His music-video debut, far from his best work, signals cultural alienation.
Steven Spielberg’s Cannibal, his very first music video, contradicts his usual large-scale fantasy content. It’s a four-minute single take of singer-songwriter Marcus Mumford, from the British band Mumford & Sons, lamenting his susceptibility to romance, even describing his lover and himself as mutual predators. The clip is so simple, the song so direct, it seems oddly present-tense, as if the great popular artist renounced fiction to study issues — personal uncertainties — that match our own.
After giving himself up to overexcitement in the futuristic chase film Ready Player One, Spielberg simplifies his filmmaking approach, in which genre storytelling had been a way of seeing the world. Cannibal reorients him. Moviemakers have been known to do music videos and TV commercials for relaxation — or to flex artistic muscles and test ideas outside their film narratives. Cannibal comes close to clarifying the social anxieties that ultimately muddled RP1 and West Side Story.
RP1’s Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan) introduced himself saying, “I was born in 2027, after the Corn Syrup Drought, after the Bandwidth riots. After people stopped trying to fix problems and just tried to outlive them.” That self-assessment sounds prophetic but also like contemporary malaise, and it’s much more articulate than Marcus Mumford’s strained lyrics. Through Spielberg’s close-ups, we simply look at Mumford as a bathetic balladeer. Only Spielberg’s technique (using a handheld iPhone, in his first black-and-white project since Schindler’s List) seems convincingly earnest, as if he’s searching for something we can feel that the narcissistic song itself never delivers.
Think back to how Zack Snyder’s 1992 black-and-white Morrissey music-video Tomorrow pondered, “Tomorrow / Will it really come? / And if it does come / Will I still be human?” all while the video star cruised Parisian streets. The felicitous single-take tracking shot suggested he wouldn’t be lonely for long.
Cannibal exchanges Morrissey’s desire, using trite, almost dehumanized, desperation — a perspective that the now didactic, nihilistic Spielberg has come to accept. His recent use of color and F/X betrayed popular imagining for different forms of large-scale dystopia, but I see Cannibal’s cool, naturalistic style as an effort to compensate.
While West Side Story rarely found purely enjoyable visual rhythm, and RP1 foundered, seeking a style that accurately conveyed the future of digital media, Spielberg’s preternatural film craft still outpaced both narratives. In terms of technique: West Side Story flounced its extreme racial-equity gestures. RP1’s segue into the alternate-world of digital Oasis gaming rejected old-fashioned cinematic editing. It first cuts back to reality when Wade emerges from an advertisement montage of brainwashed VR players, but Spielberg never conveyed an adequate feel for the mundane. It was Minority Report gone wrong.
Cannibal suggests that Spielberg wants to return to a more expressive, non-manipulative editing and filmmaking style — one he mastered before making two movies about past and present America as a digital junkyard. Cannibal isolates its singer in music-video limbo so that he’s a lost contemporary figure. Its bare-bones narrative (shot in a New York school gymnasium decorated with a curtain backdrop, the camera moving across guitar frets, pulling back and then rushing forward to a banal close-up) is almost a joke against gaudy, hyperactive music-video clichés. It feels as empty of romance as it is of the thrilling, off-hand ingenuity that distinguished Jaws and The Lost World.
Far from peak Spielberg, Cannibal defies our expectations borne from the marvelous “Sing, Sing, Sing” production number in 1941. Where’s the pulse of Scorsese’s Bad music video for Michael Jackson? Or the audacity of Joseph Kahn’s Iffy for Chris Brown? (Pop nerd Kahn’s dazzling interpolation of hip-hop dancing and genre riffs combined RP1 and Michael Bay’s Transformers.) Cannibal continues the disappointment of the West Side Story remake where sociological condescension indicated true alienation, extending the Obama influence I examine in Make Spielberg Great Again.
Dare we imagine that Spielberg picked a Sons of Mumford bandmate for his music-video debut out of solidarity with SoM member Winston Marshall, who sparked political controversy — and who was ousted from the band — because he expressed sympathy with Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy?
The far-left drift of Spielberg’s latest films coincides with a grim social view that has hobbled his artistry — whether the visual chaos of RP1 or the empty flare of West Side Story. Superficial simplicity won’t restore his once globally adored ingenuity and spectacle if he is not inspired by the free expression of his greatest movies — the ecumenical, open-hearted storytelling that was both exhilarating and emotionally powerful.
Or is the plain, dull Cannibal a sign that American filmmakers, like our pop musicians, have definitively lost their bearings? If so, the faux-chic minimalism of Cannibal plays like artistic deprivation, as if Spielberg was cannibalizing himself.
