This is not a finished analysis at all, more a collection of my notes somewhat refined. If it were finished I'd give it an Articles page of its own. The blog is for notes and whatever I feel like writing up, in a rough state.
When I found this clip I knew I was on to something. The relevant part starts @ about 05:48:
He talks about the event that started his filmmaking obsession/career, and it involved a toy train setup. Just like the one Richard Dreyfuss had in the living room in Close Encounters:
I wish I could find the clip I saw long ago, an interview with Dreyfuss, where he specifically said he had played Speilberg's alter ego in three movies. Offhand I can only think of two he was in—Close Encounters and Jaws. Wonder what I'm missing? The original lead for Close Encounters was going to be Bob Balaban, who also is Jewish and resembles Spielberg to a large extent. Balaban is still in the movie, he plays the interpretor at the beginning. He also has a beard and wears glasses. But Dreyfuss said he convinced Spielberg that he (Dreyfus) had to play the lead, because he needs a guy who's a kid at heart. Spielberg realized he was right, and history was made—I agree, as much as I like Bob Balaban as an actor, and agree he does resemble Speilberg, he's too dry and academic to make the part as fun and exciting as Dreyfus made it. In the same interview Dreyfuss also said he and Spielberg both knew they were going to change Hollywood, to make a big impact on it. They were heady days for the young up-and-comers at that crucial time in movie history. The time when special effects-driven movies would take over.
Sorry, I know this is rough. I'm copying my notes in and somewhat developing them here. More notes:
In a biography I read Spielberg said he could never have made Close Encounters later in his career because he could never see himself leaving his family, but at the time he was in a bad relationship with Amy Irving. The pull of creativity and the Hollywood life was stronger than the anchor of a bad relationship, so he responded to it, and history was made. I think what that really represented was the opposition between the desire to live a nice ordinary life (family life where you strive to keep up with the Joneses) and the creative life, which normal society does not condone. Artists have always been branded as decadent and weird because they don't try to be normal—being normal would rule out creativity.
Him essentially destroying the house and tearing up the yard (including a neighbor's duck enclosure) to build the huge mountain in the living room represents his creative obsession destroying his nice normal life and his family. It tends to do that if your family isn't supportive of your art and expects you to adhere to society's restrictive norms. And I like the way the obsession kept growing—he kept making bigger and bigger mountains and getting weirder about it, forgetting about everything else. This is the way the creative bug is—it will destroy everything else, or everything else destroys it, unless you have a family that understands art and supports your habit. Also note that, because he made a sculpture (special effects miniature) he knew what the back of the mountain looked like, whereas all the people who drew or painted it only knew the front of it. His specialty as a sculptor gave him a more complete understanding than theirs. I think he's saying that he (Spielberg) always had an interest in building models and sculpting, and that led to his interest in special effects, which of course was hugely instrumental in his generation's (and his) takeover of Hollywood and the creation of the Blockbuster.
What are these but powerful Hollywood-style lighting units?
And note the similarities here:
Finally, the Mothership looks like an upside-down city of glittering lights.
* * *
* * *
When I found this clip I knew I was on to something. The relevant part starts @ about 05:48:
Wish I could embed it starting there, but Blogspot doesn't seem to allow it.
* * *
In a biography I read Spielberg said he could never have made Close Encounters later in his career because he could never see himself leaving his family, but at the time he was in a bad relationship with Amy Irving. The pull of creativity and the Hollywood life was stronger than the anchor of a bad relationship, so he responded to it, and history was made. I think what that really represented was the opposition between the desire to live a nice ordinary life (family life where you strive to keep up with the Joneses) and the creative life, which normal society does not condone. Artists have always been branded as decadent and weird because they don't try to be normal—being normal would rule out creativity.
Him essentially destroying the house and tearing up the yard (including a neighbor's duck enclosure) to build the huge mountain in the living room represents his creative obsession destroying his nice normal life and his family. It tends to do that if your family isn't supportive of your art and expects you to adhere to society's restrictive norms. And I like the way the obsession kept growing—he kept making bigger and bigger mountains and getting weirder about it, forgetting about everything else. This is the way the creative bug is—it will destroy everything else, or everything else destroys it, unless you have a family that understands art and supports your habit. Also note that, because he made a sculpture (special effects miniature) he knew what the back of the mountain looked like, whereas all the people who drew or painted it only knew the front of it. His specialty as a sculptor gave him a more complete understanding than theirs. I think he's saying that he (Spielberg) always had an interest in building models and sculpting, and that led to his interest in special effects, which of course was hugely instrumental in his generation's (and his) takeover of Hollywood and the creation of the Blockbuster.
And note the similarities here:
In the desert. Well, that's Hollywood, isn't it? They deliberately turned the ship upside-down to somewhat hide the resemblance to a city.
* * *
Building a toy train setup involves a lot of skills—exactly the same kind that a special effects person needs, at least in pre-CGI days. You make the terrain from paper mache and plaster, put little trees and bushes and rocks on it, make little buildings and install little lights in them. This is exactly the stuff a special effects team did in the 70's.
And anyone who's done any sculpting or building of terrain sets (like for stopmotion movies for example, trust me, I know of what I speak) knows how dirty your clothes get. You get plaster stuck in your hair and all over your hands, dried, so you have to crack it off in big chunks. This is exactly what happens to Neary when he builds the big mountain set in his living room (the place where formerly his train setup was—like everything else in his life it got pushed aside). Actually I think he built the mountain right on top of his train setup, on the same table. Well well, that seems powerfully metaphorical!
This is the creative obsession. When it hits hard you forget about everything else. You stop eating and sleeping and you work like a maniac. It starts to affect you. You become zombielike because you're not sleeping enough. Literally you'll wake in the middle of the night struck by intense inspiration, go to the studio (wherever it may be—in the basement, the spare bedroom, or just the typewriter in the home office) and you lay down what you must, before it's gone. Or you let it die. This is not conducive to good middle-class ordinary family life if you want to keep up with the Joneses (unless we're talking Indiana Jones maybe). I think that's captured brilliantly in Close Encounters.
And I love that to get to Devil's Tower they have to drive against all traffic. Everybody else is going the other way. This is a metaphor. When you're struck by the art bug, you live differently from most. They want to live their conventional lives, and to think creatively—to cover yourself with the materials of creativity—is not normal. You go against the flow of the rest of the people on your street. Even when there's danger (like a fake nerve gas conspiracy designed to clear everybody out of the area). Yo go where you must, you follow the muse, wherever it leads.
And where it led Roy Neary is into a spaceship that resembles Hollywood and a big palace-style movie theater at the same time, with little Hollywood lighting units swarming all around it, that lifted him out of his drab ordinarry life and into the skies. That was his going to Hollywood to live the dream, where he got to play with much bigger and better train sets and lighting units and sharks.
I can't find a picture, but in the Mothership scene there are banks of movie cameras all pointing at the ship filming it and big lighting units set up on tall posts with thick electrical cables snaking all over the ground. It resembles a studio set during a film production. The same was true in the big conference room scene.
When all the lights went out in Los Angeles as the ships flew by overhead, LA looked a heck of a lot like a movie miniature with little lights all over it, like the toy train setup, or the Mothership. Once you see this stuff, it's all over the movie.
When the little boy first sees the UFOs in the sky outside the house he smiles and says "Toys!" Like a toy train setup? I suspect this is to link the lights and the UFOs with a child's imagination. The child is taken away by the aliens before Neary is (and he's not frightened). I think he represents Spielberg as a little kid, when the movie bug first bit him.
Big hint—the little aliens come out of what looks like a movie screen under the mothership, and then Neary goes into it. Scroll back up and look at the—ah screw it, I'll just repost it. So much easier:
This is directly under the movie palace marquee with the flashing lights moving across it. Under the glowing city of lights that looks like Hollywood. And is in the desert. With banks of movie cameras filming it, and massive lighting units all over the field. This is not really subtle at all once you start to notice it. In fact it's like "How did I never see it before??!"
Who else emerges from the movie screen? Lost pilots from the 40's and people from all kinds of earlier times. Almost as if we're watching old movies on the screen, only the people are emerging from it, solid and real.
And I just noticed—who do we see in the foreground of that little GIF just above? Bob Balaban, the other guy chosen to play Spielberg (watching himself be escorted into the movie screen?), and Francois Truffaut, one of Spielberg's idols, a renouned French director. It's definitely a movie about making movies.
I just ordered the 4k versions of both of these movies yesterday, and am looking forward to watching them tomorrow when they come in. Ironic, that. I also ordered 4k versions of The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, and 2001, all in one package.
In another bit of irony, I fully believe it was from 2001 that Spielberg (a close friend of Kubrick's, chosen to finish AI after his death) got the idea of a person entering a movie screen. That would take a heck of a lot of 'splainin'!
Rather than try to go through it all myself, I'll let Rob Ager (my mentor for all this movie analysis stuff) do it:
I'm quite sure Spielberg was aware of these hidden meanings in Kubrick's films. Ager has devoted a lot of time and a lot of videos to figuring out Kubrick's tricks, and he used a lot of them. Far more than any director I'm aware of. And he buried them deep. He was a chess master and loved to crack secret codes.
2001 is also filled with movie and fimmaking references, such as the space station that looks like a film reel spinning endlessly:
Why is it two hubs attached to each other like that? Usually space stations of this kind are depicted as only one such wheel-shape. The obvious answer seems to be so it looks like a film reel.
And look at the lighting units, in a scene where a camera features prominently and there seem to be several movie cameras or something on tripods aimed at the monolith:
Just ran across this in my notes for Jaws:
Ironic? Quint looked at Hooper’s laid-out apparatus and said “What’re you, some kinda half-assed astronaut?" In his next film with Spielberg (Close Encounters) he would be exactly that.
* * *
The mountain grows
He must have once built the mountain sculpture on his railroad miniature. Then on witnessing the UFO fly past overhead he was struckwith the obsession to sculpt Devil's Tower. He started by sculpting shaving cream and then mashed potatoes. Each was a progressively better sculpting medium, and each model got bigger and more realisticThen came a smallish one in modeling clay, then he really lost it and started throwing bricks and dirt in through the kitchen window and made the big one (over the form of an upside-down trash can). By this point his family had left him and he was seen as the crazy guy who walks around covered with dirt and all kinds of weird materials. Exactly the opposite of a good upstanding suburban home-owner. The artistic visions are almost driving him crazy, and he's forced to do their bidding, it's too strong for him to resist though it's costing him everything.
Then, near the end of the movie, at last we see the real thing. In a sense we've been moving toward it the entire time, as he gradually figured out what these weird visions were. He could only figure it out by making them, one after the other (he's a discovery artist, responding to an inner compulsion he doesn't understand).
But here's the part that struck me as really cool, that I never noticed before. Now he and his artist-woman, the right one for him (she has the inner visions too, and so does her son) move toward and onto the mountain—the very one they've all been obsessively drawing and sculpting etc. It dwarfs them now. All those incredible textures they've been drawing and sculpting in successively better realism and detail are now life-sized, and they're climbing among them. Only Neary knew there's a huge flat area on the back of the mountain, big enough to serve as a landing field, because he's a sculptor. He built it in the round, whereas the sketchers and painters all just did the front view. It's as if he created his new world—his new life—by stages, from the stuff of his visions, and then was able to step into it.
This will be the setting where the final act takes place, where he gets lifted off the ground and whisked away to his dream world in the sky (the Hollywood career he's always dreamed about). So cool that it began as just a weird vision in his head that he had to realize again and again as he figured out its shape and textures, and now he lives in it. Just as he ended up living the dream of being a Hollywood director of special effects movies, after making a bunch of amateur 8mm movies on his dad's movie camera.
That blows my mind—especially the fact that Spielberg could encode all of it so that we didn't even notice, no matter how many times we watched it. That is an incredible talent.
It's really the story of a man who thought he was a normal suburban husband/father, but discovered he was an artist driven by powerful visions that his family didn't share. But as he moved toward the place that was calling to him (and everyone else was moving the other way like good obedient sheeple), he met others driven by the same kind of vision. This kind of artistic vision really does alienate you from the normal people. But it can also give you wings to fly.
Added 05-15-23
I've now seen his recent movie The Fablemans. It's a memoir of his early years when he started making movies. It features a very important sequence at the beginning showing him going to the movies where he saw the train crash effect that seared itself into his mind forever, leading to his obsession with filming his miniature train set. There's also a scene where he meets John Ford, a gruff old campaigner played by David Lynch.
Why Fablemans? It's like Spielberg—a spiel being a story, or more specifically a pitch (like a director might have to make to get a project greenlit). Apparently in German Berg means mountain. I suppose an iceberg is a mountain of ice. So his name means story-mountain. He changed it to fable-man.
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