The Fabelmans. This is my “he just like me fr 😭” It’s hard to overestimate something so intimate, light-hearted, and perceptive that is not just about Spielberg’s childhood but is damn near an origin story for modern cinema as we know it. His era, the one he grew up in, is the first time consumers had relatively easy access to movie cameras, and since then each generation, including myself, has taken after Spielberg as the model for picking up a camera and shooting a movie. We are the ones influenced by his films but also by the way he got to make them in the first place. He’s the original kid with a camera. In turn he’s examining “the way he made them,” the inherent power and danger of the moving image, showing its real life consequences and how most of the time the cinema image is so potent that it reaches beyond the grasp of its author’s intention. 

This is particularly effective (and moving) in the film’s more reflexive moments when he intercuts Sammy’s footage with his own or Sammy says, “I would never make the movie you’re all watching right now.” He’s giving us the magnetic attraction he had to film, the regret and pain that it caused, and how the Spielberg we know was born all at once. The act of making films is intimately connected with the dramas of family and coming of age.

It’s interesting to me how Spielberg is reflecting on this 54 years into his career but I myself have already made several movies about this. I’m not saying this as a pat on the back, in fact quite the opposite. I don’t like or even think I should be making movies about how making movies has drastically shifted the way I think and live, it’s just what happened. It shows the postmodern state we (I) live in where our generation is basically skipping all the stages everyone previously had to go through because of the ability to make movies, the easiness and cheapness of an iPhone compared to an 8mm camera, the amount of film history and new media so readily available right next to each other… we have nothing to do but collapse back in ourselves. I’m jealous of Spielberg’s story and the opportunities he’s had— but another thing he is saying here is that you have to look at yourself and your story and know “This is not the end.”

Not to mention all of the little ways Spielberg plants real life elements and suggests how they worked their way into his films, and henceforth our cultural consciousness. We’re watching origin stories for E.T., Saving Private Ryan, Jaws, The Last Crusade, on and on. I suppose this points back to my idea about “folding back in itself” because I literally just made a video about this exact thing, talking about how when I am shooting something on my phone sure I want it to function by itself, but I also know that the primary purpose is the discovery of what you like and what makes you feel… By just living life your eye is drawn to certain things, and whether or not you as a filmmaker are aware of it those images, if they’re potent, when put into a feature film, grow out of their original context and gain a life of their own. The only difference is now we are increasingly aware of this phenomenon. 

With Spielberg, he’s given us his story with all of these ideas about filmmaking, which is what I’m drawn to, but his portraits of those around him and the various memory set pieces are still sweetly nostalgic and sturdily constructed as ever. So when people say about this film and Spielberg’s story “This is the divorce that raised an entire generation of kids” there’s probably a lot of truth to it, but there’s hundreds of other real life stories which informed hundreds of other artists to in turn capture the imaginations and feed the souls of millions. It’s a rabbit hole you can get lost in, but Steven Spielberg, of course, delves in with grace and humility and wonder. I love the movies.