I’m not a Spielberg-head. The most popular and successful Hollywood director of all time was never a hallowed name in my household, nor were his films regular viewings. Sure I saw many of his classics growing up, but they didn’t connect with me the same way they did with so many other movie kids. Probably because we didn’t own them on home video so I didn’t have the opportunity to watch them hundreds of times. My childhood VHS/DVD library was stocked with fare like Shrek, SpongeBob SquarePants collections, and Weekend at Bernie’s (a film I have seen more than any Spielberg movie because my family got a free copy of it from Pizza Hut).
So when I had the chance to see The Fabelmans at TIFF, relentlessly marketed in the press cycle as his most personal film ever, I thought I’d do my due diligence and cover a few major blindspots so I could better engage with it. I had somehow never seen E.T., so I watched it (good flick!), next was A.I. (thinking about this one for too long sends me into an existential crisis so let’s move on), and then I watched West Side Story. When the latter came out, I read so many tweets foaming at the mouth about the master at work, flexing every tool in his arsenal. Swooping long takes and total control of shadow and light. What all of these raves so conveniently omit is the dull, digital patina plastered over every frame. The craftsmanship is Spielberg, but the palette is Russo Brothers, but I digress. When I sat down to finally watch Fabelmans, I was fully prepared to connect the dots. Play film detective and snuff out the pet themes that populate his oeuvre.
Fabelmans tells the story of a young Steven Spie… sorry, “Sammy Fabelman” 😉—a boy coming of age in the 1960s with a preternatural gift for the filmic arts who must deal with anti-Semitism, frequently moves to different towns across the country, and most of all, his parents’ tumultuous marriage. It’s a bit shaggy and a bit too “this is a movie for people who love movies”, but I found its charm and spectacle undeniably winning. Spielberg knows how to make a film. As I watched it, none of the films I watched in preparation came to me. The one film that did preoccupy my thoughts was one I had seen months earlier: underground filmmaking legend Damon Packard’s magnum opus Reflections of Evil. It is The Fabelmans’s evil twin—leaving the womb 20 years earlier and 40 million dollars poorer.
"It is The Fabelmans’s evil twin—leaving the womb 20 years earlier and 40 million dollars poorer."
Reflections has a backstory worthy of its own middlebrow festival winner about a man whose life ambition was to make movies, no matter the personal costs. Packard received a substantial inheritance from a relative and sunk it all into a passion project so mad (and full of blatant copyright violation) that nobody would (could?) ever fund it. It’s a 138-minute nonstop sensorial barrage in which a man (Packard) aimlessly wanders around a hellish L.A. constantly assaulted, barked at by dogs, and puking at alarmingly frequent intervals. All while the ghost of his sister, who died when he was a child in the 1970s, attempts to make contact with him. It’s one of the most explicitly hauntological movies ever made. The past running in perpetuity with the present, like an itch that can never be scratched. What could this purposefully combative gonzo experiment possibly have in common with Spielberg’s feel-good bildungsroman?
Well, both films see their respective directors reckoning with the past and analyzing how it informed and created their current state. Fabelmans is essentially Spielberg doing some self-guided therapy for a mass audience: a rigorous look into what drove his obsession with moviemaking and how his parent’s divorce affected him. Reflections is more of a primal scream: an act of rage that one feels Packard needed to put on screen lest he self-combust. It’s no less a study of its director’s psyche, but coming outside the polite confines of typical psychoanalysis.
Neither of these films are particularly unique in this regard, but what really twins them is the fact they’re both concerned with how personal history can be read through the lens of Steven Spielberg. One by, ya know, literally being about Spielberg’s childhood. The other by being obsessed with Spielberg and his outsized impact on modern day culture (which is to say, modern day life itself). Fabelmans and Reflections are both, at their core, tributes to Spielberg’s genius. If Fabelmans is a blatant act of self-mythologizing. Reflections is a proof point for Spielberg’s unmatched talents of leaving un-scrubbable stains on the cultural consciousness. The opening scene of Fabelmans shows a young Sammy going with his parents to a showing of The Greatest Show on Earth, positioning it as ground zero for his passion for filmmaking as he becomes obsessed with a train crash sequence. It’s not hard to imagine a young Packard having a similar experience watching Close Encounters or Raiders of the Lost Ark and being struck with a similar epiphany.
"Spielberg is the ghost in Packard’s machine—an inescapable entity animating his mania."
Spielberg is the ghost in Packard’s machine—an inescapable entity animating his mania. Not even the production of Reflections was free from Spielberg’s presence. In a short behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film, one actor talks about how he had just been an extra in Minority Report. So Packard and Spielberg do have something in common: they both directed this dude.
However, Reflections is the only film that also condemns Spielberg as the arbiter of boomer complacency which poisoned the end of the 20th Century and the ensuing 21st Century. In Reflections, the city of L.A. is a clearly sickly organism that Spielberg played a major role in infecting. A recurring image in the film is the poster for Miss Congeniality, plastered all around the city. Sandra Bullock’s smirking visage seems to mock Packard’s protagonist and is a constant reminder of the modern age of blitzkrieg movie marketing that Jaws ushered into the world.
Then there’s the bonkers finale that culminates at Universal Studios Hollywood (where Packard shot on location, guerilla style, earning himself a lifetime ban from the park). The scene’s images of a man having a psychotic break while on the E.T. Adventure ride and wandering through a concrete monument to consumerism is one of the most no-holds-barred blasts of Spielberg’s art-to-commerce churn. (There’s a Schindler’s List joke in this section that I won’t spoil but will say is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen and is also unbelievably scathing.) It’s the distillation of the modern world, the modern world he helped create—one where a whole generation of people who are still in charge of basically everything found comfort in complacency and turned their wildest imaginations into cultural detritus for us to swill.
"The scene’s images of a man having a psychotic break while on the E.T. Adventure ride and wandering through a concrete monument to consumerism is one of the most no-holds-barred blasts of Spielberg’s art-to-commerce churn."
Reflections’ original title was Night Gallery Revisited: Reflections of Evil, a reference to the Rod Serling series, Night Gallery, the pilot of which was Spielberg’s first professional gig. Like Serling’s previous series, The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery told supernatural tales that were ultimately morality plays, often with an ironic twist. Viewed through this lens, Reflections is a morality tale of a disruptor of the establishment who became the total embodiment of the establishment, to an extent that no one has before him or since—leaving untold psychic damage in his wake.
And that analysis isn’t just from reading subtext, it’s pretty plain text. One scene in the film literally shows young Spielberg shooting Duel on the ABC backlot, but the scene goes awry: a haywire special effect results in machinery grinding up and killing an actor. What does young Spielberg yell to his crew? “Keep rolling!” Fabelmans is of course rife with self-criticism, with Spielberg tacitly admitting that he has valued art over human emotions, like Sammy complaining about how editing a home movie to cheer up his mom will distract him from the larger production he’s planned or the scene where he catches himself in the mirror filming his parent’s divorce. But it does (understandably, obviously) stop short of saying Spielberg would let a man die for a good shot. Reflections has no such preoccupations with pulling that punch. If Fabelmans is the story of how a young man sometimes puts art above family on his way to becoming the epoch-defining filmmaker, Reflections is a continuation of how that boy’s worse qualities only grew with his ambitions, resulting in masterworks that certainly topped his senior prom video but only left him more removed from humanity.
In a 2015 interview, Packard assessed the current state of culture, bemoaning that, “everything is commercialized nostalgia now, there’s nothing original being done. It’s all about reaching back into the past for inspiration.” I wonder what Packard thinks of Fabelmans, a film made by the object of his obsession which couldn’t be a better embodiment of this critique. He’s certainly been thinking about it, posting a “red band” edit of the trailer to his YouTube in which he adds funny voices saying swear words and sporadic clips of Buffalo ‘66.
You know on second thought, maybe that is his final word on the matter.
I’m not a Spielberg-head. The most popular and successful Hollywood director of all time was never a hallowed name in my household, nor were his films regular viewings. Sure I saw many of his classics growing up, but they didn’t connect with me the same way they did with so many other movie kids. Probably because we didn’t own them on home video so I didn’t have the opportunity to watch them hundreds of times. My childhood VHS/DVD library was stocked with fare like Shrek, SpongeBob SquarePants collections, and Weekend at Bernie’s (a film I have seen more than any Spielberg movie because my family got a free copy of it from Pizza Hut).
So when I had the chance to see The Fabelmans at TIFF, relentlessly marketed in the press cycle as his most personal film ever, I thought I’d do my due diligence and cover a few major blindspots so I could better engage with it. I had somehow never seen E.T., so I watched it (good flick!), next was A.I. (thinking about this one for too long sends me into an existential crisis so let’s move on), and then I watched West Side Story. When the latter came out, I read so many tweets foaming at the mouth about the master at work, flexing every tool in his arsenal. Swooping long takes and total control of shadow and light. What all of these raves so conveniently omit is the dull, digital patina plastered over every frame. The craftsmanship is Spielberg, but the palette is Russo Brothers, but I digress. When I sat down to finally watch Fabelmans, I was fully prepared to connect the dots. Play film detective and snuff out the pet themes that populate his oeuvre.
Fabelmans tells the story of a young Steven Spie… sorry, “Sammy Fabelman” 😉—a boy coming of age in the 1960s with a preternatural gift for the filmic arts who must deal with anti-Semitism, frequently moves to different towns across the country, and most of all, his parents’ tumultuous marriage. It’s a bit shaggy and a bit too “this is a movie for people who love movies”, but I found its charm and spectacle undeniably winning. Spielberg knows how to make a film. As I watched it, none of the films I watched in preparation came to me. The one film that did preoccupy my thoughts was one I had seen months earlier: underground filmmaking legend Damon Packard’s magnum opus Reflections of Evil. It is The Fabelmans’s evil twin—leaving the womb 20 years earlier and 40 million dollars poorer.
"It is The Fabelmans’s evil twin—leaving the womb 20 years earlier and 40 million dollars poorer."
Reflections has a backstory worthy of its own middlebrow festival winner about a man whose life ambition was to make movies, no matter the personal costs. Packard received a substantial inheritance from a relative and sunk it all into a passion project so mad (and full of blatant copyright violation) that nobody would (could?) ever fund it. It’s a 138-minute nonstop sensorial barrage in which a man (Packard) aimlessly wanders around a hellish L.A. constantly assaulted, barked at by dogs, and puking at alarmingly frequent intervals. All while the ghost of his sister, who died when he was a child in the 1970s, attempts to make contact with him. It’s one of the most explicitly hauntological movies ever made. The past running in perpetuity with the present, like an itch that can never be scratched. What could this purposefully combative gonzo experiment possibly have in common with Spielberg’s feel-good bildungsroman?
Well, both films see their respective directors reckoning with the past and analyzing how it informed and created their current state. Fabelmans is essentially Spielberg doing some self-guided therapy for a mass audience: a rigorous look into what drove his obsession with moviemaking and how his parent’s divorce affected him. Reflections is more of a primal scream: an act of rage that one feels Packard needed to put on screen lest he self-combust. It’s no less a study of its director’s psyche, but coming outside the polite confines of typical psychoanalysis.
Neither of these films are particularly unique in this regard, but what really twins them is the fact they’re both concerned with how personal history can be read through the lens of Steven Spielberg. One by, ya know, literally being about Spielberg’s childhood. The other by being obsessed with Spielberg and his outsized impact on modern day culture (which is to say, modern day life itself). Fabelmans and Reflections are both, at their core, tributes to Spielberg’s genius. If Fabelmans is a blatant act of self-mythologizing. Reflections is a proof point for Spielberg’s unmatched talents of leaving un-scrubbable stains on the cultural consciousness. The opening scene of Fabelmans shows a young Sammy going with his parents to a showing of The Greatest Show on Earth, positioning it as ground zero for his passion for filmmaking as he becomes obsessed with a train crash sequence. It’s not hard to imagine a young Packard having a similar experience watching Close Encounters or Raiders of the Lost Ark and being struck with a similar epiphany.
"Spielberg is the ghost in Packard’s machine—an inescapable entity animating his mania."
Spielberg is the ghost in Packard’s machine—an inescapable entity animating his mania. Not even the production of Reflections was free from Spielberg’s presence. In a short behind-the-scenes documentary on the making of the film, one actor talks about how he had just been an extra in Minority Report. So Packard and Spielberg do have something in common: they both directed this dude.
However, Reflections is the only film that also condemns Spielberg as the arbiter of boomer complacency which poisoned the end of the 20th Century and the ensuing 21st Century. In Reflections, the city of L.A. is a clearly sickly organism that Spielberg played a major role in infecting. A recurring image in the film is the poster for Miss Congeniality, plastered all around the city. Sandra Bullock’s smirking visage seems to mock Packard’s protagonist and is a constant reminder of the modern age of blitzkrieg movie marketing that Jaws ushered into the world.
Then there’s the bonkers finale that culminates at Universal Studios Hollywood (where Packard shot on location, guerilla style, earning himself a lifetime ban from the park). The scene’s images of a man having a psychotic break while on the E.T. Adventure ride and wandering through a concrete monument to consumerism is one of the most no-holds-barred blasts of Spielberg’s art-to-commerce churn. (There’s a Schindler’s List joke in this section that I won’t spoil but will say is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen and is also unbelievably scathing.) It’s the distillation of the modern world, the modern world he helped create—one where a whole generation of people who are still in charge of basically everything found comfort in complacency and turned their wildest imaginations into cultural detritus for us to swill.
"The scene’s images of a man having a psychotic break while on the E.T. Adventure ride and wandering through a concrete monument to consumerism is one of the most no-holds-barred blasts of Spielberg’s art-to-commerce churn."
Reflections’ original title was Night Gallery Revisited: Reflections of Evil, a reference to the Rod Serling series, Night Gallery, the pilot of which was Spielberg’s first professional gig. Like Serling’s previous series, The Twilight Zone, Night Gallery told supernatural tales that were ultimately morality plays, often with an ironic twist. Viewed through this lens, Reflections is a morality tale of a disruptor of the establishment who became the total embodiment of the establishment, to an extent that no one has before him or since—leaving untold psychic damage in his wake.
And that analysis isn’t just from reading subtext, it’s pretty plain text. One scene in the film literally shows young Spielberg shooting Duel on the ABC backlot, but the scene goes awry: a haywire special effect results in machinery grinding up and killing an actor. What does young Spielberg yell to his crew? “Keep rolling!” Fabelmans is of course rife with self-criticism, with Spielberg tacitly admitting that he has valued art over human emotions, like Sammy complaining about how editing a home movie to cheer up his mom will distract him from the larger production he’s planned or the scene where he catches himself in the mirror filming his parent’s divorce. But it does (understandably, obviously) stop short of saying Spielberg would let a man die for a good shot. Reflections has no such preoccupations with pulling that punch. If Fabelmans is the story of how a young man sometimes puts art above family on his way to becoming the epoch-defining filmmaker, Reflections is a continuation of how that boy’s worse qualities only grew with his ambitions, resulting in masterworks that certainly topped his senior prom video but only left him more removed from humanity.
In a 2015 interview, Packard assessed the current state of culture, bemoaning that, “everything is commercialized nostalgia now, there’s nothing original being done. It’s all about reaching back into the past for inspiration.” I wonder what Packard thinks of Fabelmans, a film made by the object of his obsession which couldn’t be a better embodiment of this critique. He’s certainly been thinking about it, posting a “red band” edit of the trailer to his YouTube in which he adds funny voices saying swear words and sporadic clips of Buffalo ‘66.
You know on second thought, maybe that is his final word on the matter.