Schindler was for the goyim, Fabelmans is for the Jews
long time y'all. i saw the The Fabelmans
Globalists,
Fall is the busy season. Winter too, I guess. But I'm back. Because in a torrent of work, I've spent way less time speaking with y'all, and my life was lamer for it.
That being said, I never really left. You can find me & my pal Sloane Peterson on the gram. And you can always holler at hollywoodforeveryall@gmail.com. I’ll tell you everything except my real name. (Haven’t decided whether to divulge my Hebrew name. Can’t give the stans too many challah crumbs…)
**
LA theater report jotted the week of Thanksgiving:
I've been going! A lot! Laemmle Glendale, Laemmle NoHo, LF 3... and I think my wife and I are the last people who still do this in the entire world? Banshees on Thanksgiving was EMPTY. What, you have FAMILIES??? How about your CINEFAMILY? lol jk but I'm the last motherfucker seeing these movies in theaters!!!!!! And look, I get it, I know the screens at the Laemmle Glendale are bite-sized, but they have popcorn, samosas, they're around the corner from my new "kabobery" Raffi's Place (shoutout to the loyal reader who tipped us off), and they play good stuff!!!!!!!Â
The Fabelmans
Last winter, I saw Spielberg's re-make of West Side Story, and I was bored into itchy misery. Afterwards I posted that Spielberg's last fifteen years as a director, in particular on the four-quadrant flicks, had been a car crash on the level of the recent work of Bob Zemeckis.Â
So when I walked into The Fabelmans at the Los Feliz 3, I was resentful that I had agreed to be there at all. And yeah, there were a couple moments where I couldn't help but think, "Did the characters really have to blurt out the subtext?"Â
But overall, I fucking loved it. Because while Spielberg may be unsubtle, he isn't simple. The Fabelmans isn't about ~~the magic of the movies~~. It's more about the mysteries of inner-life, not beyond reach, but uncomfortable to explore: the not-quite-capital-T-traumas that led him to pick up a camera as a coping mechanism. It's about parents who are at once loving yet preoccupied, caring yet remote, about how unhappiness seeps into the family idyll -- and how high-functioning people fail to process that unhappiness.
And for a certain group of people often associated with high-functioning unhappiness -- Jews -- the movie is a landmark. I'd go so far as to say it's Spielberg's most Jewish movie, even more so than Schindler's List. Because while Schindler is about a total mensch of a goy, The Fabelmans is about Jews being jewish: grinding, thriving, suffering, exotified, still different, in a world with no Schindler, where sidling up to power isn't just about achievement, but also assimilation & occasionally protection.Â
As you've guessed, I'm quite Jewish. I'm of the variety who laughed really hard when Nathan Fielder, in characteristic deadpan, stated the hard truth: "I haven't been to synagogue in years, because it's so boring." I grew up in a Jewish town -- truly, it's the goyim who must assimilate, and they do, god bless them. So while I hear the Jews control all media, I've gotta tell ya: Hollywood isn't Jewish enough for me to really feel at home. I was the only Jew in the creative group at an Oscar bait factory. If you wrote a Holocaust script in the last decade, I probably pretended to read it.
The last section of The Fabelmans is kicked off by fearsome anti-Semitic bullies descending on Sammy, the teenage protagonist who's a stand in for Spielberg. What follows is anything but a revenge fantasy. The boy doesn't hit back, but he does respond, in the indirect & deeply conflicted ways he can: with his words, his art, and even with his nebbish sex appeal, wooing the bully's girlfriend's Evangelical friend. This is Spielberg, at 75, finding something like an early Phillip Roth groove.Â
But beyond comic sex farce, Spielberg is reaching for something more openly vulnerable -- and more ambiguous. Typically, Spielberg insists on total clarity of the dramatic construct -- you never wonder what Spielberg's protagonists want or how they feel -- but Sammy's relationships with his goyish classmates unravel for reasons that Spielberg makes a point of acknowledging even he doesn't understand.Â
Sammy makes a movie shown at his prom that glorifies his bully. Afterwards the bully -- who looks to me like Harrison Ford in American Graffiti -- demands to know why Sammy did so. The bully can't make sense of it and maybe senses he's being manipulated. But Sammy says he doesn't really know! The buddy filmmaker makes a tortured little speech, revealing he has looked inward and found only conflict, cynicism, and shame: wanting to make a movie his lunkhead classmates would cheer for (perhaps to vicariously experience being seen as a hero too), but also -- his great shame -- wanting to be liked by the guy who punched him in the face for being Jewish.Â
This scene hit me at an interesting time: I'm working through my atypical reaction to learning Kanye hates Jews. For the first few days after Kanye declared "def con 3 on Jewish PEOPLE," I said, repeatedly, that I was psyched to accept his apology. He made Runaway. I told it to Jews and goyim alike. To their credit, everybody looked at me funny.
I was wrong. But I loved the guy.Â
And I always did. Much like the Max Fischer who went to Rushmore, I too was a nice boy who didn't do his homework but excelled in extracurriculars. During the week, I'd come home from school, and I'd listen to The College Dropout until it was too late to study. And on weekends once a month, I'd go to speech & debate tournaments, before it was my turn to speak, I'd listen to all twelve minutes of the album's finale, Last Call, on my iPod. How else was I going to get "pumped up?"
It was only through watching The Fabelmans that I had a real sense of why I downplayed Kanye's very plainly stated position. I guess I didn't want to accept that the person whose work built me up & brought me so much joy could hate me for who I am. It's one thing to scoff at historical Nazis or cartoonish visions of red necks who hate Jews. It's very different to think that someone you revere might consider you & your community a cancer on humanity. It's so uncomfortable that I feel like I can't really take it in, even now. Perhaps that's the relative privilege of whiteness: of not having had to be confronted in real life with outright prejudice. I'm not used to it.
Nonetheless, now that we're six years out from the "Jews Will Not Replace Us" chant at Charlottesville, Jewish artists are processing their reactions to anti-Semitism along with Spielberg -- and doing so in ways that feel honestly ambiguous. No, we aren't all avenging, Nazi-killing heroes. In fact, from that place of privilege, we question whether they hate us at all.
In Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal, I liked that I got to wonder along with him which of the new people in his life were uncomfortable with him and who actually thought his "son" shouldn't be raised by a Jew (I suspect the answer for many were both). And I just finished watching The Patient on FX, a limited series from the guys who made The Americans. It's about a Jewish shrink who gets kidnapped by a non-Jewish serial killer who demands treatment for his murderous rage. The series hints at the possibility of a violent reprisal, but it pointedly avoids the trap. And the serial killer isn't a Nazi, but he sees his therapist’s Jewishness as crucial to his plan. He knows Jews are the best therapists. He brings his captive a bagel.
In The Fabelmans, Sammy’s inexplicable behavior seems like coping by minimizing -- classic cognitive dissonance, behaving in a way that softens the uncomfortable truth. And reflecting further on that scene and its resonance for me, I've done a lot of that minimizing of anti-Semitism beyond Kanye too. When I let myself go there mentally, I can think of several instances when non-Jews have made jokes about my being Jewish that have made me uncomfortable, and I've laughed and thrown it right back. But I didn't feel good. What the hell else are you supposed to do? It happened a few times when I did a semester abroad in London and lived in a dorm with kids from Europe, a continent with a trickier history in this regard.
But I have said so many times to my friends & my parents that I was "non-alarmist" when it came to anti-Semitism. And I had an awesome justification: lots of Jews, many of whom are Republicans, get hysterical about pro-Palestinian sentiment on college campuses. They mistakenly conflate that legitimate political position with anti-Semitism as part of a broader demonizing of the Left. So, harping on anti-Semitism seemed uncool, if not disingenuous to me.
But of course, apart from that very real & unfortunate dynamic, we do have a rising tide of Jew hatred, i.e. 1) Kanye, 2) a Republican party whose major politicians use the words "globalist" and "banker" as dog whistles, and 3) a whole ass internet awash in conspiracy theories that are transparent rip-offs of the Protocols — i.e. the one that fomented the Holocaust — now given legitimacy & fuel by Kanye.
Here is my most resonant personal experience with anti-Semitism: One time in 2016, I talked on Twitter for hours with a Nazi, an American guy my age in Virginia. He posted a lot of crazy shit from a burner. I engaged him and eased him into a dialogue. Eventually, he mentioned had a cousin who went to USC. I tried to tell him his cousin must be around Jews all the time and that we couldn't be so bad. That didn't work: He still hated Jews. Then I tried making him feel bad about being unemployed & obviously dull, reminding him he couldn't blame the Jews for his failures to keep pace in modern life. Of course, I didn't really want to persuade him anymore. I was just bullying him. He didn't fight back. He kept chatting with me, attempting to find common references. To make me laugh. As much as he wanted me to know there was no Holocaust, he wanted me to like him more. He said he was coming to visit his cousin and joked, repeatedly, about meeting up to fuck.
Somehow, I never talked about that exchange in therapy, and like Sammy, I still don’t know what I was thinking in starting it, continuing it, or repressing it. Maybe, like 7-year-old Sammy recreating & filming the scene of a train crash that gave him nightmares, I just wanted a feeling of control over something very scary.
So for all the magic Spielberg has conjured, his latest trick is helping us Jews look honestly at our precarious perch — and inside ourselves.
Hollywood Forever Y'all,
Max