Nostalgia, Homages, Midnight in Paris, and Super 8

This past weekend I took in two very different but pretty terrific films: J.J. Abram’s Super 8 and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. Both films deal with the past. One film pays homage to what some would call the golden age for one of our greatest filmmakers, and the other film deals with the very concept of a golden age, or if such a thing even exists. After Allen’s film, a friend and I began to recall our own histories, talking about films that got us into movies in the first place and films that continued to have significant impacts well past our childhoods. Together, films like There Will Be Blood, E.T., J.F.K., Bottle Rocket, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Die Hard, The Social Network, Jaws, Punch-Drunk Love, Star Wars, The Thin Red Line, Pulp Fiction, and Magnolia were mentioned. These were films that stayed with us for one reason or another. They’ve affected us in significant ways and helped fashion what we love about the medium. We got to talking about the independent film movement in the late ’80s-early ’90s and how exciting it was when films like Drugstore Cowboy, Sex, Lies and Videotape, Reservoir Dogs, and even Clerks were popping out and how that excitement has kind of dwindled. Those were the good ol’ days, right?

I’ve always felt nostalgia could be a nice crutch in life. I’m not talking about living in the past. I’m not talking about a lack of perspective. As we get older we get more analytical, more guarded, and with good reason. Through experience we have gained perspective as we shed ourselves of our more naive skins. Practicality and then cynicism looms over our jaded selves. When cynicism gets out of hand, it can make us a lot less happy, enjoy less. It can be toxic. We may even become cynical a-holes (in fairness, the The Zookeeper can do that to anyone). So when I say nostalgia can be good, I mean it helps remind me of where I’ve come from and how I came to be the person I am today; I’m talking about the reflective acuity the past allows for the present, or even the future. I believe it’s good for the soul.

Some circles have accused Super 8 of using nostalgia as a crutch, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. You can’t direct nostalgia. What is nostalgic for me may not be nostalgic for you. But the common thread of nostalgia is innocence, or at least a perceived innocence or a perceived purity. It can be an innocence of the mind (childhood, past relationships, old locations) or of a medium (types of films). What you can do — and what Abrams I feel does very successfully — is take everything he loved about Steven Spielberg’s Old Testament offerings and try to share that with the rest of us. If it works, it perhaps evokes feelings of nostalgia for an individual as it reminds us of the types of films we used to get from a master of cinema. But it can’t actually be those films for me because I’m not 8 years old anymore.

Admiring what Abrams accomplished isn’t a case of living in the past either. That’s too easy a dismissal and more than a little condescending. It’s the difference between celebrating what we love from those more innocent times and wishing, say, Hollywood would simply “Make’em like they used to.” In Super 8‘s case, it’s about paying homage to early Spielberg. In Midnight in Paris, however, Owen Wilson does wish they made it like they used to, only he’s referring to life. He pines for the days in Paris when giants like Hemingway, Scott and Zelda, or Cole Porter could be spotted walking out of the Moulin Rouge. Here is a man who literally would like to live in the past. We sometimes look at our own pasts through gold-filtered lenses, and Allen says it is perhaps even more dangerous to harken back to a time you didn’t even experience. In life, in real life, romanticism leaves in a hurry. It is not only unhealthy to live in your own past, it is unhealthy to pretend you can live in any golden age. More to the point, there is no golden age. There is always struggle and there is always pain, and we will never have the benefit of a future perspective in our present reality.

With the experiences that life affords us, however, you can choose to engage in the spirit you still treasure of that past time. Abrams engaged in this spirit. And at the end of the Allen’s film, Wilson’s character chooses Paris not because he is a fool or duped into thinking he can relive his youth. He is fairly collected and clear-headed. He understands life throws curve balls and that he even may be making a mistake. But he also understands that if he doesn’t try to live the kind of life he always wanted to live, if he doesn’t try to be the person he always wanted to be, he will continue to be lost and he will continue to be disappointed and he will continue to wonder.

In Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (one of those impact films mentioned earlier), there is a very foreboding message repeated in the film: “We may be done with the past, but the past isn’t through with us.” I’ve always understood the darker connotations in this message, but later it inspired a different reading; that it is just as much a positive assurance as it is a threat (the film’s many outcomes are further evidence). As a guy who tries to use my past failures and successes to an advantage today; who will continue to assess who I am and why I am; who will always love Spielberg’s early films, who will always treasure all there is to treasure from the all the “golden ages” from which one could choose, be it Paris in the ’20s or the Nintendo era of the ’80s, it’s a pretty comforting thought.

The Next 10 Steven Spielberg Homages

Once upon a time, Steven Spielberg was a young radical, the champion of the high-concept blockbuster, a director who didn’t shy away from extraterrestrial beings or magical circumstances, or treat them as B-movie trash. Alfred Hitchcock praised him as the first director who “didn’t see the proscenium arch,” and while it can be argued he was just one of many in the 1970s who didn’t, I’d argue he was the first to infuse aliens with the charm of Capra.

But in the circle of cinematic life, Spielberg is now old-school. The first generation who grew up with his films is now old enough to make films themselves. And they have. Many have cited him as an influence, but only J.J. Abrams was brazen enough to actually make a movie that directly pays homage to him. (Is it meta if the man you pay tribute to then produces your film? Would Sergio Leone have produced Quentin Tarantino? The mind really whirls.) Critics are already divided on Super 8 and its unabashed exploitation of nostalgia, but audiences seem destined to eat it up. The most common response to the trailer is (surprise) “Oh, that reminds me of an old Spielberg film!”, so it’s already nailing that pleasure center of our brains. And where one goes, others will follow. Here are the 10 Spielberg homages we expect to see over the course of the next decade.

1.    ”Fortune and Glory”

Oh, I know what you’re saying — Indiana Jones has been “done” several times over.  Lara Croft, National Treasure, The DaVinci Code, Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy trilogy, and Uncharted are just a handful of movies (or games that will be movies) to have borrowed the dashing archeologist trope.

But no one has gotten to the heart of what made Indy: pulp serials. No one has yet made a movie about faux scholasticism, they just slap more of it on. Indiana Jones is ripe for proper homage. We need another hero who is straight out of 1930s serials, and a story that takes place in the glory days of Egyptology and colonialism. Or, we need to meet a scholar so steeped in pulp and Indiana Jones movies that he desperately seeks out magic artifacts, and inadvertently finds one.

2.    ”The Pirates Don’t Eat the Tourists”

Unlike Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park hasn’t been subjected to a lot of rip-offs. (Unless you count SyFy movies. And I don’t.) Its influence has been purely technological instead of creative or spiritual. I suspect this is because of it’s timing. Those who soaked up Close Encounters of the Third Kind were undoubtedly dazzled by Jurassic Park, but their influence was “set.” The 1990s kids who grew up with that movie aren’t quite old and established enough to infuse it into their films.  Also, the film has been heavily sequelized, with every year bringing whispers of more installments or outright remakes. It’s hard to homage if something is still running.

Still, it’s bound to be coming.  I expect a homage to take on “Science for profit and menace” theme more fully, spinning entire stories out of “Nature finds a way.”  (One could argue The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is already playing with that a bit, but Apes always did.)  Or, some young filmmaker may watch it and wish so fervently that a theme park would come to life that he writes his own story rich with chaos. (Jon Favreau’s The Magic Kingdom may already be that movie.)  Or someone else will take up the “ancient animals given new life” thread, and spin a tail of nature bringing back the woolly mammoth, and the planet reverting to a primal state.  Pick your storyline, rebottle the magic of the hidden reveal (a dinosaur foot, a rumble, wide-eyed shock of the characters seeing what you can’t, the horror of it all going wrong), and you have a trip down memory lane.

3.    ”Gonna Need A Bigger Boat”

Jaws has influenced a ton of movies. (Especially if you count SyFy. Which I don’t.) But have any of them actually captured its stark, ominous nature? Its two-note villain? Not in my opinion. Isn’t there someone out there who is brave enough to make a monster movie — in the snow, on a mountain, in the sea — where you barely see the monster … but you hear it in the film’s music? Yes, there is. They’ll take Jim Shepard’s “Tedford and the Megalodon” and tweak it into a two-hour hunt, full of hints and ominous music signaling the rise of a nightmarish, white creature from the icy depths.

4.    ”I can’t remember what my parents look like.”

Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun is one of his most underrated films. (It’s also the moment people should have realized Christian Bale could act.) It’s Spielberg’s homage to David Lean, and given his unique twist by being portrayed through the eyes of a child. Looking back on it now, it seems utterly daring to have a kid ripped from his parents, and spend the film slowly descending into hollow-eyed savagery. Somewhere, a director is watching this and planning his own kid-in-the-wilderness epic that will make full use of the isolation, the horror, the loss of innocence, and that last, tear-jerking scene where he can’t recognize his own family. Perhaps it will be a post-apocalyptic tale. Maybe they’ll ground it in real history. Whatever its plot, expect many shots of a young ragged boy (or girl!) in an unforgiving landscape — and they’ll pretend the whole thing is a movie…

5.    ”Bangarang!”

Hook is generally counted among Spielberg’s biggest disasters, though it’s enjoying a second life among 20-somethings who adored Rufio. (I wasn’t one of them. Sorry!) What’s odd about Hook is that no one is paying overt homage to it, but everyone is currently ripping off its conceit and reworking fairy tales for the modern world. Tomorrow, you may even load up your favorite website and discover a director is writing his own fairy tale hero — or rather, the story of what happens to that hero when he forgets he’s a magic, immortal fairy tale, and goes to live in the real world. What happens when he returns? What does he or she find? Will they rediscover their magical, innocent essence? Yes. Because this is an homage to Hook.

6.    ”He came to me!!”

Having not seen Super 8, I can’t say whether it’s carrying a boatload of references to E.T. (Given the amount of carnage inherent in the trailer, I suspect it has the broken family, but none of the quiet friendship-across-a-galaxy.) But it’s my humble opinion that no one — and certainly not Mac and Me — has ever captured the sheer magic of finding and adopting an alien from another world. E.T. is so full of the loneliness of a geeky and messy childhood, and how we all pray for that one thing that will make us special. No director has ever tapped its quiet magic, favoring shrill jokes and hysterical situations over sitting quietly with your new friend, and enjoying some candy. Someone is aching to “remake” that story but with a new angle (maybe it could star a girl this time!). Perhaps the lead character is readily familiar with films that find alien friends, and has to constantly say, “This isn’t like E.T..”  But sweetly and with reverence.

7.    ”Come back, plane!”

If there’s a film that’s as widely disdained as Hook, it’s Spielberg’s 1941. But it has a real cult following, and I suspect it may even attract more of one in a post-Inglorious Basterds world. Someone out there is basking in its madcap glory, taking note of its use of real historic events and gleeful, destructive distortion. They’ve undoubtedly watched Basterds as well, and noted that Quentin Tarantino didn’t even suffer a vicious backlash for gunning down Hitler. A brave soul is, even now, sitting and churning out a world war mash-up (maybe they’ll set it at the Battle of the Somme to distinguish it) that shrugs off any recorded events in favor of joyful, gory abandon. When you least expect it, there will be a German officer wielding a dangerous torture device that’s actually a coat hanger.

8.    ”I have to stay.”

The Terminal is a light and breezy affair, a film anyone could have made, but Steven Spielberg did. But there are a lot of fun and poignant moments in it that could sprout in the right creative mind. At the tail end of the decade, it’s not impossible to see someone lightly paying tribute to this quirky film of bungled tourism, and combining it with the magic and otherworldliness of Spielberg’s early work. Wouldn’t you love to see a movie about a human stranded for a year on Terminal Alpha Centari, a stranger in a strange land, frustrated with interplanetary bureaucracy and a  world plagued by fear after the Pegasian-B terrorist attack? All they want to do is go home. But what kind of home will they find, now that they’ve incurred time-debt by waiting around for their passport to be stamped?

9.    ”This means something. This is important.”

Once again, I have to stress that I haven’t seen Super 8, so I don’t know how much Close Encounters is infused into it. But come on, another director can be inspired by the same film, and come away with a wildly different story. Someone out there is wondering what happened to Roy Neary once he climbed on board that ship. They’ve wondered for years and years, pouring the answer into a screenplay. Or they’ve wondered about the family he left behind, and whether they were ever told anything about where he’d gone. What would it be like to be the son or daughter of a man who had a close encounter … and who chose aliens over you?  That’s ripe stuff for a 30-something filmmaker, and Spielberg homage central. They could even feature a mashed potato Devil’s Tower, or find the end of their own journey there.

10.    ”Is this your first stay in a rest home, Mr. Bloom?”

When Spielberg remakes something, any homage to it is going to become mind-boggling meta. But his version of Kick the Can in Twilight Zone: The Movie is fascinating — it’s kinder than George Clayton Johnson’s original (Mr. Conroy isn’t left behind), it has a bit more of a bruised spirit (the reborn kids realize there’s a darker side to childhood), and a quiet acceptance of maturity (they choose to go back, realizing the spirit is what must remain young). We’re currently in a cinematic era that upholds arrested development. A canny young brain out there (who appreciates being an adult) could take Kick the Can and spin a story about a person getting their wish to remain young forever … and the heartbreak that ensues when you chase after someone begging not to be left behind.