Speilberg: The Dreyfus Affair

In my last post, I stumbled clumsily around some ideas about an increasing anti-intellectualism in American culture. Today, I'd like continue that attempt, this time looking specifically at one of the more rabid anti-intellectuals at work in the culture: Steven Spielberg.

Of course that's overstatement. There's nothing rabid about Steven Spielberg. I should have said he's one of the tamer, kitty kat-snuffling, tummy-rubbing, starry-eyed anti-intellectuals at work in the culture. He's the cutest widdle diwector since Leni Reifenstahl or D.W. Griffith. (Okay, that's overstatement, too.)

Today, let's consider Spielberg's early films like Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. If you haven't seen Jaws, or if you need a refresher, here it is in 30 seconds, as re-enacted by bunnies. If you haven't seen Close Encounters, boil a dozen potatoes, then drain, mash, and build a volcano out of them.

In these movies, Spielberg employs a stand-in for himself, a "character double," in the form of Richard Dreyfus as the sniveling do-gooder liberal and know-it-all. In both films, Dreyfus is hysterically interested in something other people aren't (sharks, mountain craters), and part of what he has to do in both movies is to confince people that he is not crazy. But do audiences really identify or care about Dreyfus/Spielberg in either movie? I would doubt it, as even their fellow characters don't much care about them.

Yes, Jaws is a great movie, very well made and terrific with popcorn. But Dreyfus (and let's keep in mind that Dreyfus here = Spielberg) is not a sympathetic character. We do not -- and aren't meant to -- like him, as we are meant to like family man/police chief Roy Schieder or the salty and pirate-like Robert Shaw. The good people of Amity don't take to Dreyfus, who's a scientist and seems to have something to prove, to "get his name in the National Geographic." Dreyfus doesn't relate to them either. When the mayor asks him what kind of shark they're dealing with, Dreyfus tells them: "Carcaradon carcharias," suggesting that Dreyfus doesn't quite get that we layfolk don't care nothin' for them complycated science names.

To Shaw the pirate, Dreyfus' sissyness is plain. He tells Dreyfus: "You've got city boy hands, Hooper. You been countin' money all your life." (True story: my friend Jessica used to get migrane headaches whenever she heard Richard Dreyfus' voice. She had to change the channel quickly whenever and wherever he appeared.) Shaw, as Quint, is someone you can't help but like. He's been places, he's got actual scars, he's had adventures.

In Close Encounters, the Dreyfus/Spielberg character is even less likeable/empathetic. Here, Dreyfus speaks entirelly in frantic, upper registers. Somehow, he's talking through his nose. He builds giant lumps of things as an effort to "understand" or "investigate." He tries to teach his children fractions by smashing model trains together. He is unhinged, alien arrivals or no. And, as a man and a father, he's presented as such an impotent force that he can't even convince his kids to watch Pinnochio.

Neither movie is as anti-intellect or anti-science as Spielberg movies would become, but they both point to some lasting motifs (or memes) in his work. As a chief example, in both movies the intellectual/scientist is presented as a buffoon, someone who misunderstands and does not fit within the "real world" of fishermen, families, and masculine traits. As with Jeremy Davies' translator character in Saving Private Ryan, the Dreyfus of Jaws survives the movie where others do not, but these intellectuals -- to a greater or lesser extent -- survive at the expense of the more worldly and "heroic" characters.

Similarly, the Close Encounters Dreyfus is literally (and I don't use that word lightly) "alienated" from his family by his own scientific curiousity. At the movie's end, Dreyfus leaves his family and his planet behind to essentially become an alien, a brainy creature who can communicate through musical tones, lights, and fancy technology. Kinda like Spielberg.

In these early films, Spielberg is in a sense illustrating himself, and doing so in a way that is largely self-immolating. In some sense, Spielberg is sending himself away or -- as we'll see in looking at his alien/dinosaur/robot movies -- extinguishing that intellect for the sake of innocence and wonder, two things that have difficulty sharing time with science and critical thinking. After all, as the Billy Bragg song goes, Scholarship is the Enemy of Romance.

(By the way, I haven't seen these movies in some time, so if I'm recalling detail incorrectly, please make an effort to set me straight.)