Feedback Friday: Spielberg vs. Kubrick, Zhao vs. Marvel (Patreon)

Our episode on A.I. covered some of the contemporaneous response to Steven Spielberg taking up the project from Stanley Kubrick: People who didn't like the film, particularly the ending, were quick to blame Spielberg for every sentimental aspect of the film, while crediting Kubrick with all the coldest and most intellectual bits. Spielberg later pointed out that their guesses were completely wrong. In this week's feedback letter, listener Cam compares that conflict to the conversation around Nomadland director Chloé Zhao and her Marvel movie The Eternals: 

I was listening to the podcast about A.I. and was very interested in your discussion about the tension between what was “Spielberg-ian” and what was “Kubrick-ian” in the movie. Specifically when Tasha talked about the ending of A.I. (which critics had ascribed to typical Spielberg sentimentality, but in reality was actually written by Kubrick), it brought to mind an  interview with Chloe Zhao I saw on Empire online.

Zhao was responding to a question about the way The Eternals was dissected by critics who ascribed certain plot points to the Marvel machine, and others to the Oscar-winning director of Nomadland. Zhao said:

“When people have that feeling, like they need to put order into things, they need to understand it by putting it into boxes,” she says. “It is not about us, it is about them. And I say that lovingly, because they have a level of comfort [with] how their entertainment and their world – their beloved Marvel, or their beloved indie filmmaker — functions. That’s the order of the logic of their world that’s being disturbed. So I appreciate their passion, to try to make sense of it.”

My question is: Are there times when an understanding of what you expect an artist to produce can lead to this attempt to neatly box up different elements of a film, rather than taking it in as a whole? Bonus question — did anyone like The Eternals and see it as an extension of Zhao’s work? Or did it read as a Marvel Frankenstein?

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Tasha responds:

First off, I just have to say, that's either a remarkably generous quote on Zhao's part, or a remarkably diplomatic one. Can you imagine what it would be like to routinely have people who've never met you or been to your workplace look at your job and loudly announce which aspects of it you've been handling, and which were done by other people? And then not only spread that information around, but judge you for it? Zhao saying that it's no big deal when people do that, because they're just trying to make sense of the world, strikes me as awfully kind, or maybe the kind of thing you tell yourself when you're trying to keep cool and carry on.

That said, this is either a very short, easy-to-answer question — yes, expectations for a filmmaker can lead us to make assumptions about what we're seeing and discard things that don't fit. Asked and answered! Or it's a dauntingly huge one about what that means, or why we do it, or what it makes us miss. I'll try to land somewhere in the middle.

I certainly think there are plenty of examples of people boxing up creators into neat packages. We talk a lot at the Next Picture Show about taking all films in context. But the downside of contextualizing everything is that we're all always looking for the connections that help explain films and filmmakers, based on the flawed and incomplete evidence of the final product. 

One thing you learn from talking to creators about their projects is that film is a very collaborative medium. Every movie that actually makes it into release is a kind of dialogue between the director(s), writer(s), actors, producers, craftspeople, the studio or financiers, and the market and era it's being made for. So as we're trying to stick directors into neat little boxes, we're pretty likely to be putting those boxes in the wrong places, because we have no information about the complex factors that shaped a given movie.

Early in my career as a critic, I often made the mistake in reviews of crediting (or blaming!) any given specific aspect of a film on the person credited as being responsible for it — if there's a plot point that doesn't make sense, it's obviously the writer's fault, if there's a muddy or confusing shot, it's obviously the director's fault, and so forth. But the more time I spent on interviews like this old A.V. Club conversation with Joss Whedon (forgive me, I know his name is now a killing word, but this really was a significant reveal for me back in the depths of 2001), the more I heard stories like the one Whedon tells about working on Alien Resurrection, where director Jean-Pierre Jeunet wanted him to make script changes that he couldn't explain or justify. In happier examples, think about how radically Spielberg's work on Jaws was altered (for the better) because he had a mechanical shark that didn't work.

So while we might stick directors into certain boxes based on watching the films, we risk assuming that they did a given thing because it was some deep expression of their art, and not, say, because it was raining the day they wanted to shoot a given outdoor scene, or because they couldn't afford the special effect they wanted. Unless we hear from the director themselves, a lot of those assumptions will be wrong. So making broad statements about what a director wants and why they've done specific things is almost always going to risk leaving a lot of pertinent information outside the box.

In the case of Eternals, short of reading interviews with Zhao (while taking them with a grain of salt, because Marvel filmmaking teams are some of the most carefully coached, on-message people in the entire industry), I would hesitate to say "This part is Zhao, that part is Marvel." And I'm not sure we really benefit from that kind of piecemeal guesswork, anyway. Did I like the film? It was fine. Did I see it as an extension of her previous work? It certainly contends with isolation, loneliness, and grand soaring vistas in ways I found familiar from her other work. I'd hesitate to call it a "Marvel Frankenstein," if only because Zhao's only made four features so far, and she's never had this kind of budget or scale or access to major stars before. Maybe Eternals was the movie she always wanted to make and didn't have the money for. Maybe it's how all her movies would have looked if she'd had $300 million budgets from day one.

I think the more interesting question here is, do we want to see more Marvel movies from Zhao, and does she want to make them? In terms of trying to figure out who she is as a filmmaker, watching where she goes from here, now that she's worked on small, personal films and big industrial ones, will probably tell us a lot more than we knew before. I'm pretty sure she doesn't want to be pushed into a tiny, constraining career box herself, so why not let her carry on defining herself?