Hollywood Utopia

68 Hollywood Utopia
hail the spectator into a world of the obvious that affirms that what the viewer has
always believed or hoped is (obviously) right and accessible, and assures the viewer
excitement and comfort in the process. The films offer nothing new beyond their
spectacle, nothing the viewer does not already want, does not immediately accept.
That is their conservative power, and it has spread throughout the cinema of the
1980s
(cited in Rosenbaum 1997: 98).
Alex Sharkey, in a review in The Independent, articulates a growing consensus
concerning this supreme populist film-maker which particularly applies to Jaws
and Jurassic Park:
Spielberg is not a good director in the conventional sense. His characters assume
recognizable human attributes only when they are dramatically endangered. He
seems unable to represent emotions other than the primitive staples of terror, awe
and sentimental yearning for the nuclear family with its clearly defined relationships
. . . but when he cuts to the chase, he is peerless; his genius is for triggering the fight
or flight response. In the universal language of fear he is fluent and voluble
(Sharkey 14 August 1993).
Other critics are even more dismissive of Spielberg’s actors’ performances,
describing them as ‘screaming, staring and scampering’ and ‘about as sinister as
Walt Disney’. Even Wayne Knight’s ‘villainous Nedry in Jurassic Park is a complete
caricature: an obese, jabbering wreck’, he is the computer expert who sets up the
destructive drama by turning off the system to give him a ‘window’ to get out stolen
embryos to a paying competitor. However, he ‘gets his comeuppance as is normal
in moralistic Hollywood fare’. The stereotypical lawyer is also despatched for
leaving the kids alone to face the danger. But as in Twister, characterisation and
rounded human agency may not always be an indicator of value or be relevant for
discussion within recent special effects driven nature films.
Adam Bresnick, in the Times Literary Supplement review of Joseph McBride’s 1997
biography of Spielberg, provides a most provocative critique: ‘At the deepest level
of fantasy, Hollywood would like to believe that it is essentially a philanthropy, that
what it offers its mesmerised public is the gift of pleasure and, at certain exalted
moments, the gift of consciousness itself.’ But for Bresnick, Spielberg, and
particularly his alter-ego Schindler, hide behind the fantasy of philanthropy (the
salve of liberalism’s bad conscience) where a ‘gift, can be an absolute good’ with
little need for any moral/ political context. Bresnick pushes his argument too far,
however, when he contends that philanthropy is the only representationally
accepted and ‘viable way of solving society’s ills - whether they be Nazi Germany