‘The Fabelmans’ and fables about film

Spielberg was pointing the camera at himself all this time

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

With The Fabelmans Steven Spielberg has joined a current with Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Alejandro Iñarritu’s Bardo, and Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Dance of Reality in making a film inspired by his own life, an autobiopic, tied into a personal story of a young man getting into the art-form. There’s its superhero-style title, referring to those fable men called storytellers (I wanna see the list of rejected titles, The Playbergs, The Dreamweavermans). Then there’s the plot, about a Jewish kid growing up in suburbia making home movies. Perhaps then the film will at last give us a peek behind the curtain of Spielberg’s subconscious, like surrealist Ballard gave us with his sober yet graphic semi-autobiography Empire of the Sun.

Spielberg’s adaptation of Empire of the Sun was one of the serious films with which he’s staggered his career (see The Colour Purple, Amistad, Lincoln). Still, his reputation rests more on his blockbusters, with even his fans rating him for his technical wizardry, his smooth storytelling, for being a great populist artist. (To his detractors he’s either too populist, or, when he tries not to be, pretentious; one hard cineaste blog of…