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THE FORMATION OF SPIELBERG’S GENERATION
It is fruitful to interpret the well-known Steven Spielberg biography as the formation of both a filmmaker and the primary member of the first generation to experience film on television. He was born on December 18, 1946 in Cincinnati, Ohio. His father and mother were of Jewish descent. During his childhood, observation of the rituals and laws was relaxed, yet Steven knew he was different from the Protestants who typically were his neighbors and classmates throughout his youth. There were soon two younger sisters who completed the family. The Spielberg family left their aunts and uncles in Cincinnati, and were on their own when they moved to New Jersey in 1949. The family moved again in 1957 to a development outside Phoenix, Arizona.
Sunbelt Culture
Phoenix and the surrounding parts of Arizona were booming in the 1950s as part of a new region in the United States called the sunbelt. The swath of land below the 37th parallel stretching from Florida to southern California acquired this name after the term “sunshine belt” was first devised by Air Force pilots (Goldfield, 3). In World War Two America projected its power across both the Atlantic and Pacific for the first time. This involved the deployment of many Eastern men to the Western states where these men experienced open country and year-round sunny weather.
California’s rapid postwar growth spilled over to other sunbelt states. The widespread distribution of the newly invented air conditioner and the postwar national commitment to building an interstate highway system opened up additional parts of the Southwest, particularly Arizona. The sunbelt soon acquired several positive connotations. The housing stock was new, with many amenities targeted at the middle class. Contractors took advantage of the open spaces and built units rapidly for single-family house owners. The economy would be based on service and high-tech industries.
Spielberg’s father, Arnold, was one of those World War Two soldiers who had been deployed to the Pacific front from the Midwest, and now was one of many veterans moving their families to the West. He was following a pioneering national migration; in addition, his career was emblematic of the postwar economy since he was adapting his electrical engineering skill to the new field of computer electronics.
In New Jersey, young Steven first experienced the movies and television. The family bought a Dumont TV set in 1949 (Champlin, 12). He seemed very sensitive to the emotions that were conveyed by movies and television and his parents curtailed his viewing of these media to some extent. In Arizona he took charge of the family’s 8mm camera and that led to his lifelong fascination with visual storytelling. The boy had full access to the popular culture of his day and correspondingly did not show much interest in books. Spielberg claims Arizona as his true boyhood home although the family relocated for a final time to California in 1964, while he was in high school. Arizona was where he developed a mania for movies and started making them with his pals. His biographers can just about trace all of his later movies to obsessions he developed at this point. These include he and his friends acting out scenes of combat that referred to the recent war, watching shooting stars in the night sky, watching TV, and even the trauma of living through a family estrangement and the breakup of his parents’ marriage.
That the adult Steven Spielberg claims Arizona as the region central to his formation is important. Regionalism has contributed less and less to our understanding of American culture during the course of the twentieth century, since mass culture is centrally produced and distributed on a global basis. This is unfortunate. Regionalism is still a strong cultural marker, but it has to be understood in ways that are not based on simple linear geography. The sunbelt has become the landscape of aspiration for the affluent inward-looking self-contained American family. The suburban mindset has risen to permanent dominance across the political spectrum. This attitude naturalizes the desire to center life on private domestic matters while viewing public institutions as (un)necessary evils. It took a while to incubate in the immediate postwar period until these sunbelt values became manifest in the politics of the 1970s.
Many contemporaries were wary of emerging suburbia. Lewis Mumford wrote in 1961, “This was not merely a child-centered environment: it was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle” (Mumford, 494). His sour words were about suburbia in general but highlighted the dangers of sunbelt culture. The sunbelt accelerated the centrifugal force of suburban culture. Unlike east coast suburbs, the sunbelt developments no longer looked to an urban center for their cultural life. The new lifestyle created a demand for an even more efficient technology of cultural distribution, which undermined the need for proximity to heterogeneous centers. Television was one such distribution technology, and it could deliver both picture and sound to the isolated houses of the desert sprawls. Already, Mumford could write that children do not see “the workaday world; plac[ing] an undue burden of education on the school and family … reality has been progressively reduced to what filters through the screen of the television set” (496).
While watching television did not trigger great intellectual aspirations, it was what Steven had. Growing up in the sunbelt’s tabula rasa, the television became his window on the world, his guide to the past. The housing was built overnight invariably on recently subdivided pastures and fields. There was little sense of history clinging to the terrain. The postwar migrants did not even have their own rooted connections to other parts of the country since they were, themselves, a generation removed from the land or the product of earlier migrations from Europe who had few personal links to American history. They could only see the land as a given.
Television did little to help white Americans understand the lands of Arizona and California. Early TV westerns ignored or whitewashed the removal of native Americans and Spanish-speaking settlers while concocting a new myth of the redeemed Southerner conquering the West for the benefit of all. This mythification was as egregious as other myths of origins ranging from Virgil’s Aeneid to La Chanson de Roland. Its obvious falsities would become apparent (at least to historians) as the 1960s civil rights movement forced a more honest look at nineteenth-century American history than American television was able to portray (see Nadel, 2005).
The myths of the West discouraged an interest in historical culture among the new inhabitants of the sunbelt, and at least one boy seemed frustrated by the discouragement. One senses when reading the oft-told recollections of the young Steven getting an 8mm camera and filming his friends acting as soldiers, cowboys, or space invaders, that here was someone whose imagination wanted to engage the history of the Arizona landscape, but did not have the native stories with which to do it. Spielberg’s potential for a historical imagination had to make do with the spatially remote events of World War Two, for lack of visible evidence of the temporally distant repressed events that still cling to the Arizona or California land. He would later turn to the topic of lost histories and buried bodies in suburban landscapes in collaboration with his fellow sunbelter Tobe Hooper in Poltergeist (1982).
The Family’s Influence
Suburbanization is a spatial manifestation of a cultural shift towards family-centered life and consumerism. As this shift occurred people tended not to think of themselves as carpenter, engineer, or clerk but as “regular middle-class folks.” They were moving away from a production-oriented identity to a consumption-based identity. “Middle class” became a very flexible term adopted by just about everyone, and it came to include a wide range of incomes and education levels. The unifying center of the middle-class identity was no longer work, but a family lifestyle based on high levels of comfort and consumption.
The production/consumption shift undermined notions of public life and enhanced the status of family-oriented living. This was a change from an earlier stage of American democracy that was founded by people who applauded public life. “Enlightenment thought [eighteenth century] … held that public values … were qualitatively different from and superior to private values of love and personal nurturance” (Coontz, 1992, 96). The long nineteenth- and twentieth-century turn towards the private was intimately tied to mass media growth. Magazines, films, and eventually broadcasting all promoted a leisured life centered on the domestic hearth as a refuge from the public world of work and commerce. This kind of attitude became the basis for the American longing for the suburbs, which were removed both from industrial work in the town and from agricultural work in the countryside.
No cultural movement is monolithic and linear, however. Even the relatively unified group of films being produced by the major Hollywood studios would cycle through different messages and different ideologies, though always within a mainstream consensus. For example, in the 1930s Hollywood occasionally glorified public action and told populist stories of work and workers (see Lary May for an extended argument of this thesis). This was a time when unions and the labor movement strove for the dignity of workers and legislation was passed to give unions some rights. But in the 1950s anti-communist hysteria did much to undermine people’s belief in either workplace solidarity or collective action. Two sets of values competed, and on television Steven Spielberg could watch the populist 1930s movies, while in the theater the current Hollywood movies would reflect a backward movement towards private domestic stories.
Postwar media insisted in a thousand daily messages that marriage was the source of life’s satisfactions. The extended family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, nephews and nieces loses status and economic/emotional functions while the tight group of husband/wife/children increases in emotional importance. This also made the emphasis on family life more important as an alternative to fracturing communities. “The insistence that marriage and parenthood could satisfy all an individual’s needs reached a peak in the cult of togetherness among middle class suburban Americans in the 1950s” (Coontz, 2006).
Spielberg’s parents divorced in 1966 when he was nineteen but the marriage was apparently troubled long before. This colored his childhood. In the larger society divorce was becoming common, perhaps unsurprisingly. The pressure on contemporary marriage was intense precisely because the relation had become so important. The suburban family had only themselves for companionship. It became a facet of American life that other relationships were subordinated to the primary relationship of marriage. Spielberg’s generation continued to accept the intensity of marriage and, currently, are not surprised when it spills over into the public world of politics or even international relations. Americans want family-type feelings from their stories, their movies, and even their political leaders.
The postwar period had some notable public-sphere successes. The G.I. Bill helped Spielberg’s father and millions of others to receive higher education. Other social networks had been put in place by the federal government. These, however, fell far short of similar networks being constructed by European countries. In 1948 President Truman desegregated the United States military. There was a growing affluence and a feel of triumph after the victory of World War Two. Americans took pride in setting into motion the successful Marshall Plan that helped rebuild the economy of Western Europe. The civil rights movement was growing and drawing sustained momentum from global anti-colonialist politics. But there was also the stalemate of the Korean War and concern over the expansion of communism and the Soviet development of the atomic bomb. The fear of communism facilitated a backlash against the labor movement. It also seemed to be the background for a high degree of conformity in everyday life. The mood of the nation was hard to generalize. Ambivalence between public activities and private contentment played out in the formation of TV.
Television and Disney in the Suburbs
This generation was the first to experience television as a formative medium; it was becoming the source of tradition in the new suburbs. Its programming was distributed from coast to coast by the three networks: CBS, NBC, and ABC. In the first few years programming was diverse; there were anthologies of live dramas featuring many different settings and experimental news documentaries. It stabilized in the later 1950s, around a predictable roster of nightly news reports, wholesome situation comedies and cheaply made episodic series restricted to three or four genres (predominantly Westerns). This nationally disseminated content solidified the postwar feeling of a unified nation that had not been prevalent in the prewar, more regionalized, United States.
At first the center of the TV world was New York City. New York continued to host the corporate headquarters of TV broadcasters, but after 1955 the production center rapidly became Los Angeles. Television production moved to Los Angeles to take advantage of the expertise and efficiencies of film production studios already located in southern California. New York also had some unfortunate associations that advertisers wanted to avoid, such as left-wing politics and ethnic exoticism. California seemed more “white bread” and wholesome. TV took advantage of the Hollywood industry’s established relationship with the American mainstream. A hybrid version of the sunbelt attitude started to permeate television.
But television’s relationship with the film industry was not straightforward. The attempts of the Hollywood studios to take powerful positions within broadcasting largely failed due to a variety of factors. There was hostility from government and advertisers, and there was the lack of investment money. Thus a natural convergence was postponed for more than three decades. Nonetheless the children in Spielberg’s generation were heavily exposed to the Hollywood products featured on primetime TV. Studios such as Warner Brothers and Universal started making the routine westerns and police shows that filled out the broadcasters’ programming. A minor Hollywood studio, Disney, used its television show to promote both its films and its new theme park, Disneyland, and eventually became the biggest cultural provider of the twentieth century. And slowly television opened up Hollywood’s archives.
The obstacle to showing movies on TV through its first decade was that the broadcast networks were unwilling to pay what studios thought films’ exhibition rights were worth. So the only movies that were available on television in the early 1950s were the occasional Hollywood exceptions such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), which CBS paid a huge sum for, and movies from foreign and bankrupt studios such as Arthur Rank and RKO, since these companies were quite willing to take what little they could get. Generally such sales were made to independent stations looking for non-network programming. The irony is that foreign films (mostly British) were more available on early TV than they have been since, because of such cheap sales. Yet foreign films on television were presented to the viewers as if there was nothing special about them. TV famously deprives stories and images of their context and the casual viewer might not even notice that a film was from another country. The medium juxtaposes all levels of genre and production into an endless flow of images and talk. The films on TV had to fit into the rigid schedules of the stations, which typically broke down the hours into fifteen- and thirty-minute sections. They also had to be interrupted for commercial advertising breaks. This early generation thus had an eclectic education in film culture as they grew up on television.
Although Steven Spielberg complained in later years that his parents closely monitored his TV viewing, he seemed to watch many popular shows designed for his age group, particularly Disneyland (ABC 1954–1961, NBC 1961–1981, a.k.a. The Wonderful World of Disney) and The Mickey Mouse Club (ABC 1955–1959) (McBride, 62–64). He and the rest of his age group received heavy exposure to the “Disney version.” Disney’s influence on moviemakers of Spielberg’s age was a more conservative force than the other Hollywood movies starting to appear on television.
The Walt Disney Company helped fashion a turning point in postwar American culture. The company opened the Disneyland theme park in 1956, in Anaheim, California, approximately a thirty-minute drive from Los Angeles and in the heart of the territory occupied by the expanding aerospace industry. Disney had famously financed the park’s construction by making a deal to provide child-oriented programming to the ABC broadcast network. This provided an opportunity for aggressive cross-media marketing using the TV show to promote both the park and the film releases. Disney’s strategy became the forerunner of the cross-media marketing of the modern blockbuster. The TV show, films, and park rides were all used to promote the sale of related merchandise, cartoon books, and music records. The ubiquity of Disney in 1950s culture made it hard to remember that the studio was only a minor player in prewar Hollywood. Disney became the face of suburban culture, with a decidedly sunbelt complexion.
The company helped create sunbelt culture but it was not of it. The Disney artists had rural, urban and European backgrounds. Disney’s own American upbringing had brought him through a variety of circumstances—he had lived in the city, a small town, and on a farm, struggling in all of them. The stories he and his workers had used in the 1930s for their shorts were mildly populist, puncturing big business and rich-folk sensibilities. For the feature-length animations, Disney turned to stories that had connotations of the European courtly and high-art traditions. This is true of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1941). Both the cartoons and feature-length animations won wide admiration for their artistry and inventiveness. Walt Disney’s own vision was somewhat technical, but his studio won artistic prestige. Schickel reports that Disney himself was pleased with the admiration of intellectuals and other critics, although he did not fully understand it (Schickel, 208).
Both the embrace of European traditions and the populism changed during the war and its aftermath. Walt Disney himself became bitter after a fierce strike by workers at his company in 1941. He was thoroughly anti-communist in his beliefs, and his company dropped any critical themes and became pro-corporate in their scripts. Their productions turned mostly to American themes and, in particular, to historical treatments of pioneering days. Davy Crockett and The Swamp Fox portrayed the American fight for “freedom.” The Disney portrayal admitted no warts and eliminated any suggestion of slavery or even racial prejudice. Texas John Slaughter and Zorro were deliberate attempts to give an American history to the sunbelt. Zorro was a unique treatment of the Hispanic chapter of California history. Yet such multicultural diversity was diluted by a complete elision of class conflict: a hero of the upper class was shown fighting for the benefit of all. It flattered east-coast viewers by completely paralleling the conflict between California creoles and Spanish authorities with the thirteen colonies’ struggle against Great Britain.
Disney’s turn to history was part of the studio’s embrace of American triumphalism during the Cold War. This reactionary gave a new generation a whitewashed version of America that was more demagogic than textbooks if only because it was on TV. Even a biased political print source has to acknowledge complexities of the American story that a TV adventure series can blithely ignore. Disney cold-war ideology dropped the “older, optimistic, inclusive populism of the Depression era” (Watts, 288) and now espoused “a notion that the nuclear family, with its attendant rituals of marriage, parenthood, em...
