GOOD SPIELBERG, BAD SPIELBERG

Talking Pictures

Stephen Schiff

After a summer of gabble about revamping the movieratings system, about the evils of screen violence in general and Steven Spielberg’s two blockbusters, Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, in particular. I’m more convinced than ever that we have no idea what our children should see and hear—that, in fact, we decide such things not on the basis of what will be good for them but on the basis of what will be good for us.

This summer, the age-old discussions had a bizarre new timbre. Of Indiana Jones, the reviewer for People magazine screeched, “It is an astonishing violation of the trust people have in Spielberg... .No parent should allow a young child to see this traumatizing movie; it would be a cinematic form of child abuse.” The tone here isn’t just angry, it’s hurt, betrayed; it’s the same tone one might hear in a mother’s voice as she discovers her beaming cherub trying to fire. The betrayer is the most famous movie director since Hitchcock, and a man who, in the eyes of his public, is himself a big, adorable child. “I can be an adult among my close friends,” Steven Spielberg has said, “but then, I can be a closet kid too, and go back and hide in the closet and play with my toys, which is the place 1 would rather be than anywhere else.’^Awwww. Spielberg is the Michael Jackson of the movies, a babe too innoceflf to glory wickedly in the rewards of talent and success— too innocent, therefore, to incur our resentment. However, our affection for him may be / conditional. We love him only as long as he’s a good boy, as long as he makes sweet, friendly movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.

But there is a seething Hyde within the boyish Jekyll, and this summer he emerged unmistakably—and in force. Spielberg produced Gremlins (which Joe Dante directed), a funny, subversive horror film that evokes the wormy underbelly of the very universe he created. The world of this movie is recognizably his: the small town, the mother-dominated family, the lonely child-hero, the assortment of toys and candies and in-jokes, and above all the otherworldly cuddlebug, this time a cooing fuzzball named Gizmo. But Gremlins also introduces the Spielberg id—Gizmo spawns a brood of hilariously evil creepy-crawlies that spend Christmas Eve destroying Smalltown, U.S.A. The movie is designed to slap Spielberg fans in the face. “You like this?” it winks, proffering its mini-E.T. “Well, this goes with it!”

Gremlins came hard on the heels of Indiana Jones, another movie that plays naughty tricks on its audience. It begins like the jolly juggernaut its predecessor, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was—only to descend into a hellish, fire-red netherworld, a land of enslaved children toiling under the lash, of howling priests who disembowel their victims, of torture and poison and madness. It’s useless to pretend, as some of its fans have, that Indiana Jones isn’t upsetting. And it’s equally useless to pretend, as many of its critics have, that the people it upsets the most are children.

One could gas on for hours about the findings of child psychologists like Jean Piaget and Bruno Bettelheim, who have warned parents and educators against trying to protect Impressionable Young Minds from the monsters and terrifying deeds in fairy stories. But perhaps a single suggestive quote, from Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, will suffice:

Those who outlawed traditional folk fairy tales decided that if there were monsters in a story told to children, these must all be friendly—but they missed the monster a child knows best...: the monster he feels or fears himself to be.... By keeping this monster within the child unspoken of, hidden in his unconscious, adults prevent the child from spinning fantasies around it_As a result, the child remains helpless with his worst anxieties—much more so than if he had been told fairy tales which give these anxieties form and body and also show ways to overcome these monsters.

For a kid, Gremlins could make a great fairy tale. If you’re having fun playing, it tells him, and terrible trouble results (especially because your friends get in on it and things whirl out of control), you can still solve the problem on your own, without the help of your parents. For a child, that’s a bracing, possibly therapeutic message. Likewise, Indiana Jones may strike youngsters as oddly comforting. It’s about a family unit—Indiana as father; the gold digger, Willie, as mother; and the diminutive sidekick, Short Round, as child. And it’s most useful as a fairy tale during the section that even Spielberg says he wouldn’t want a ten-year-old to see: the father drinks something (the black blood of Kali) and is transformed into a stranger; he turns against the child; he nearly kills the mother. If this scenario suggests saddening and all-too-plausible parallels in American family life, Indiana Jones makes the most of it: the film then shows the resourceful child forcing the father back to his senses, saving his life, and helping the whole family escape from the nightmare world that has engulfed it.

Yet it’s no wonder that parents are frightened by this movie. They watch kids spirited away to a wicked underworld, parents helpless to save them, a father drinking and turning brutish. And they may find Gremlins even more upsetting: it’s about an ineffectual dad who isn’t around when his son needs him, who’s a failure as a breadwinner, whose attempts to please his family threaten to harm them. Underneath that reading is an even spookier one. If the child-hero, Billy, is viewed as Gizmo’s papa, Gremlins becomes a story about the fear of having children, about how the lovable strangers we raise and trust will turn on us, hurt us, even long to destroy us.

The unconscious is the part of us that remains a child forever, but it’s not all daffodils and yipping puppies. So perhaps it was inevitable that the child’s eye of Steven Spielberg would eventually settle on darker humors —and that a lot of grown-ups would denounce him for it. I congratulate him. I liked Gremlins a lot, and I liked Indiana Jones even more—and I don’t in the least resent them for startling me, for unsettling me, or for reaching down into those regions of the spirit that most summer movies never even nudge.