The ‘community’ fallacy corrupts a popular artist.
When a great popular artist gets chummy on a politician’s podcast, it taints the artist’s likability. That’s the problem with Steven Spielberg’s recent appearance on Michelle Obama’s podcast, ostensibly to promote his upcoming film, Disclosure Day. Seeing Spielberg commit to the partisan format of IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson (the former first lady and her brother) on May 27 gainsaid the impartiality that one assumed from his widely admired movies. The podcast appearance came after Barack and Michelle Obama joining Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw on Spielberg’s $250 million superyacht Seven Seas for a weekend getaway last year. Those interactions (plus Spielberg’s comic short “Obama” released in 2013) confirm suspicions of a Hollywood–Beltway political connection that, ever since Barack Obama’s election in 2008, has permeated Spielberg’s artistic vision; his filmmaking has suffered for almost the past two decades.
Spielberg’s hobnobbing on IMO caught attention for his observations on the state of moviegoing in this period when movie houses are closing and streaming has overtaken theatrical releases. Michelle’s clueless interrogation showed no appreciation for that long-gone era when Spielberg films drew around-the-corner lines of ticket-buyers; she seemed ignorant of Spielberg’s plea for traditional film habits, what he called “adventures in moviegoing.”
She also showed no particular interest in Spielberg’s work. (She watched his 2001 film A.I. Artificial Intelligence for the first time only days before the interview and expressed no response to it other than surprise that he had made a movie with such a topical title.) Instead, the interview became an occasion to draft Spielberg into her circle of influence, hawking her own IP.
Spielberg obliged the disgruntled ex-FLOTUS by providing an oration against streaming platforms to match her routine ax-grinding about the state of the nation. The demise of popular moviegoing revealed Spielberg’s Democrat partisanship: “That’s the battle we’re fighting because Covid really hurt us — really hurt moviegoing — because people who couldn’t go out to the movies got very accustomed to watching movies at home.”
It was never necessary that Spielberg show himself a deep thinker; being an extraordinarily gifted cinematic visionary capable of profound emotional effect was enough. But Spielberg’s simplistic recall of Covid proved that he swallowed Democrats’ leftist narrative. Spielberg expressed no awareness that the politically motivated lockdowns, not the pandemic itself, were what prohibited public interaction and destroyed interpersonal socializing.
His dim memory of shelter-in-place rituals (blaming without naming) resembles those “for-the-greater-good” nostrums favored by mask-enforcing pols who faked objectivity, pretending to be humane.
Clueless, indifferent Michelle asked, “How does that affect the viewers do you think? Do you think we’re missing out on something, the experience watching movies as a community?” That “community” redundancy proved she wasn’t one of the brainiacs from Obama’s administration or his shadow bunker at Kalorama; she just automatically baited Spielberg with the socialist concept of “community.”
And Spielberg bit: “In a movie theater, everybody is tuned in to the story being told to them from the screen, and for one moment, we’re in communion, and we are in agreement and we are a community. We’re a community of strangers watching something that makes us laugh and cry and sing out and want to share those feelings.”
This is too close to socialist Zohran Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism.” It’s harrowing to watch Spielberg shrink his famous ecumenicism to fit Michelle’s party line.
Sounding like a Hollywood flack (without the cynicism), Spielberg spoke in clichés:
And often you go into a lobby and you’re still buzzing about the movie, and you talk to strangers. You’re not talking about the stuff that divides you, you’re talking about what just united you. And that is the great thing — that movies built community. And we need community now more than ever.
You know this is snake oil when Michelle amens, “Desperately.”
Adepts might immediately hear echoes of Spielberg’s vaunted mentor Lew Wasserman, the agent-mogul who ruled Hollywood during the Blacklist. The protégé’s personal affinity for that potentate — who drew arbitrary boundaries between free enterprise and free expression — comes through. Those echoes were Spielberg indulging Michelle’s enmity: “When you see a movie in a theater, you’re also surrounded by people who are strangers. and there are people in that theater who you know do not believe what you believe.” Barack echoes came next: “There are people in that theater who actually believe in the opposite of your core beliefs about democracy, about this country, about the world, about what we need.”
Such cynicism is not characteristic of the optimistic pop artist who united the world with Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, The Color Purple, and the Indiana Jones trilogy, but it certainly reflects the arrogant divisiveness of the films Spielberg made with noted Leninist Tony Kushner (Lincoln, West Side Story, The Fabelmans). The vision of agape most powerfully expressed in Amistad and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (which I fully detail in Make Spielberg Great Again) emanated from the memory of populism that once supported a network of theaters from downtown urban centers to neighborhood movie houses. (Their disappearance following mid-’60s urban riots redefined the concept of “community” way before cable TV and Covid.) But true populism contradicts Michelle’s narrow-minded idea of “community” — a multimillionaire organizer’s version of Hillary Clinton’s hackneyed “It takes a village.”
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During the Depression and World War II, there was an open political alignment (as well as personal visits) between Hollywood power players Jack Warner and Darryl F. Zanuck and President Franklin Roosevelt that produced films supporting FDR’s social and military agenda. (Unabashed studio propaganda went from the wonderful Footlight Parade and 42nd Street to the bland Wilson, about Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations proposition.) But it’s obvious that the Obamas have surreptitiously infected many popular artists and now reduce Spielberg to mouthing half-felt platitudes — as if to make himself worthy of the Obamas’ attention.
Note the way Spielberg rushes his words together while merely regurgitating Hollywood rhetoric (following the liberal script), hoping it accommodates the humanism missing from the urban-poor/elite conflict of Ready Player One, the white shame of West Side Story, the Jewish–Gentile apprehension in The Fabelmans.
“Adventures in moviegoing” is a respectable concept, a matter of realizing one’s humanity through the vision and experience of others. Spielberg’s popularity has nothing to do with “community” or the zeal for cinema that captivated the entire world. Once upon a time, before he encountered the Obamas, Spielberg’s sense of adventure inspired audiences to rush into theaters confident that he would not insult them.