'Disclosure Day,' 'Obsession,' and the Future of Filmmaking
As a veteran filmmaker unleashes another blockbuster, other commercial hits from newer generations raise questions about Hollywood's next chapter.
Years before Tony Kushner became a favorite collaborator of the world’s most revered blockbuster director, the playwright nailed the filmmaker’s appeal. The first half of Kushner’s 1988 show Angeles in America ends with the AIDS-stricken Prior Walter encounters a dazzling angelic being who sets up the cosmic metaphors to come. “God almighty,” Prior exclaims. “Very Steven Spielberg!”
Kushner went on to write four Spielberg movies, including Munich and Lincoln — some of the director’s more straightforward dramatic works — but he was reacting to the more populist element of the Spielberg oeuvre. By the late 1980s, Spielberg was a household name thanks to his success at translating complicated ideas about people and society into the language of universal awe. The so-called “Spielberg Face” (explored in this brilliant video essay by Kevin B. Lee) encapsulates the euphoria of experiencing forces that defy traditional explanations. For Spielberg, aliens provide the greatest avatar of that effect. His latest effort embodies a 50-year cinematic journey.
Disclosure Day is very Steven Spielberg for many reasons, most obviously because it marks his fifth movie centered on extraterrestrial life on Earth. It follows decades of inquiries into otherworldly visitations. At 17, Spielberg made his amateur debut with Firefly, following in subsequent years with Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., War of the Worlds, and — yes, this counts — Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.