The Fabelmans

We know this film presents Steven Spielberg’s recollection of his childhood, his growing insights into his parents’ troubled marriage, his early experience of antisemitism and his fascination with filmmaking. So what else is there?

The family name. Sammy Fabelman personifies the Jewish storyteller, the Jew in Sammy and the narrative conviction of the fable-man. In Spielberg’s case, the extremely able fable-man. 

Indeed, when Sammy’s prom-screening converts his school bully into an iconic All-American ideal, the Golden Boy — to the bully’s moral confusion and chagrin — Spielberg encapsulates the theme of Neal Gabler’s How The Jews Invented Hollywood. The persecuted immigrant Jewish merchants created The American Dream in their projection of an idealized urban America. In defence against antisemitism they imagined an ideal America that just might accept them. 

It never did, entirely. As with Sammy’s Jesus-loving girlfriend, embracing the Jew requires his conversion.

The second driving theme is John Ford’s lesson on filmmaking: “When the horizon is at the top, it's interesting. When it's on the bottom, it's interesting. When it's in the middle, it's boring as shit! Got it?“

Got it. But that’s as true for life as it is for visual composition. Life demands the extreme, whether the height of passion or the depth of despair. The median blah is a waste of the materials whether of art or of life. For Sammy’s mother Mitzi, her husband is the mid-space horizon, his friend the high/low depending on your balance of passion and morality. Sammy's "uncle" is more supportive of his passion for film than his father is. 

        Mitzi doesn't just practice Ford's wisdom but also articulates it: “You know what I miss most about the piano? Surrendering to the score.” As does at greater length Uncle Boris: “Family, art. It will tear you in two….Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion's mouth. It'll bite your head off.” 

As if to prove that, it’s by filming his family’s picnic that Sammy discovers his mother’s passionate affair with his father’s best friend. That is to say, making art opens a reality beyond the artist’s awareness and experience. What making art can discover can tear out the heart or bite off the head — or compel further exploration and risk.

        For Spielberg, that’s show-biz. Aka art. Aka life.