'Steven phone home': the cultural ambivalences of family in the cinema of Steven Spielberg

Abstract

The family is a significant and repetitive presence in contemporary cinema. This thesis is concerned with the contested discourses which circulate around representation of the family, and with the family’s centrality to narrative and the desire that animates the stories our culture tells itself. The success of Steven Spielberg’s films makes them appropriate subjects for such an investigation. His extensive filmography over three decades touches upon a broad array of different genres and target audiences, as well as generating widely varying popular and critical responses. His attention to familial relationships raises crucial questions about contemporary representations of the family, and their intersecting ideals of home and suburbia, religion and the Father/God, and metaphors of the familial nation. Spielberg’s films, with very few exceptions, circulate around both literal and metaphoric representations of family, repetitively betraying an intense preoccupation with this emotionally charged discourse — representations marked with both intense sentimentality as well as significant ambivalence. Having developed a reputation for manipulative sentimentality, Spielberg is often critically dismissed. His superlative appeal to affect, achieved through the narrative device of the family, has, however, brought his films enormous success and popularity. Grasping how and why the ‘sentimental manipulation’ of a Spielberg film works so effectively illuminates contemporary politics and popular culture. While substantial feminist criticism has evolved around the patriarchal implications of ‘family’, understanding family discourses through the dynamics of desire and ideological investment has been little developed, particularly in the realm of popular culture. By engaging with the films of Steven Spielberg through such a problematic, this thesis offers a new perspective on contemporary representation of the family.