Steven Spielberg
The Fabelmans

The camera's eye digs deep, revealing truths that can escape the distracted gaze of everyday life. And above all, they can hurt, wound, show feelings that conflict with the uplifting vision we are used to. Thus, the magic of cinema is combined with a certain fear for young Sam. It's the repulsion towards these painful discoveries, the anguish inherent in the fact that, by filming someone, you can capture their deepest spark, their true feelings, and in the case of a family member, it may turn out to be a discovery not at all pleasant. A discovery that concerns the future filmmaker's mother.

The Fabelmans is an important, revealing film. A work useful to understand its author even beyond the latter's own willingness. In the sense that by recounting his love for cinema and his youthful years, Spielberg accidentally reveals (or perhaps intentionally, but it seems more difficult) also the origin of what are his limits. The discourse is a bit oblique, but follow me.

Alongside the most exquisitely technical creative drive, for which young Sam-Steven shows himself particularly gifted from childhood, a problem peeks into the narrative fabric. By filming people, the boy realizes he has a privileged vantage point, an observatory from which he can clinically investigate the feelings of others, emotions and gestures that normally may go unnoticed. And it is by watching in the dark the footage of a beautiful family outing that Sam-Steven discovers what he would rather not, identifying a crack in his seemingly indestructible family.

The sentimentally honest confession, however, has a metanarrative flip side. By showing how cinema can hurt, how the investigative eye can clearly and mercilessly outline our pettiness, Spielberg-Fabelmans reveals to us that, in the end, he fears that art, is afraid of its profound, emotional, cognitive implications. A cinema that investigates the human element can undermine his certainties as a boy and as a 76-year-old. The trauma of the discovery makes him flee, embracing a cinema that is instead engineering and pyrotechnic. An art that is a stunning imitation (for its technique) and at the same time a reassuring simulacrum because, unlike reality, it always remains under the control of the director-demiurge.

Filming something means controlling it, from the lights to the crashing trains, the desert sand, the blood of war. Everything is meticulously false and therefore nothing can scare young Sam. But the human element, no, it is never fully manageable, it surprises, drags the viewer into the vortex of feelings, changes the spectator and even the director. It erodes every certainty.

I say this film is greater than the intentions of its author because by showing himself like this, Spielberg confirms a trait more and more evident in this senile phase of his path. The inability to tell something that goes beyond his dictatorial control, the impossibility to say something dangerously human, the obstinate return to clichés in building characters that are never fully rounded, but always a bit caricatured.

The power of cinema scared the boy and after over fifty years of career, full of fireworks but also of much craft, we can say it continues to scare the old man. He does not want to investigate the human soul due to his ancient trauma. This is the revelation that retrospectively illuminates dozens and dozens of works. Everything must be (and is) magnificent in his art, the scientific genius unfolds in a formidable, almost obsessive technique in recreating reality. But it is a limping reality because in those scenarios the author (who is not really an author) puts characters that mortify everything a little, in their evident limits. They are algorithms, controllable functions, like lights or camera movements on a dolly. And for this, they are always a bit cloying for the viewer, lacking the spark that is characteristic of human unpredictability. Steven avoids it, subtracts it from his cinema because that art for him is pure selfishness, self-celebration, spasmodic control. The only truly well-rounded character must be himself.

Even here, in the film of his life, there's a lot of surface, many trinkets. Almost an hour of superfluous adolescent issues, to be kind. There's a lot of technique, in the sense that making cinema in concrete terms is shown in great detail and it is wonderful. It's the magic of the seventh art in its most performative dimension: for Steven, the ultimate goal is the deception of an instant, the illusion that what flows on the screen is true. There's nothing beyond, everything plays out in the space that goes from the idea to the moment the fiction magically deceives the audience's eye. It's an aesthetic challenge that extinguishes with the projector in the theater.

There is nothing beyond that instant because he knows he can't control it. He is not familiar with human reactions. He knows that shooting provides an interpretation of people, he experiences it himself when two bullies contest him for diametrically opposite reasons. One appears too cool in the school film, the other too pathetic. But Sam-Steven did not mean to pass judgment. It's something that emerged despite himself.

Thus, even today, that technical genius continues to have little familiarity with human things and the judgment that emerges on him is not entirely flattering, but perhaps he hadn't realized it.