The camera as a shield
"The Fabelmans" scene analysis
Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is one of the standout movies of the year. The legendary director’s long-awaited semi-autobiographical film has its roots in the late 1990s when he first expressed public interest in a project about his young life in New Jersey, Arizona and California. Over 20 years later, the movie offers an intimate and critical view of the Spielberg family during the director’s adolescence.
After a very touching silent, home movie-style sequence that portrays the Fabelman family moving into their new home in Saratoga, California, the parents sit their four kids down for a family meeting. Long-expected but heartwrenching, we watch as the kids react to their parents announcing the decision to separate.
The three Fabelman sisters, seated on the couch, begin to cry as they process what is happening. Meanwhile, our teenage protagonist Sam Fabelman (Spielberg’s self-insert character) sits silently at the bottom of the stairs. At this moment, there is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot that heartbreakingly ties together every slice of life the audience has seen so far of Sam.
As Sam watches his family fracture, he glances at the mirror on the wall. In it, he sees himself circling his family with his camera, filming the drama.
It is out of place as a sort of daydream, as the movie does not utilize this style anywhere else. It’s also easy to miss in a moment like this, where the drama and emotions are so high that each individual shot can sort of blend together. But it tells us the most about the movie, about Sam and, most importantly, about Steven Spielberg.
The film opens with a young Sam being both entranced and traumatized by the climactic train crash in The Greatest Show on Earth. He goes on to unlock his passion for filmmaking through his need to process and control this trauma, by recreating and filming the train crash.
Years later, we can see Sam has taken comfort in being behind the camera. He doesn’t want to attend his senior class’s ditch day event in Santa Cruz but is convinced to go when he is presented with the opportunity to film it with an Arriflex.
Sam uses his camera as a shield. This is perhaps a common phenomenon for those of us who handle cameras a lot. The filmmaker/photographer/videographer/etc can use the camera to dissociate, in a way. You are still presented with the world in front of you, but behind the glass of a viewfinder. It acts as a sort of barrier between lived experience and perceived experience.
Sam clearly struggles with complex emotions. He is adept at dramatizing them, as we see when he is directing the lead actor for his WWII film, but processing them is an entirely different beast. When things get difficult for Sam he retreats behind his camera, opting to translate his trauma to drama to put up a barrier and protect himself. He is trying to control the things in his life that seem uncontrollable.
