Guiding Light: Lincoln as Spielberg's Other Extra-Terrestrial

“With his death,” writes Doris Kearns Goodwin at the conclusion of Team of Rivals,  “Abraham Lincoln had come to seem the embodiment of his own words – ‘With malice toward none; with charity for all’ – voiced in his second inaugural to lay out the visionary pathway to a reconstructed union.” Goodwin’s book is the main source for Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner’s Lincoln, an almost “anti” biopic that evades showing the expected high notes in the Lincoln symphony, instead condensing its most storied of American subjects into a procedural set on a political chessboard.  A man who was “the embodiment of his own words,” this Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis) shows how those words ascend and float beyond the grit of his terrestrial existence. The film asks what the specificity or legend of a lone individual means for the broad world, the title card “Lincoln” cutting to the opening images of whooping soldiers with raised bayonets to pierce flesh, their boots stamping on faces to drown them in the mud. Scores of dead are burdened on this name, which represents different things to different people, and remains to do so. In the microcosm of a few months, Lincoln seeks not to “reveal” the macrocosm of a human life or an age, but rather to understand how that life remains mysterious and unknowable, always malleable and moving, never fixed. Lincoln is the great “Uniter,” a curious seeker and seer whose challenge is to move through a labyrinth of swinging pendulums, his rare quality of empathy now part of the historical dialectic. He surrenders himself to the tide, to “the ages” which claim him.  Looking into his large black hat, out of which he grabs speeches containing deathless words that usurp plain biography, he could be said to be gazing into a great and mysterious abyss.  With that mystical quality along with his curiosity, compassion, and will to take the ills of a nation upon himself, Abraham Lincoln’s closest kin in Spielberg’s universe is E.T. Both characters heal divides between times, people, and places, the alien coming from outer space while Lincoln's extra terrestrial landscape is the cosmos of the mind and deep thought. These characters scratch themselves into our memory, bidding us to "be good" before departing.

The opening trailers in recent months immediately proposed the question of who Lincoln was, and whose Lincoln would Spielberg and Kushner portray? The high-pitched voice of Daniel Day-Lewis, so unlike the great English actor’s other commanding characters (Daniel Plainview, Bill the Butcher, John Procter, Hawkeye), came close to provoking some kind of controversy. Instead of the rock-steady Lincolns pervading popular consciousness and our Halls of Presidents, Lincoln here seemed to be shades of Walter Brennan or even, as lovable Spielberg hater Jeffrey Wells noted, Matthew Modine (though no one mentions Sam Waterston, whose similar high voice was part of the 1987 Gore Vidal-based Lincoln miniseries). It would have been the most wonderful of rejections if popular audiences turned down Spielberg’s Lincoln because of his voice (which historians tell us is probably accurate), a demonstration of what’s so important to the picture Spielberg has created. For as Abraham Lincoln sits and chats with some Union soldiers, they tell him that they were at Gettysburg and saw him at a cemetery dedication years before. “Could you hear me?” Lincoln asks them, regarding his speech. They hey couldn’t. But they know the words, and with some fumbling imperfections, they have it memorized. Lincoln listens as the soldiers, two black and two white, recite his words back to him.

            

Hearing himself: Abraham Lincoln (Daniel Day-Lewis)

In the abstract, without seeing this scene but hearing about it, one could understandably dismiss it as eye-rolling Spielbergian bullshit, particularly when one of the black soldiers wraps up with the final lines ("government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth"). But the way Kushner has written the opening, and Spielberg with his longtime collaborators (like cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, editor Michael Kahn, and let's not forget composer John Williams) has executed it with his actors, reveals some key themes, setting a tone for where the next 140 minutes will take us. The approach is not to sentimentally congratulate the soldiers for their memorization or to show how Lincoln’s message affects them. Rather, the moment is about Lincoln hearing his words come back to him through other voices, and his understanding about how history and perception are running away with what he originally set to paper and orated. The authored document - much like Schindler's list of Jewish names, a grave at Arlington, or a mechanical robot programmed by scientists to love - comes to life.

Abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), portrayed negatively in Birth of a Nation, now represents our present-day conscience in Lincoln.

The tempest of history is embodied in how the soldiers are talking over each other with varying temperaments. Of the two black soldiers, one is prudent and restrained, the other blunt and maybe too forthcoming about unequal pay. One is acting in tune with social niceties, the other is telling the truth. There’s a flow of oppositions: white soldiers and black soldiers, pretense and truth, North and South, Free and Slave. Kushner is interested in a historical dialectic of ideas moving forward through chaos, and the labyrinth through which progress moves is the battlefield of language. The film is full of oratory which is deliberately theatrical, as characters speak knowing that what they say matters, and historical record will become a kind of script or play, the domain of politics a stage on which everyone is acting. And indeed, to be too forthcoming or honest like abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones), the voice to our modern-day sensibilities, is politically treacherous. The film is about the passing and ratification of an abstraction to be printed as a piece of paper, the 13^th Amendment, which will legally abolish slavery. That paper holds in it Lincoln’s hopes for a new and healed nation, and of realized “self-evident” truths about our nature. Stevens will have to compromise his values to pass it. The film is stressing the problematic relationship between Historical Text and Reality.

The opening shot of The Godfather. Spielberg introduces Lincoln in a similar fashion, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski's choices at times reminded me of "Prince of Darkness" Gordon Willis' work on the Corleone trilogy.

The opening moments of Lincoln also remind me of another story about theatricality alongside backroom dealings and conspiratorial mazes in the reflective mirror hallways of history, where the deep ocean of dark contrasts to the few sharp rays of light. As the camera slowly pulls back from the soldiers talking, and our first glimpse of Lincoln is the back of his head in the foreground, how can one not think about the introduction to The Godfather? Like The Godfather, Lincoln introduces its hero by showing the rear of a patriarch’s head. He is listening, wavering through decisions, and thinking through the shadows, the “swamps” on the way “true north.” Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography even seems to be very much modeled on Gordon Willis’ pallet for The Godfather trilogy, the supporting players in 1860s’ politics functionally similar to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo’s Corleone adversaries and collaborators. Isn't David Strathairn’s William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, a consigliore not unlike Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen? The wry and wily glutton W.N. Bilbo (James Spader), who works tirelessly with some accomplices (Tim Blake Nelson, John Hawkes) to secure votes from lame duck congressmen, a Clemenza? Old school Francis Breston Blair Sr. (Hal Halbrook) a Don Altobello? Pro-Slavery Democrat representative Fernando Wood (Lee Pace) and Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens (Jackie Earle Haley) the antagonistic equals of Barzini, Hyman Roth, and Lucchesi? The passionate Stevens, struggling to muzzle himself until a climactic congressional moment, so much like Frank Pentangeli?  In the President and Stevens, discussing and debating one’s moral compass while seeking "true north," don’t we see Michael Corleone telling Pentangeli, “Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer”? And isn’t this Lincoln, played similarly by a man perceived as the generation’s greatest actor like Marlon Brando before him, an ungraspable, mysterious, and omniscient Godfather too?

I don’t think this is necessarily coincidental (or particularly vital, as others remark how the picture is similar to Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent).  I may be reading too much into things, as I'm prone to do, but it makes sense that Spielberg would seek out a unique model to inspire his design, rather than fall back on the predictable look of other 19^th century epics. He’s even retained Coppola’s motif of doors closing on people, keeping them in the dark and apart from the realities of whatever convoluted process or scheme is being concocted.

Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben) and Mary Todd Lincoln visiting Congress.

And as The Godfather is about children struggling to comprehensively grasp and live up to their mysterious father, aren’t we all, presently as viewers, even as an international audience (read of Tolstoy’s adoration of Lincoln), Lincoln’s children, all of us jealously trying to claim his legacy and be his heirs? Still he remains elusive to us, his essence mysterious, a rare hero whose universalism may prove frustrating to a nation obsessed with its own exceptionalism, in turn leading the “exceptionalists” among us to denounce him as the espouser of a “Union” some of us didn’t want (for Ron Paul supporters and readers of Thomas DiLorenzo, he's the despotic hand of the Great Fed closing down on freedom, and ushering great violence along with him).  In his time and up close, the spirit of Abraham Lincoln was hard to grasp, and Walt Whitman, whose own universality and multitudes of contradictions mirrored Lincoln’s, pointed out how the President’s contemporaries were unable to portray the mystery and depth of his indelible face in art. He writes, “[His] look, though abstracted, happened to be directed steadily to my eye…[Far] beneath his smile I noticed well the expression I have alluded to. None of the artists or pictures has caught the deep, though subtle and direct expression of the man’s face. There is something else there" (my italics).

For Whitman that “something else” is of the same cosmic God-stuff in his leaves of grass, the smallest sprout of which “shows there is really no death,” and Tony Kushner and Steven Spielberg, using the visage and technical mastery of Daniel Day-Lewis, apply Whitman’s transcendentalism and Lincoln’s ceaseless intellectual movement of sensitivity and empathy to the cycle of history: “All goes onward and outward….and nothing collapses.” The American Civil War, as remembered by Walt Whitman, is not relegated to an isolated, concrete patch of history with half-a-million dead and maimed, their blood soaking the grass. It is an “era compressing centuries of native passion, first-class pictures, tempests of life and death – an inexhaustible mine for the histories, drama, romance, and even philosophy of peoples to come – indeed the verteber of poetry and art (of personal character too,) for all future America – far more grand, in my opinion, to the hands capable of it, than Homer’s siege of Troy, or the French wars to Shakspere.” The enigmatic face of Day-Lewis conveys the mystery of Lincoln, which connects to the perennial echoes beneath the circumstances in his times. A cosmic sweep of history isn't attained by Spielberg through David O. Selznick gusto (such as in the recent War Horse) or the extroverted events in Lincoln's life, which we would get in a big miniseries, but in inwardness masterfully conveyed by a thinking human face.

         "We should have run a better man against Lincoln when we had the chance." Daniel Day-Lewis as Bill the Butcher in Gangs of New York.

 This is why the casting of Day-Lewis is so perfect for Lincoln. An actor noted for his deep immersion and transformation into varied personalities with the most honed of technical skills, Daniel Day-Lewis almost always portrays the quality of thinking, of introverted depth. There is always a searching, studied calm on his face, a kind of knowing that only gradually reveals itself. It’s in the gay punk from My Beautiful Launderette, the palsy-afflicted poet Christy Brown in My Left Foot, Newland Archer in The Age of Innocence, John Procter in The Crucible, even in the misfire Nine’s Felliniesque director Guido. In Gangs of New York, Bill the Butcher understands the "spectacle of fearsome acts” preserves his power. In There Will be Blood, Daniel Plainview deduces “the worst in people,” using that insight to his advantage. The womanizing brain surgeon Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being can aptly draw out how the Czech communists aren’t worthy of Oedipus, who at least tore out his eyeballs when he realized his sins. In The Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye understands how his adversary, the Huron Magwa, “makes himself into what twisted him,” the oppressive and violent systems of colonial Europe being appropriated by Magwa to perpetuate war and greed. Day-Lewis’ characters repeatedly understand human nature and its innate imperfections.That is Abraham Lincoln.

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The paradox of a man whose mind is ceaselessly evolving while moving inward is there with one of Lincoln’s first scenes, an unexpected picture of Lincoln’s dream life. He’s on a boat, coasting over water, accelerating through space and the future. He is describing the dream to his wife, Mary Todd (Sally Field), who identifies herself as his “soothsayer.” “I am keenly aware of my aloneness,” Lincoln says, adding that he’s “a king of infinite space.” But the boat, in this recurring dream, is now moving faster than it ever has. Too fast maybe.

The President's "soothsayer": Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field)

Is it Time? Space? Or is it Death fast approaching? As an audience, we are more aware than Lincoln that he only has months left on this planet. And indeed, if ever a life seemed to suggest the preciousness of Time nervously set against the urgency of death, accomplishment, and clarity, it’s Lincoln. Embroiled in Civil War, where each day returns countless more bodies and dismembered flesh, Abraham Lincoln is charged with solving the problem not only of Union, which is his primary goal, but of slavery, and completing the task of what was deliberately omitted from the Revolutionary documents nearly a century before him (slavery’s absence from the Constitution pointing out how it’s an insoluble problem, a riddling Sphinx, begging to be challenged and solved).  His Emancipation Proclamation from 1863 is only that – a “proclamation,” words, a temporary war measure that doesn’t free slaves in any of the border states. Unless slavery is legally abolished through a ratified Amendment to the Constitution, once peace is established things could go back to what they were before 1861. 700,000 lives are wasted along with four grueling years. Civil War would only temporarily subside before erupting in the future.

Team of Rivals: "Lincoln"

That’s what the dream is, Mary points out with frustration. This proposed, unpopular 13^th Amendment. And it’s also Time, Space, and Death, stirred together in a quickening whirlpool. The complexity of the puzzle is in how Lincoln has to pass the amendment with an uncooperative and divided congress before peace is established, something the Confederacy, exhausted and now losing the war, is seeking. But to prolong the war for this unpopular measure – which the “people” could live without – is harmful to Lincoln’s character, the stakes of a meat grinding battlefield bringing him dangerously close to appearing like the despot his enemies have painted ("King Abraham Africanus the First" is how he's described on the House floor). A wonderful scene between Lincoln and William Seward shows this: the common folk, embodied in Mr. and Mrs. Jolly from Ohio, would rather the war ended without the amendment passing first. "Why?" Seward asks. Mr. Jolly says, as if the answer were all too obvious, "Niggers." The immediacy of life and death is more important than some Negroes getting their freedom and in one swoop poured over the land, competing with whites for land, jobs, and goods. This proposed amendment will require, according to Seward, “shady work.”  In our own time, regarding the uninsured, climate change. and gay marriage, we see how far behind “the people” typically are, not led by human empathy or a historical longview so much as by convenience, convention, and self-satisfaction. 

 Abraham Lincoln drew from the well of the literary canon, memorizing the poetry of the King James Bible and Shakespeare, seeing the dimensions of what constituted “the human” in the words.  Shakespeare’s characters - Lear, Hamlet, Brutus, Macbeth, Prospero, etc. - vividly portray the plasticity of human identity, its changing and mystery.  What Shakespeare richly gives his readers is not necessarily moral lessons to teach us the faults within ourselves, but rather the talent to observe and listen to ourselves while we think, as if we were literary characters.  In Lincoln, Spielberg and Day-Lewis convey this in the President’s deliberations, his back-and-forths, his stares, and in his dreams where the “aloneness” of an individual’s existence is overwhelming.

"There is something else there." Walt Whitman on Lincoln's face.

As a politician educated through the practice of Law, Lincoln is himself an actor tip-toeing on the stage of legalese and historical tumult. Whitman refers to him as “the leading actor in the stormiest drama known to real history’s stage through centuries.” And Spielberg and Kushner are always stressing the performance of politics in their film, in regards to the necessary posture a congressman like Thaddeus Stevens must assume in order to enable progress, in addition to the Lincolns “putting on a face” after their son Willie died three years earlier. Lincoln tells Stevens, “I admire your zeal” and “moral compass,” and “a compass will put you true north.” But Lincoln adds, “If you can’t avoid the swamps, what good is true north?” In front of congress, as Fernando Wood, the new amendment’s chief adversary, tries to goad Stevens into devolving into his abolitionist passion which would doom the vote, Stevens “performs,” sticking to Lincoln’s suggested script: "I don't hold with equality in all things, only with equality before the Law." Stevens is chided outside by fellow abolitionists for this compromise of his values, but as the checkered floor behind him suggests, he grasps the game of chess that this political journey of true north truly is.

Spielberg earlier dealt with this in Amistad, where the abolitionists take offense to the key means of defense a lawyer (Matthew McConaughey) offers to them: they can win through tiptoeing through "vagaries of legal minutiae," and yet doesn't this corrupt their "statement"?  In Schindler's List, Schindler and Stern work similarly through business arrangements and documentation, keeping Jews alive. "Do we have to invent a whole new language?" Schindler asks with anger. "I think so," Stern answers. Here, Lincoln, privy to the trajectory where their mutual narrative will go, informs Stevens of the inevitable Reconstruction squabbles, "We shall oppose each other in the course of time," but nothing can go forward unless the abolitionist leader makes this rhetorical compromise. Lincoln's masterstroke is to speciously reply to some conservative Republican congressmen question as to whether Southern representatives have made offers for peace before the vote. Wood is right that Lincoln's written reply, of "To my knowledge" no one from the South is in Washington to offer peace, is a "lawyer's dodge." But it works. And as with Schindler's list, where "all around its margins lies the gulf," the principle behind it trumps the means by which it is achieved. 

Elsewhere, Lincoln uses the theatrical quality of storytelling to stir his audience – a tool that may upset more practical and concrete thinkers, like his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton (Bruce McGill), who storms off before Lincoln can relate an Ethan Allen anecdote with a punch-line involving the “sight of George Washington” making British officers shit themselves.  He uses lines to his eldest son Robert (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meant to discourage him from joining the Union Army, and Lincoln knows that it's the "same scene" played out between fathers and sons across the nation. Lincoln quotes Lear ("poor bare-fork'd animals") and Falstaff ("we have heard the chimes at midnight"), and attends an opera of Faust. Like Hamlet, Lincoln understands how "the play's thing thing" that will catch our consciences, how we are unwittingly acting in everyday discourse. As history is rendered as paper, illuminating humankind with each fresh recitation, Lincoln’s active and curious imagination is like that of an aesthete. As Whitman notes, the tragedy of Lincoln’s assassination at Ford's Theater has a timeless meaning associated “in senses finally dearest to a nation…the imaginative and artistic senses – the literary and dramatic ones…A meaning precious to the race, and to every age.”

The performative quality of politics and statesmanship rhetoric can be of low stuff, geared to preserving and selfishly exerting power, relying on the implacable stone of “clout,” the subject of one of Roy Cohn’s memorable rants from Kushner’s Angels in America. Cohn says, "You are hung up on words, on labels, that you believe what they seem to mean," but "like all labels they mean tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste [Cohn is referring to his status/non-status as a homosexual with AIDS], but something much simpler: clout." We hear the word "freedom" used too cynically nowadays, a front covering nefarious ends. On the other hand, the strategic, theatrical presentation of the self, with which we always see Lincoln here, can be another tool and mask concealing the “self-evident” truths which are obstructed by “clout” and selfishness. Indeed, the villainous Cohn may well be speaking for Lincoln and his approach to Thaddeus Stevens, albeit towards virtuous ends, when he defends his use of labels and language: "This is not sophistry. And this is not hypocrisy. This is reality."

Beyond that sophistry/reality, though, and its performative theater to be set down on documents for the ages, we know that race, the relationships between human beings is what truly is being communicated (again, as Mr. Jolly says, "Niggers"). And Lincoln the Shakespearian knew all about this. In Lear, the royal court is ripped apart for the king, who discovers the love of his flattering daughters was untrue, while Cordelia, the daughter who wouldn’t “play,” was his most loyal and compassionate progeny.  On the stormy heath, Lear strips and encounters the bare truth of human nature, the sublime awfulness of it, and the common denominator that links all people and nature. It’s from this scene in Shakespeare’s play that Lincoln thoughtfully draws, speaking to his black house servant, the confidante and dressmaker to his wife, Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben). She asks if he will accept her people as equals.  "White people don't want us here," she says. "I don't know you or your people," he admits. But he says that her people, the same as his, is how Lear describes all of us: they're but "poor bare fork’d creatures, such as we all are," and so our expectations shouldn't be "incomprehensible to each other." Keckley had a son die for the Union Army, same as thousands of other mothers. "I'm his mother. What else must I be?" The boundaries of race are surpassed.

Lear’s illumination in literature and language gives Lincoln humility. Lincoln has that “knowingness” of which I spoke, but what distinguishes him from all other men, is that what he knows is that he, the Socratic man, doesn’t know. Lear’s tragic desolation makes this vain king see all men as equal (eyes being an important aspect of the play, the “vile jelly” being grotesquely gouged from Gloucester’s eyes). And it was Abraham Lincoln’s style as an orator and debater, in dealing with either slavery or temperance societies, to understand his opponents’ passion and views, and admit that were he in their shoes, he may very well be agreement with them. It’s the extraordinary gift of the imaginative heart and mind that gave him the upper hand in politics. As different as we are, we're are indeed all poor, bare fork'd creatures.

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Steven Spielberg's Amistad

From the most superficial of glances, the marriage of Steven Spielberg, America’s most popular, warmest, and most manipulative of image manufacturers, and Abraham Lincoln, seems too perfect, but perfect in such a way that it could be disastrous, or at least a hackneyed, tiresomely "Oscar bait" effort of epic film production. This is based on a kind of dismissal of Spielberg that comes all too easily, and for which the director is at least partially to blame. We’ve been taught by Spielberg’s Hollywood New Wave best friends (Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese – both of whom emulate Alfred Hitchcock, the greatest of Hollywood voyeurs, the same way Spielberg does), to distrust what we see and what we feel by that which we see. The implication is that our feelings cloud our thoughts and obscure the truth. This is fair, and the same way Lincoln looks at the clock pendulum swinging back and forth like the fluctuating arguments of an Idea, I too have wavered on Spielberg, criticizing one moment (The Color Purple, Hook, Saving Private Ryan, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, War Horse, The Adventures of Tin Tin) and passionately praising or ferociously defending elsewhere (Jaws, E.T., Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Jurassic Park, A.I., Minority Report, Munich).

Elliott and E.T. look, feel, learn.

Spielberg is a filmmaker who represents the sympathetic act of seeing, and from optical engagement we are changed emotionally, and then from that movement of heart we are changed intellectually, and so moved to decisively act. Repeatedly in Spielberg’s films we see this cycle of sight and mind, with the heart as a go-between. Recently writing about E.T.:The Extra-Terrestrial, I noted how when E.T. says “I’ll be right here” to Elliott at the conclusion, he’s not pointing at the boy’s heart (as Elliott was when he had earlier said that line), but at his head, implying memory. E.T., an emissary of peace, engenders compassion in those surrounding him. He is visually linked with Elliott when their eyes meet, the creature mimicking what he sees the boy do (much like Chief Brody and son in that tender dinner table scene in Jaws). What E.T. feels, Elliott feels, and vice versa. Following the abundance of seeing is feeling, language (the Speak 'n Spell, "BE GOOD," E.T. beginning to talk), and finally action (Elliott "liberating" the frogs from a school dissection experiment, the kiss mimicked from The Quiet Man, E.T.'s construction of an intergalactic phone). Cinema itself, for Spielberg, becomes a catalog of memories influencing emotion and action, the transformative power of John Ford’s The Quiet Man, viewed by E.T. on television, being arguably the central moment of the picture, as it influences Elliott, so far away, to kiss a girl, linking the past (John Ford, John Wayne) to right now, alien to little boy, emotion to thought and action.

Pre-Cognition: Minority Report

Elsewhere, we see similar patterns in Jaws, when Mrs. Brody looks at an artist’s rendering of a shark attacking a boat, which moves her to immediately see her youngest son, sitting out on a boat in open water, in danger. She forcefully demands that he get out of the boat right now. In Amistad, one of the African defendants, though he doesn’t know how to read or speak English, actively interprets Dore illustrations from a Bible and is able to translate, between cultures, the mythology of Christ and apply it to his brethren.  Or think about A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, where the advanced mechas read the primitive love robot David’s memories as cinematic images, and treasure him as a storer of fossilized memories drawn from an extinct time. The process of sight proceeding cognition is of course loudly in Minority Report, where the clairvoyant “pre-cogs” feed visual images to John Anderton’s Pre-Crime unit, the pictures proceeding thought.  However, the negation of emotions on the part of the crime fighters in their analysis of a crime of passion soon-to-happen, leaves the system – and even the viewer/Anderton – susceptible. With these two films in particular, Spielberg  makes us think about our position as moviegoers (yes, oddly as much as his European critics Michael Haneke or Jean-Luc Godard). Spielberg, with the Kubrickian flavor of A.I. and Minority Report, was acknowledging his power to manipulate, where “clarity” is a drug and the illusions of happiness merely illusions (many people complain about the pat happy ending of Minority Report, but don’t consider that it’s in fact a construct in an imprisoned and comatose John Anderton’s head). Eyes are a black market commodity in Minority Report, while visually reliving memories an addiction.

"It's kind of a ride." Jurassic Park

It’s true, Spielberg is saying, that images lie and delude. But they are also potent, changing minds along with hearts. The greatest example is in the most problematic of Spielberg films, Schindler’s List, which we may criticize for making a trip to Auschwitz an “amusement park ride” not too distinct from what the archeologists venture into with Jurassic Park, thus trivializing a historical atrocity as “entertainment.” I’ve unfavorably compared Spielberg’s film to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, the former film being a “monument” conveniently set in an archived past, as we’re safe from the Holocaust and its meaning, while Polanski’s Holocaust is present, absurd, and of the same stuff that may happen again and again. But here again, reaching behind the frosting of sentimentality, I’m contemplating the Spielberg formula of sight/heart/mind/action. The film’s most famous of images may be Oskar Schindler, an affluent Nazi party industrialist, comfortably on horseback while the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto below gets his attention.  He looks.  In the black and white photography, we identify with Schindler’s optics through Spielberg’s imprint of the color red on a young girl’s red coat. Later on, Schindler will see that same red coat dug up from a mass grave. Schindler, who from his earliest moments is marked by how watchful he is (look at him in the cabaret), is shaken. Moved, he must act. And how does he act? Like Lincoln, through the maneuvering and masquerading of an official document, the titular “list,” which we are reminded is secretly “life,” an “absolute good.”

What Schindler sees: Schindler's List

We can ask, of course, if we are at all changed by Schindler’s List, or if we are re, in contrast to Polanski’s film, “safe” at this historical distance, with Spielberg’s choice to present history in black and white. And yet, though he may criticize the aesthetic and representation, growing up in the suburbs in 1990s, it was Schindler’s List that introduced the kids at school to the Holocaust, provoking our curiosity. And perhaps, being that Schindler’s List is about a “document,” just as Lincoln is about a “document,” the presentation of the film as a sort of monument meant to generate emotion is justifiable. Lincoln, like Spielberg, knew that the way to change a man’s head was to reach him first by the heart too. For Spielberg, “documents” or official cargo is by no measure insignificant. This is what the Ark of the Covenant is treated as in Raiders of the Lost Ark, isn’t it? And hell, if you look at it, it burns your flesh off. The top secret item that the U.S.S. Indianapolis in Quint’s story is transporting in Jaws is also something that burns the flesh off hundreds of thousands of people, the atomic bomb. Human beings are treated as texts of sorts in Munich, as espionage murders are gruesome spectacles that communicate the insoluble dialectic of rage (neither side able to put themselves in the shoes of the Other). Spielberg presents the darker side of communicative images when the Israeli assassins leave the sexually desirable enemy assassin exposed to view (“Leave it open,” one of them says after another tries to close her robe over her bleeding wounds). As a filmmaker, Steven Spielberg is always stressing the ramifications of sight and the symbolism of visual presentation on the exterior world. Cinema is memory, that which is etched deeply on our minds through vision.

"Keep your eyes closed!" Raiders of the Lost Ark

And Abraham Lincoln, so keen with intelligence, has those eyes that are also looking out, searching for people and identifying. “[He] stood observing the people,” Whitman writes of seeing Lincoln in person. “He look’d with curiosity upon that immense sea of faces, and the sea of faces return’d the look with similar curiosity.” Lincoln stepped on the theatrical scaffold of politics, playing a role that would deliberately etch himself into the memory of those around him. Doris Kearns Goodwin notes how Lincoln was aware of how he was perceived, and how the way people remember us may keep us alive after we are dead. “To see memory as the essence of life came naturally to Lincoln,” according to Robert Bruce, quoted in Goodwin’s text, for he was a man who “seemed to live most intensely through the process of thought, the expression of thought, and the exchange of thought with others.” Memory was a “midway world/’Twixt Earth and paradise” (to quote Lincoln’s poetry).

Cinema as memory: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence

That brings me to what I feel is the central prop in Lincoln, a series of photographic glass plates, obsessively looked at by Lincoln’s youngest son, the precocious Tad. Along with toy soldiers splayed out on “official war maps” (which greatly angers Lincoln's "Thundering God of War" and "Neptune" who "shakes thy hairy locks," Edwin Stanton), Tad falls asleep on the floor with these plates, which are pictures of slaves who have been horribly scarred, or are up for sale, their list prices ($600) written in pencil below them. Lincoln wants to discourage Tad’s almost morbid fixation with the images, but we should note how they provoke Tad’s curiosity about the black servants in White House, Elizabeth Keckley and William Slade (Stephen Henderson). Were they ever beaten like this? (Keckley says yes – with a fire shovel.) Were they put up for sale like livestock? As John Quincy Adams asks of the African prisoners in Amistad, what was their story?

One of the photograph glass plates of a former slave, obsessively viewed by young Tad Lincoln.

In addition to Tad’s stimulated curiosity, think about what Lincoln says. He has Tad to put the glass plates put away, but he instructs the child to "be careful with them." The images are history, to be preserved. They are something that may not only show, but in their presentation of degradation, they may sway, and hundreds of years in the future serve as documents pointing out where we came from, and how we should be wary of how we change through Time, that “great thickener of things” as Lincoln calls it. Lit by candles, like light going through projected film, Spielberg is making these images cinematic cousins to the filmmaker’s art, documents that illuminate the past. Tellingly, the final moments of Lincoln have the deceased President resurrected through the candlelight by his death bed, the flame dissolving into his Second Inaugural speech, during which Lincoln voices the need for a “just and lasting peace among ourselves with all nations.”  The words, like the images, and like the man whose words have usurped him and granted him immortality by etching him into our memory, are there to illuminate us, lighting the path for insight. Not, as is so often alleged of Spielberg, to blind and placate us. Note how Lincoln is awakened to the weight of the "terrible things" he has done with General Ulysses Grant (Jared Harris), coming close and "intimate" with the corpses on the Petersburg,Virginia battlefield, still smoking after the great conflagrations that preceded it. "I've never seen the like of this before," Lincoln said. Yet Grant reminds him how he might have needed to see it up close.

Lincoln’s relationship to the present is one that the filmmakers are hesitant to embrace, precisely because of our politically divisive times, where Red States and Blue States seem to be drawn on the similar lines that divided a nation in the 1850s. For just as the South seceded soon after Lincoln, a progressive moderate who was by no means an abolitionist, was elected, so too did the Tea Party embrace measures (Voter ID, for example) which probably would not have been touched if a black man, Barack Obama, another moderate, was elected in 2008.  Such a deduction is wide open to criticism, I understand, but it’s harder to deny that of our nation’s current political halves, one half sees the Constitution as a fixed document, something that gives unassailable rights of self-governance, while the other understands that everything is in flux, and had those old squabbling codgers, the Founders, be around today, as men of science they would be a little flabbergasted at how backwards and obstinate we are, in many ways still fighting the Cold War (our nation’s fear of anything remotely “socialistic”) just as we’re still hearing, sometimes quite loudly, echoes of the Civil War – itself being the final series of battles in the Revolutionary War.  In Petersburg, we see the United States flag and the Confederate flag in the same frame for a moment. The difference is that the Confederate flag is fixed to the ground, while the United States flag moves forward, and out of the frame.

"We won't know ourselves anymore." Alexander Stephens (Jackie Earle Haley)

Though Lincoln accomplishes his checkmate within the congress, abolishing slavery for good and ending the war soon after, Spielberg and Kushner seem ambivalent about the prospect of an optimistic closure. The war ends, but we cut to a city (Richmond, Virginia, following the last siege of Petersburg) on fire. Lincoln wants to pardon deserting soldiers (“Peace comes, it can’t just be hangings”), but corpses are still wedded together in the dirt, Union and Confederate, and resentments ride high (“Liberty all around. Not revenge,” says Lincoln, knowing that the appetite for vengeance is too present). The wordless exchange between Grant and General Lee at Appomattox has a somber and haunting undercurrent. Peace is established, but in this world that's changed too rapidly for the South, the hatchet isn't buried. Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, says to Lincoln about slavery’s end, “We won't know ourselves anymore.” Stephens points out how Lincoln's Union is built "on cannon-fire and death," with thousands of corpses lain to waste on his watch. The President accept this. One of Lincoln's gifts, again, was understanding how the opinions and emotions of his rivals were natural, and were he in their shoes, he may well feel the same. 

The resentment will continue to simmer, and outside the context of this film, without Lincoln’s guidance, Reconstruction won’t be tidy, and of course, injustices to the black race will continue through the next century and beyond.  What we have seen here made it possible to have the president we have today, yes, but the fear and distrust so prevalent regarding him are just as clearly linked, I think, to the attitudes displayed throughout Lincoln’s 1865.  But we should also note how delicately Spielberg and Kushner handle this scene between Stephens and Lincoln. I think there is a kind of incomprehension among the Southerners, a desperate sadness which conceives resentment naturally. Stephens is not like the John Calhoun (Arliss Howard) from Amistad, who arrogantly puts the fire of a secessional threat to President Martin Van Buren's (Nigel Hawthorne) feet. Indeed, these characters are racist, backwards, and wrong - unable to grasp the simple declaration: "Slavery's done." But they are endowed by their filmic creators with sensitivity, a vulnerability behind their ferocious and reactionary words. 

Our time also associates with Lincoln during the final carriage ride between Mary and Lincoln, during which they acknowledge how miserable they’ve been (“a long death” is how Mary earlier describes her migraine-afflicted life), and resolve to be happy. In peacetime, we return to Lincoln’s dreams, and he tells Mary how he’s not only been thinking about the West, but also the Holy Land, and Jerusalem. “I dream of walking in that ancient city,” Abraham Lincoln says, namesake of the father to three clashing religions who dwell there. Knowing that Kushner and Spielberg’s previous collaboration was the imperfect but masterful Munich, about Israel and Palestinians trapped in ceaseless bloodshed, we wonder of how distant that Jerusalem of 1865 must be, and how this great Philosopher President of “semi-divine stature,” is progenitor to a country which will be embroiled so detrimentally with matters related to that Holy Land in the years to come, as rockets are being fired to and from Gaza as I write this, and tensions with nearby Iran accelerate the unsteady hand of a doomsday clock.  Munich also questions our inability to prognosticate the future and our ethical attitudes. The protagonist Avner (Eric Bana) listens the philosophical musings of a friend's girlfriend: "Should one look at right and wrong as ethical questions? That is the problem. Marcuse says Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right' does not assign a moral category to 'wrong.' Free will inevitably causes wrong. That's written by Marx. The blind anarchy of capitalism. You have to be prepared to reconsider right and wrong. Because basically those are just terms that express a horrible struggle, parts of an equation of pure dialectic." Avner looks on while sharing marijuana, and admits with a laugh that he really doesn't understand. But Lincoln has the same affect on Seward when he talks about Time and our inability to look into "the seeds of Time" and see how those seeds would grow. Seward admits his incomprehension, and Spielberg's audience laughs. But though there's no "profit in prophecy," as Lincoln tells Robert, Spielberg and Kushner want to have us consider, with our perceptions and the causal path of geopolitical events, a longview of incessant change, with ideas in friction conceiving new ideas and perceptions. 

The insoluble dialectic: Munich

Our present uncertainties involving the Holy Land reminds us of Lincoln’s closing words, where the Great Emancipator and emissary of Union is talking about a lasting peace not only “among ourselves” but with all nations. Abraham Lincoln is Whitman’s hero of Union, not only as President of the "Union," but as a representative of the transcendental union between all lines of separation, where random and diverse events, in the most horrifying scenes, are absorbed into the Great Self.  The accident of rhetoric materializes as something Lincoln draws from the abyss, the black hole of his large hat into which he stares while considering what to telegraph Ulysses Grant at a crucial moment, finding Euclid. This quiet scene, where Lincoln’s contemplations are treated self-reflexively by Spielberg as the President is framed within a frame, questions the construction of purpose. "Do we choose to be born?Are we fitted to the times we're born into?" Lincoln asks. One of them, an engineer, is skeptical of anyone orchestrating history, setting the clocks: "There's machinery, but no one's doing the fitting." Like a film director, Lincoln knows that the significance of composition and the arrangement of his words, framing purpose and representing ideas (later, he'll admit that one of his final speeches was inadequate) in a maze of machinery that active individuals must hold up. Like Lincoln's first speech in the film, as a flag is being raised, he will raise the flag "if there be no fault in the machinery," and then it will be up to the people to keep it up. Lincoln also refers to Euclid's law of equals as "mechanical" law, something self-evident and true, but being such, it rests on us to exercise the abstraction in reality. 

Moving forward: Lincoln

The war and slavery are problems to be solved, like a film, which presents an infinite matrix of possibilities for presentation (where to place the camera and actors, where to cut, where to have music, etc).  Conducting his own Lincoln Symphony, Spielberg and Kushner eschew the storied notes of Ann Rutledge, Lincoln-Douglas, the 1860 Republican nomination and election, the secession of the South, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and Ford’s Theater. Instead, the essence and mystery of Lincoln, which appropriately remains mysterious, is compounded into these few months before he is claimed by “the ages.” Lincoln is fixed on the Gordon Willis-like chiaroscuro shadows, only incidentally moving to the flame for Lincoln’s light. Spielberg, the great voice of American narrative film, and so progeny of D.W. Griffith, reverses the representational wrongs of Birth of a Nation, in which Thaddeus Stevens and his biracial mistress/housekeeper, Lydia Hamilton Smith, influenced negative cinematic depictions. Here Thaddeus and Lydia are not only the moral heroes of Lincoln, but as cinematic touchstones linking Griffith to Spielberg, they show how indeed history has moved in nearly 100 years of moving images in America. This is why the preservation of images, be it Tad Lincoln’s photographic plates or something theatrical and designed like an expensive motion picture, is important. These artifacts of captured light show us how we move through Time.

Birth of a Nation (1915): The naive abolitionist Austin Stoneman - based on Thaddeus Stevens - manipulated by his conniving mulatto housekeeper, Lydia Brown (based on Lydia Hamilton Smith). Spielberg reverses the filmic representation of these two characters near Lincoln's conclusion, as Smith reads the 13th Amendment to Stevens, the two lying in bed together.

More than the abolitionist Stevens, I think young Tad is our audience surrogate.  Making the White House his playground, and traversing through it like Danny Torrence in The Shining (speaking of an interiorized protagonist and father figure influencing the outside dwellings!), we, Lincoln’s spiritual children, are analogous to the child, who is also in a theater when news comes of the great man’s assassination. The boy is watching a take on Aladdin, perhaps the kind of fairy tale we associate with Steven Spielberg as much as we do sentimental passages of history..  The director has made films about family dysfunction his whole career, beginning with the political chaos of post-Watergate with Jaws followed by a series of absent or distant fathers, reflecting the anxieties of a national audience distrustful of innately corrupt institutions.. He leaves us now with the definitive father, reclaimed but just as quickly stolen away. Spielberg has been delicate with us, like Lincoln with his children. Maybe too delicate. And though his touches still resound here, they are subtler than expected. He is still guiding us, taking us into his arms and showing us pictures, like Lincoln with Tad, but acknowledging that we’re mature.

The wonderfully insightful New York critic Bilge Ebiri writes about how Spielberg presents father and son in the picture, tying them to America’s destiny, noting that Tad is “something of a ghost, or an angel – a figure in whom America’s past, present, and future merge. The son might, in a sense, represent the nation’s conscience — both its broken promise of freedom and its belief in a higher purpose.”  The most stirring shot of Lincoln figures after the climactic vote, the bells ringing with promise in the distance, father and child embracing tightly together and looking out of the shadows and into the light of day with the drapes and thick saturating white enshrouding them. We feel their distance from us, but are  reminding of how our present is forged restlessly, even from such a distance, every gesture and word filled with inception and budding possibilities.

(Like Lincoln, I'm afraid I carry the traits of a bad preacher: "I could write shorter sermons, but when I start I get too lazy to stop." If you just scrolled to the end here and thought this was too long, an abridged version of my take on Lincoln can be found here at l'etoile magazine's website).

I'm also going to link other blogs and insightful reviews Lincoln as they come around, in addition to making my own revisions:

The brilliant Cinephiliacs maestro Peter Labuza's take.
Another piece by Bilge Ebiri, linking Lincoln to Amistad.
Sean Gilman, of The End of Cinema blog.
James Callahan of Artist Access on Lincoln, and his favorite Spielberg films. He's awesome, because our two favorites are identical (solidarity A.I. lovers). 
Scott MacDonald of the Toronto Standard.
Kevin Levin of The Atlantic defends Lincoln from nitpicking historians.
Two pieces by Salon's Andrew O'Hehir, on the film and the lessons the film may have for President Obama.  
Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly. 
A.O. Scott of The New York Times.
Historian Roy Blount Jr. in The Smithsonian.
MSN critic Glenn Kenny.
Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times.
Omar Moore of Popcornreel.com. 

The Man Who Fell to Earth: Steven Spielberg's E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial

E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial is celebrating its 30^th anniversary.  And regardless of whatever official commendations are there to further canonize Steven Spielberg’s warm suburban love story between a lost alien and a lonely middle child, my increasing devotion to it is of such a personal nature that I have to wonder if this film, of all films, is the central one in my life. This is not to call it the best, though it warrants consideration for such “list” accolades as any other masterpiece, being one of the 1980s’ great American films alongside Raging Bull, Blue Velvet, and Hannah and Her Sisters, but I mean central, that spark of solar conception around which everything has since grown and now orbits – as both a movie goer and a human being. Has any other movie influenced my attitudes and memories so much? Even my sense of family room afternoons as a child is colored in the same hazy glowing beams of Allen Daviau’s E.T. cinematography, and the suburban sprawl of Spielberg’s California is recognized as my sprawl in Richfield, Minnesota.

Encountering it now, I can hardly contain myself emotionally, as if I were experiencing my deepest and youngest self, the moment of becoming a conscious human being.  After all, it was during the film’s release, the summer of 1982, that I had the earliest memories of being in a dark movie theater, clapping my hands over my ears and eyes for fear of what was projected above (my primary response to E.T., I think, wasn’t comfort, but great fear). Memories were achieving a degree of cohesiveness, fragmented moments like sounds and clicks becoming words, then coming together to make complete sentences, sensations morphing into thought. Working in accordance with the iconography I was seeing in the Catholic Church, Spielberg was working out my own mythological or religious system, or pattern by which I psychologically interpreted things. In retrospect one can easily see the parallels between E.T. and myth, of miracles, peace, and resurrection; but I also remember the two most horrifying and indelible visual impressions that haunted me at that time, obsessing me almost morbidly: one was Christ crucified; the other was E.T., pale and sprawled out on the floor, near death. Did E.T. do to me what E.T. did for Elliott (Henry Thomas), and what Christ – like other archetypal heroes – did for all humanity, where I was unwittingly bound to it, as if I were an extension of it?

E.T. is a fairy tale of connection, resurrection, and departure, of the relationship between thought and feeling, reality and fantasy.  I had similar sensations with Moonrise Kingdom this summer, another fairy tale that, in Wes Anderson’s words, is a memory of a childhood fantasy. Spielberg and Anderson skillfully wove meditations of an adolescent frontier under colonial attack from the featureless practicalities of adulthood, the sprawl of development (I feel the same thing in my favorite music album of recent years, Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs). Watching him as a child, Spielberg had me looking out into the cosmos and the future; as an adult, Anderson turned me around to gaze back at beach-shore monuments that time would swallow. The emotional depths of both of these perfect little fairy tales of youth direct to something beyond logical steps of catharsis, instead hitting a nerve of awe. They are intimate and local stories harboring a cosmos, one encapsulating a Redeemer myth and the other the Great Deluge, where a broken family – like a species in the schisms of Nature – is healed and illuminated, if perhaps only temporarily. We also saw this in Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild this year, another Flood myth existing less in the context of post-Katrina New Orleans than the boundless cosmos of a young girl’s interaction with Nature. There too, the adult world, sophisticated and technological civilization, almost deliberately evokes E.T. with faceless men in sterile white suits, the resources of their logic canceling out magic.

As different as Spielberg and Anderson may be stylistically, a generation apart and appealing to different moviegoers, the effect that both of their films have on me is a reminder of their mutual place as two great architects of childhood attachment and loss. They’re both children of divorce, as I am, and in both of their cases the parents split when the directors were teenagers.  As filmmakers of their respective generations, they are positioned culturally in a way that relates to their movies. The paternal reliability of American life was obliterated by Vietnam and Watergate, and picturesque calm was prey to an uncertain chaos, much like Amity being terrorized by the cthonian beast in Jaws.  After the unveiled curtains of corruption in his ‘70s peers, the despair and loneliness in The Godfather, Chinatown, The Conversation, The Fury, and Taxi Driver, Spielberg – and George Lucas – channeled a need for re-established order and escape, like with the friendly aliens of cosmic reassurance in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Chief Brody’s killing of the shark in Jaws, and Indiana Jones, with the help of God’s wrath, melting some evil Nazi flesh in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Though not a political conservative, one could say he filled the same need that Reagan did for a lot of people, and like with Reagan, we could say that role was, on the whole, for the worse (not necessarily applied to Spielberg as an artist, but in terms of where Hollywood went, with Spielberg becoming an institution of grand-scale escapist moviemaking).

Wes Anderson, likewise, grew out of the ‘90s “lost generation” of filmmakers, the children of the ‘70s New Wave revolutions and the Un-Greatest Generation. He is Telemachus. Like Paul Thomas Anderson and David O. Russell, Wes Anderson is privileged but dysfunctional, pained in his search for a father beyond a biological father, like Stephen finds Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses or Hans Castorp caught between Settembrini, Naphta, and Peeperkorn in Mann’s The Magic Mountain.  The affectations of style, target to so much criticism and derided as “whimsy” or indulgent, point to a need to affirm one’s own sense of self in a crowded house, while also paying tribute to the past so as to find some kind of spiritual family, like Antoine Doinel reverently plagiarizes Balzac in Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Truffaut is unsurprisingly a huge influence on both Spielberg and Anderson).  In the excesses of our post-modern culture, where everything is a reference to something else – and so any gesture is muted and hollow – Anderson is looking for the stability of a meaningful framework, a temporal context, not cheap quirks.  In Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom, families are spread apart, broken, uncommunicative, full of resentment, and unreliable.  Moonrise, with two adolescent protagonists whose appearances recall Bud Cort in Harold and Maude and Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde, and set in 1965, just before the ascendancy of the “New Hollywood” (and cultural disillusionment), is a love letter to a time before the Flood. The “Cuckoo Song” playing during its unbelievably executed conclusion references the passing of summer months as autumn begins, and the private treasures of the past have to fly away, much like Spielberg’s E.T. on his spaceship, and memories undergoing erosion through time.

E.T. has the spirit of a silent film, images generating emotional reactions that fly above language.  The dialogue scenes, the first of which occurs about eight minutes in, often have the lightness of improvisation, sometimes bearing the quality of the director’s hero and Close Encounters costar Francois Truffaut and his films about children, something that is markedly lacking in his later films about innocence. Gestures, glances, and movements communicate enough to us, and while many stories are a little too overt with their messages, E.T. often wordlessly gets to its theme of good will.  It absorbs through images and touches the heart, with sentiments that evolve into language and are bridged to the head.

Few films may engender a simple notion of compassion as this one, as sympathy exudes from it like the glowing red orbs inside the extra-terrestrials. Tellingly, the first we see of E.T. is his fingers in close-up, pulling a branch, the hand looking like a Peace sign. In the director’s own words, E.T. is essentially “an emissary of Peace,” and so a figure in opposition to the tough talk of Reagan’s Cold War.  We even see a character wearing a “No Nukes” t-shirt. I think it’s ironic that the other big movie of 1982, and the victor over E.T. at the Academy Awards, was Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, and yet the epic historical film pales in comparison in its theme of compassion to the alien love story.

Though there is no violence in E.T., or even a “villain,” there are subtexts of aggression throughout.  The film begins very frighteningly, with darkness, smoke, shadows, and unseen creatures leaving sign of themselves through the hollow brush or a swing set. The mood is that of a malevolent horror film, just as it’s a dystopian science fiction world when the top secret government officials, led by “Keys” (Peter Coyote), capture E.T. and begin to run tests on him. The world of families is warm and affluent, but marked with aggression. In the household of Elliott’s family, we see it immediately as the older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) has his friends over for a Dungeons & Dragons-type of role playing game, with players in an alternative universe of fantasy rolling dice for power and dominance. Elliott is picked on by the other boys, some of whom grab knives when they investigate the strange sounds outside (“Put the knives away,” the mother, Mary (Dee Wallace), instructs them, though they don’t listen). When Elliott hurts his mother’s feelings by mentioning how their father is in Mexico with his new lover, Michael says, “I’m going to kill you.”  To keep little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) silent about the newly discovered E.T., her doll is threatened with dismemberment (with Elliott mimicking classic bloodsucker Count Dracula).  Showing E.T. his toys, Elliott demonstrates how, with his Star Wars action figures, “you can have wars,” and shows off two fictional characters shooting and killing each other. As peaceable and sheltered as Spielberg’s suburbs are, it is a world of murder and power, where, so Elliott shows, “the fish eat the fish food, the shark eats the fish, and no one eats the shark.” Relationships are undercut by hurled insults like, famously, “penis breath,” or a schoolyard joke where the alien’s home is suggested as “your anus, get it? Your anus!”

This is the horror underlying nature. Alien invaders are also interpreted as dangerous, like with the arcade game Space Invaders, which is referenced on a t-shirt, or the action figures from Star Wars. In Elliott’s science class we see a historical chart of history, and the ominous warning of “extinction,” relating to the species that couldn’t adapt. Certainly, the pain that Mary feels regarding her broken marriage has to do with being an older woman losing time to her responsibilities as her husband is with someone who is presumably younger and more available. When the science teacher, a faceless emissary of necessity and awful truths of what underlies nature, passes out cotton swabs to poison to dozens of frogs for dissection, he says, “They won’t feel anything. They won’t be hurt,” but you can’t help but think the science project isn’t, for Spielberg, somewhat analog to the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Civilization buffers the reality and horror of loss and death, as we see Michael’s Halloween costume, a fake knife piercing his head. We discern that his earlier costume idea was a “terrorist,” a line that was eliminated from Spielberg’s 2002 DVD re-release of E.T., in addition to walkie-talkies taking the place of shot-guns carried by federal agents during the climactic chase. Thankfully, Spielberg has listened to his audience and restored the original 1982 cut (and eradicating the superfluous CGI shots of E.T.), which also re-establishes the subtext of violence that underlies the film’s power as a document about peace and love in a lonely and cruel universe.

The author in less dignified, if more innocent, days.

E.T. and his species are, according to Spielberg and screenwriter Melissa Mathison, plants.  He’s an earthy creature, moist and brown, transparent when his heart glows, and attached to nature. When E.T. takes a plant from the ground, he’s careful to get it by the roots, holding it like a nurturing caretaker. He looks up reverently at the great trees around him, and a cut to a rabbit nearby reinforces a kind of one-ness with the environment.  E.T. alludes to a Christ figure, another “man who fell to earth” (I’ve always found it neat that Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ has a few shots modeled on Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, along with David Bowie as Pontias Pilate, associating God-as-Man to alien being), bringing a message of peace, eventually dying, resurrecting, and ascending back to the heavens after instructing us all to “Be Good” (meanwhile, Elliott falling asleep before E.T. disappears in the woods clearly echoes Gethsemane). He is also the Buddha, a spiritual wanderer who loves and liberates all living things, psychically freeing the doomed frogs in Elliott’s science class.  The construction of the alien’s grace owes much to Mathison, a Buddhist who also wrote the screenplay for Scorsese’s Dali Lama biopic Kundun.  E.T. is a heart and he loves, Elliott’s “ouch” becoming his “ouch.” He sympathizes with the Other, and heals. E.T. is a commercial work of art sincerely interested in the idea of kindness.

But there’s a lot of hunger in E.T., and this gets back to the cruel and base necessities of the world, of dog-eat-dog (or shark-eat-fish), of prosperity as victory, of rabid consumption. The film is replete with the idea of eating: the pizza that plays alongside the Dungeons and Dragons game (and is accidentally dropped by Elliott when he hears mysterious sounds in the shed); the trail of Reese’s Pieces Elliott leaves for E.T.; the shark eating the fish; and finally E.T.’s attempt to eat a Hot Wheels toy car (cars denoting excessive guzzling as much as anything).  We see both Elliott and E.T. raid the refrigerator, picking through the health food to find something tasty, E.T. acquiring a fondness for Coors beer – of which he drinks too much.

Consuming mass quantities: "E.T." raids the fridge and has a Coors.Add caption

Is that what happened with E.T. in culture? The film is an easy target for criticism because how it was, along with Star Wars, so successful in its tie-in marketing. Whatever its Zen meditations, you could say that the pajamas, dolls, Halloween costumes, and Reese’s dispensers sold on a mass scale were good fodder for “ugly Americans.” That’s why it’s important to watch the film not as a spectacle but as an earnest and observant drama about suburban life, because I think Spielberg is cluing us into the concept of “too-muchness,” be it the enormous drive way at Elliott’s home or the alien’s appetite (“Is he a pig? He sure eats like one,” Gertie says while E.T. chows down). Industry is part of E.T.’s design, as we see those tall trees, on which E.T. looked in awe during the opening minutes, cut down and laying lifelessly on the ground later, when Elliott and E.T. bike into the wilderness so that the Speak’n Spell “phone home” device can be constructed. Industry is the outlay of the sprawl, as what we see is land bought and under development, the human world encroaching on the forest. The Dungeons and Dragons conversation at the beginning mentions money, and though there’s no “winning” at life like in role-playing, we hear “money helps.

Industry, the heart, and the mind were key motifs in one of the first science fiction films, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where we’re told, “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!’ This is probably the story of Spielberg’s career, as he’s known as the great manipulator, pulling emotional chords like a puppet master and provoking his audience to move in accordance to his wishes. Sometimes, like with E.T. and its masterful dialectical opponent A.I., where Kubrickian skepticism is married to Spielbergian poignancy, it is remarkable. E.T. is filled with sentiment, but doesn’t feel sentimental, and the manipulations of A.I. present the filmmaker allowing his own dissection and deconstruction by way of his elder guide Kubrick, like Gigolo Joe (Jude Law) leads on the loving mecha David (Haley Joel Osment). I am tremendously affected by Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as Dr. Henry Jones (Sean Connery) grabs Indiana (Harrison Ford), whom he thought dead, and exclaims, “I thought I lost you, boy!” before capturing his restraint and steady poise again. Other times, like in Spielberg’s Oscar-baiting historical dramas – The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Schindler’s List, Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, Munich - excellent as they may be in some cases, the maneuvers, aided by composer John Williams, are potent but more transparent: “I could have done more,” “Give us free,” “Earn this,” and so on. Maybe E.T. and A.I. are aided by their stature as fairy tales or metaphors, though that excuse certainly doesn’t work for Hook, the director’s 1991 Peter Pan misfire.

Transference of cinematic images as memory: "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" (2001)

The newest Spielberg film is Lincoln, coming out in a few weeks time, where the broken family is a divided nation, and the struggling father, Abraham Lincoln, has to brilliantly maneuver the passing of legislation to ensure legal rights for Americans of all races, and end the bloodiest of wars in a nation’s history. Already, Spielberg’s detractors are out for blood and waiting for him to make a hagiographic and treacly historical spectacle. But Lincoln is an appropriate subject for Spielberg not only as another addition to his list of struggling fathers to harness chaos (Lincoln may be linked then to Chief Brody from Jaws) or as another film about race relations and war, always fascinating for him as they are. But it was Lincoln who, like Spielberg, entreated his audience, the American people, to his side through emotions. Historian Roy Blount Jr. paraphrases Lincoln, “In order to ‘win a man to your cause,’ you must first reach his heart, ‘the great high road to his reason.’” Not surprisingly, the film Lincoln has a subtext of social performance, of the “legal” and “official” stepping on the stage as representatives of human motivations and beliefs. Written by Tony Kushner, it is a collision of myth, history, and individuals understanding that they are participating in the ceaseless construction of myth, of stories and parables, of a drama or history book. Language lays out who we are, and also how we are. A person’s worth tragically – or victoriously – amounts to words, words, words, much like the names typed onto Schindler’s list.

E.T. doesn’t talk when we first meet him. He purrs and bleats like a house pet, his eyes and hands searching around curiously for information. He learns by connecting to objects with his eyes and hands. It’s through looking that he and Elliott become linked emotionally, the same way that moviegoers are unwittingly linked to a film they’re watching. The first moment when Elliott and E.T. come face to face in a field, the screams of the alien are mirrored by Elliott’s shriek, and Spielberg cuts to various angles around the child as if the totality of the film’s matrix were absorbing him. Later on, after E.T. has followed Elliott’s trail of candy, we finally see the two of them together in the same shot, the creature’s placid face lit and revealed. E.T. is tired, Elliott is tired. Later, E.T. is surprised by an opening umbrella, which makes Elliott surprised in the other room. “Elliott thinks his thoughts,” posits a scientist examining the two,  as they  both are afflicted with deathly illness. “No,” Michael corrects. “Elliott feels his feelings.”  In this friendship, the lonely boy understands feeling, something Michael earlier chided him for lacking after Elliott brought up their father’s alternative romantic relationship in the presence of Mary. “Why don’t you grow up? Think how other people feel for a change.” Feelings denote a kind of sentience, a being-ness, indicated by how the science teacher justifies to the schoolchildren the legitimacy of killing frogs for dissection because “they won’t feel anything.” But Elliott looks at the doomed creature through the glass jar and senses something. At the same time, E.T. watches television and reads comic strips, feeling something – and then constructing a plan.

The scene of E.T. watching The Quiet Man, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne, feels like the film’s central set-piece, the eye-of-the-duck so to speak. E.T. stares in amazement at Wayne grabbing Maureen O’Hara, bringing her close and kissing her. At the same time, with the sound of Elliott’s classroom replaced by the ferocious wind of The Quiet Man, Elliott is compelled to repeat what E.T. is seeing, taking a beautiful girl and planting his own classic movie kiss, before the science teacher grabs him and takes him away to be punished for releasing the doomed amphibians. It’s a beautiful statement on the communicative effect of cinema, demonstrating how affecting our emotions affects the development of our thoughts, of language. For it’s soon after this scene that E.T. evolves the power to form and imitate words, taking cue from Gertie and Big Bird on Sesame Street (another reason not to vote for Mitt Romney: Big Bird taught E.T. how to talk!)  The recognition of the letter “b” leads to Gertie’s encouragement, “Good!” And so E.T. learns to relay the great message of the film, “Be good.”

Soon after, E.T. is literally clothed by civilization, wearing a dress, hat, and wig, repeating his name (“E.T., E.T., E.T.!”) and Elliott’s, and finally pointing out, via a comic strip, his plan to “phone home.” It’s not accidental that the main tool he uses for his phoning contraption is a Texas Instruments Speak’n Spell, an educational toy popular in the 1980s for the development of language skills (specifically spelling). Sight leads to feeling, leads to understanding, leads to language and thought. Critics of Spielberg are wrong to say that E.T. is only there because of its appeal to the emotions (the implication being this is how you take advantage of people, infantilizing them, and dumbing them down – and yes, Spielberg isn’t wholly not guilty either). As the film bridges alien and human, it also links feeling to intellect. While E.T.’s words in the film are first evidently based on repeating what he’s heard others tell him, after his heart-glowing resurrection we hear him directly answer a question. “Does this mean they’re coming?” Elliott asks, regarding E.T.’s fellow space travelers. “Yes,” the alien replies. In the final scene, E.T. offers “thank you” to Michael, tells Gertie to “be good,” and repeats a line Elliott told him when they first met. In an early scene, Elliott pointed at his chest, saying “I’ll be right here,” before leaving E.T. in his room for a moment.  But in the closing minutes of their relationship, E.T. says those words – “I’ll be right here” – and points at Elliott’s head.

The link of sight to emotion and then to truth/action is elsewhere in Spielberg’s histories, such as Schindler’s List, when Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) follows a young Jewish girl in red during the liquidation of a Jewish ghetto; he recognizes the girl’s corpse later on, compelling him to free his doomed Jewish workers.  In Lincoln, we notice young Tad Lincoln obsessing over photographs of slaves, their backs scarred from floggings and their prices for purchase beneath them. From such morbid images, he is stirred to ask questions of the black servants in the White House (“Were you whipped?”), about their personal histories, something which will drive forward the dialectical course of racial relations, of injustice in conflict with activism and freedom, in the future. For Spielberg, cinema is sentiment and truth sewn together. In his world, we come together and watch, falling in love with imaginary friends, an image wondrously displayed as Elliott caresses a purring E.T. while they listen to Mary tell a Peter Pan story to Gertie, spying through the blinds.

As when I write about any classic film, I indulgently really often talk about myself, there’s a final note on my personal relationship to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, pertaining to how I imagine this film influenced my relationship to my domestic pets over the years. E.T. is, as I mentioned, akin to a house-pet in how he purrs. At the time of the picture’s release, I have my first memories of being attached to pets, like a cat named Muffin, with whom I would lie and stare at for sustained periods, not really saying anything, but repeatedly murmuring wordless noises (I was three. Give me a break). E.T. is very much a movie about pets, even if its titular character is a form of advanced intelligence with his own home in a galaxy far, far away. We anthropomorphize animals, giving them human traits and thoughts that they probably don’t possess, to make them more familiar to us (just as we give our dolls characteristics, which makes the shot of E.T. hiding amongst Gertie’s stuffed animal collection significant, or Gertie’s devotion to her threatened favorite doll). Even if they’re dim-witted, it’s natural to think that cats and dogs actually know more than we do. But they don’t have language, and so they have no kind of thought structure similar to ours. Still, we make them one of us. It’s charming that Spielberg and Mathison name the dog in Elliott’s family “Harvey,” a nod to the giant bunny befriended by James Stewart in Frank Capra’s film (at one time going to be remade by Spielberg with Tom Hanks). The dog is a sort of double for the alien, and the two are confused for each other when Elliott’s explores the strange noises in the shed.  At the end of the picture, it’s Harvey who gives E.T. the final farewell, a wordless one, before turning back to his human family.

So in a way, our pets are imaginary friends like E.T., with shorter life spans ensuring that they have to go away before we’re fully grown up or fully grown old and ready to shuffle down our own mortal coils. They’re vulnerable and dependent on us, helpless with a true innocence, lacking malice (even the villainous shark in Jaws is just hungry, its cruelty only a human projection; Quint’s monologue of the USS Indianapolis, about the ship that delivered the atomic bomb, is very ironic, given the damage the monsters of god inflict is insignificant when compared to what humans do to each other). Elliott’s kindness and openness to E.T. is the same care one has for a pet, and with Spielberg’s message of kindness, it reminds me of Milan Kundera’s words from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as the novel’s two principle characters deal with the cancer of a dog who has been with them throughout their entire relationship. He writes, “True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test (which is deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.”  Though we might say Spielberg at times epitomizes the homo sentimentalis “kitsch” that Kundera derides, I take this to heart when hearing Keys’ words to Elliott in the governmental hospital, when he expresses how glad he is that Elliott was the first person E.T. met.

Another cat who’s been close to me, Fefu, has been sick this past week, and it’s not been easy evaluating my memories of E.T. along with its images while understanding the mortality of my special little friend, who’s been with me these last six years. E.T.’s purring is her purring, and I’d do anything I could to keep her safe, happy, and healthy. But Spielberg’s film is also consoling for these tremors, I feel, addressing the turmoil – and necessity – of attachment before entropy and death sets in. Moonrise Kingdom was also strikingly filled with animals, whether performed by children in a Benjamin Britten opera of Noah’s Ark, or the several cats populating the house of Bill Murray and Frances McDormand (one of whom comes along with the young girl who escapes into the wilderness). As Anderson’s camera tracks through the house of sleepy felines in 1965, one realizes that all of these creatures are now long passed away, like the birds from the “Cuckoo Song,” or the protagonists’ innocence. Anderson and Spielberg entreat us to cherish the creatures over whom we hold “dominion,” the wordless but breathing ornaments of memory who provoke the most basic and essential sympathy, worth more than money. Whatever power people have in their realms and conquests over the sprawl, in families and communities, these two films, one 30 and blooming in its age while the other is a glowing infant, are viewfinders to what makes existence both precious and mysterious.

"Building Better Worlds": Hyperreal Visions in Ridley Scott's "Prometheus"

One of the several memorable trailer-friendly tagline moments from Ridley Scott’s Prometheus features a precocious and fascinated android, David (Michael Fassbender), looking closely at a contaminant DNA-filled vial and whispering, “Big things have small beginnings.”  It’s a knowing declaration applicable not just to the evolutionary potential of the gooey alien material, but to the progression of movies throughout Scott’s career, from his mainstream breakthrough in 1979, the original Alien, up to this highly anticipated “prequel” to the Alien franchise. We’ve seen Scott, the art director with humble beginnings directing commercials, moving from 35 mm film and fashioning Alien with the deepest of blacks in the cramped and claustrophobic quarters of the Nostromo ship where passengers are picked off one by one by H.R. Giger’s nightmarish phallic/fetal xenomorph monster, and now, 33 years later, shooting in digital 3D and showcasing his already masterful wrangling of computer generated imagery with no expense spared.  As if to deliberately distance itself from the franchise it spawned, the opening images of Prometheus display a limitless and fertile natural environment.  Scott seems to promise a magnificent mural of unbounded preternatural creation such as we’ve seen in other Scott epics of the deep past, as in 1492: Conquest of Paradise, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, and Robin Hood.  Alien, on the other hand, was a tightly controlled horror film of suspended silences; its terror is intimate.

Whatever the flaws of Prometheus are, they have little to do with its cinematic approach or technological ingenuity.  The film’s disappointments are not what we have in a comparison of the new Star Wars films to the old ones, for example, where fans of the originals complain how special effects “progress,” the increasing digitalization of cinema, remains inferior to the solidity and real-time/real-space quality of the original pictures.  Rather, as with other Ridley Scott films, it’s likely that stages of a broad concept's roughly handled rewriting are the seeds of its undoing (and – again with Ridley Scott films such as Kingdom of Heaven and Blade Runner – it’s possible that a “director’s cut” may help remedy the short-comings). 

 Prometheus, as Scott’s first foray into 3D, may also be a very personal film. It’s the work of an aging artist (Scott is 74) facing the anxiety of his limited time while pressed to continue “creating worlds” in the service of big and impersonal corporations that are cynically in conjunction with technological development or gimmicks (for this film it’s the most infamous of suspect media corporations, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox).  Prometheus' corprate mogul Peter Weyland may be an amalgamation of Scott and Murdoch, a fascinated seeker existentially running out of time, whose talent and money run into the brick wall of nothingness.  As a director with an endless number of films in development, Scott's age and mortality is an afterthought for the viewer. Few filmmakers work as well with new technology as he does. Prometheus, taking cue from Scott’s idol Stanley Kubrick (who died at age 70) and 2001: A Space Odyssey, features technology as an unstoppable contagion, always changing and growing, and finally becoming the undoing of its master and creator.  This idea, working alongside the picture’s execution as a special effects summer blockbuster marvel, gives haunting dimension to a film that stumbles during its rushed final act.

The “aliens” are both the engineers and the engineered – us and them, humans and androids, viewers and CGI-generated motion picture; as cinema viewers, we are experiencing whole geographies and landscapes, and finally intimate memories, as the product of mechanical construction.  David (whose name and mannerisms remind one of Kubrick's collaboration with Steven Spielberg, AI: Artificial Intelligence - the name from Haley Joel Osment's loving mecha, the manner and appearance from Jude Law's Gigolo Joe) mimics Peter O’Toole in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the film pointing out how our everyday reality is guided by cinema or images, which is to say technology.  In 1979, watching 2001’s visual effects progeny of Alien, Star Wars, Superman, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, could we have presumed that the otherness of fabricated worlds (visual effects) would become so ubiquitous?  I believe this is something Sir Ridley is wondering about in Prometheus, his futuristic haunted house story.

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The brutal and beautiful landscapes that begin Prometheus are interrupted by the shadow of a perfect circle hovering and clashing with the wild anthropomorphic shapes we might read into the rocks and valleys.  The atmosphere is not science fiction but archaic mythology.  Instead of the flashing environs of Alien and Blade Runner, both of which carry their share of mythological reference, Scott is touching the fairy tale quality of Legend, the dark ages of Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood, or perhaps the ascending Renaissance of discovering new worlds in 1492: Conquest of Paradise.  Instead of the end of time, Scott takes us to a beginning. 

A monk-like figure stands by the water and unrobes himself.  With the deliberateness of a priestly ritual, he drinks something. His body contorts and then begins to fall apart, disintegrating into the water which is now soiled with his contaminated blood.  The computer generated camera eye takes us into the blood vessels, and then the DNA, the microcosm equaling the macrocosms of the geography with which the film opened.  

It’s a puzzling and maybe maddening introduction for a picture people have been waiting some time for, its reversal of Alien’s silences indeed deliberate.  The blue humanoid creature of pure muscle, a demigod, looks like the construction of computer generation: a perfect creature engineered by filmmakers and graphic artists, who in the context of this story is the engineer for our species and intelligence.  It is a humanoid version of Kubrick’s benevolent, mysterious monolith from 2001, the guide for humankind’s evolution four million years ago.  But there is a strychnine, hopeless edge to Scott’s vision of the alternating eons, in contrast to Kubrick’s detached and sublime enigma that culminated in the famous “Star-Child” looking back at us.   Scott is making a commentary on his medium of filmmaking, and his flirtation with abstraction – like Kubrick and later Terrence Malick – might ensure Prometheus’s fate as a disappointment that fails to catch fire with fans; unlike Kubrick or Malick, Scott steers headway back into his over-plotted narrative at the end, concretizing his abstractions to the point of irritation.  Plot gets in the way of poetry.

--At least in relation to existential questions (faith and science; beginning and end; human and alien; human and god).  Prometheus works as a meta dialogue:  a science fiction special effects film working against its predecessors in its bid to enter the canon – Kubrick, Cameron’s Avatar, and Scott’s own Alien and Blade Runner.  In the film’s present, 2089, we see archeologists Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) and Charlie Holloway (Logan Marshall Green) exploring 35,000-year-old cave drawings in Scotland – setting the narrative in motion as other cave drawings reveal how our ancestors are pointing to a cosmic map, “an invitation” to meet our makers when the technology is ready.  These drawings might make us think of Werner Herzog’s observations in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, where the renderings of animals under flickering fire suggest animation.  For Herzog, the caves are the most primitive form of cinema, as lifeless creations are given a soul (“animism”) complementing the dreams and craft of their makers, the artisans. 

Four years later, the spaceship Prometheus, named for the fire thieving demigod who was punished for aiding humankind, is preparing to encounter the destination pinpointed on the ancient star-map.  The passengers, including Shaw and Holloway, are hibernating.  David oversees day-to-day operations, his curiosity leading him to explore all facets of human knowledge and language, being tutored by holograms.  In his spare moments, he not only appreciates Lawrence of Arabia but also the digitized memories of Prometheus’ passengers.  

In other words, our memories are cinema. And now, pixelated as they are, they are digital.  Cinema is digital; so is Alien, on DVD/Blu-Ray or as a big budget 3D prequel.  The masterful design of the ship by production designer Arthur Max, alongside Scott’s perfect orchestration of images, immerses us in a sense of complete hyperreality, of screened images and holograms displacing and dismantling our definition of “reality,” or hard-space and memory storage.  In an information age, our memories are not private.  Like on Facebook, Elizabeth Shaw’s remembrances of her late missionary father (Patrick Wilson) are accessible to anyone, and as David watches, Shaw’s memories are colored with quick dissolves to images related to what is spoken about: the memory is even edited like a movie.  The videoscopic theme finds interesting, if purely coincidental, reference in the casting of Prometheus' chief medic, played by Kate Dickie, who portrayed the CCTV surveillance woman in Andrea Arnold’s 2006 noir  masterpiece Red Road, manning government cameras that flirt with the private lives of citizens.

The illusions/images so dictate our framing of the “Real.”  In Shaw’s memory, her father’s sense of heaven and God are sculpted by what he “chooses to believe.”  He knows that there are alternative images of God and the afterlife, but he has selected the image that fits him – a Christian one.  The android looks to Lawrence of Arabia and sees his double in T.E. Lawrence, who runs his fingers through flames, even decisively coloring his hair to match Peter O'Toole.  “The trick is not minding that it hurts,” David repeats Lawrence's line in reference to putting finger to flame. The truth, which in Scott’s universe may be unbearably cthonian, brutal, monstrous, parasitical, etc, is deflected by the images we hold up as sacred: Christ’s passion, or a David Lean epic.  The movies won’t save us any more than Jesus Christ will (and Shaw’s father would die from the same Ebola that ravaged the people to whom he preached), but we absurdly choose to believe them anyway.  The illusions point to a desire to transcend what Lawrence calls “only flesh and blood.”  The movies are escaping from meat-space, much like the ascetic and gnostic believer or Platonist seeks another world.

The digital immersion of easily accessible “worlds” weaved by technological wizardry (which have long replaced special effects “trickery” – a theme pertinent to Ridley Scott enthusiast Christopher Nolan and his Prestige) unlocks convenient treasures and marvels, but also steals away our sense of time, holding the immediate problems at bay: family, death, and hideous monsters that want to eat you.  Two conflicting forces on the ship are the Weyland Industries steely corporate head, Meredith Vickers (Charlize Theron), at times more robotic in her disposition than David, and the captain, Janek (Idris Alba), an earthy, well-humored practical skipper who doesn’t have any illusions.  Vickers spends most of her time in a special module (described as a “lifeboat”), with a manufactured environment, a “separate world” of walls that have earth-set frontiers displayed. She can be psychologically buffered from her present environment.  She exists out of time, helpful given a troubled relationship to her past (Peter Weyland is her father, and apparently not a good one, preferring the android David).  Janek comes out of hibernation and sets up a Christmas tree, because the crew needs a holiday “to show time is still moving.”  It’s Janek who inquires if Vickers is an android (something about which I wondered throughout the film’s first half), while also insinuating that perhaps the two of them should have sex.  Her attitude to sexuality is very automatic: she gives him a specific time and place, without the slightest hint of carnal expectation or appetite. 

David is seen as something present purely for utilitarian purposes.  For the crew, or even his maker Weyland, he has no soul.  These are the stakes of technological progress and ingenuity aligning the corporation to Hollywood: Weyland Industries is, according to its slogan, “building better worlds,” and even building better people (special makeup effects - and not CGI - creates the humanoid that begins Prometheus; Weyland gives the android David). The "ghost world" of hyperreality and simulation is on equal footing with the real world.  This idea is conveyed when the crew finally sits down and evaluates their mission.  They are guided by a hologram of Weyland (Guy Pearce), who interacts with his viewers as if he was actually there, introducing them.  Weyland is, apparently, dead, and so Holloway says after being introduced by the hologram, “I never had to follow a ghost before.”  

This dialogue goes beyond Weyland’s death and touches concepts of the hyperreal and digital, where everything is “ghostly” in its screened rendering: what’s not alive is increasingly encroaching on real spectators, something reinforced by 3D cinema.  Later on, the Prometheus astronauts and archeologists will explore the caves – or tombs – of the alien planet, and be startled by holograms of the long-dead hosts running through them: a memory caught on “film,” awaiting interpretation and anticipating bad things to come, much as our memories of 1979’s Alien, built into our cinematic memory as we walk into the theater to see Prometheus, make us anxious for what Ridley Scott has in store this time (and, like the Prometheus passengers, many viewers have been disappointed by what they’ve seen).  The real world is "manufacturing" air.  The "organic" nature of things is discounted, and so the film's two first casualties are the men fascinated by real and organic matter, the geologist and the biologist. 

The machine, David, grapples reality and emotions better than we can, again taking Lawrence as his model.  The machine is creative, while people, domineered by the corporate Weyland structure that renders everything holographic in “building better worlds,” are stuck playing a zero-sum game. The scientists, Vickers reminds Shaw and Holloway, are now merely employees.  We notice how the most interesting of camera POVs in the caves is taken from David’s vision.  He is the one most insistent on seeing things.  The machine sees all, and everything in this brave new universe is mapped out (by “pups” that traverse through the alien corridors, recording space), while Janek and his first mates watch a myriad of screens like a captivated audience. David is the most captive of viewers, sitting himself down in the central alien module and watching a hologram recording from two thousand years ago, our extraterrestrial “engineers” readying something before their stock of WMDs gets out of hand and destroys them, followed by a magnificent interactive display of the galaxy, communicating the intentions of the Engineers for the planet Earth.

David also has the agency to create links between his existence and what he sees in films like Lawrence of Arabia – though his words (“There is nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing”) are not quotes of O’Toole’s Lawrence, but reference the keen observations of the “Other,” the Arab Prince Feisal who admonishes Lawrence for thinking so simplistically about the desert-dwelling Arabs, just as the Prometheus crew overlooks the possible feelings and motives of an android (or the similarly desert-dwelling aliens).  The full context drawn from the film that David describes as a favorite focuses on Lawrence voicing his loyalty to the English and to the Arabs.  “You are an Englishman,” Feisal says. “Are you not loyal to England?”  “To England and to other things,” Lawrence answers.  “To England and to Arabia both?” Feisal responds. “And is that possible? I think you are another of these desert-loving English. Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There's nothing in the desert. No man needs nothing. Or is it that you think we are something you can play with? Because we are little people; a silly people; greedy, and barbarous, and cruel.”  Perhaps David senses a futility in the Prometheus mission, which is, we come to understand, a mission for the fountain of youth, eternal life (another interesting coincidence is how Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, from which the spaceship in Alien gets its name, was to be David Lean's follow-up to A Passage to India, until he fell sick and died in 1989). It is the enthusiasm that colonialists have for discovering new worlds, not realizing the problems that will ensue with indiginous populations. Lawrence doesn’t understand the Arabs, just as the crew doesn’t understand the Engineers, or how the Engineers possibly don’t understand the humans, or how the humans don’t understand what they’ve created with David.  As with T.E. Lawrence, what the characters find in the desert drives them mad, tearing the veneer of stability away.   

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Kubrick’s ghost of 2001 (and The Shining) haunts Prometheus from its first image to its last.  Scott opens with the camera overlooking a planet silhouetted by a sun, recalling 2001’s symmetrical row of spheres; the beauty of this introduction, further evoked in a friendly epic score complementing the planet's terrain, is juxtaposed against the ending.  Whereas Kubrick’s use of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra suggests symmetry and an order, one step in evolution connected to the next, Prometheus isn’t about “straight” lines (Kubrick's alignment of planets) but how nature is cruel, hungry, and carnal; the feeling of two parasitical attacks suggest forced oral sex with either gender: a python creature (whose appearance first is strongly vaginal) rams itself into an entranced biologist’s mouth, eating him from the inside; a resurrected Golem-like Engineer alien is forced by a tentacled beast to have its face rammed into a toothy vaginal mouth (an almost hilarious channeling of a male fear of cunnilingus).  Sex (creation) is messy in the Alien universe, and Scott’s lush beginning is greeted with the antithesis of Kubrick’s Star Child at the end – the familiar, H.R. Giger-designed alien, newly hatched; not a new creation of infinite possibilities, but a harbinger of pure destruction, consumption, rape, hatching, and blind parasitical infestation. 

Is the marvelous technology displayed in Prometheus also a warning? Scott, like other filmmakers (Scorsese, Mann, Wenders, Bertolucci, and of course Cameron), beams positively about 3D, but the captain (director) of the ship is overridden by the automatic drive for profit that motivates Miss Vickers.  Why did humankind make androids, and why do filmmakers use 3D or computer generated imagery?  Because we can, as Holloway says to David after the android inquires why humans made him. This is the fear of 3D and digital filmmaking: the raptors from Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park have gotten out of hand, and eaten all the real people (and places) in the park.  The holograms are running the show.

Meanwhile, the convenience of streaming with images of convenience displayed at the viewer’s call, as in Vickers’ “lifeboat” module, keeps us away from any historical link to the past. David is enthralled by memories and old images, while Janek, the most human of the crew’s passengers, appreciates the symbolism of a Christmas tree and a musical instrument once owned by Stephen Stills.  He is able to see the big picture, unlike Vickers (who hopelessly grapples for life until the future quite literally descends and crushes her in the form of a spaceship).  He altruistically flies the Prometheus into the spacecraft heading to earth for a biochemical attack, a moment in Prometheus that is a little hard for an audience to accept.

Yet the act of altruism chimes in with the key motif of the film--which clueless high-minded viewers seem to recklessly overlook, making themselves look much like the hubris-laden scientists in the story. The gaps in logic in Prometheus are there for a reason, and though we love to think progress is inevitable, the film shows how this isn't so: people still absurdly follow religion. They altruistically give themselves up without much thought (for one thing, think of suicide bombers). The geologist gets lost. The biologist is playful with an malevolent looking creature. The most enlightened people engage in unprotected sex (here after they've been in the presence of alien bacteria), just as intelligent educators and politicians are lured into hopeless sexual indiscretions (Anthony Weiner). At the conclusion of the film, there is an act of forgiveness between two characters -- something which critics have also poked fun at, but isn't forgiveness the cornerstone of Christian theology and, as Freud pointed out, isn't forgiveness simply absurd? It doesn't make any sense. This is what Prometheus is about, and it's a little maddening to see how it's ten steps ahead of the smug condescension  of its critics (and I say this as someone who's still on the fence about the movie as a whole). 

History stalks the tightly-enclosed lifeboat modules of the present moment. It’s another clever twist then that Scott alludes to The Shining, as his film is also a “haunted house” story.  In the final paces of Prometheus, Shaw has her axe in hand (like Jack Torrence, though acting more like Wendy Torrence), and nervously walks through the Vickers module with its stately music (I think I heard the melody to “Put on a Happy Face”) and décor, evoking the gala ball occurring at Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel.  Like Vickers, Jack Torrence wants to exist in his own little world (the Overlook), safe from the outside world’s intrusions or family responsibilities.  The way that David watches Lawrence of Arabia shows that art – images – may keep history alive for us, an idea further reinforced when the two unfortunate scientists – the geologist and the biologist – come upon a heap of Engineer corpses and compare the site to a “Holocaust painting.”

The contagion of technology alters vision and how we process images.  After David has malevolently poisoned Holloway with the alien bacteria, the archeologist perceives the contaminants moving in his eyeballs.  Afterwards, Holloway collapses in the haunted corridors and repeatedly demands Shaw tell him what she sees in his face.  Back on the ship, Shaw – impregnated by Holloway’s “disease” from a sexual encounter 10 hours before – wants David to let her see what is rapidly growing inside of her.  Scott will soon challenge our capacity for “seeing” with the next scene, a stunning and grotesque caesarian-section in a robotic surgery pod.  Creation – of which the infertile Shaw mourns that she cannot contribute – is colored as something vile and fearful.  Pulled out of her abdomen is a tentacled embryo, which will soon later be the gigantic toothy-vagina monster. It wriggles above her in the steady hands of surgical robot arms, as she is stitched up and rolls out of the pod.  

We have just seen an elaborate and horrifying sequence of unbelievable CGI ingenuity, so disgusting that we should ask ourselves if the technology was worth inventing.  It is the most memorable of virgin births, relating to how we may read a Christ allegory into the film (the Christmas tree; the fact that the Engineers on this planet were wiped out 2,000 years ago; Shaw’s barrenness making her something of a Virgin Mary; the surgery is referred to as a caesarian, and never as an “abortion”).  Prometheus prepares the way for the anti-Christ; when we look upon the Engineer mural and shrine, there is a sculpture – I think – of the familiar Giger-designed xenomorph alien: this is prophecy.  The new creation, as alien weapon or technology, is a savior, as we see David reflexively rescue Holloway and Shaw from a brutal sandstorm and in the following moments poisoning Holloway. The savior is also the destroyer.

Certainly a troubling element in Prometheus that has several viewers shaking their heads relates to the religious questions of Scott’s astronauts, when I think a great deal of Alien franchise fans probably share Janek’s disposition: he doesn’t care about the questions: they want action, not theology. It is hokey when Shaw talks about her choice to believe, or her declaration at the film’s conclusion, when her will to be absurdly curious is identified as a trait of her “human-ness."  As with visual effects and hyperreal digital worlds in cinema, there is no return to earth in Prometheus, but a constant and stubborn flight from reality.  What would the elderly Weyland, in bad movie make-up, hope that his “Engineer” tell him?  His day is at an end, and now old-age "makeup" will be the work of graphic designers.  At this juncture, who cares “why we are here”?  I feel Scott may be on to the hokey and hackneyed starry-eyed deep questions posed, as when Holloway says to Shaw, “One small step for mankind,” and she responds, “Seriously?”  There may be several clunky lines of dialogue here, but perhaps they’re appropriated from other movies and culture (much like David takes lines from Lawrence of Arabia, or colors his hair). 

Behind the debates, long-winded questions, and the theology, there is silence.  The trillionaire Weyland lies dying after his creator has struck him down and rendered him in a state of Stephen Crane-like despair.  “There’s nothing,” he says, suggesting what he senses lies on the other side of the existential door.  The android David replies, “I know.  Have a good journey, Mr. Weyland.”  Weyland's lines recall what we hear toward the end of The Wages of Fear, another classic film about an absurd journey--aspiration as nightmare. The journey is black, and after the abundance of things we've seen courtesy of Ridley Scott and his design team previously, that's sad.

Movies and religion inspire us and keep us safe from that black nothing descending on Weyland.  The viewer gazes, fascinated, and wants to see more.  The engineer, Ridley Scott, wants to create and show more.  The plot holes of Prometheus, working to mar the experience, may be remedied by the possibility of sequels: a new trilogy.  But I suspect that a divisive R-rated big budget science fiction movie, aiming high (unlike The Avengers, which gets on base by aiming low), will only be moderately successful, and so not enough of a studio priority to ensure growth for a franchise. We are left, nevertheless, with the filmmaker’s ode to seeing, which evolves with the creative/destructive tools of his craft.  “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe,” Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) famously says at the close of Scott's best film, Blade Runner, shortly before his imminent death.  “All those moments will be lost in time…like tears in rain.”  For Scott, "Nothingness" equals a lack of vision; for as Kubrick’s Star Child turned to us with open eyes and gazed, the Giger alien bears destructive teeth but has no eyes. The best cinematic technology can open our eyes, or it can make us merely consumers with dulled vision.  Whatever its flaws, Prometheus wants our eyes to be active and to seek through its dimensions and impeccable engineering.  In its layers, I suspect, there is something worthwhile.