Burroughs returned to the academy to study psychology … Then he went to Mexico (where he accidentally killed his wife with a revolver), and on a GI grant, studied native dialects and was able to obtain drugs with comparative absence of legal restriction.
That parenthesis is all she rates. Similarly – and to take only the most spectacular example – Burroughs’s obtrusive interest in the sexual hanging of young boys (orgasm to be synchronised with the pathetic voiding at the moment of death) is duly accorded the status of a ‘symbol’, a symbol, in this case, of ‘critical anarchism’. So it is, though not in the sense intended. At no point will Mr Mottram admit a human value. He does not answer to any of the gods we answer ro: he sits up late at night, listening for the knock of The Semiologic Police.
Burroughs’s principal ‘theme’ — in that he goes on about it more than he goes on about anything else — is ‘control’, social, sexual and political. Mr Mottram annotates this theme with some rigour (his book has good bits too), and he does draw haphazard attention to the things that make Burroughs worth looking at: his great scenes of interrogation and manipulation, the desolate evil of his wound-down cities and inert, vicious bureaucracies, that sense of wasted and pre-doomed humanity which animates his best writing. What Mr Mottram never addresses himself to, however, is the question of artistic control, of the artist’s control of his material and his talent. Control is not something one grafts on to natural ability: it is part of that ability. Burroughs has vacated the control tower, if indeed he ever went up there. No living writer has so perfidiously denied his own gifts — most of which are, incidentally, comic and exuberant rather than admonitory and bleak. It may be his just reward, then, to be studied by people who don’t find him funny.
New Statesman 1977
Steven Spielberg: Boyish Wonder
Steven Spielberg’s films have grossed approximately $1,500 million. He is thirty-four, and well on his way to becoming the most effective popular artist of all time… What’s he got? How do you do it? Can I have some?
‘Super-intensity’ is Spielberg’s word for what he comes up with on the screen. His films beam down on an emotion and then subject it to two hours of muscular titillation. In Jaws ($410 million) the emotion was terror; in Close Encounters ($150 million) it was wonder; in Raiders of the Lost Ark ($310 million) it was exhilaration; in Poltergeist ($480 million and climbing) it was anxiety; and now in E.T. — which looks set to outdo them all — it is love.
Towards the end of E.T., barely able to support my own grief and bewilderment, I turned and looked down the aisle at my fellow sufferers: executive, black dude, Japanese businessman, punk, hippie, mother, teenager, child. Each face was a mask of tears. Staggering out, through a tundra of sodden hankies, I felt drained, pooped, squeezed dry; I felt as though I had lived out a year-long love affair — complete with desire and despair, passion and prostration — in the space of izo minutes. And we weren’t crying.for the little extra-terrestrial, nor for little Elliott, nor for little Gertie. We were crying for our lost selves. This is the primal genius of Spielberg, and E.T. is the clearest demonstration of his universality. By now a billion Earthlings have seen his films. They have only one thing in common. They have all, at some stage, been children.
It is pretty irresistible to look for Spielberg’s ‘secret’ in the very blandness of his suburban origins — a peripatetic but untroubled childhood spent mostly in the south-west. As I entered his offices in Warner Boulevard, Burbank Studios, I wondered if he had ever really left the chain-line, ranch-style embryos of his youth. The Spielberg bungalow resembles a dormitory cottage or beach-house — sliding windows, palm-strewn backyard. The only outre touch is an adjacent office door marked twilight zone accounting: perhaps it is into this fiscal warp that the millions are eventually fed, passing on to a plane beyond time and substance …
Within, all is feminine good humour. Spielberg has always surrounded himself with women — surrogate aunts, mothers, kid sisters. These gently wise-cracking ladies give you coffee and idly shoot the breeze as you wait to see the great man. That girl might be a secretary; this girl might be an executive producer, sitting on a few million of her own. Suddenly a tousled, shrugging figure lopes into the ante-room. You assume he has come to fix the coke-dispenser. But no. It is Mr Spielberg.