Watching the opening of Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" the Phantom was startled by just how dreadful it was. The Phantom had loved the movie when he saw it in the theater, but either he had arrived late and missed this miasma of a scene or he simply repressed it beyond memory.
Spielberg has made dozens of movies and some are free of the deadly sentimentality which has spews like brain rot at his viewers, but his historical films almost always have at least one defining "Spielberg moment."
In "Lincoln" it's right there in the second scene, the first with dialog, Lincoln talking with union soldiers after a battle, when the soldiers start reciting the Gettysburg Address, each in turn--you keep waiting for them to break into interpretive dance--the final paragraph delivered by a Black soldier walking off into the mists.
Ye gads. Puke. Ugh.
In his otherwise wonderful "Empire of the Sun" a British boy imprisoned in a Japanese prison camp makes a connection, across the barbed wire, with a Japanese son of a Kamikaze pilot. Spielberg makes movies about kids. That's okay. ET is gooey, but it's not a depiction of history. That's okay. But when he tries to turn history into ET, it makes your stomach turn and your skin crawl. He ruins that movie with another Spielberg attempt at tear jerker.
Even the otherwise excellent miniseries, "Band of Brothers" has one of those "here it comes" nauseating scenes, in which Richard Winters, on leave in Paris, spots a boy in the subway who triggers a flashback to a German soldier, a mere boy, who Winters shot as he ran across a field attacking a company of SS soldiers in "Crossroads." The scene had some sliver of truth--Winters in fact had recounted that shooting in his report on the action--the soldier incongruously smiled at him before Winters shot him, but oh, what Spielberg does to contaminate that. Suddenly, Winters is deeply saddened by his own action of shooting a mere boy, who happened to be wearing an SS uniform and was kneeling in the field in front of his company, likely a sentry.
Winters remarked about that scene, "I never regretted shooting a single German my entire time in the field."
Spielberg had made Winters famous and revered in "Band of Brothers" but Winters could not abide that sullying of the truth, despite it all.
A later episode "Why We Fight" is much more effective and moving because Spielberg eschews the goo and gets at a complicated truth: Frank Perconte, a hard bitten soldier we have followed through Easy Company's slog across Europe chews out a new recruit who is looking to get into combat.
"Last night I slept in a real bed with sheets and this morning I wiped my ass with actual toilet paper for the first time in two years and here you are, like all the new guys, 'Where's the Germans at? When can I kill some Germans?' Well, it's been two years since I been home and this is the best I've had it."
A few scenes later, we see Perconte racing through woods, scrambling through a town, desperate to find Winters to bring him to a concentration camp he and his brothers in arms have stumbled upon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMlemhFqowU
The episode is called "Why We Fight" and of course, it seems misnamed because it implies Perconte was fighting to defeat the monstrous evil which created this concentration camp, but he's just got finished telling you that was not why he was fighting. He had no idea what he was fighting. He had no idea of the magnitude of evil the Wehrmacht he was fighting supported. He was simply fighting to stay alive and to protect his fellow Easy company men. But the discovery of that camp provided him with a new reality. So the episode name proves to be ironic and clever.
Nancy Isenberg, author of "Fallen Founder" about Aaron Burr, noted that "history is not a bedtime story."
Spielberg cannot seem to keep that in mind, always ready to drift off into glorifying, embellishing, seeking out the phony emotion, contaminating the real stinking experience with perfume.
Shakespeare never did that. Falstaff looks at a rotting corpse and says, "There's glory for you. It stinks."
If we could look at the past clear eyed, it might not own us in such a sinister way.
"The past is not dead," Faulkner told us, "It's not even past."
Spielberg has made dozens of movies and some are free of the deadly sentimentality which has spews like brain rot at his viewers, but his historical films almost always have at least one defining "Spielberg moment."
In "Lincoln" it's right there in the second scene, the first with dialog, Lincoln talking with union soldiers after a battle, when the soldiers start reciting the Gettysburg Address, each in turn--you keep waiting for them to break into interpretive dance--the final paragraph delivered by a Black soldier walking off into the mists.
Ye gads. Puke. Ugh.
In his otherwise wonderful "Empire of the Sun" a British boy imprisoned in a Japanese prison camp makes a connection, across the barbed wire, with a Japanese son of a Kamikaze pilot. Spielberg makes movies about kids. That's okay. ET is gooey, but it's not a depiction of history. That's okay. But when he tries to turn history into ET, it makes your stomach turn and your skin crawl. He ruins that movie with another Spielberg attempt at tear jerker.
Even the otherwise excellent miniseries, "Band of Brothers" has one of those "here it comes" nauseating scenes, in which Richard Winters, on leave in Paris, spots a boy in the subway who triggers a flashback to a German soldier, a mere boy, who Winters shot as he ran across a field attacking a company of SS soldiers in "Crossroads." The scene had some sliver of truth--Winters in fact had recounted that shooting in his report on the action--the soldier incongruously smiled at him before Winters shot him, but oh, what Spielberg does to contaminate that. Suddenly, Winters is deeply saddened by his own action of shooting a mere boy, who happened to be wearing an SS uniform and was kneeling in the field in front of his company, likely a sentry.
Winters remarked about that scene, "I never regretted shooting a single German my entire time in the field."
Spielberg had made Winters famous and revered in "Band of Brothers" but Winters could not abide that sullying of the truth, despite it all.
A later episode "Why We Fight" is much more effective and moving because Spielberg eschews the goo and gets at a complicated truth: Frank Perconte, a hard bitten soldier we have followed through Easy Company's slog across Europe chews out a new recruit who is looking to get into combat.
"Last night I slept in a real bed with sheets and this morning I wiped my ass with actual toilet paper for the first time in two years and here you are, like all the new guys, 'Where's the Germans at? When can I kill some Germans?' Well, it's been two years since I been home and this is the best I've had it."
A few scenes later, we see Perconte racing through woods, scrambling through a town, desperate to find Winters to bring him to a concentration camp he and his brothers in arms have stumbled upon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMlemhFqowU
The episode is called "Why We Fight" and of course, it seems misnamed because it implies Perconte was fighting to defeat the monstrous evil which created this concentration camp, but he's just got finished telling you that was not why he was fighting. He had no idea what he was fighting. He had no idea of the magnitude of evil the Wehrmacht he was fighting supported. He was simply fighting to stay alive and to protect his fellow Easy company men. But the discovery of that camp provided him with a new reality. So the episode name proves to be ironic and clever.
Nancy Isenberg, author of "Fallen Founder" about Aaron Burr, noted that "history is not a bedtime story."
Spielberg cannot seem to keep that in mind, always ready to drift off into glorifying, embellishing, seeking out the phony emotion, contaminating the real stinking experience with perfume.
Shakespeare never did that. Falstaff looks at a rotting corpse and says, "There's glory for you. It stinks."
If we could look at the past clear eyed, it might not own us in such a sinister way.
"The past is not dead," Faulkner told us, "It's not even past."
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