By R.M. Cannon
Book by Andrew Gordon
Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 302 pages, $26.95
If you hadn’t known movies have layers upon layers of psychological mud, Empire of Dreams clarifies this fact beyond doubt. An almost 10-year write by a University of Florida professor with mega-doses of research, Dreams discusses 30 Spielberg films, first quoting him as saying “I dream for a living,” then analyzing what Gordon calls The Suburban Trilogy (E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Poltergeist).
Not a new author, Gordon, before Empire of Dreams, authored An American Dreamer: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Fiction of Norman Mailer and co-authored Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness. In Dreams, Gordon uses many autobiographical quotes from the director, his collaborators, his critics, reviewers and biographers, plus lots of photographs.
As expected, Gordon analyzes Spielberg’s science fiction and his movies with George Lucas. Interestingly spends almost as much time on his lesser-known early films, making the book a deliberate dissection of Spielberg’s career moves and maneuvers, and a perfect read for aspiring filmmakers, screenwriters, psych majors and even anthropologists.
As we laypeople suspect and Gordon confirms, cinema is a complicated affair, taken as seriously by its experts as surgeons take anesthesia and microphysicists take quantum physics. Hence in this epic, you’ll learn the age Spielberg was when making movies, their budgets and formats, and the origin of film ideas. (It was for instance a Playboy article that was the basis of Spielberg’s early T.V. thriller Duel.)
Refreshingly enough, Gordon also candidly discusses his own perceptions of Spielberg films, writing about Jaws that: “Spielberg uses subjective camera elsewhere, but only in Jaws does the opening shot come from the point of view of the unseen antagonist. By being given a shark’s eye view, I am implicated along with the shark, momentarily identifying with the aggressor.”
Cleverly woven throughout the book, readers will find other not-so-extraneous personal details of Spielberg’s life: like how his own divorce and the divorce of his parents as a young boy fully influenced his choice of scripts and direction of them.
Fascinatingly enough, many racy and provocative themes are explored. Themes like Oedipus fixations, male fantasy and phobia, paranoia and repressed homosexuality, the hero’s problems with women, paranoia, anal sadism and even hydrophobia.
Gordon’s personal reactions to films, and that of a few of his friends, also enhanced the book’s readability. All these details make for an interesting read, but also endear the author to his audience, insuring that we will be willing to consider his various points of view. Despite the book’s many taboo topics, it is early on that Gordon establishes himself as a credible author — one who can even manage to successfully compare Spielberg and Hitchcock, saying “every thriller must be judged against Hitchcock’s achievement.”
Above all, one has to appreciate the intelligent structure Gordon lends to what would otherwise be an overly busy and cumbersome book—particularly his repeated look at “opening sequences,” followed by well-labeled plot development and themes, and then ended with a conclusion that is followed by footnotes.
Though one ordinarily might resent a critic posing as a therapist, although he is clearly an armchair psychologist, I enjoyed this book tremendously and Gordon charmingly pulls off all his analysis with straightforward, anecdotal writing that uses some of the same techniques filmmakers use to keep us riveted to the screen.