The Greenhouse Effect
Michael Koresky on Always
"God creates dinosaurs.
God destroys dinosaurs.
God creates man.
Man destroys God.
Man creates dinosaurs."
Thus spoke Jeff Goldblum’s adorably sarcastic “Chaotician” in Jurassic Park, establishing not only the crux of that particular cautionary tale’s natural/theological dilemma, but the scientific and religious ideologies for much of the Spielberg canon. Commonly referred to as “that Spielbergian glow,” the spirituality so intractably at the core of most of the director’s films leaves an imprint on the viewer that many summarily dismiss as plodding sentimentality, as if attempting emotional catharsis always points towards an easy out rather than a deeper introspection. Goldblum’s quote lays the groundwork for the very particular triangular dialectic between God, man, and nature in Spielberg’s films, and the spiritual dynamic released when man finds himself haplessly sandwiched between the other two.
Yet the questions raised in Jurassic Park reflect the precarious balance of this complex system of concerns: the Creationist stance would seem to conflict with the quote’s more Darwinian trajectory. If nature “selected” dinosaurs, as Goldblum later says, for extinction, then is there room for God in the equation? That Spielberg is able to locate a strong religious core within so many of his fantastical texts seems almost miraculous, especially when the battle between man and nature often takes center stage. Time and again, Spielberg’s characters try to control nature, only to find themselves controlled in turn by a much greater power. When the scientists first lay their eyes on Jurassic Park’s prehistoric beasties, their mouths are agape at the sheer jolt of the possibilities of science and man’s Godlike, almighty ability to use it for his own purposes. It’s a decidedly Spielbergian moment, as they stare in awe at something offscreen, an acknowledgement of the divine manifest right in front of their eyes.
Significantly, Spielberg’s is a green world. The trees, plants, flowers, tall grasses, and forests convey an otherworldly rapture, radiating a decidedly unnatural glow. Man’s attempts to harness nature’s gifts raise Spielberg’s religious inquiries. Think of Richard Dreyfuss mutilating his backyard shrubberies to reform them into a likeness of what has become his Mount Sinai in Close Encounters of the Third Kind; E.T. abandoned by his race of benevolent fellow beings after attempting to collect plant life surrounding the majestic California redwoods; think of The Color Purple’s Celie and Nettie finding spiritual solace in an infinite thicket of sunflowers; think of former President John Quincy Adams and rebellious slave Cinque bonding over the discussion of African violets in Adams’s self-made plant nursery in Amistad, and also Lois Smith’s reiteration of Adams’s assertion of man’s survival instinct in Minority Report, dictated as she presides over her greenhouse full of serpentine, poisonous blossoms and weeds. Not always a botanist’s dream, Spielberg’s landscapes can turn malevolent when the sun goes down, as in Elliott’s flashlight journey through the cornstalks; the gnarled, hellish oak that crashes through a child’s bedroom window in Poltergeist; the fairy-tale nightmare forest of A.I.; or the spectral shafts of light whipping through the quivering branches in the opening shot of Jurassic Park, awaiting what Goldblum later dubs “the rape of the natural world.” If we cannot control our natural environments, then our place in the universe is undefined; we merely dwell on a plane between earth and a greater consciousness.
Spielberg’s concerns may not be classically existential, but, in terms of popular American cinema, his spirituality questions man’s existence as much as Woody Allen’s cold atheism. And both American directors’ works are deeply informed by a Judaistic tradition that gets displaced onto conventional American mores. In fact, Spielberg’s 1989 Always, a remake of his favorite film from childhood, Victor Fleming’s A Guy Named Joe (1944), could be the inverse of Woody Allen’s 1989 Crimes and Misdemeanors. Through spiritual inquiry, both films reach a working definition of life on planet Earth, and what lies in the empty recesses of each room: Allen sees God nowhere, while Spielberg sees God everywhere. The latter stems from the Judaistic belief that God manifests in everything, and that He is eternally watching. But the triangular relationship is most clearly defined in Always because it’s also true that in the Judeo-Christian tradition, God’s will is understood to work through the laws of nature, and that humans have both moral claims on nature and nature has moral claims on humans. There must be a balance between the privileges of nature and the needs of man. In transposing A Guy Named Joe’s story of a WWII bomber pilot’s journey into the afterlife onto that of a forest firefighter, Spielberg raises more philosophical environmental concerns than he probably even intended.
Initially rejected and now forgotten, Always came thanklessly wedged between the third Indiana Jones movie and Hook, the latter arguably Spielberg at his most transparent and self-regarding. Perhaps at the time, the film’s spirituality seemed rote and forced; after all, it was a remake and therefore seen as more a tribute to a bygone sensibility than as a thoughtful examination of human responsibility and faith. It should be re-viewed as a quintessential Spielberg film; it depicts the belief that our choices are at once motivated by a greater power and a distinct set of humane ethics. That Spielberg filters it all through classical Hollywood narrative tropes is wondrous. Here, all the director’s recurrent stylistic motifs become one with theme: the shafts of heavenly light that appear to emanate from everything, the delicate multiplane framing that both unites and separates the actors, the pop-cultural references that somehow function outside of time.
The entire universe of Always exists within one intermediary zone, an environment of indeterminate chronology, space, and geography; as photographed by Mikael Solomon, the whole film floats between earth and sky, mirroring the neither-here-nor-there realm the characters inhabit. The relationship between hotshot forest firefighting pilot Pete (Richard Dreyfuss) and tenacious air-traffic controller Dorinda (Holly Hunter) is one of limitless warmth and humor, yet still with a romantic yearning so urgent that their early scenes together flit by all too quickly. The characters simply glow, and Spielberg uses the actors’ personas to carry the film along; Dreyfuss’s jocular earnestness and Hunter’s eccentric, squirrely mannerisms are both always ready to segue into an outpouring of emotional reckoning. Following Pete’s death in a fiery midair explosion after a daring rescue of his firefighting compatriot Al (John Goodman), both Dreyfuss and Hunter must switch into a different spiritual mode, their shifting, doubting perceptions at odds with the unyielding faith at the film’s core. And now, here, caught in a space between one world and the next, Pete (in the afterlife) and Dorinda (in a timeless, geographically disorienting earthbound sphere) begin to enact the confusion implicit in the relationship between God, man, and nature. Pete must return as a guardian angel and act selflessly to aid apprehensive flyboy Brad Johnson and also to help Dorinda move on from her emotional stagnancy; his words become his friends’ subconscious thoughts.
Even prior to Pete’s death, Spielberg stages the romantic union of Pete and Dorinda as less a concrete “relationship” than as an intuitive dream state from which they will soon wake. They even communicate while she “shops in her sleep,” breathily rattling off supermarket items. While awake, Pete responds, their dialogue revealing their already nearly subconscious connection. A fireside chat in the wee hours of the morning attains a heavenly composure, the dramatic ethereal lighting making this their crucial scene; unaware of his imminent death, Pete discusses his own mortality, that he wants Dorinda to attend his funeral should it soon take place. An ominous blue chills the room, until the phone rings, calling Pete to his final mission. In one slow zoom toward Dorinda, Spielberg depicts a growing spiritual awareness; as the camera creeps closer, the morning sun breaks through the window, bathing the top of Hunter’s face in a warm, red glow.
From this point on, much of the film seems to take place at the break of dawn, with beams of light shooting through morning clouds. The blazing oranges, gleaming blues, and lush greens of Always elevate it way past the level of a mere genre piece. After Pete’s demise, he finds himself surrounded by the burnt remains of the forest for which he had attempted to extinguish a raging fire. Amidst the collapsed tangle of charred branches and ash remains a patch of verdant green meadow and white flowers. This is where he meets the angel Hap (Audrey Hepburn’s final screen appearance), who informs him of his spiritual destiny; Pete is sent back to the mortal realm to linger as a ghost. A year seems to pass in the blink of an eye, dead surround the living, earth meets sky. The temporal confusion is further complicated by the timelessness of Spielberg’s pop quotations: while the acting styles are memorably contemporary, there is a distinct Forties sensibility to the repartee recalling A Guy Named Joe’s era (“Gosh!” exclaims Pete, “You big lug!” declares Dorinda), while “their” song is the Fifties version of Jerome Kern’s Thirties standard “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” and Dorinda is seen, zombie-like, watching a skit from a Seventies episode of Saturday Night Live. The costuming at times also reflects this tendency toward anachronism, as Brad Johnson’s dated flyboy outfit, complete with leather and goggles, makes him something of an apparition out of Twelve O’Clock High. There’s never a shot of an urban landscape; the middle-of-nowhere Northern California setting is cut off from any outside contact.
In re-establishing a Forties wartime melodrama within the world of forest firefighters, Spielberg de-emphasizes false genre heroism and integrates philosophical concerns more biblical than ideological. The blistering ferocity of the forest fires invokes something greater: it’s “nature’s burn,” says Goodman’s Al. The environmental-spiritual discourse doesn’t stop with Always, especially if you buy the plausible theory that the entirety of Spielberg’s later A.I. Artificial Intelligence is a veiled Bible story, albeit one instigated by the melting of the polar ice caps. A.I.’s world is drowned (literally) in a cosmic joke, the true “greenhouse effect,” while the acres of thriving forest and plant life in Always burn with a universal wrath, a comparison that reflects the Torah’s recognition of the inherent duality within man’s relationship to his environment. Nature is at once a source of life and moral value as well as a threat to humanity, represented by the malevolent force of the flood, the test of human will in the face of natural fury which is in turn initiated by God’s indignation.
Then the smoke clears. After violently, self-destructively stealing a plane and attempting to put out a forest fire herself, Dorinda looks up in awe through the cockpit windshield. What she sees is a signature Spielberg shot, as indicative of a greater spiritual presence manifest in nature as that iconic image of Elliott’s bicycle soaring over the face of the moon. The noxious clouds part like the waves of the Red Sea, and beneath is the clear, brilliant night sky; Dorinda’s plane glides through a celestial orbit as expansive and crystalline as the ocean. If the fury and anger of the blaze can lead to this scene of vast serenity, then perhaps the world is indeed ruled by Goldblum’s chaos theory. Dorinda crash-lands in the water, her plane sinking and lodging to the earth’s bottom, later mirrored in what is perhaps the most devout scene of Spielberg’s career, the entrapment of A.I.’s “amphibicoptor” beneath the waves of our drowned universe, where robo-boy David comes face to face (literally, in a gorgeous superimposition) with the Blue Fairy, and prays to his hopelessly unresponsive God figure, remaining there forever and the next day and the next . . . always. Divine intervention frees both from their oceanic fates. On the verge of drowning, Dorinda sees Pete beside her in the cockpit, where he has always been watching over her. He releases her from his netherworld, guiding her to the water’s surface. Dripping wet, and left on an expanse of runway that leads into the great unknown, Dorinda is reborn into a new, concrete world.
Air, wind, fire, water—Always is elemental in its rapture. It supposes that spirituality itself reflects the evolving unity between humans and their environment in an effort to reconcile free will and the force of God. Spielberg has many times before remained reverent and even humbled while questioning man’s free will in the face of political, racial, and moral injustice (Amistad, The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report, Schindler’s List, A.I. ). It has been noted that on film, Spielberg’s methods are decidedly pantheistic (this is certainly indicated by the mix of Christianity and Judaism in Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan, and the Christlike imagery that abounds in Close Encounters, E.T., and Amistad). Whether it is done as a nondenominational tactic or as a means of reaching the widest possible audience is difficult to ascertain; either way, the director’s nonsecular foundations are rooted in the earth, waiting to grow into something awesome. This spiritual clarity, gleaned from a natural wonder and refracted through an elegant set of cinematic gestures, is what defines his output, and scares off many viewers hoping for even a glint of irony. As a fairy tale, Always is an ephemeral flight of fancy as innocent and yearning as the ripples in a wishing well. Yet it has an undeniable conviction that craves enlightenment, and attempts to explain just what is off-screen, what lies beyond the corners of the frame, what all those slack-jawed Spielberg characters are really staring at with that gaping astonishment. However divine, it’s right here on Earth.
This article originally appeared in Reverse Shot's Spring 2003 Spielberg symposium.
