchal authority. As the Indian nation is gendered female by the sway of the goddess, it must be disciplined by the paternal western male force represented by Indy.60 This disciplining of Kali reinstates the White Father at the head of the Family of Man; the young Raj swaps allegiance from Kali to Indy, from the mother to an appropriate father figure and a proper national Father.61 Pertinent to this familial interpretation of Temple is McClintock’s observation in her analysis of King Solomon’s Mines that “the story of the familial progress of humanity [is] from degenerate native ‘child’ to adult white father.”62 While Temple represents a postmodern recasting of such colonial narratives as King Solomon’s Mines, the irony and pastiche only undermine the problematic imperialist politics through the nostalgic pastiche for ‘dead’ forms. The film relies more on pastiche than parody – leaving a generally uncritiqued appropriation of the familial and national discourses of the original texts. Consequently, Temple represents an attempt to restore the Father and the Family of Man on a national and (neo) colonial stage. The real treasure stolen by the Thuggees, the film demonstrates, was Western paternalistic authority; Indy consequently returns the Shankara stone to the village with little regret, and in doing so, defeats the Indian cult that attempted to destroy Western authority, stepping into his rightful place as benevolent father/imperialist.

58 E. Ann Kaplan notes that it “is significant that popular culture represents … three types of mother in its main mother paradigms, namely the ‘angel in the house’, the over-indulgent mother, satisfying her own needs, and finally the evil, possessive and destructive all-devouring one.” E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London; New York: Routledge, 1992). P. 48. Kali, of course, fits the criteria of the third variant within the familial and national symbolic of the film.

59 McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. P. 235. McClintock is specifically discussing Rider Haggard’s ‘pathological’ anxiety about femininity in the context of the British imperial project in South Africa, as represented in King Solomon’s Mines; she is however, also generally discussing gendered and familial cultural ideologies.

60 It is important to note that the postmodern tropes of the Indy films distinguish them from straight colonial narratives. Temple is a contemporary pastiched take on the adventure narratives of the thirties, but although these postmodern stylistics overtly deflect the colonialist aspects of the films, as discussed in Chapter Three, parodic humour often works with original grand narratives rather than undermining them.

61 And of course, emphasising the slippage between the concerns of this chapter and those of Chapter Three, allegiance to a paternal God.

62 McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. P. 241.

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Having saved a dying people, the final scene of Temple shows the new imperialist, with his blonde lover in the Indian village, framed by the happily reunited women and children.

The threatened ‘extinction’ of the village through the loss of its children intersects with anxieties expressed both in Spielberg’s films and throughout contemporary culture about the importance of reproduction (within the family and within the nation) for the continuation of the biological, cultural, and of course, national future. Temple perpetuates the idealisation of the Child that surface throughout Spielberg’s films: as Edelman argues, the “Child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention.”63 As Indy and Willie finally kiss, the background is comprised of dozens of Indian children enthusiastically clapping, who then run forward to extend their benediction to the heteronormative couple. Through Indy’s rescue of the village, the Indian families, and their future, he has maintained both the familial metaphor that sustains an infantialised image of the colonised other, but significantly, he has also ‘rescued’ the paternal imperialist family ideologies as well as the actual families of the Indian villagers. As the mystical village shaman tells Indy, “We knew you were coming back when life returned to our village”. Life and prosperity are associated with Indy, not simply the stone that he returns. Indy’s intervention restores a paternalistic Western presence that also ensures the future, stabilising the national hierarchy between the ‘third’ world and the ‘first’, and saving India from itself.

The Indiana Jones films suggest anxiety about national, masculine and imperial discourses, while working to recuperate their representational authority. As Sharon Willis argues, “popular representations […] strain to manage differences figured as pure threat in images and stories which mobilize social anxiety, only to reassure mainstream audiences by restoring the privilege of white heterosexuality, white masculinity, and the white middle-class family.”64 While Indy’s heroism is illuminated in contrast to the ‘others’ defining American selfhood, this identity is

63 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). P. 3

64 Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. P. 3.

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defined only through perilous adventures on the margins of the British Empire, an empire fragmenting under waning imperial authority. Populated by exotic others, these alien figures induce identity anxieties, challenging the stability and coherence of the western subject. Indy’s side-kick/adopted Chinese son, the vulnerable village of broken families, and the paternalistic politics work with Indy’s affirmation of white patriarchal authority, and a hierarchical global Family of Man.

Exiled in Munich: Monstrous Motherlands

The representation of national familial metaphors and frameworks differs considerably in Munich from the transantional imperial discourses of family in Indiana Jones and the Temples of Doom. Instead, national ideals converge with powerful metaphors of home, as suggested by both the cultural and the political invocation of ‘homeland’. However, the equation of home and homeland is particularly conflicted and ambivalent in Munich (although Spielberg is often denigrated as uncomplicatedly patriotic and nationalistic, even fascistic, by some critics).65 Discourses of family function on a biological, as well as a social, level; the ‘core’ ideological function of the family – reproduction – perpetuates the biological, cultural, political and national investments in familial ideals. As Foucault points out in his discussion of nineteenth-century discourses of sex, “it had long been asserted that a country had to be populated if it hoped to be rich and powerful, but this was the first time that a society had affirmed, in a constant way, that its future and its fortune were tied… [to] marriage rules and family organization”.66 The institutions and systems of the domestic family and such investments in systems of national family animate disciplinary ideologies that are at the heart of Munich’s anxieties of family and homeland. Bat-Ami Bar On, in a discussion of the Israeli film Machboim, points out “the tension between… duties to [the] personal family and… duties to [the] national one.” In Machboim, according to Bar On’s argument, “[t]he elimination of

65 See footnote 2 in this chapter.

66 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2008 (originally published 1978)). P. 26. Michael Shapiro further notes of Foucault’s discussion, that “while the family provided a model of governance (as evidenced in political treatises through the seventeenth century), it was to be displaced by a concern with ‘populations’ in the eighteenth century.” Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. P. 58.

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the tension between a personal family and the larger society is among the most important conditions for group conformity.”67 In such discourses of family and nation, reproduction is repositioned as duty to nation. In addition to the economic imperatives that Foucault discusses, investment in national familial practices not only reproduces citizens of that nation, but also replicates particular ideologies that serve that nation’s identity and all-important boundaries ‘within the family’ and ‘without’, predicated upon imagery of nation and patriotism, a key anxiety in Munich’s narrative of homeland and eventual exile.

Ideally, as Shapiro discusses, “a nation embodies a coherent culture, united on the basis of shared descent or, at least, incorporating a ‘people’ with a historically stable coherence.”68 Steven Spielberg, in his film Munich, however, represents an ideologically fraught narrative of family, nation and homeland. The film focuses upon the cycle of violence triggered by the terrorist murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; much of the conflict, however, is thematically premised on the problematics of family and homelands, and the ways in which these two ideals converge and conflict.69 As Robert Sklar observes of the film’s focal character, Avner “is the center of the film’s focus on its big questions: What is Home, Where is Home, Who has a Home – or the right to it? … Yet Spielberg also wants to invest him, through his roles as a son, a husband, and a father, as a surrogate for the Jewish people and carrier of their seed across the generations.”70 However, the ‘argument’ of the film is more conflicted and problematic than Sklar suggests, considerably problematising Avner’s position as representative of national history and future by articulating the anxieties that lie between the national family and the individual family. The film invokes a complicated political situation while engaging with the

67 Bat-Ami Bar On, "Sexuality, the Family, and Nationalism," in Feminism and Families, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson (New York and London: Routledge, 1997). P. 226. Bar On describes the film as one of the “local reflections regarding the constitution of Jewish-Israeli gender, sexuality and their intersections in the context of the Zionist nation-building project”. P. 223. Machboim, 1980, Dan Wolman (dir.).

68 Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. P. 118.

69 Kenneth Waltzer describes the film’s thematics as “two peoples, two homes, two national dreams in a terrible clash.” Kenneth Waltzer, "Spielberg's Munich, Ethics, and Israel," Israel Studies 11, no. 2 (2006). P.169.

70 Robert Sklar, "Munich," Cineaste 31, no. 2 (2006). P. 56.

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links between literal and metaphoric national families, and in doing so, constructs and, significantly, deconstructs elisions between the ideals of family and national homeland, and the power of the national symbolic.71

The film commences with a re-enactment of Palestinian terrorists breaking into the Israeli Olympic village and taking eleven athletes hostage. Significantly, the tragic end to the hostage crisis is not fully re-enacted until the conclusion of the film; rather, the unfolding of the events is expressed through the media coverage, framed within the screen, watched by Israelis and Palestinians alike. The names of the victims are solemnly read out on the evening news, and the camera reveals the film’s central protagonist, Avner and his wife, Daphna, watching the media response to the tragedy. This introductory sequence cuts between three scenes; Avner in the domestic home, the news coverage, and a behind-the-scenes view of the high-level political response to these violent acts of terrorism; upon the naming of each of the murdered athletes’ on the news, the names of the Palestinian operatives are read out with an unusual symmetry. Cutting back to Avner’s home, Daphna sadly asks her husband “what now?” to which Avner responds: “we’re going to have a baby.” The two stand in profile on the threshold of the kitchen, framed by a striking arch, and backlit by the bright kitchen light. The film then cuts from the domestic to the political, where, in a darkened room, Prime Minister Golda Meir angrily addresses her officials. This montage shifts perspective from the micro-family and its focus on reproduction, to the affairs of the state and the protection of the homeland. Meir sits at the head of table amongst a group of men, in misty diffused light, as the camera pans in close-up between their solemn faces: “ambushed and slaughtered again” Meir declares. She goes on: “Palestinians… they are not recognisable. You tell me what law protects people like these?” These early scenes present a synecdoche of the primary concerns

71 The film’s treatment of the complex political problem between Israel and Palestine is the focus of debates over whether the film is too pro-Israeli or too pro-Palestinian. James Schamus notes that “in the United States the controversy was about Spielberg’s purported ‘crime of moral equivalence’.” James Schamus, "Next Year in Munich: Zionism, Masculinity, and Diaspora in Spielberg's Epic," Representations 100 (2007). P. 62. For discussion on the politics of the film, see Gabriel Schoenfield, "Spielberg's Munich," Commentary 121, no. 2 (2006). Also see Morris Dickstein, "The Politics of the Thriller: On Munich and Moral Ambiguity," Dissent 53, no. 2 (2006), Waltzer, "Spielberg's Munich, Ethics, and Israel." It has been suggested that the film “seems to function primarily as a Rorschach test, reflecting only what one wishes to see in it.” See Editors, "Editorial: Debating Politics at the Movies," Cineaste 31, no. 2 (2006). P. 4. This thesis is focused instead on the manner in which the family metaphor interacts with the film’s representation of the nation.

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and anxieties of the film – of how the idea of home and nation externalises the other, and simultaneously consolidates nation through political and familial tropes. The representation of the fraught Israeli-Palestinian conflict addresses the ‘inclusiveness’ of family and homeland, yet contains irruptions of boundary anxieties; these are contained and appropriated through powerful evocations of domestic and national family, but conversely, exclusion and exile. David Mitchell suggests that “family and nation paradoxically coexist because neither grouping succeeds in sustaining the singularity to which each necessarily aspires.”72 Munich expresses a potent ambivalence about national familial containment, and breaks down ‘easy’ parallels between family and homeland through critiques of maternal images, absent fathers, and nation-building through familial reproduction.

Avner’s conceptualisation of his homeland is illustrated through the many references to cooking and kitchens, which also place Avner in the tradition of Spielberg’s problematic domesticity.73 In Avner’s introductory scene, he moves from the television and its broadcast of the Munich tragedy to his brightly-lit kitchen, where he emphasises his commitment to his family. Home is where and with whom you eat, an idea that is gradually fully drawn out in the context of the film.74 When Avner, having left his pregnant wife in Israel in order to assassinate the Black September terrorists, meets his team of fellow Mossad operatives, he prepares a massive banquet, diffusing the general uneasiness as this disparate group of men meet each other for the first time to discuss their assignment. But this domestic image of communal eating is increasingly broken down as the job and the connection to homeland become more tenuous. As Maurice Yacowar notes, Avner’s initial and “primary family is the Jewish national identity… His journey in the film is one that that takes him away from this national family.”75 Robert, the sensitive toy and bomb maker is the first to show signs of this movement away from the familial/national objective when the team discusses the use of bombs in their assassinations – “Bombs achieve a double

72 Mitchell, "National Families and Familial Nations: Communista Americans in Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban." P. 52.

73 See Chapter Two for more detailed discussion of domesticity and the home.

74 Sklar, "Munich." P. 56.

75 Maurice Yacowar, "Munich of Fact and Fiction," Queen's Quarterly 113, no. 1 (2006). P. 121.

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objective: they eliminate targets and they terrify terrorists” – Steve follows up his statement with the offer of food, but Robert refuses with distaste as he leaves the room, refusing to share food with his compatriots.

The most significant and insistent references to kitchens and their persistent link to the ‘private’ life of family and its public manifestation in the national is represented during Avner’s meetings with his informant, the mysterious Frenchman, Louis. This acknowledgment is emphasised as Avner and Louis meet in front of a glistening, perfect, kitchen shop – a sleekly packaged ideal of domestic life.76 As Avner stares into the shop, the glass reflects back at him not his own image, but that of Robert, recently killed – perhaps accidentally – in one of his own bomb blasts. The shiny ideal of a national homeland and communal family shimmers in a darkened, icy domestic scene of the perfect, expensive kitchen behind the glass, yet it is tainted by the blood and sacrifice that premises such an ideal. George Lakoff, in his discussion of the politics in the United States, argues that “[f]amily-based frames and metaphors seem utterly natural and commonsensical… [they] are mostly unconscious, which makes them very hard to examine consciously. Their very invisibility gives them power.”77 Munich exposes these metaphors, makes them visible; reflected on the surfaces of the idealised kitchen, Avner sees the face of Robert, the dead idealist. As Louis dryly comments to Avner, “you could have a kitchen like that someday. It costs dearly, but home always does.”78

The ‘cost’ and ‘privilege’ of home(land) becomes increasingly disputed during the narrative, channelled through the ambivalent politics of the film’s representation of the Israel-Palestine conflict as a debate over home, history and the land’s (familial) future. In one pivotal scene, Avner talks to a young Palestinian, a PLO operative, about home, homeland and family. This scene, where Avner tells Ali, “You are Arabs. There are lots of places for Arabs”, reveals the national investment in the

76 Dickstein, "The Politics of the Thriller: On Munich and Moral Ambiguity." P. 91.

77 Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Ideal. P. 67.

78 David H. Richter also points out, “[i]n Munich the syrup of ‘home’ is tinged with poison: home is what always costs dearly, home is what you die for, home is what you maim and kill for, home is what you defend until you cannot look at yourself in the mirror”. David H. Richter, "Keeping Company in Hollywood: Ethical Issues in Nonfiction Film," Narrative 15, no. 2 (2007). P.154.

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familial/homeland premised upon the simultaneous exile of the ‘other’. Fantasies of home and family, particularly in the national context, produce the idea of the other – both parties attempt to possess the nostalgically constructed ‘homeland’ exclusively; Avner and Ali’s conversation is a microcosm of the nature of the argument and definition of home. This key piece of dialogue between the Israeli and the Palestinian establishes the film’s concerns about past generations and homelands, the very familial nature of national ideologies that are established on the premise of nostalgia for family and home that empowers desire for a sense of belonging within the national body.

Avner: “Tell me something, Ali” Ali: “What?” Avner: “Do you really miss your father’s olive trees? Do you honestly think you have to get back all that… that nothing? That chalky soil and stone huts. Is that what you really want for your children?” Ali: “It absolutely is. It will take a hundred years, but we’ll win. How long did it take the Jews to get their own country? How long did it take the Germans to make Germany?” Avner: “And look how well that worked out.” Ali: “You don’t know what it is not to have a home… You say ‘it’s nothing’ but you have a home to come back to… We want to be nations. Home is everything.”

In this conversation, nation as home is figured through generations, ideals of family, nostalgic imagery, and nostalgia’s concomitant sense of loss. Their discussion condenses the film’s conflicted ideologies of home, as well as alluding to the reproductive imperative that structures the ideology of the family and national, ethnic and generational investments in the future and familial homelands. As McClintock remarks, “the nation takes shape as a contradictory figure of time: one face gazing back into the primordial mists of the past, the other into an infinite future.”79 Despite their profound political differences, Ali’s words resonate with Avner, who spends much of the film trying to establish what constitutes home and family, a people and a homeland. But his political ideals, represented by Steve’s fervent nationalism (“the only blood that matters to me is Jewish blood”), fray the longer he stays away from his family, and from his national family. James Schamus elaborates: “Avner’s

79 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 65. Paraphrasing Tom Nairn, The Breakup of Britain, (London: New Left Books, 1977).

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genealogy and identity are key and contested issues, tied up in the constantly shifting discourses about ‘home’ – and national home”.80 Patriotic discourses premised on familial homelands promote a collective subjectivity that functions within both a political and national stage, to the individual, domestic level. In Munich, this patriotic ‘equation’ is progressively fractured, as a sense of national collectivity and belonging is increasingly challenged by the homelessness and exile that troubles Ali.

While Avner tries to point out the immediate futility of their Palestinians’ desire for an (ethnic) homeland, declaring that the Palestinians will “never get the land back… [they will] die old men in refugee camps waiting for Palestine.” Ali responds by mobilising discourses of family, reproduction, the nation and the future: “We have a lot of children. They’ll have children. So we can wait forever.” The ‘nation’ is a profoundly different object for the two men – for Ali this investment in reproductive nationalism is figured as resistance, endless reproduction in the face of ‘homelessness’. For Avner, the nation is increasingly a repressive and complicated figure. In constrast, Ali’s nationalist dreams are predicated upon resistance through reproduction, children, and the future, foregrounding the biological significance of the family to discourses of the nation.

However, the discourses of future generations, of national families and of familial nations upon which Ali bases his political resistance are significantly similar to those of Avner’s mother, who similarly represents the history of Israeli nation-building through her reproductive duty to generate family and future. In the maintenance of the nation, as Ida Blom points out, the “private (bearing of children) was as necessary to maintain the nation as the public (the defence of the nation).”81 After ending his mission in Europe, Avner returns to Israel, disenchanted and feeling adrift from the nation that he has defended so fervently. In a striking scene, Avner visits his mother, who avows her blind support for Avner’s mission in the name of Israel. She contextualises this support by relating her history upon her arrival in Israel from Europe, her salvation from the Holocaust, and her desire for an Israeli future in the face of possible cultural and familial extinction:

80 Schamus, "Next Year in Munich: Zionism, Masculinity, and Diaspora in Spielberg's Epic." P. 57.

81 Blom, "Gender and Nation in International Comparison." P. 17.

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Mother: “Everyone in Europe died. Most of my family. A huge family… I didn’t die because I came here [Israel]. When I arrived, I walked up to the top of a hill in Jerusalem and prayed for a child. I never prayed before, but I was praying then. And I could feel every one of them praying with me. You are what we prayed for. What you did, you did for us. You did for your daughter, but also for us. Every one of the ones who died, died wanting this. We had to take it, because no one will ever give it to us. A place to be a Jew among Jews, subject to no one. I thank God for hearing my prayer.” Avner: “Do you want to know, mama? Do you want to know what I did?” [referring to his assassinations of Palestinian Black September Operatives] Mother: “No, Whatever it took, whatever it takes. A place on Earth. We have a place on Earth. At last.”

This history connects the specific destruction of Avner’s mother’s family in the Holocaust to the attempted genocide of the Jews, the elimination of entire ethnic group. Personal, familial and national salvation comes in the form of national homeland, “a place on Earth”, mediated through the discourses of Mother, Child, nation and the generations of the future and the past. As Keanne states, “Heimat is both geographical place and mythic space, the locus of national dispute and collective identity.”82 Although specifically mediated through the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, on a broader scale, Munich is generally preoccupied by ideas of what nation and home means, and how collective, familial identity is figured through a (fantasised) sense of place. However, the Israeli nationalist desire to have a “place to be a Jew among Jews” works in a similar way to Ali’s politicised vision of the future of the Palestinian generations – that (the national) “home is everything”. Broadly, the rhetoric of the Child promises a (national) future and familial continuity.

Spielberg, however, injects substantial unease and ambivalence into these ideological positions – when they cannot be aligned, the national family is nurtured at the expense of the individual family. This unease is funnelled through the ambiguous representation of Avner’s unnamed mother, who prioritises the national family, the collective, over her own family, and over Daphna and Avner’s daughter. As Daphna recognises in Avner’s initial desire to accept the government’s mission at the start of the narrative:

82 Stephen Keanne, "Imaginary Homelands: Notes on Heimat and Heimlich," Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1997). P. 81.

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Daphna: “Your mother. She knew what she was doing. She abandoned you on that kibbutz.” Avner: “She didn’t abandon me. My father was missing. He was in prison, she was overwhelmed… She did what anybody would do.” Daphna: “Yeah, so she took you to the kibbutz and abandoned you. And now you think Israel is your mother.”

When Avner momentarily forgoes his national duty to return to Israel for the birth of his child, his mother tells Avner, “when you were born, your father was elsewhere. I was alone.” She then pointedly asks, “Should you be here? Aren’t you on duty?” Avner’s mother prays for a child for Israel, and gives him wholeheartedly to the country: for her, familial duty directly corresponds to national duty. Serving the country serves the national family – being present at the birth of his daughter is accordingly a dereliction of duty to Avner’s greater family. In this conflict over which family is the site of ‘home’, the equation of ‘family’ and ‘national family’ begins to fray. Moments later, as Avner holds his baby girl in his arms, he asks Daphna to move to .

Daphna: “don’t you want your daughter to be an Israeli, Avner?” Avner: “She’ll always be an Israeli.” Daphna: “Not in Brooklyn. She’ll just be another homeless Jew… Don’t do it then, Avner. This is our home.” Avner: “You’re the only home I ever had.”

The rhetoric of nation demands that Avner sacrifice the individual family for/to the national family: as Nathan Lee describes it, “[t]wo families are offering their embrace, and their interests have come into direct conflict: the nuclear family of wife and child vs. the ethnic/political idea of Israel.”83 As opposed to the ideologies espoused by his own mother, by Golda Meir, by the kibbutz, Avner rejects the assimilation of home into ‘mother’land; instead he animates home through his own individual family. As Morris Dickstein observes, in “choosing family over nation… [Avner] opts for home over homeland, the authenticity of the personal life over the collective project of nationhood”.84 Leaving Israel for the United States with his

83 Nathan Lee, "Munich," Film Comment 42, no. 1 (2006). P. 64.

84 Dickstein, "The Politics of the Thriller: On Munich and Moral Ambiguity." P. 90.

257 family, Avner repudiates his maternal ‘mother’land, refusing the unfinished mission from Mossad in order to return to his wife and daughter. Avner’s movement away from ‘Israel’ rejects a national familial history that left him with only nationalist, metaphorical mothers – the Prime Minister, his assimilation within the motherland, even his caricatured patriot mother – yet with only the absence presence of an unknown f/Father.85

The representation of motherhood is repeatedly subverted throughout the film, and such familial imagery is further complicated when considered in conjunction with the film’s representation of both the Omnipotent Father and the Absent Father. The film’s preoccupation with the idea of the always-absent father, in contrast to the grotesquely-present powerful mother, is expressed in Avner’s meeting with Prime Minister, Golda Meir. Leaving his house the morning after the Munich massacre, Avner is picked up by a general who tells him “I don’t remember you. But of course I know your father”. Avner does not respond, and they drive to their meeting with the prime minister. Throughout the film, the history of Avner’s unnamed father is constantly referred to in a reverential yet ambiguous manner; he was in gaol – a political prisoner? a hero of Israel – in what capacity? This absent presence of the father is evocatively paralleled with the strident presence of the maternal image – in this scene, through the characterisation of Golda Meir. Upon entering a sitting room where Avner waits, Meir greets Avner affectionately by name, clearly establishing a fond relationship. Meir goes on to introduce the collection of (male) generals and senior officials who incongruously fill the otherwise domestic room, although it is Meir who dominates the screen. In contrast to this intimidating introduction, where Avner is blocked in the frame by the dominating, uniformed men, Meir then mimics traditional etiquette, and asks politely after Avner’s father. She makes coffee for Avner, a show of maternalism that is skewed by the overt masculinity of the generals and the leader of Mossad. Despite the masculine presence, the camera continually centres her in the mise-en-scène: an older, grandmotherly woman making coffee, dressed in a comfortable, homey dress, uncannily asking Avner to leave his family to assassinate terrorists. She is the symbolic mother of the Israeli homeland – an excess

85 Maurice Yacowar notes that in his actual mother, and the Prime Minister, “Avner has two nationalist mothers.” Yacowar, "Munich of Fact and Fiction." P. 123.

258 of femininity contrasted to the paternal absence that structures Munich’s familial representation of nation, and Avner’s personal history. In Meir’s request that Avner take on this mission of national importance that necessitates the abandonment of his pregnant wife, Munich dramatises national duty and the that both stabilise and conflict with national cohesion; these family ties are, however, probematically structured through gendered representations of the ‘mother’land.

The surfeit of powerful maternal images in the film raises anxieties about the cultural demand to raise the child in the father’s image, to overcome the Oedipal crisis played out through national familial metaphors. Avner’s relationship to his family and his ambiguous relationship to the nation is complicated by the film’s metaphors of a national motherland, paralleled to the ever-present absence of Avner’s father. Meir tells Avner that she had always enjoyed having him around as one of her security personnel; in contradiction, Avner asserts instead that she “liked having the son of a hero around.” Meir responds meaningfully, “truth be told, you don’t look much like your father… Your mother is who you resemble.” Avner rises to his feet at this remark, and Meir walks over to him and puts an assessing hand on his cheek – a vaguely maternal yet threatening gesture. The ominous domesticity of this scene is emphasised through this denial of Avner’s relationship to the f/Father, instead privileging a claustrophobic maternal presence. While, “images of mothers and of men occupy different positions and levels in national iconographies and ideologies” as Elleke Boehmer writes of the gendering of the nation,

the meanings that collect around the mother metaphor when applied to lands, languages and other national entities are incommensurate with the idea of the father. The image of the mother invites connotations of origins – birth, hearth, home, roots, the umbilical cord… In contrast the term fatherland has conventionally lent itself to contexts perhaps more strenuously nationalistic, where the appeal is to… filial duty, the bonds of fraternity and paternity. 86

Yet this conventional maternal, domestic, imagery of the nation in Munich is complicated and a considerable source of anxiety, it is claustrophobic and threatening, and the film is preoccupied with the re-assumption of the f/Father within the gendered

86 Boehmer, Stories of Women: Gender and Narrative in the Postcolonial Nation. P. 27.

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rhetoric of the national family. At Meir’s departure from the room, the generals follow and Avner is left holding his cup of coffee, a solitary figure backlit in the middle of the room, with the camera looking down, isolating him in the house. The national familial metaphor is foregrounded, but it is also a point of anxiety and conflict – Avner’s national allegiance is problematically maternal, while his tenuous relationship to the paternal and the fatherland is overtly absent, even in his genetics.

Avner’s narrative trajectory away from his motherland to self-imposed exile in America, away from loyalty to the nation’s symbolic mother, Golda Meir, and away from his own mother, who repeatedly expresses her fervent nationalism, suggests that figuring the homeland as the motherland evokes significant Oedipal anxieties (as the ideology of the domestic home itself connotes aspects of the problematic maternal). Stephen Keanne argues that “the mother herself is always home. This is the male fantasy of belonging, an antidote to internalised fear and projected abjection… there is more to Heimat, and, indeed, Heimlich, than place.”87 There is a similar movement away from the maternal nation in Temple, where the Indian nation rejects the dominance of the female Kali Goddess for American paternal neo-imperialism precipitated by Indy’s intervention. The metaphor of citizen-child to national leader- parent leads to the narrative of male independence from the maternal (and national) apron strings, figured through Avner’s bitter exile from the home/motherland, initiated upon Avner’s own ascent to fatherhood. David H. Richter makes the point that “[i]f ‘Home Sweet Home’ has been the theme song of Spielberg’s career, Munich provides the palinode, ending with its protagonist in exile, an Israeli expatriate living in Brooklyn. The song of the hearth is sounded but in a minor key”.88 For Avner, the place, or ‘home’ of the mother becomes a problematic place of belonging; an unheimlich belonging scarred by the violence of the holocaust, the violence of the Munich tragedy, as well as the violence that Avner enacts on behalf of the motherland.

In a 1942 discussion of the ‘problematic’ power of the mother in American families, Philip Wylie argues that “momworship has got completely out of hand”, that “our

87 Keanne, "Imaginary Homelands: Notes on Heimat and Heimlich." P. 86.

88 Richter, "Keeping Company in Hollywood: Ethical Issues in Nonfiction Film." P. 153.

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land, subjectively mapped, would have more silver cords and apron strings crisscrossing it than railroads and telephone wires”.89 Munich demonstrates a similar anxiety about ‘monstrous’ maternal potency, represented through the surfeit of mother figures, and the problematic authority of the motherland. If the domestic house/nation is ruled by mother, such maternal and potentially feminising influences becomes problematic in ‘raising’ and defining a potent (masculine) nation and its sons, wrapped tight in apron strings. This anxiety about the power of the m/Mother over the nation plays itself out in Munich, but also in other Spielberg films that enact national and familial anxieties. In Saving Private Ryan, the eponymous character refuses the order to leave the war and return to his mother, already bereft of all other sons; instead, he chooses to remain on the battlefield with the ‘only brothers that he has left’. In Ryan’s refusal to return home, and in Avner’s self-imposed exile from Israel, the apron strings are cut in order to privilege national masculine imagery.

Representations of maternal homelands are rejected, and the familial/national trajectory in Munich is enunciated through the (albeit, problematic) movement toward the Father. While Avner’s biological father is conspicuously absent in the film, he is suggested in the character of Papa, Avner’s highly paid information gatherer, and ultimately though Avner’s own assumption of paternal responsibility through his voluntary exile from the maternal national body. Significantly, Papa also starts as an absence, only referred to in Avner’s discussions with Louis, but the terrifying moment when Avner is to be introduced (Louis blindfolds him and drives him out of into the countryside) is alleviated by the warm, romantic sunshine and children playing in the provincial homestead. As opposed to the city-scapes and violence that dominate most of the film, the gentle scenes at Papa’s house privilege a vision of the individual

89 Philip Wylie, A Generation of Vipers (New York and Toronto: Farrar and Rhinehart, 1942). P. 185. Quoted in Mike Chopra-Gant, Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies (London and New York: I.B. Taurus, 2006). P. 89. Wylie’s argument about ‘momism’ related to a fear that overprotective mothers were smothering their sons, making them “weak and passive” and consequently weakening national security. To contextualise Wylie’s wartime argument about maternal power and the need for masculine/national authority and independence, Elaine Tyler May points out that “Wylie argued that the debilitating effects of Momism would seriously weaken the nation and make it vulnerable to enemy takeover.” May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. p. 74. May also points out that “[f]ears of sexual chaos tend to surface during times of crisis and rapid social change.” P. 93. As Michael J. Shapiro also argues on this point, anxieties about the nation and sexuality are still prevalent, and can be seen in current fears about deviant sexuality undermining morality (defined as heterosexual and family oriented) and consequently a coherent nation. See Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. P. 12.

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home and family, free from the burden of an intersecting national discourse. The significance of this Father, ‘Papa’, is that he is not a national Father – he adamantly refuses to work with, or for, governments. His authority, unlike that of Meir, is not premised upon the ideal of the national body, and instead is located within the domestic family. Papa rejects the family/nation discourse, representing a significant ideological contrast to Avner’s struggle with Mother-Israel, and its people as his family. Throughout the film, he moves from maternal nationalism to the ideology represented by Papa as he focuses on his own family and rejects the maternal embrace of Israel. One familial discourse is foreground while another is marginalised, breaking the ‘parasitic’ relationship between family belonging and national belonging, and Avner’s paternalistic bourgeois-familial family is favoured over the kibbutz/national family of his mother.

As opposed to the surfeit of mothers that claustrophobically comprise the representation of Israel, Papa is a ‘comfortable’, paternal patriarch. He is ensconced at the head of a long table seating his large extended family; an easy and ‘natural’ authority is exuded as the family defer to him while enjoying their lunch. As Morris notes, as “the ultimate patriarch, Papa seems omnipotent and omniscient.”90 In significant contrast, during the first meal that Avner prepares, he seats himself at the square table in an apron, serving his team, a scene that does not permit the symbolic representation of an authoritative patriarch. Steve pointedly asks: “why did they make you team leader?” In contrast to these awkward scenes of a nationalist family of assassins, in Papa’s idyllic home in the French countryside children frolic in the sunny background, and Papa harvests food for the family from his own bountiful garden. There is no government or nation, but rather an idealised domestic and patriarchal hierarchy, framed by lush, sun-drenched gardens. Despite the amoral nature of their income stream (Louis calls his family “ideologically promiscuous”), they lay down one emphatic rule: that there is to be no dealings with government. However, Avner directly uses the Israeli government in the elimination of an assassination target, breaking this cardinal rule. Papa, despite his anti-government stance, empathises; for Avner, Israel is not a government, but a family to be protected,

90 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 371. Morris also argues that Papa is the ‘obscene’ patriarch – as well as domestic, he is deadly and threatening.

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to be fed. The continual metaphor of food and providing for the (national) family is once again foregrounded. Together, they walk through the garden, tasting and examining the harvest.

Papa: “There are so many people to feed, but…” Avner: “But they are your family so you have to feed them.” Papa: “Yes. We don’t work with governments… But you did what you did because you have to feed your family.”

Papa significantly recognises that for Avner, family and nation have become one: “The world has been rough with you, your tribe, with your family.” As James Schamus observes of this conversation, “Israel thus keeps its double status – as state, but also as family.”91 The emphasis that Papa places on family and the need to protect the family – whether national or personal – permits deviation from his usually firm stance against governments. Yet the film’s conclusion does not allow this easy equation between family and nation – Avner absconds to Brooklyn, and ultimately refuses the embrace of the national family. Yet his own family is still a significant point of anxiety at the conclusion of the film. Scenes of Avner making love to his wife are intercut with the horrific violence of the Munich terrorism,92 where the tragic results are for the first time re-enacted in the film, and while potent images of the to- be-destroyed Twin Towers hover in the background of his new life in Brooklyn.93 Despite Avner’s exile in the US, the threat of violence pervades the domestic home, inflecting his relationships, and dominating the mise-en-scène. Repeatedly throughout Munich the relationship between family and nations are represented as uneasily intertwined and inseparable, even in exile.

91 Schamus, "Next Year in Munich: Zionism, Masculinity, and Diaspora in Spielberg's Epic." P. 60.

92 Sklar discusses this moment in the film: “[i]n one sense, embarrassing and tasteless, this scene nevertheless seems to signify the director’s idea of Avner embracing the role of procreator and father figure, forging the continuity of Jewish life in the face of death.” Sklar, "Munich." P. 57. Alternatively, however, this scene signifies the violent intrusion of the nation into the domestic sphere. Daphna was ‘the only home’ that Avner had, but the violence of his domestic life now suggests that this home too is lost or corrupted. Considering that at this stage of the narrative Avner has rejected the Israeli home/motherland, even if he is ‘embracing’ the role of Jewish procreator as Sklar argues, this role has become conflicted and compromised.

93 Despite the ostensible anxieties about the status of Israeli nationality, the film is very much concerned with the American homeland and American national identity, encapsulated in the looming presence/absence in these final scenes of the Twin Towers, destroyed in 2001 (the film was made in 2005).

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Amistad: White Marble Busts, Founding Fathers and Historical Representation

Amistad’s first visualisation of its hero, Cinque, is an extreme close-up of an angry black man’s sweaty face as his bloody fingers pry at his chains. The almost distorted close-up alienates Cinque from the audience, despite his dominance on the screen, an alienation further enhanced by his untranslated rallying of his fellow enslaved compatriots on the stormy night as they violently rise up to take control of the schooner in a mess of blood, mayhem, dark images, and rapid, disorienting editing. Yet the historical narrative of Amistad is crucially structured to explain and redeem these initially alienating representations of an angry black man, specifically through the African Cinque’s relationship to American meta-narratives of history and the Founding Fathers.94 While Munich is a meditation on the relationship between the nation and the metaphors of family and exile, Amistad is a more explicit representation of national discourse structured through a familial inscription upon US national history.

Although based on a specific historical event, the film’s narrative and its core relationships are structured through an ideological appeal to ancestral families and national homelands, using these devices to ‘redeem’ American slaving history. The film is a contemporary representation of history, rather than the (always impossible) re-enactment of history.95 As Stoddard and Marcus observe, “[p]ortraying history through film, and especially Hollywood feature films, is difficult because of the tendency to fit historical stories into traditional generic film narratives, often leading to a compacted and simplified historical narrative.”96 Accordingly, Amistad is a

94 The Founding Fathers of the United States were involved in American independence and the formation and shaping of principles of government and the Constitution; for the purposes of the narrative/historical narrative of Amistad, John Adams was the second president of the United States, and father of John Quincy Adams, one of the film’s key characters, who became the sixth president.

95 While this point may seem obvious, historical inaccuracies and ‘artistic liberties’ film sometimes preoccupies critical literature, rather than considering how history is used in contemporary American filmmaking.

96 Jeremy D. Stoddard and Alan S. Marcus, "The Burden of Historical Representation: Race, Freedom, and 'Educational' Hollywood Film," Film and History 36, no. 1 (2006). P. 28. For more details about the historical, rather than filmic, narrative of events, also see Frederick Dalzell, "Dreamworking Amistad: Representing Slavery, Revolt, and Freedom in America, 1839 and 1997," New England Quarterly: A Historical Review of New England Life and Letters 71, no. 1 (1998). 264

didactic film, redressing the national historical consciousness in terms of slavery and the political and legal system that supported the slave economy. As frequently noted, the film romanticises Cinque’s struggles, John Quincy Adams’ paternal duty to father, fatherland and Founding Fathers, and falsifies the Supreme Court’s ultimate decision to release the Amistad slaves through an appeal to equality and human rights, rather than through the actual complex and technical legal decision based on unsubstantiated property rights.97 However, while recognising gross historical inaccuracies, this debate is not particularly relevant to a discussion of the significance of the representation of history. It must always be remembered, as Jameson discusses, that

history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious.98

History is mediated through contemporary discourses, shaped into narrative, and pertinent to the discussion at hand, shaped by discourses of family and nation. The film, regardless of its historical referent, remains a text; the (admittedly historically inaccurate) characters and events are constructed in order to carry the ideological work of the film, in this case through a contemporary nostalgia for the desired authority of American Founding Fathers. As Robert Burgoyne points out,

[d]ebates about film and its responsibility to the past largely obscure what… are more significant issues – the central position occupied by film in the articulation of national identity and film’s ability to hold up to scrutiny and drive home the emotional meaning of the imagined community of nation and its bruising inadequacies.99

In Amistad, Spielberg creates a national/patriotic space in his rendition of the historical events surrounding La Amistad, using cultural texts to establish an

97 For a discussion of how the film could or could not deal with criticisms of historical accuracy, see Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. PP. 264-9.

98 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). P. 34-5.

99 Robert Burgoyne, Film Nation: Hollywood Looks at U.S. History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). P. 6.

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imagined vision of racial justice that stems from an emotional investment in homelands and the continuing wisdom and authority of the great American forefathers.

Historical events are reconstructed into an historical narrative that serves these purposes and redresses current and historical anxieties surrounding race relations. As Matthias Uecker further observes, “[n]ostalgic versions of the past are artificially created in response to present emotional needs… Authenticity is located in the characters and their desires, rather than in the past which they reimagine.”100 Specifically, Spielberg’s re-imagining is mediated through the affective rhetoric of family, and refracted through the ultimate national and historical family of the founding fathers, working to retrieve the nation’s history from racism.101 As Rowland Sherrill argues, “historical experience is gobbled up by nationalistic faith in the dynamics of the American imagination”.102 Cinque’s story is visually retrieved from the dry and distant history books to illustrate love of family and homeland – he longs for his African homeland, evoked in soft glowing light, while the music swells as Adams refers to America’s Founding Fathers who embody the heart and political ideology of the nation.

The film’s affective historical re-inscription occurs when Cinque’s largely untranslated Mende story is given not only a voice through a translator, but also filmically visualised. Such visualisation counteracts the predominantly distancing and dark cinematography that represents Cinque, from his initial distorted close-up, and the frequent representation of his powerful, angry presence looming over the bookish lawyer, Baldwin. The slave, an alien, a possession, in a foreign land, eventually, however, produces a point of recognition between the two cultures, a shared appreciation for family. When asked about his leadership of the Africans’

100 Matthias Uecker, "Fractured Families - United Countries? Family, Nostalgia and Nation Building in Das Wunder Von Bern and Goodbye Lenin!," New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 5, no. 3 (2007). P. 193.

101 Friedman suggests that, “in essence, the film conceptualizes the United States of 1839 as dysfunctional family ripped apart by bitter disputes about slavery.” Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 226.

102 Sherrill, "American Sacred Space and the Contest of History." P. 322.

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resistance on the Amistad, Cinque replies: “That wasn’t bravery. Any man would do the same to get back to his family. You yourself would do it.” In response, Baldwin whispers to Joadson, the black abolitionist103 also working to free the Amistad Africans, who produces a long, white tooth that he discovered in the slave ship. Cinque clasps it, pondering, a moment which precipitates a flashback. He tells them slowly: “My wife gave it to me”, which coincides with images of his wife walking and smiling, in golden afternoon sunshine inflected, through slow motion, with an aura of nostalgia. He continues, “to keep me safe.” The tale of his capture by the slavers and the experience of the middle passage is then recounted, which brings the narrative back to the violent and disquieting first scene where the rebelling Africans slaughter the crew of the Amistad.104

It is through Cinque’s story, the ‘translation’ and the visual privileging within the filmic world, that Amistad erases the audience alienation that the first scene’s violence evokes. Jeffrey makes the point that

[t]he presentation of the Africans in these early scenes and used make it difficult to align ourselves with them or their rebellion. The images and sounds suggest savage, violent, murderous, incomprehensible blacks and perpetuate the long-lived stereotypes found not only in film and literature but in many other forms of popular culture as well. ... as the film progress, the Africans become less alien… they become more like us.105

This ‘de-alienation’ is effected through personalised, familial and affective narration and shared meta-narrative of ancestral history. Once the communication barriers have been broken down, Cinque’s narrative is integrated with that of his home, his homeland and his family, and most significantly, eventually integrated with those of his white American friends. The film initially disenfranchises Cinque’s voice, but

103 The Joadson character is a composite black abolitionist image which permits ‘historical work’, even if it is not precisely correct, standing in for the abolitionist black movement in the North at the time.

104 This scene comprises some problematic ‘otherising’, as Julie Roy Jeffrey argues, “while the decision to begin with the mutiny establishes a mood of emotional intensity, it also projects powerful negative and stereotypical images of blackness. … Their intention is murder but we understand little beyond that.” Julie Roy Jeffrey, "Amistad: Steven Spielberg's 'True Story'," Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 21, no. 1 (2001). P. 87. It is also important to note that Cinque’s recollection, and the film’s visualisation of the middle passage stands in for the many in this film.

105 Ibid. P. 87.

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then disrupts this apparent alienation from its central character. Fontenont notes the significance of the switch in narrative modes, shifting “the narrative perspective from third person observer to first person participant.”106 Structurally, throughout the film, the Amistad Africans are alienated from possession of the narrative, and then individualised, highlighting culturally dominant narratives and representations. Significantly, while prosecuting lawyer Holabird’s third person oral narrative of murder on the high seas, (related in the static and hierarchical mise-en-scène of the court room) matches the violence of the opening sequence, this story is then supplemented, and overwhelmed by Cinque’s visual and filmic narrative of violence, his telling of the trauma of the middle passage, the loss of family, and homeland.

Within American history, the trauma of the middle passage is both a rupturing and formative moment in the nation, and works structurally in the same manner throughout the film. As Michael Shapiro notes, “Race relations are a ‘problem’ because they threaten the nation segment of the nation-state. They are recalcitrant to the American state’s claim to contain a coherent and unified national culture.”107 Framed through the evocation of familial and national discourses, Amistad foregrounds a narrative that attempts to repair this incoherence of the state and its problematic relationship to its own history. The powerful visual evocation of the violence and brutality involved in the slave trade disrupts the dry text of the film, of the court of law, of the sparse facts of the ship’s log that disguise genocide, and significantly humanises the film’s opening extreme close up of a black face on a black night, speaking an unfamiliar language.108 Cinque is then humanised through his personal narrative of his (lost) home, visualised in his flashback sequence, which is transformed from senseless violence to a representation of (American) ideals of freedom. Gary Rosen observes,

106 Chester J. Fontenot Jr., "Black Misery, White Guilt and Amistad," MELUS: The Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 24, no. 1 (1999). P. 238.

107 Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. P. 97.

108 As Dalzell notes, “unsettling is the film’s faithfulness to the profound cultural differences that divided the Africans from their American captors and benefactors. The black men speak Mende, which the film usually translates in subtitles, but occasionally does not.” Dalzell, "Dreamworking Amistad: Representing Slavery, Revolt, and Freedom in America, 1839 and 1997." P. 130. In the opening scene, the Mende is not translated.

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Cinque, by the movie’s lights, has to be seen freeing himself in court just as he did on board the slave schooner. Strangely enough, the same need drives Amistad’s hagiography of Adams… Framed throughout by patriotic symbols, Adams embodies a pristine America just as Cinque embodies a pristine Africa, and the two must collaborate in the end.109

The film moves from dry history to a personalisation of slavery and freedom, achieved through the humanising ideologies of home and family, nation and ancestors that Cinque invokes. These ideals are then reciprocally channelled into an ideal of the greater American Familial Nation, comprised of the Founding Fathers. The ‘black’ story is translated into John Quincy Adams’ familial story and a story of America’s political and ideological Fathers, into a redemption narrative of American slave history.

The characters in the film are constituted by a powerful attachment to homeland, and a shared understanding of family – this is the narrative journey for the white characters, most significantly, John Quincy Adams, and ostensibly for the (liberal, white) audience. The film’s narrative is mediated through both personal and national geneologies of family that coalesce to provide narrative and historical closure. In the national and historical constitution of homeland, Amistad is preoccupied with problems of national familial fragmentation derived from the violent history of slavery, and the rupturing narrative of the Middle Passage. In this sense, and particularly in the fraught history that Amistad represents, the ideal of homeland, expressed powerfully through the prism of the familial metaphor, is a complicated trope; home “has become a complex, multiple and sometimes fraught notion… That construction that once firmly tied ‘place’ to ‘race’ through the notion of ‘homeland’ has led to anxieties... [that the nation is fragmenting]”.110 Foundational ideals of familial unity, continuity and genealogy play an importance discursive role in the rehabilitation of the ideal of a healthy homeland, through history, for the national future.

109 Gary Rosen, "'Amistad' and the Abuse of History," in The Films of Steven Spielberg: Critical Essays, ed. Charles P. Silet (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow, 2002). P. 246.

110 Helen Addison-Smith, "E.T. Go Home: Indigeneity, Multiculturalism and 'Homeland' in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema," Papers 15, no. 1 (2005). P. 28-9.

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The characterisation of John Quincy Adams, former president, and son of the nation’s second president, John Adams, who is significantly, a Founding Father, is structurally vital to the film’s preoccupation with nation and family. He is initially constructed as a weak old man, moving slowly, and with difficulty. Significantly, he is extremely reluctant to involve himself in the Amistad case and the nation’s conflict over slavery. Most importantly, in establishing both the ideology of the film and Adams’ characterisation, this festering sore troubling the nation is presented as a job unfinished by the father/Founding Father, a problem remaining to be resolved by the national son. A low angle camera shot looks up at Adams and Joadson framing the elderly white man and the black man against a bright blue sky and the glistening white dome of the congress building, adding visual and political emphasis to the unresolved problem. Joadson addresses the former president:

I know you, Mr President. I know you and your presidency as well as any man – and your father’s... You were a child at his side when he helped invent America. And you in turn, have devoted your life to refining that invention. 111

Adams turns his back to the camera and twirls a white rose behind his back, and Joadson continues: “There remains but one task undone. One vital task the Founding Fathers left to their sons before their thirteen colonies could precisely be called United States. And that task, sir, as you well know, is crushing slavery.”112 Adams’ initial reluctance and physical incapacity plays an important role in the film’s movement towards familial (and therefore national) redemption from slavery. The conflict at the heart of the film stems from the filial failure of the nation’s sons to advance, as Joadson pleads, the cause of the Founding Fathers. Joadson’s invocation of Adams as a child suggests he has yet to step up into the properly paternal role, to inhabit the role of national Father bequeathed upon him by both biology and national metaphors. Adams is represented in the film as an impotent shadow of his great forebear; advisors to the current presidential administration derisively comment about the now

111 It is more appropriate for a black character to make this speech, making it more difficult to undermine the idea of a racially united USA. See Natalie Zemon Davis, Slaves on Screen: Film and Historical Vision (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000). P. 79. Adams, at this stage of the narrative, still declines to help the abolitionists free the Amistad Africans. It must also be noted that Joadson’s speech is addressed to contemporary audiences.

112 Emphasis added.

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frail former president: imagine “knowing all your life, whatever your accomplishments, you’ll only be remembered as the son of a great father.” They further add: “The only thing John Quincy Adam will be remembered for is his middle name!” While these comments both provide background information about one of the film’s core characters and about his somewhat conflicted motivations, most significantly, these comments structure the narrative’s ideological relationship with the past and with the ideal of the (national) Father. From ideological (and considerable physical) weakness, Adams’ movement toward his filial duty and to the cause of the nation’s fathers is fundamental to the (attempted) redemption of a fragmented homeland.

Although a reluctant participant in the case, it is Adams’ insight that precipitates the crucial surfacing of Cinque’s narrative, and it is Adams who recognises the importance of history in understanding who – beyond simply what – a person is. As Adams pointedly declares to Joadson, “in a courtroom, whoever tells the best story wins.” The film then cuts to Joadson, significantly positioned next to a white marble Romanesque bust; he is a living black man beside the immortalised figure of a white man, adding further emphasis to the film’s retelling of marginalised black narratives.113 Adams wants to know what Amistad Africans’ story is - not where they are from, but to hear their story:

Adams: “Mr Joadson, you’re from where originally?” Joadson: “Why, Georgia sir” Adams: “Georgia… Does that pretty much sum up what you are? A Georgian? Is that your story? No, you’re an ex-slave who’s devoted his life to the abolition of slavery, overcoming great hardships and obstacles along the way, I should imagine. That’s your story, isn’t it? … You and this young so-called lawyer have proven you know what they are. They’re Africans. Congratulations. What you don’t know, and as far as I can tell, haven’t bothered in the least to discover, is who they are. Right?”

Significantly, at the end of this scene, the camera cuts to a close-up of the plant Adams was preoccupied with throughout the sequence – a white rose, presumably the cutting from the earlier scene in the congress gardens. This shot crafts an alignment

113 Albeit these are black narratives that are, by and large, funnelled through white discourse and are subsequently integrated into (white) metanarratives of American history.

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through the symbolism of the flowers with national duty and homeland – the White (House) rose and its significance to Adams and the United States government find its parallel in the African violet that brings the memory of home rushing through Cinque later in the film. The shared moment over the flowers allows a mutual understanding and respect to develop between the two characters: Adams recognises Cinque’s desire to return to his homeland; Cinque’s longing, deep inhalation of the scent from the rare African violet triggers the moment of Adams’ genuine sense of sympathy for the plight of the Amistad Africans, brutally torn from family and nation.

It is through Amistad’s conceptualisation of history, home and family that the ‘nation’ moves beyond mere location; mediated through the represented and representative individual narratives of the film, the nation is naturalised within the home of an historical ‘founding’ family. Stephen Keanne discusses in his analysis of home and Heimat that “released from geography into the conceptual, Heimat... allows a revisiting of historical time through subjective memory. It is always past… Heimat- as-concept has far outstripped Heimat-as-place”.114 In this manner – returning to national history through the individual and affective narratives of Cinque and Adams – the narrative foregrounds the conceptual conflation of personal families and national historical families. The history that the film persistently revisits is insistently that of family and ‘Heimat-as-concept.’ Adams’ ancestors, the founding fathers, the paternal father are left with “but one task undone” in order to reinvigorate the ideological suppositions of the American homeland. Before his final hearing before the Supreme Court, Cinque confidently announces (through his interpreter):

Cinque: “We won’t be going in there alone.” Adams: “Alone? Indeed not. No, we have right at our side. We have righteousness at our side. We have Mr Baldwin over there.” Cinque: “I mean my ancestors. I will call into the past, far back to the beginning of time, and beg them to come help me at the judgement. I will reach back and draw them into me.” [The camera slowly moves closer, creating more emphasis.] “And they must come, for at this moment, I am the whole reason they have existed at all.”

114 Keanne, "Imaginary Homelands: Notes on Heimat and Heimlich." P. 82.

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As Cinque finishes his statement, the camera zooms to Adams’ face as he takes in the import of Cinque’s words, and the scene closes with magisterial music. The film is predominantly composed of static shots, so filmically, there is considerable emphasis, enhanced by the portentous music, placed on this conversation.115 The camera first moves from over Adams’ shoulder toward Cinque as he speaks, and then moves in a reverse shot towards Adams as the film allow Cinque’s statement to sink in for maximum effect. Cinque, in his invocation of his ancestors, repeats the political paradigm critiqued by Edelman, that familial reproduction is always for the future, a potent investment in biological and cultural continuity: for family, the Child is, as Cinque claims, “the whole reason they have existed at all.” Significantly, Adams takes Cinque’s argument about the familial (never-ending) telos of the reproductive family to the national stage.

The film’s finale court room scene is predicated upon the ‘lessons’ Adams learns from Cinque about ‘ancestors’ in this conversation; Cinque’s dialogue foregrounds both the nation’s founding fathers, as well as Adams’ own biological father. To reiterate McClintock’s point, “[t]he family as a metaphor offered a single genesis narrative for national history”.116 The nation’s history, the conceptualisation of a familial genealogy, is evoked as a point of moral equivalence between the two men and as the path to racial equality and justice, which structures the film’s narrative arc. Earlier in this meeting between Adams and Cinque, Adams bemoans lost opportunities to better the nation as a leader – that he may not have been wise enough or strong enough, and that the moment is now gone. However, he is galvanised by Cinque’s call to his ancestors for strength, his statement that they will be with him, because he (their future) is the point of their existence. This moment propels Adams’ own retrieval of history, his revelation of the importance of continuing the work of the f/Father, and that time is not gone, but that history lives on in the next generation. Such discourses foreground the genealogical nation, a discursively privileged sense of

115 Remarkably, as Ian Freer observes, “there are only three dolly moves in the whole movie”. Ian Freer, The Complete Spielberg, London, Virgin Publishing, 2001, p. 255, quoted in Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. P. 278. For further discussion of the visual elements of Amistad, see Friedman, Citizen Spielberg. PP. 278-82.

116 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 63.

273 familial biological continuity premised upon the social, biological and the national family sustained through metaphors of national Founding Fathers.

The critical Supreme Court scene represents the final court of appeal for the Amistad Africans, deciding whether they are the property of the Spanish government or free men. Adams’s appeal against slavery to the Supreme Court Justices privileges his personal narrative as the son of a Founding Father, a familial metaphor on the national scale. He commences his speech with direct reference to his meaningful conversation with Cinque, contextualising the Africans within the specifically American thrust of his argument:

The other night, I was talking with my friend, Cinque. He was over at my place, and we were out in the greenhouse together. And he was explaining to me how when a member of the Mende – that’s his people – how when a member of the Mende encounters a situation where there appears no hope at all, he invokes his ancestors. Tradition. See the Mende believe that if one can summon the spirit of one’s ancestors, then they have never left. And the wisdom and strength they fathered and inspired will come to his aid.117

Adams then recites the famous names of American political and constitutional history: “James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, …” He walks past the carved (white) marble busts, and continues reciting, “Thomas Jefferson, .” He pauses significantly: “John Adams.” He stops in front of this particular bust and looks at this carved marble representation of his own father, the revered Father of the Nation, the ultimate conflation of the film’s national familial metaphor with that of the paternal imperative. Looking at his marble Father, Adams continues:

We have long resisted asking you for guidance. Perhaps we have feared in doing so, we might acknowledge that out individuality which we so, so revere, is not entirely our own. Perhaps we feared an… an appeal to you might be taken for weakness. But we have come to understand, finally, that this is not so. We understand now. We’ve been made to understand, and to embrace the understanding that who we are is who we were.

117 Emphasis added.

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The camera zooms to a close up and lingers on Adams and the paternal bust, then cuts back to medium long shot of Adams in front of the statue, with judges arranged along the left side of the image, assessing the (visual) argument that Adams represents. This cut thereby include both the judges, as representatives of a contemporary interpretation of the constitution, and the marbles busts of the Founding Fathers in Adams’ final plea: “We desperately need your strength and wisdom to triumph over our fears, our prejudices, ourselves. Give us the courage to do what is right. And if it means civil war, then let it come. And when it does, then may it be, finally, the last battle of the American Revolution.” In these concluding remarks, Adams connects the foundational moments of the nation, through the American Revolution, to its ‘natural’ conclusion in the Civil War, through a linear, familial progression of national history.

In a nation-building sense, this manner of constructing the ‘natural’ family through the founding fathers recuperates history for the inheriting sons, affirming a future that the ideal of family – both biological and national – secures. McClintock argues that

the family offered an indispensable trope for figuring what was often violent, historical change as natural organic time. Since children ‘naturally’ progress into adults, projecting the family image on to national and imperial ‘Progress’ enabled what was often murderously violent change to be legitimated as the progressive unfolding of natural decree.118

Adams’ personal history and his own redemption are aligned with that of the nation and the broader national history and the recuperation of its defining trauma. As Schultheis comments, “we depend on the nation as family metaphor for a sense of historical and individual coherence.”119 This final courtroom scene, upon the release of the Amistad Africans, concludes with a relieved Cinque asking Adams: “What words did you use to persuade them?” To which Adams responds: “Yours.” Cinque reaches for Adams’ hand and awkwardly shakes it, as the conflicted histories are

118 McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family." P. 64.

119 Schultheis, Regenerative Fictions: Postcolonialism, Psychoanlysis and the Nation as Family. P. 23. Shapiro also comments that “[t]he state’s autobiographical performances, its stories of founding legitimacy, and continuity… are aimed in part at overcoming… biopolitical fracture. The state attempts to write itself in a way that ends the split”. Shapiro, For Moral Ambiguity: National Culture and the Politics of the Family. P. 123.

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‘resolved’. The paternal symbolic, expressed in this film through the national familial metaphor, is finally codified in Law at the film’s conclusion. Legal, national, racial, historical resolution is achieved through the close-up of a black-white handshake, with the white busts of the founding fathers prominent in the background. And in the movement toward the national (founding) Fathers, Amistad privileges an affirmation of the Law, (quite literally through the morally righteous decision of the Supreme Court), although demonstrating considerable conflict within its resolution that can only superficially absolve the trauma of a broken nation through a redeemed familial history of the nation.

So, as in many Spielberg films, the apparent recovery of the family and the sentimental culmination of narrative closure in Amistad, cannot contain the total trauma of United States’ conflicted national, familial history. Cinque’s triumphant return to West Africa is paralleled with historical destruction of the slaver fortress – a absolution of the history of slavery which emphasises its destruction. But the final images of Cinque show him looking out to sea – not at ‘home’ – while a caption appears on screen: “Cinque returned to Sierra Leone to find his own people engaged in civil war. His village was destroyed and his family gone. It is believed they were sold into slavery.” The camera focuses on Cinque as he stands at the prow of the boat that fails to return him to his idealised ‘homeland’; a tear runs down his face as he looks into the sun, and the screen fade to black. This tragic final scene suggests that the home/nation is always lost, a ‘belonging’ out of reach. Rather than a geographical place, the home remains intangible, and ultimately, for Cinque and a history that has been corrupted by the trauma of slavery, irretrievable, a taint that pervades the recovery of American history, national family and homeland in Amistad. As Kaes remarks on the topic of Heimat,

the word is always linked to strong feeling, mostly remembrances and longing. ‘Heimat’ always evokes... the feeling of something lost or very far away, something which one cannot easily find, or find again… ‘Heimat’ is such that if one would go closer and closer to it, one would discover that at the moment of arrival it is gone, it has disappeared into nothingness. It

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seems to me that one has a more precise idea of ‘Heimat’ the further one is away from it.”120

For Cinque, the ‘homelandless’ African, home is ultimately figured through a screen that fades to black, ‘home’ vanishing as he approaches his return. Broader anxieties of a lost home are externalised onto Cinque’s experience of dislocation and loss, while simultaneously privileging the redemption of the historical American national home through the paternal validation of the Founding Fathers. The United States is founded upon this separation of the family that Cinque, and the film, cannot resolve in the final scene. Regardless of the power of the familial discourse of national families, this rupture of the Middle Passage, the tale of Cinque’s loss, still has the last word against a vision of a unified United States, despite the apparent privileging of the Fathers’ metanarrative of the familial nation and a unified history, evoked in a close- up of clasped black and white hands.

Conclusion: Disintegrating Homelands, Degenerating Homes

The ubiquitous rhetoric of the family is irretrievably intertwined with prominent cultural discourses, and as discussed in this particular chapter, that of the nation. As Lakoff observes, “[w]e have Founding Fathers. We send ‘our sons and daughters’ to war… Groups in the military think of themselves as ‘bands of brothers’… the nation’s landmass is seen as ‘home’ to the nation seen as a ‘family’.”121 Throughout these three films specifically, and through popular and political culture in general, the ideologies of family, home and nation mutually reinforce each other, yet also frequently conflict. Significantly, even when animated within national metaphorics, familial discourses continue, at some level, to invoke Oedipal narrative arcs. As Keanne argues, “[f]rom a pre-Oedipal attachment to the mother, the individual subject must turn to larger love objects in order to become part of the mass, hence nation,

120 Keanne, "Imaginary Homelands: Notes on Heimat and Heimlich." P. 83. Quoting Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: the Return of History on Film (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). P. 163.

121 Lakoff, Whose Freedom? The Battle over America's Most Important Ideal. P. 65. Lakoff goes on to argues that “conservatives are clear about the centrality to their politics of ‘family values’.” However, beyond political battle lines of the left and the right, the family metaphor remains a powerful discourse, regardless of political persuasion.

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state”.122 In the movement toward the f/Father – Indy’s colonial triumph, Avner’s paternal return to his family, and historical redemption through national Founding Fathers – these films privilege assimilation into the Symbolic and the Law that structure Spielberg’s familial narratives. Indy takes on a colonising authority and paternal benevolence in his duties to his ‘third world’ children, Avner rejects the smothering maternal embrace of his motherland, while Adams and Cinque accept their role in the Founding Fathers’ historical construct, benignly approved by the Law of the land and the United States Constitution.

It is the familial dramas of national identity, channelled through imagery of regeneration, paternity and assimilation to symbolic Law that animate powerful filmic affect. Yet such representations of the paternal national symbolic are inflected with anxiety, ambivalence and ambiguity toward this conflation of family and nation. Spielberg’s films are not simply patriotic or nationalist, and do not merely channel a fantasy form of the family/nation. Instead his films articulate cultural dialogues about the family’s rhetorical relationship to discourse of the nation in complex and conflicting ways, emphasising the ever-present threat of exile, civil war, homelessness and national corruption in conjunction with familial breakdown and trauma. Assimilation into the Symbolic, the Law of the land, is conflicted, problematic and can never be fully attained – as discussed, the ‘rescue’ of the homeland in 1941 results in the annihilation of the family home that slips off cliff’s edge into the ocean, an ironic representation of the potential disintegration that haunts the fantasy of nation and family, hearth and home. And overtly throughout Temple, Munich and Amistad, paternal reproduction, while a privileged trope of familial discourse and national metaphors, is a problematic site of conflict and anxiety that the films struggle to fully ‘resolve’. The investment in the ideal of family and its attendant investment in futurity are forever haunted by the pleasures of the death drive, the dark fantasy of violence that taints Avner’s lovemaking, the civil war and brutality that marks the homelands of Amistad, and the dark tunnels and ritualised, c/Child-consuming sacrifice that lie beneath the security of apparently benevolent paternal colonialism.

122 Keanne, "Imaginary Homelands: Notes on Heimat and Heimlich." P. 83. 278

Conclusion: Flat Facts and Fairy Tales

Steely reflective surfaces and a dark bluish light establish the noir tone of Minority Report. The camera moves through a shadowy room, lingering on rubbish and family photos, a cold and broken home in disarray. Ignoring the mess, John Anderton rifles through a catalogue of home movies, takes a deep puff of the futuristic drug, neroin, (promising ‘clarity’) and indulges in happier times gone by, in memories of wife and child and of the open spaces so distinct from the film’s dominant futuristic city-scape. The 3D hologramatic images of his lost family are those of a better time, but the images are stretched, fluttering, their ‘clarity’ distorted. Anderton’s long since kidnapped son looks up at his smiling father, and says ‘I love you, daddy’ before the film snaps to black. Switching discs, Anderton watches his former wife, Lara, as her stretched and flickering image asks him to “come and watch the rain with me.” Once again, the video suddenly ceases, hurtling Anderton back into the present, into the dark, dirty room, watching the evening rain stream down the windows, alone.

This structuring loss of the son and the resulting breakdown of family frames Minority Report’s overarching plot and politics. Nostalgic vision of Anderton’s now- destroyed family-life emphasises the dystopic politics of the film – the nostalgia of lost family parallels the loss of utopia. In this futuristic world, Anderton is a Precrime detective, using three psychics, the angelic precogs, to prevent murders before they happen. But Anderton’s zeal for his work is predicated upon the loss of his son, and conversely, the dystopic law of this futuristic fantasy is premised on familial rupture, the murder of precog Agatha’s m/Mother is the origin of the totalitarian system ruled over by a corrupt and murderous father figure. Threatened himself by the problematic, authoritarian System, Anderton rescues Agatha, and in doing so, redeems his, and her, initial familial loss.1 Resolving the structuring trauma of Agatha’s family history repairs his own shattered home, restores the broken nation, and thus redeems the ‘future’.

1 As Karen B. Mann points out, “the film offers two narratives of lost children”, and she suggests that John’s “rescue of Agatha can come to equal the rescue of his son/himself through displacement.” Karen B. Mann, "Lost Boys and Girls in Spielberg's Minority Report," Journal of Narrative Theory 35, no. 2 (2005). P. 204 and P. 207.

Anderton’s final scene recalls the earlier one, as he stand in the blue lit room, and the water runs down the windows. But, this time, Lara stands beside him, heavily pregnant, as they watch the rain together. The music soars, and Anderton smiles, somewhat sadly, putting his hand on her pregnant belly. The camera moves closer in the dappled blue light to a medium close up as they look at each other and she nestles her head on his shoulder. As Lester Friedman argues, “[i]n Minority Report, … salvation rests in the reconstitution of the family, not the power of the state or, for that matter, any sort of superior being or consciousness.”2 Throughout Minority Report, the future dystopia is barren and unproductive. In ideological contrast, the film’s conclusion fashions a nostalgic ‘future’ whereby the past is recovered and reborn, reviving a sterile society, promising deliverance of the corrupted family. The family assuages the traumas inflicted by an invasive state founded upon death and surveillance. Salvation of the future, of the family, of the f/Father, is premised upon the idealised Child that emerges triumphant from the sterile state that persistently corrupts the private home.

Yet as the camera lingers on this final idyllic image of the restored familial ideal, the shadows of the rain running down the window flickers across their melancholy faces, pale in the blue lighting, recalling the unsatisfactory blurred and stretched images of Anderton’s hologramatic family at the beginning of the film, a suggestion of the problematic familial fantasy that structures the film’s redemption of dystopia and broken families.3

Minority Report, and particularly these two scenes, is a synecdoche for the preoccupations, narrative anxieties, ambivalent sentimentality, problematic resolutions and fractured families that dominate Spielberg’s filmmaking. Both the

2 Lester D. Friedman, "Minority Report: A Dystopic Vision," Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussion of Cinema 27 (2003). Online, no pagination.

3 Karen B. Mann observes that “the conventional happiness of John Anderton and his pregnant wife re- establishes the nuclear family that has been violated on a number of levels in this film. The moment appears to privilege Anderton as father. Yet the rain running down the window panes offers the suggestion… that the larger world outside has NOT changed”. Mann, "Lost Boys and Girls in Spielberg's Minority Report." P. 209. Arguably, in addition to Mann’s point that the outside world has not changed, the imagery also distorts the fantasy of the family ideal, both as an image and in its structural power to recuperate the familial home at the film’s conclusion. Perhaps the familial world has not recovered either.

280 idealised fantasy family and its corrupted home are the narrative heart of the film, a corruption reflected in the state and the obscene Father. In parallel, the angelic precogs, freed from their earthly and perverse Temple, invoke the divine, an overt Spielbergian use of vernacular religion, suggesting a ‘spiritual’ transcendence that rehabilitates the troubled image of ‘the family’ – both that of Anderton, and that of the nation that founds its authority upon the violation of the home and the family.4 Minority Report, like many Spielberg films, moves from this corruption of the home toward an image of familial domesticity, a recuperation of idealised family life. The intrusion into the family home by the state/Law strangles the nostalgised future – by the film’s conclusion, however, John’s wife is pregnant, and the future, the c/Child, is seemingly possible without state interference.5 As Edelman argues, the Child promises “a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow… [invoking] the Child, [invokes a] disciplinary image of the Imaginary past or… a site of a projective identification with an always impossible future.”6 Throughout Spielberg’s narratives, reproductive (nostalgic) ideals of home, domesticity and family signifies a fantasy of the future that must be safeguarded, a protective hand resting on a pregnant belly.7

4 The law does catch Anderton in the later stages of the film, and he is ‘haloed’ and added to prison keeper Gideon’s ‘flock’. Gideon tells Anderton as he is put into ‘storage’ that the experience of the halo is “actually kind of a rush. You have visions. They say your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true.” The halo seems to suggest, that, like Roy in Close Encounter, the abandonment of the symbolic permits the ‘ascension’ to the real, a fantasy of freedom from the law (although always framed within the law) which permits fantasised access to the maternal body, to religious transcendence, and the final isolationist fantasy of the family that uneasily concludes the film. For a interesting reading of the conclusion that suggests that Anderon never leaves the halo, and the film’s final sequences are his immersion in his fantasy/memory, see Nigel Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2007). PP. 328-9.

5 Karen B. Mann notes of the film’s interdependence of religious and political discourses, paralleled to those of the family, that “[a]lthough civil law is man-made and susceptible to revision, it nonetheless exceeds the will of any one man and derives from an abstract civil society, whose generative powers approximate those of God and nature. Similarly in Minority Report to close down the Temple at the police station’s core restores the relation between Man and God that allows the legal and the divine to resemble and confirm one another. … rationality reaffirms its affiliation with governance at the same time that fatherhood returns to the home.” Mann, "Lost Boys and Girls in Spielberg's Minority Report." P. 35.

6 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). P. 31.

7 In the case of Minority Report, John’s unborn child presages a new era where the future is returned to its cycle of nostalgic repetition, engaging “a fantasy that generates endless narratives of generation”. Ibid. P. 82.

281 But as the dark evening, the blurry, shadowy imagery, chiaroscuro lighting, and the pouring rain suggest, the fantasy of the future is conflicted. The contradiction of resolution, the problem that manifests in Minority Report’s conclusion, is inherent throughout Spielberg’s representations of homes and families. Equally applicable to the blatantly problematic conclusion to A.I., and observable in many fraught conclusions to even the most seemingly sentimental familial returns, Mark Garret Cooper notes of Minority Report’s resolution that

domestic resolution [is] wholly inadequate to the particular problem of governance at hand. … [the film] does not so much provide a happy ending as cite the formulaic conclusion audiences expect. Rather than prove that the world has been made safe for romance (again), the film envisions the private sphere as an isolation zone. … This solution seems all the more inadequate given that the film spends most of its running time showing such seclusion to be a practical impossibility. What passes for resolution… is, in sum, a manifest contradiction.8

Overtly, Spielberg privileges reuniting the fractured family. Yet, while he ‘heals’ his dystopias, the family was fractured to begin with. His sentimental returns can never fully camouflage this ambivalence toward the familial embrace, despite the often overt familial ‘repairs’. Minority Report, as the rain pours down on the window, reminiscent of the first vision of Anderton ‘home’, is framed by trauma through the attempted recuperation of loss with the substitute c/Child-to-be. As Morris puts it, another “feel-good ending… crumbles under scrutiny.”9

The main concern of this thesis has been to understand how the varying discourses of ‘the family’ circulate through, and structure, Spielberg’s films, considering the foundations of sentiment and conflict that dominate his narratives, the way in which

8 Mark Garrett Cooper, "The Contradictions of Minority Report," Film Criticism 28, no. 2 (2003). PP. 24-25. This ‘isolation’ also continues in Minority Report, as the abused children/angels/precogs are removed from society, living in a (technology-free) lakeside cottage, rugged up in front of the fire, reading novels, a prelapsarian fantasy of the ‘private sphere’. The family survives in Minority Report only in isolation, as do Poltergeist’s Freeling family, who depart the suburbs, and excise the public world of the television, closing the door firmly behind them. Even in The Lost World, doting dinosaur ‘parents’ are ultimately allowed to nurture their broods of baby dinosaurs on their remote island, free from the disruption of human society, a similar conclusion to that of the characters of Minority Report. But both of these films are premised upon the death of the Bad Father and the retrieval of the good father – the cracks in familial discourse are papered over with idyllic nostalgia and prelasparian imagery. Such pathological isolation is the logical endpoint for the ‘private’ family.

9 Morris, The Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light. P. 329.

282 Spielberg constructs, represents and problematises the ‘family’. Within the typically ‘Spielbergian’ familial dynamic, there are contradictions, fluctuations, permutations, absences and ambiguities that are configured by both the ideal fantasy family and the fantasy of its disintegration. In addressing such familial rhetoric, each chapter of this thesis has considered the specifics of Spielberg’s representation of the family through a particular optic, painting a broad picture of the family in Spielberg’s narratives. In the first section, the thesis addresses the representation of the so-called ‘private’ family, analysing the psychoanalytic problematics of family, and specifically setting up the framework for understanding ‘the family’ and Spielberg’s troubled familial resolutions through structures of the maternal and the paternal, and the narrative anxieties produced by submission to the Law. Such dynamics extend to the subsequent discussions focused upon the ‘private’ world of the family and conflicted ‘homes’ and suburbs. The thesis then considers how these core images of ‘the family’ manifest within powerful ‘public’ narratives, effecting how discourses of religion and nation are constructed and represented, the way that stories and histories are told. As a definition, ‘family’ seems an obvious ‘flat fact’, but as this discussion of Spielberg’s films proposes, in rhetorical contrast to simplistic dismissals or idolisations of Spielberg’s ‘sentimental’ narratives, his families are amorphous, contradictory and conflicted, fairy tales to soothe, and to invoke, the fantasies of the uncanny home, the dark chasms within ‘the spiritual’ and the threatening authority of the nation-state.

As this thesis has argued, how suburbia – America’s hearth and home – is represented, and how narrative is preoccupied by the lurking uncanny within, is central to Spielberg’s representation of the family. The threat of domestic failure implicit in suburban imagery suggests anxiety about the rituals of family and home, that the resolution of domesticity entails sacrifice and isolation. Such anxieties also become apparent through Spielberg’s use of ‘vernacular religion’ within apparently secular narratives, drawing upon religious metaphors scaffolded by the deified ‘Happy Holy Family, and specifically the authority of the f/Father-God. Within this vernacular spirituality, however, (ir)resolution becomes particularly problematic – the material world of family, or f/Father, can only stand in for the sublime, once again creating a disjuncture preventing, yet suggesting, heavenly maternal sublimation. In a similar way, as this thesis has demonstrated, this conflict and ambivalence toward the ‘belonging’ that structures (the fantasy of) family also structures the relationship

283 toward the imagined community of nation in Spielberg’s narrative. While the metaphors of national family and those of a seemingly familial nation reinforce each other, they also expose substantial ambiguity – in their movement toward the f/Father, Spielberg’s films privilege assimilation into the Symbolic and the Law, yet also collude with interdependent discourses of family and nation that disrupt this dynamic. Exile, homelessness and corruption pervade Spielberg’s narratives of national and familial identity. The compromise and/or antagonism that ‘stains’ familial resolution implies an uneasy recognition of the impossibility of attaining the object of desire, that the sentimental family is always a site of fracture and anxiety. Submission to the Law of the (paternal) Father, tempered by concurrent (attempted) sublimation to the Real of the maternal, the vacillation between fantasised wholeness and always unsatisfied, uncertain desire, structures Spielberg’s representation of the family. As the imagery of Minority Report suggests, narrative resolution is always inflected with anxiety, the implication of not-quite resolution that the soothing balm of the family, despite the best laid plans of special effects and cinematic affect, cannot conceal. Regardless of the form that the family manifests in his narratives, Spielberg persistently returns to the image of family to frame his (ir)resolutions – whether it be the travails within the suburban home, the troubled depiction of the f/Father God and the Happy Holy Family, or the dominating rhetoric of the national symbolic.

While each chapter of this thesis has specifically analysed two or three films in light of particular manifestations of familial discourses, in fact all of Spielberg’s films could have been considered, to different degrees, within each context. More broadly, all popular culture might conceivably be interpreted in terms of larger cultural preoccupation with the Family. The family is one of the most powerful and affective structure of narrative; as Pomerance points out “[t]he family is our logic, our repository, our sacred fire and source of light, and also, of course, the origin of a darkness we project outside of it.”10 Yet, despite recognition of Spielberg as a major contemporary director, and acceptance of the representation of the as family central to his films, this aspect of his filmmaking has suffered critical neglect. Spielberg’s cause and effect use of ‘the family’, his ‘trademark sentimental manipulation, has led to a dismissal of his films. And even more problematically, the (sentimental) appeal

10 Murray Pomerance, "Introduction: Family Affairs," in A Family Affair: Cinema Calls Home, ed. Murray Pomerance (New York and London: Wallflower Press, 2008). P. 2.

284 and use of the family in popular film itself is a neglected area of analysis. Consequently, Spielberg has been underestimated, not just as a film maker, but more importantly, in terms of his harnessing of the complex appeal of the familial dynamic that resonates so powerfully in popular culture. This detailed analysis of Spielberg’s diverse familial narratives and metaphors has interrogated the contradictory subtexts that mediate discourses of the family, rather than claiming ‘the family’ for, or saving it from, the clutches of conservatism or liberalism, or attempting to define Spielberg as a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ director as a consequence. As demonstrated in this thesis, his all-pervasive narratives of family are intertwined with those of social and political constructions, with compulsory heteronormativity, with the apparent binary of public and private, and with the investments in both a (paternal) biological and cultural future.

In analysing the significance of familial representation in Spielberg’s films, this study has considered a range of critical theories, addressing questions of representation, narrative, and the production of meaning and broader ideological and cultural concerns. Although not the only relevant approach to the topic, the Lacanian analytic and Žižekian insights into popular culture have been fruitful in breaking apart the familial and psychoanalytic structure that frame Spielberg’s films and families, enabling an examination of the family through the dynamic of fantasy and desire, loss and resolution, at the heart of Spielberg’s narrative and familial conflict. In addition, Lee Edelman’s queer theory analysis of investments in the ‘future’ and the future’s representative, the Child, suggest an alternative and innovative perspective for illuminating the central anxieties that surface in Spielberg’s families around biological, familial, national and cultural reproduction. The preoccupation with ‘family’ represents a cultural investment in the future – not just in the (paternal) individual and family, but also more generally in society and the human race. What emerges throughout Spielberg’s films, and what is the significant contribution of this thesis to Spielberg studies, is that despite the sentimentalised appeal of harmonious unity and the veneration of the Child, reproduction, and the future, there is an inverse desire to destroy the family – Edelman’s ‘cultural death drive’: the Hook, the poltergeist, the shark and the truck disrupt the familial ideal, and linger uneasily within the glued-together family that remains. So, as this thesis has argued, while the familial, heteronormative, reproductive embrace in Spielberg’s films appears to be the

285 logical endpoint of narrative, simultaneously the drive to destroy the family resurfaces – through the liberation of the constricted family man, the drive into the freedom of the West, the ascension to the stars, the flight into exile, or through an all-consuming dinosaur, slashing children with her raptor claw – a momentary manifestation of antagonism toward the familial ideal of hearth and home.

As has been argued throughout this thesis, the complexity and ambivalence of his narratives’ familial resolutions suggests that Spielberg is not merely a sentimental or manipulative director. The family is the biological and discursive point of origins, a biological ‘fact’ that cultural fantasies are built upon. An important filmmaker and arbiter of popular culture, Spielberg’s families are worthy of considered analysis by virtue of his vast appeal and success. Further, the enormous (filmic/narrative) popularity of simply ‘the family’ appears as a collective symptom of (western) psychopathology in general, a broader field of study that would reward greater research and analysis. In fact, Spielberg’s popularity stems from his ability to tap into dimensions of potent cultural and familial discourses that both attract and repel. As such, this discussion of Spielberg’s familial narratives, significantly, is not pro- or anti-family. Rather, this thesis has considered how the ideology of family structures film and sentiment in frequently conflicted and contradictory ways, across his films, and within individual films. Spielberg’s ‘sentimental’ families confront the contradiction and anxieties that the (ir)resolution of the ‘family’ evokes – representing the pathos and hostility toward the dynamics and ideals of the family that structure his narratives, the space between ‘flat facts and fairy tales’.

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304 Filmography

Hooper, Tobe. Poltergeist. USA: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, SLM Entertainment, 1982. Spielberg, Steven. Always. USA: , , 1989. ———. Amistad. USA: DreamWorks SKG, HBO Pictures, 1997. ———. Artificial Intelligence: A.I. USA: Warner Bros., DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, 2001. ———. Catch Me If You Can. USA: DreamWorks SKG, Kemp Company, Splendid Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Bungalow 78 Productions, 2002. ———. Close Encounters of the Third Kind. USA: Corporation, EMI Films, 1977. ———. Duel. USA: Universal Pictures, 1971. ———. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. USA: Universal Pictures, 1982. ———. Empire of the Sun. USA: Amblin Entertainment, Warner Bros., 1987. ———. Hook. USA: Amblin Entertainment, TriStar Pictures, 1991. ———. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. USA: , Corporation, 2008. ———. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. USA: Lucasfilm, Paramount Pictures Corporation, 1989. ———. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. USA: Lucasfilm, Paramount Pictures Corporation, 1984. ———. Jaws. USA: Universal Pictures, Zanuck/Brown Company, 1975. ———. Jurassic Park. USA: Amblin Entertainment, Universal Pictures, 1993. ———. Minority Report. USA: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, DreamWorks SKG, Cruise/Wagner Productions, Blue Tulip, Amblin Entertainment, 2002. ———. Munich. USA, Canada: DreamWorks LLC, Universal Studios, Amblin Entertainment, Kennedy/Marshall Co., Barry Mendel Productions, Alliance Atlantis, Peninsula Film, 2005. ———. Raiders of the Lost Ark. USA: Lucasfilm, Paramount Pictures Corporation, 1981. ———. Saving Private Ryan. USA: DreamWorks SKG, Paramount Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Mutual Film Company, 1998. ———. Schindler's List. USA: Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, 1993. ———. The Color Purple. USA: Amblin Entertainment, Guber-Peters Company, , 1985. ———. The Lost World: Jurassic Park. USA: Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, 1997. ———. The Sugarland Express. USA: Universal Pictures, 1974. ———. The Terminal. USA: DreamWorks LLC, Parkes/MacDonald, Amblin Entertainment, 2004. ———. War of the Worlds. USA: Paramount Pictures, DreamWorks Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, Cruise/Wagner Productions, 2005.

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