- Empire
of the Sun:
- Spielberg's
Overlooked Misunderstood Masterwork
-
- By
Ernest Rister, from THE OUTSIDER: A SHADOW ON THE SUN
- EMPIRE
OF THE SUN (1987)
(d. Steven Spielberg, scr. Tom Stoppard, ph. Allan Daviau)
JAMIE: I was dreaming about God.
MARY: What did he say?
JAMIE: Nothing. He was playing tennis. Perhaps that's where God
is all the time -- [in our dreams] -- and that's why you can't see
Him when you're awake, do you think?
MARY: I don't know. I don't know about God.
JAMIE: Perhaps He's our dream...and we're His.
-- EMPIRE OF THE SUN
In the short documentary, THE CHINA ODYSSEY, Steven Spielberg talks
about his take on author J.G. Ballard's semi-autobiographical novel,
EMPIRE OF THE SUN. Ballard's book details his own true-life experiences
as a British child of privilege separated from his parents by the
Japanese invasion of Shanghai in 1941, and one of Spielberg's boldest
opinions of the work was that half of the book was a lie -- half
of it true in the broad strokes, certainly, but it was Spielberg's
belief that the details and vignettes were completely warped by
Ballard's childhood perception.
This is crucial to understanding Spielberg's work on the film -
which has long been dismissed or completely, fundamentally misread
- not a single shot can be trusted.
Consider the scene referenced in italics above. Spielberg concludes
this passage with a shot of Jamie in bed while his mother and father
look on fondly. Spielberg's editor Michael Kahn then does something
strange - he performs a quick dissolve of this same shot onto itself,
which at first glance appears to be a gaffe.
Only later - and only if you're looking - do you see the payoff
to this moment. Jamie becomes separated from his parents and spends
the remainder of his childhood in a Japanese internment camp. He's
spent years idealizing his parents to the point where he finally
admits - in a scene of tremendous power - he can't remember what
they actually look like any more. Subtly illustrating this point,
hanging next to Jim's makeshift prison bed is a Norman Rockwell
painting torn out of the pages of LIFE Magazine. The painting is
of a Mother and Father looking fondly at a child in bed. It is the
exact same image from earlier in the film.
The implication here is that the earlier scene never happened, or
at the very least didn't happen in the way Spielberg presented it
to you -- the reality of the moment has been skewed by Jamie's fantasies.
Either way, Spielberg's camera lied to you. And there wasn't a film
critic in America who noticed.
Spielberg's camera is a font of dishonesty in EMPIRE OF THE SUN,
a blazingly original, criminally ignored film. Nothing in the frame
can be trusted. Consider the first appearance of John Malkovich
as the stranded maritime con man, Basie. When we first meet Basie,
he is one cool customer, strongly backlit, his face obscured by
dark sunglasses and a G.I. cap. This is all fine and good, except
Basie's appearance has already been foretold by the cover of the
WINGS comic book Jamie reads in the first moments of the film. The
cover of the comic details a back-lit G.I. wearing dark sunglasses
and a wide-brimmed cap.
In the closing moments of the film, Jim confronts Basie, and finds
him a thin, shell of a man with bad skin, still pursuing his dream
of being the pirate "lord of the Yangtzee". Is his physical
condition simply the result of malnutrition? (unlikely, since at
this moment Basie is in seemingly ample supply of Hershey's Chocolate
bars)? No - the truth is that Steven Spielberg, long considered
dead behind the eyes in some circles, made a film that toyed with
reality as much as RASHOMON or BLOW UP, but because at that time
he was critically regarded as a live-action Walt Disney, his work
was dismissed.
EMPIRE OF THE SUN would seem to be sitting up and begging for analysis,
so loaded it is with moments of fantasy and reverie in the midst
of suffering. The film is all about the human need for escapism
and denial in the face of a harsh reality (a human feature also
highlighted in GRAVE OF THE FIREFLIES), but it was received as a
Shanghai version of AN AMERICAN TAIL by way of a David Lean imitator.
This was incorrect. Many critics, in fact, directly faulted Spielberg
for the unreality of EMPIRE OF THE SUN and took him to task for
it. They missed the point. Spielberg literally lifts the subconscious
interpretation of events by a 12 year-old boy and prints those memories
onto film. The prison camp - which was criticized for being a Hollywood
construct and not a real environ - exists as the child remembers
it. Since children can have quite a fine time with a cardboard box,
you can imagine how much fun a boy who loves planes had living next
to an airfield. Spielberg puts that interpretation on film.
The headache-inducing result of his labor was that audiences took
his moments - some of them wildly abstracted - at face value, too
long conditioned to shut off their frontal lobes when viewing a
work with the word "Spielberg" attached to it. The film
is jammed full of impossible moments that clearly are not happening,
including a toy glider that stays impossibly aloft, the aforementioned
scene involving the family, a trio of pilots who salute the young
boy in a hail of welding sparks, a pilot of a P-51 who waves to
Jim, a refrigerator that bursts open revealing - instead of food
- glitter and toys...there's a gesture that Jim sees his father
perform, rubbing his finger across his upper lip. Later, Jim will
have a new father figure, Dr. Rawlins, who will repeat the same
gesture. Film critic Patrick Taggart actually asked what the point
of this gesture was. Ten years later, I'm happy to tell him the
gesture is the result of Jim's fading recollection of his parents.
He remembers his father making the gesture, and as Dr. Rawlins becomes
his "new" father, Jim begins superimposing attributes
onto him, including his father's own mannerisms.
Spielberg reveals to us this inner life in an enormously subtle
way. The standard practice for Dream Scenes is to clue the audience
in by the use of hazy wipes and dissolves. Spielberg discarded these
completely, trusting in the intelligence of his audience. One quick
throw-away even spotlights the British POWs reading from A Midsummer
Nights Dream, another little clue to the movie's intentions that
Spielberg discards like so much pocket lint.
Time and time again, Spielberg and his screenwriter Tom Stoppard
serve up an entire cast of characters who choose to ignore the reality
of the world around them and end up emaciated shells of their former
selves or worse. The film's message seems to be that in the face
of such a serious reality, denial and escapism are deadly, and the
world must be dealt with on its own terms. Jim's Great Dream - other
than flying - is to reunite with his parents, and he carries all
of his childhood memorabilia in a small suitcase. Jim must forsake
this fantasy and grapple with reality - this case that contains
his dreams will later be seen floating alongside the dead in the
Shanghai Harbor.
Because of his pre-occupation with exploring this theme, EMPIRE
OF THE SUN is unique in the Spielberg canon in that it is a film
less concerned with plot than it is with examining an idea - the
value and necessity for denial and escapism -- and all the ways
the human animal lies to itself. The unfortunate result is a film
that winds down emotionally by the end of its 2nd hour. Movies are
things we go to for many reasons, but primarily we go because we
want to feel something. Works like EMPIRE OF THE SUN almost function
like a parlor-game -- they're a great work-out for the left-side
of your soul and a litmus test for how you view film, but they're
also a bit emotionally cold. This oft-repeated criticism of EMPIRE
OF THE SUN isn't something so easily dismissed away. LAWRENCE OF
ARABIA sported a hole in the center of its drama in the shape of
a man who was a total enigma. EMPIRE OF THE SUN - which David Lean
himself was attached to at one point - also has a protagonist at
its center who is emotionally distant, keeping the viewer at arm's
reach. The difference being, in LAWRENCE, you had a man of fathomless
interest and contradictions at its fore, and in EMPIRE OF THE SUN
you had a spoiled child.
To me, EMPIRE OF THE SUN represents the death of the Spielberg I
grew up with, just as much as it tells the tale of a child who must
shuck off the best parts of childhood in order to survive. Its my
personal belief that the failure of this film was a giant blow to
the man, whose career went into a tailspin even as it was generating
ever-higher box office returns. Spielberg's public quotes around
this time are the most self-loathing of his life, referring to works
like INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, ALWAYS, and HOOK as "hamburgers"
and himself as little more than a McDonald's fry chief. INDIANA
JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE - in particular - is the flattest, least-inspired
and assured film he ever made.
The great thing about video is that it gives films a second chance,
and it is never too late to rediscover a buried classic. EMPIRE
OF THE SUN deserves your attention on home video, but what's more,
I think Spielberg's work in the film deserves your open mind and
your further contemplation.
-- Ernest
Rister
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