Later, while scoring the film, Spielberg’s regular composer John Williams shied away from what he considered to be an over-ripe modulation on the sound-track. ‘It’s shameless,’ said Williams: ‘will we get away with it?’ ‘Movies are shameless,’ was Spielberg’s reply. E.T. is shameless all right, but there is nothing meretricious about it. Its purity is Utopian, and quite unfakeable.
You can ask around Los Angeles — around the smoggy pool-sides, the oak and formica rumpus-rooms, the squeaky-clean bars and restaurants — in search of damaging gossip about Steven Spielberg, and come away sorely disappointed. There isn’t any. No, he does not ‘do’ ten grand’s worth of cocaine a day. No, he does not consort with heavily-set young men. In this capital of ambition, trivia and perversity, you hear only mild or neutral things about Spielberg, spiced with many examples of his generosity and diffidence.
He has walked out with starlets, notably Amy Irving. He blows a lot of money on gadgets, computers, video games. He owns a mansion, a beach-house; he has just spent $4 million on a four-acre hillock in Bel Air. He seldom goes to parties: ‘When I do go, I’m the guy in the corner eating all the dip.’ Spielberg, it appears, is a pretty regular guy. Apart from his genius, his technique, his energy, his millions, his burgeoning empire (rivalling Coppola’s Zeotrope and Lucas’s Marin County co-operative), he sometimes seems almost ordinary.
Towards the end of the interview, I asked him why he had never dealt with ‘adult relationships’, with sex, in his movies. After all, he de-eroticised Indiana Jones in Raiders, who was originally conceived as a playboy, and he excised the adultery from Jaws (the sex-interest in the novel Spielberg attributes to ‘bad editorial advice’; actually the culprit was bad writing — but this is California). For the first time Spielberg grew indignant. ‘I think I have an incredibly erotic imagination. It’s one of my ambitions to make everyone in an 8oo-seat theatre come at the same time.’ Well, we’ll have to wait until he has completed Raiders II, E.T. II, and, possibly, Star Wars IV, as well as the host of minor projects he is currently supervising. But if Spielberg does for sex what he has done for dread and yearning, then he can expect a prompt visit from the Vice Squad.
‘I just make the kind of films that I would like to see.’ This flat remark explains a great deal. Film-makers today — with their target boys and marketing men — tie themselves up in knots trying to divine the LCD among the American public. The rule is: no one ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the audience. Spielberg doesn’t need to do this because in a sense he is there already, uncynically. As an artist, Spielberg is a mirror, not a lamp. His line to the common heart is so direct that he unmans you with the frailty of your own defences, and the transparency of your most intimate fears and hopes.
Observer 1982
John Updike: Rabbitland and Bechville
John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels are fattening into a sequence — a wahooing, down-home barn dance to the music of time. Rabbit, Run (1960) gave us Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s disastrous early marriage, Rabbit Redux (1971) his chaotic experiments with adulthood. Rabbit is Rich, the latest but not the last in the line, traces with appalled affection the contours of Rabbit’s maturity: it is about middle-aged spread, physical, mental and (above all) material.
Rabbit has never looked a less likely hero for an American epic. Equipped with a troublesome family and a prosperous car showroom, Rabbit is meant to seem provincial and vulgar even by the unexacting standards of suburban Pennsylvania. His reading consists of Consumer Reports and the odd newspaper — ‘mostly human-interest stories, like where the Shah is heading next and how sick he really is’. His mind is a jabbering mess of possessions, prejudice and pornography. But then Rabbit is an extreme middle-American, a voluble and foul-mouthed representative of the silent majority.
The time is 1979 — the time of petrol shortages, the Three Mile Island radiation leak, the hostage crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan. Like its predecessors, the novel is crammed with allusive topicalities; in a few years’ time it will probably read like a Ben Jonson comedy. Rabbit, however, is quick to reinterpret global events in the light of furtive self-interest. Will the Iranian revolution give a boost to his precious-metal investments? Is OPEC going to louse up his car-dealership?