It’s always interesting to follow the career of an accomplished artist. You see trends emerging as the artist gets mature. I do this all the time for my favorite artists. It’s one of the reasons why I watch some movies again and again. I read a book or watch an interview that gives me some more information about a movie, and then I watch it again. After reading the memoir of Naseeruddin Shah, I need to watch most of his movies again. According to him, his performance in Junoon was over the top while Sparsh and Masoom are his favorites. I have done this with some relish in case of Steven Spielberg. This is a work in progress since I have not seen all of Spielberg’s movies.
If you look at the filmography of Steven Spielberg, you can identify two main types of movies – entertaining and serious. These can further subdivided into two types – those with adult characters in lead and those with child characters in lead.
This is not a perfect division. Jurassic Park is really about the T. rex. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is somewhere mid-way between ‘entertaining’ and ‘serious’. However, one point is very clear. Spielberg always kept his child protagonists in the ‘entertaining’ section, as if protecting them from harsh realities of life. They were always sweet kids, confronted by some unusual occurrence. Yes, there was life-threatening danger but never did he try to delve into the psyche of the children – until Empire of the Sun that is. In Empire of the Sun, Spielberg reveals the dark side of children, similar to what William Golding did in Lord of the Flies.
In his Inside the Actors Studio interview, Spielberg said that he wanted to make Schindler’s List in the early eighties but he did not think he was ready. With this bit of additional information, you can see him attempting serious movies – meant as trial projects perhaps – before he is ready to take on the mammoth task of Schindler’s List. So he made The Color Purple in 1985 and Empire of the Sun in 1987. Empire of the Sun is perhaps the only movie where Spielberg portrays the complex psychology of a growing child. So far, he has treated children in his movies like they would appear in a Lewis Carol novel, but this movie is more like Lord of the Flies. It is based on the semi-autobiographical novel by J. G. Ballard.
Empire of the Sun starts in Shanghai in the year 1941. Jim Graham (Christian Bale) is a boy from a wealthy British family. As the Japanese invade Shanghai, Jim gets separated from his parents. Somewhere along the way, he meets Basie (John Malkovich) who is an American ship steward. Normally, in Spielberg movies, when a child gets separated from his parents, he meets an adult who acts as a surrogate parent. Not here. Basie unsuccessfully tries to sell Jim to a Chinese. Later on, he leaves him in the refugee camp. Contrast this with Dr Grant (Sam Neil) protecting the children in Jurassic Park. Even Jim is not the usual clingy child. He asks, “Why can’t he sell me?”
Cut to 1945. Four years have passed. Jim is now in an internment camp. We do not know anything about what happened in these four years but we see the effects. Jim looks older now. Living under constant surveillance with someone watching your every move can be an unnerving experience even for adults. We can only imagine what it must have done to little Jim. To his credit, he adapts. He gets to know all the ins and outs of the camp. He barters vegetables for cigarettes while children his age are playing games. When anyone at the camp needs something, Jim is the source. When a patient gets serious at the clinic, Jim eyes his brand new shoes. He has become fluent in Japanese, learning it unconsciously like all children do. He has also made a Japanese friend who is a teen age pilot at a neighbouring air base. He shares his passion – love of airplanes – with this friend. The brave Japanese soldiers are his heroes, he salutes their flag and sings their national anthem. It’s a beautiful piece of commentary on the conventional notions of patriotism and war.
Spielberg has two different ways for directing his entertaining and serious movies. For the former, he always uses some of his favorite visual themes – chasing of a vehicle with the chaser in the rear view mirror or the quintessential ‘riding into the sunset’. For his serious movies, he is like a different person altogether, taking absolute care that none of his usual style shows through. While watching Lincoln, I get the feeling that Spielberg is being extremely cautious in his handling of the subject, becoming as unobtrusive as possible as a director. In Empire of the Sun, Spielberg leaves many things unexplained, just providing clues to complex psychological behaviors and letting the viewers reach their own conclusions.
The transformation of Jim – from an innocent boy to a survivor – is moving and poignant. The high point is reached in the end when all the parents visit the camp and look for their children. All around him, children and screaming and crying while Jim stares into the distance, numb with shock. He has changed so much that his father walks past, not recognising him. When his mother finds him, he does not look happy or not does he start to cry. Perhaps he is relieved that the ordeal is over. He can never go back to being the Jim that he once was. Jim’s parents are searching for their boy. What they find instead is a bruised and battered Jim, mature well beyond his age.
It’s like he says while talking to Mrs Victor at the camp, “I was much younger then.”
Another moving tale of a boy coming of age is the 1938 novel The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, where Jody Baxter adopts a young fawn that he names Flag. His parents agree because his father, Penny Baxter, had to kill the fawn’s mother in order to save himself from a snake bite. Jody loves Flag more than anything else in the world. Unfortunately, Flag ruins the crops and in order to survive and Jody’s Mom has to shoot him. Jody takes the blow hard but in the end comes to term with the harsh reality that is called life. The ending of the novel is one of the best that I have ever read.
He found himself listening for something. It was the sound of the yearling for which he listened, running around the house or stirring on his moss pallet in the corner of the bedroom. He would never hear him again. He wondered if his mother had thrown dirt over Flag’s carcass, or if the buzzards had cleaned it. Flag–He did not believe he should ever again love anything, man or woman or his own child, as he had loved the yearling. He would be lonely all his life. But a man took it for his share and went on.
In the beginning of his sleep, he cried out, “Flag!”
It was not his own voice that called. It was a boy’s voice.
Somewhere beyond the sink-hole, past the magnolia, under the live oaks, a boy and a yearling ran side by side, and were gone forever.
