[The Heart Of The Art of Spielberg] "Art Will Tear Your Heart Out And Leave You Lonely"
Analysis & Appreciation of Steven Spielberg's Film The Fabelmans
Primary Theme: Kindness
Secondary Theme: The Danger Of Inhumanity
Supporting Theme: The Danger of Cruelty
Nuanced Theme: The Danger of Technology
Last year, I completed the first draft of a project titled The Heart Of The Art of Steven Spielberg. There is no other director of cinema that has had more of an impact on the world than Steven Spielberg. He is the most successful film director in history regarding commerce and art.
It’s not easy to consider art from multiple aspects at the same time, including:
The financial impact (how much did these films cost to make versus how much did they bring back?)
The cultural impact (how did it change our collective social behavior?)
The spiritual impact (how did it change who we are as people?)
After taking hundreds of pages of notes and writing thousands of words, I identified these common themes across all of Steven Spielberg’s films. I started to grade each movie according to its market performance. These themes held up over the analysis and appreciation of every movie.
I plan to publish a second expanded edition of this study next year in the Small Awakenings Substack community. I want to provide my initial thoughts about The Fabelmans, which was released in theaters on November 23, 2022.
For more information on the first edition of this project, see below:
The Heart Of The Art Of Steven Spielberg (1st Edition)
[Link] Part One: An Overview Of The Nine Themes of Steven Spielberg’s Library Of Film
[Link] Part Two: An Economic Analysis of Steven Spielberg’s Art
[Link] Part Three: The Cultural and Moral Impact of Steven Spielberg’s Art
One of Steven Spielberg’s consistent themes in the films he has directed and produced is The Power of Kindness. This is one of his rare films where this theme of Kindness is primary.
The journey of Sam Fabelman begins with him as a little boy in a state of fear. It will end just after that fear subsides. This film is a story about Sam’s anxiety, how he conquers it, and what it costs him and those around him to do it.
The Fabelmans is Steven Spielberg’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. How are artists made? At the expense of the ones they love. The Danger Of Cruelty is a supporting theme to the primary one of Kindness. They both play against the secondary theme of The Danger Of Inhumanity, concentrated in this film as a single character’s combative Anti-Semitism.
The Nuanced Theme of this film is The Danger of Technology, a thread running through every Steven Spielberg film.
Poor young “Sammy” Fabelman (a nickname he’ll come to despise) stands outside a big theater with his parents. His father is an engineer working on the future of computing technology that will change the world. His Mother is an artist, a world-class pianist who could have played on any stage in the civilized world. When she expresses her emotions through music, it heals the family.
“Movies are like dreams,” his Mother tells him. But Sam is still frightened. He reluctantly allows his parents to drag him into that dark, foreboding theater where they say dreams come alive and threaten to take you away.
There is a scene in that film where a car is destroyed by an oncoming train, maybe killing the poor driver. How did they show that on screen? How was that made? Sam Fabelman begins an intellectual journey that will result in him becoming an artist.
Cinema has been teaching children how to dream for over a century now. Films are dreams we share with one another, massive artistic projects resulting in commercial assets sold for entertainment value in a marketplace where time is the most significant scarcity.
The first act of this film is filled with tender moments. One that caught me right in the gut was a bedroom scene where Sam’s parents (Mitzi and Burt) exchange sweet thoughts about their children and their life together. Burt is tired, but Mitzi is wired. A kind but slightly bent genius, Mitzi composes without an instrument. Burt was so tired he fell asleep with his glasses on, and he cooed at his wife when she lovingly removed them from his face so that he may finally settle down for the night lying by her side.
Burt sometimes forgets the simple bits when his mind is on things so big that most people can’t understand how big they are and how much they mean for the future.
Burt sees a day when computers will control nearly every facet of human life. Unfortunately, the only person who understands on a technical level what Burt is reaching for is his best friend and employee, Bennie Loewy (played to perfection by Seth Rogen). Bennie is such a good friend that he is at every Fabelman life event, even traveling with them on vacations and excursions.
“Uncle” Bennie is an excellent friend to the family, and he understands that his work is even more critical to Burt than his family. So Bennie steps in to help ensure that Mitzi and the children have the emotional support they need.1
But Mitzi doesn’t know her husband half as well as she knows her son. She has deep insight into her son’s heart because she recognizes that he is an artist and his films are for him what piano is to her. She can see how he expresses his emotions and fears through storytelling. That’s how it is for her when her fingers touch the piano keys, and her fingers stretch octaves and shift keys.
Her son will grow to manipulate light into powerful forces that will affect the emotions of billions of human beings over decades. Her music is powerful, but it will never be that powerful. She is aware of this and dedicates herself to helping her son reach his potential.
But tectonic shifts are happening in the emotional attachments of the adults supporting him that Sam Fabelman is entirely unaware of and has no idea how it will rip their lives apart. And his obsession with making films will be the conduit through which it happens.
Mitzi helps young Sam recreate the train crash with his Lionel train set. They watch the film together in his dark closet, the projector running and posting the film.2 Mothers and their sons should be a sacred bond that cannot be broken even by death, though it can be silenced, and this silence is the great danger in Sam’s life because, through his art, he uncovers his Mother’s darkest secret. Witnessing his wife suffering the loss of her Mother, his father charges Sam to produce a film about their holiday camping trip with Uncle Bennie.
Love is not possession, though Sam does not understand this when he edits his Mother’s camping movie. Sam becomes aware that he has captured an emotional infidelity between his Mother and his Uncle Bennie. This is confirmed over time by their sometimes strange behavior.
Even though the emotions do not become an affair at any time during this film, Sam feels betrayed, and worse, his art has betrayed his whole family.
Sam is hateful to his Mother after he learns of her emotional affair with Bennie (no longer “Uncle”). He doesn’t return her warmth and smiles. Instead, he turns off his light to her, leaving a growing silence between them that feels like death. This comes to a boiling point the day Mitzi smacks Sam so hard on his back that she leaves her handprint in a bruise.
Sam doesn’t yet understand that love does not mean possession. Often changing one’s perspective is the trick that solves this problem. Sam will learn this lesson about perspective in the most likely place, which is, of course, at the end of this movie. It’s the great life lesson Spielberg wants us to see for ourselves in this story he’s created from the memories and dreams of his own life.
Good parents should indulge their children in creating art as self-expression. However, creating art does not make one an artist. Sam gets an early education on this from his mad Uncle, who ran away from home and responsibilities to join the circus, where he shoveled shit until circumstances pushed him into the cage with lions. There, he learned what art is, constantly on the edge of danger.
Eventually, his great Uncle Boris went to work in the movies. During his life, he experienced much hardship and a lot of racism, yet there is something about this old man’s wisdom that conveys to young Sam just how rough his path as an artist will be.
“Art will tear your heart out and leave you lonely,” his Uncle tells him.
There is a danger in staring at life too closely through modern technology. This is a theme that Sam will come to learn has consequences.
His Mother claims, “Guilt is a wasted emotion,” when Sam finally confronts her. “Things happen for a reason,” she tells herself out loud when dramatic events bring turmoil to her life.
Burt was offered a new job in Arizona. Big raise and promotion.
Mitzi begs him to bring Bennie along. He does this because he loves them both. Burt is far too brilliant not to know the situation between his wife and best friend, but the engineer inside his brain breaks these emotions into an equation that somehow comes to balance. Whatever gets us through the night, right?
Sam forgives his Mother because he now understands her pain and sacrifice. But in confronting his Mother, he sets her down a path that will lead to a very different conclusion for their family.
Burt gets another promotion and raise when IBM snatches him away, moving them to northern California, which leaves Bennie behind. But, unfortunately, things do not get better for his Mitzi. She acquires a monkey without asking and names him Bennie.
Sam confronts vicious Anti-Semitism from a high school bully supported by the most handsome, athletic guy in school, who beats Sam viciously when he reveals his infidelity. That situation brings Sam to his first love with Monica Sherwood, whose father owns an expensive 16mm camera and will rent the equipment for Sam to film and edit Senior Ditch Day.
During the time between his filming of that final Senior event before Prom, Sam’s family falls apart. His Mother and father agree that she should move back to Arizona to be with Bennie, who supports her emotionally in a way Burt cannot do. This decision lands hard on the family, especially Sam’s little sisters, who will bear the brunt of this decision.
In this divorce scene, Sam looks up at the mirror on the wall, and he imagines himself filming this scene. We see how Sam has learned to use his art to channel his fear, possibly to make the real world right again or perhaps place these awful emotional turmoils into a perspective that can be universally digested by an audience someday.
At the prom, he slips up and tells Monica he loves her, proposing to her and asking her to move with him to Southern California. Then he reveals his parents are getting divorced. This freaks Monica out, and she breaks up with him on the spot, leaving him in misery at what should have been a high point when the entire Senior class watches the film he made of Ditch Day.
It’s a minor masterpiece shown in that gym. Sam cast his antisemitic nemesis as the blundering fool and promoted the popular jock who assaulted him to the status of an actor in a Leni Riefenstahl propaganda film. The racist runs from the room, embarrassed, while the bully undergoes a dramatic emotional shift.
Shortly later, slumped against a locker, head in his hands, rejected and dejected, Sam is confronted by his bully, the one he made look like a Nordic God on screen. The kid demanded to know why he did it. Ironically, Sam’s film gave this kid his girl back, the one he cheated on, an action that, when called out by Sam, brought Monica into Sam’s life.
If we imagine what’s happening inside this bully’s head and heart, he must be grateful for Sam’s elevation and vindication. On the other hand, he knows he doesn’t deserve it. And he knows he isn’t half the figure portrayed on that screen. Perhaps this young bully senses that any greatness he will achieve will be just this, a projection of false images onto a screen for others to consume. What a perfect metaphor to describe the vacuousness of social media in the 2020s.
And perhaps this bully understands that the man with the camera is all-powerful when producing these images. It’s a hell of a thing when bullies realize who holds the real power in this world. Sometimes, knowledge of their impotence will cause bullies to rage and burn the world around them in violent protest.
Sam concludes the second act in full control of his skill set but not his heart.
Isn’t it funny how tense situations like these often forge the tightest bonds?
Sam turned his bully into a God on screen because he could. But, unfortunately, his emotions were secondary to the art. And getting even with the snide little racist was sweet revenge. Sam even turns his bully into his protector when he strikes down the racist who comes looking for revenge.
Art does funny things to people in their most transparent moments of struggle.
As we move towards the film’s conclusion, there is a final scene between Sam and his Mother, where she begs for his forgiveness over slapping him on the back years ago. He gives it to her without measure, all of it. They finally understand each other and that their paths are about to diverge.
Mitzi tells her son, “You do what your heart says you have to because you don’t owe anyone your life, not even me.”
Is this what his Great Uncle Boris meant when he said art would tear his heart out and leave him lonely? It’s the most excellent advice any parent can give their children who have chosen “The Art Life.”
Art requires some of the most painful sacrifices, and Sam finally understands what his Uncle told him all those years ago.
The film ends with Sam in limbo seeking direction. Finally, at the end of his patience with school, he lives with his father in a small apartment, just the artist and the engineer. Neither was able to bring balance to his life, but both still pushed that rock up the hill.
Sam has a panic attack. His father makes him tea while giving Sam the task of going through the mail. There’s a letter from Mitzi. It includes photographs. Sam quickly thumbs through them and hands them to his father, who does the same but stops and has a reaction to one in particular. His father spends a few moments moving inside. We can see it on his face.
When Sam looks at the picture, he sees his sisters laughing and goofing but eventually sees what his father saw. In the background, his Mother and Bennie are exploding with joy being with one another. Burt sees the role he couldn’t play because of his obsession. Finally, the weight of his sacrifice comes down on him. He embraces his son and tells him, “We’re never going to not know each other.” Burt has also suffered for his art. The Fabelmans suffer and then paint with that suffering onto different canvases.
At this moment, Sam opens the letter from CBS that will decide his future. The next scene is Sam on the lot meeting with the producer of Hogan’s Heroes, who laments that Sam wants to make films, not television. In a moment of pure kindness, this producer offers to introduce Sam to “The greatest movie director in history,” who has an office across the hall.
Sam has no idea who this is but is told to sit down and wait hours for this director to return. It’s John Ford, played by David Lynch. You have to see the performance to believe it, but I will say that it’s my second favorite David Lynch performance after Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks.
The final lesson Sam is given by John Ford is where this fictional biography merges with the actual biography of Steven Spielberg. Ford points out two Western paintings on his office wall, demanding Sam tell him about them. Sam starts rattling off details about the horses and riders, but Ford yells at him a question that brings meaning to this entire film.
“Where’s the horizon?”
In the first painting, it’s at the bottom. In the second, it’s at the top.
Ford says, “Right. When the horizon is at the bottom, it’s interesting. When it’s at the top, it’s interesting. When it’s in the middle, it’s boring! Now get the fuck outta my office!”
And so Sam goes out to meet his future of selling his dreams to all of us.
Millions have shared Sam Fabelman’s Steven Spielberg’s silver screen dreams in thousands of theaters over decades. He has created screen dreams calling on our worst demons and highest angels. He pleads with us to show kindness because the alternative is nearly too ugly to look at except through film and storytelling. Like Sam must now learn to do at the close of this film, Steven Spielberg mastered early how to position the horizon correctly in every scene of his art.
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Sam’s parents are played by the ridiculously talented Paul Dano and Michelle Williams, both career-defining roles.
I cried watching this scene, thinking of all the times my mother supported me in whatever mad obsession I ran during my childhood and my maturation to becoming a husband and father.