From Critics at Large: Steve Spielberg's Blockbusters

7:54Alexandra Schwartz:I knew to whom the Jaws belonged. I knew that there was a big ass shark and that that wasn't a great thing. Okay. And that it was scary. I knew a lot about the movie before I saw it. But news alert. I liked Jaws. Jaws is good.

8:09Naomi Fry:Jaws is awesome.

8:10Alexandra Schwartz:This is the news I'm bringing to our listeners.

8:13Naomi Fry:Jaws is a great movie. I, you know, watched it and was not just frightened by the idea of it as like a five-year-old when my sister like, you know, freaked me out about not going in the water because Jaws will get me. But later actually watched it, you know, in my teens and liked it. Yeah. But then didn't watch it for many years. Returned to it during the pandemic, during lockdown. And I remember how much it struck me then that it was a movie about COVID. You know, the conflict between kind of like private enterprise and, you know, individual decision making and kind of like the greater good. Right.

8:56Naomi Fry:And the kind of like binding of that against kind of like a force that comes from the outside and terrorizes a small town in this case. But I was like, wow, this is really deep. Do you want to like give us a little synopsis?

9:12Alexandra Schwartz:Jaws stars Roy Scheider. He's the police chief of a town called Amity. And the police chief has a problem, which is that there has been a rash of shark attacks. right before, right around this time of year, right before the 4th of July. And to your point, Nomi, about the common good, the first half of the movie is setting up this sort of problem, this commerce versus public safety versus economic advancement, etc. The mayor's like, no way, man, we're not shutting down. If we make an effort today, we might be able to save August. August? For Christ's sake, tomorrow's the 4th of July. And we will be open for business.

9:55Alexandra Schwartz:It's going to be one of the best summers we've ever had. Now, if you fellas are concerned about the beaches, you do whatever you have to to make them safe.

10:01Naomi Fry:But those beaches will be open for this weekend.

10:06Alexandra Schwartz:First big beach day happens, and predictably. Chomp! There's blood in the water. The police chief, Brody, goes out to sea with a marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, who is, I think, just so good.

10:24Naomi Fry:Also great outfits.

10:26Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. Oh, yeah. Dreyfus is wearing a raglan sweatshirt out on the boat that's beautifully— Yes. I just love this gray sweatshirt. It's so true. And Robert Shaw plays this briny professional shark hunter named Quint. And they go out on a boat, the three of them, in the sort of radical miniaturization of the crew in something like Moby Dick. it is for me it inaugurates this this film jaws which had a budget of nine million dollars and then had almost 500 million dollars in box office at the time was the highest grossing film ever it was the most successful movie that had ever been made uh what it inaugurates for me in the other spielberg movies that i've seen and enjoyed that we'll talk about is this this primacy of knowledge.

11:17Alexandra Schwartz:What do people, the mass of people, deserve to know? And what does that knowledge prompt us to do? This happens a lot in Spielberg. It's like a sort of cognitive or sort of informational or political or commercial elite and trying to figure out what they owe to the masses of people in terms of sharing a kind of knowledge.

11:41Vinson Cunningham:Absolutely. I think that's something that would be great for us and for listeners also, honestly, to keep in mind over the course of the episode because I think that is one of Spielberg's biggest concerns. He just hit the nail on the head. He's concerned with civics. I just want to come back, if I can, for one second to the movie-making of Jaws itself because it's one of the great movie-making stories. Our colleague Michael Schulman has a great chapter on Jaws in his book Oscar Wars, the podcast that I'm very into that I always love talking about, What Went Wrong, Movie-making podcast has a great episode about it.

12:11Vinson Cunningham:But what is kind of crazy about Jaws in retrospect is that everyone thought it would be a big flop and no one expected it to work. The studio, Universal, had already purchased this novel, which was forthcoming to adapt. Then the novel comes out and is a huge hit. So they need to move up the shooting like from a year and a half to basically two months. They have to cast this thing immediately. That all is going on. The technology of the sharks was a complete mess. And I really encourage people, if you like stories about just, like, disasters, basically the movie Jaws was a disaster too. They could not get these huge sharks to operate.

12:51Vinson Cunningham:They couldn't do it. And that failure led to the genius of Jaws because Spielberg came to realize, and Spielberg was only 26, which was really mind-blowing to me. But he came to realize that not showing the shark would be more terrifying than showing these big animatronic sculptures of sharks that they kept trying and failing to operate. He came to this Hitchcockian view of things. And Nomi, I think you referred to the shower of Psycho before. I mean, that's it. But I think Spielberg quite literally said he wanted people to have that, to feel about going to the beach like people felt about going into the shower after Psycho.

13:31Naomi Fry:Yeah. And I think this connects back, this links back to this issue of knowledge where it's like the most dangerous thing is being oblivious in a sense. So like these people on the beach, these happy fools, there is that water. It looks so inviting. Hot summer day.

13:51Alexandra Schwartz:And what could be better?

13:53Naomi Fry:What could be better? And yet under that water, that shark we don't see. And I think that as again, as you said, this is something that repeats again and again in Spielberg's movies. what don't we know and what danger lurks in that which we don't know.

14:14Vinson Cunningham:Totally. So when we talk about Jaws inventing this form of the blockbuster, there are a few things we're talking about. The first is promotion. It seems obvious to us now, but at the time, $1.8 million was spent on promoting Jaws, which was huge because the studio was trying to ride the high of the successful novel and also because it figured out very quickly that people love this movie. People were spilling their popcorn, screaming at this movie. The studio was like, this is a thing. Let's spend money to make it more of a thing. There were television spots promoting the film. All these things that seem super obvious to us now that were not so obvious at the time.

14:49Vinson Cunningham:The summertime release, another like no-duh thing that actually was quite a duh because most big releases had happened in the winter and the spring. And suddenly you get summertime and wow, kids are out of school. Teenagers want to go see this movie. The teen market is huge. Let's market movies to teens. That begins there. Merchandising. Guys, there were Jaws T-shirts. There were Jaws plastic cups. There were Jaws record albums. There were Jaws beach towels, bicycle bags. Not beach towels. Blankets, costume jewelry, toys. And then finally, I would say the other big, big element that makes up a blockbuster and seems obvious to us now but was invented by this was mass distribution.

15:32Vinson Cunningham:Because up till that point, studios were still testing movies in certain markets, rolling them out slowly. And with Jaws, the movie was just an event. It was released wide. It was everywhere all at once.

15:44Alexandra Schwartz:Alex, you had a Spielberg film that you hadn't seen, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

15:51Vinson Cunningham:Oh, yeah. I had never seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is true. This is Spielberg's movie from 1977. And science fiction and the idea of science fiction and aliens had never totally been my thing. And I say had because it's an amazing movie. I think, like, this is going to be the theme. We each are watching a known minted Spielberg classic movie. Like, surprise, they're awesome. But in a way, I kind of think I like our, I mean, I'm anticipating Nomi's reaction to her choice and maybe she'll have hated it and I'll be completely wrong in my prediction here. But I do think that this is something that has dogged Spielberg forever, where because he became such a commercial filmmaker so young, because Jaws ended up being this huge surprise hit and because then he repeated it with Close Encounters.

16:38Vinson Cunningham:And then he blasts out of the park with Jurassic Park. People like to think of him as, you know, oh, he's like the popcorn guy. And then you watch his movies and you're like, these are amazing. What a great filmmaker. What is amazing about this movie is that it's a really human movie, even though it's about aliens. Something is going on in the skies. People all around the world are noticing weird stuff. In India, a whole group of people is ecstatically singing a melody.

17:14Vinson Cunningham:And when they're asked, where did you hear this sound? They all point with their four fingers to the skies. Guys, Francois Truffaut is running around in the guise of Lacombe, the character he plays. I mean, guys, there's an amazing Truffaut performance accompanied by a wonderful Bob Balaban as his assistant translating from the French. That duo would have watched a whole spinoff about that kooky duo. They're trying to figure out what's going on. And in the middle of all of this, Richard Dreyfuss, who here is playing a guy called Roy. Roy Neary. Roy Neary, who works as a telephone lineman and lives with his wife and three kids, has an encounter, a close encounter, with a UFO and is forever changed by it.

17:59Vinson Cunningham:And one thing I love about the movie is that Spielberg pays really close attention to the human cost of wanting to know more. There's a depiction of this totally chaotic family, which I really loved. I love the honesty about how much chaos there can be in a family with kids.

18:16Naomi Fry:It's so like 70s divorce, this movie is. So much so. What it is, it's family therapy. I mean, we all go. We all talk. No one is singled out. And maybe it's not your fault anyway. Oh, it's wonderful. It still works. Why? Come on, Tina. You'll go. Please. Please. Cry, baby. Cry, baby. Cry, baby. It's not an idea. He's making a fucking mess in the living room trying to create this like weird like mountain that he keeps envisioning in his mind. He makes it out of mashed potatoes. Then he makes it out of dirt in the middle of the living room. Like the family is gone. The family is like destroyed in the name of this kind of seeking.

19:03Naomi Fry:And I think it's also I mean, obviously, we also know, you know, whoever watched the Fablemans. This is autobiographical for Spielberg. This is autobiographical. You know, Spielberg himself was a child of divorce, etc. But there's also something that is so, you know, post-60s about this movie, about like, this is a person who wants something different. And the family is collapsing because of that, for like, better or worse, you know, for this idea of kind of a self-fulfillment that has been wrought by societal changes.

19:39Vinson Cunningham:I love that take. You know? Yeah, that's so smart. Yeah, exactly. Oh, dad's having his midlife crisis, so we all have to, so the family breaks up.

19:47Alexandra Schwartz:Everybody's going to talk about aliens.

19:48Vinson Cunningham:Exactly. And then, of course, there's the aliens of it. These are Spielbergian aliens. And by that, I mean kind, cute, not as cute as E.T., but cute aliens who want to make contact, who are benevolent figures. It has the stuff, Vincent, that you mentioned that's going to be important for Disclosure Day also where there's a government body that doesn't want people to know things. It's trying to keep people in the dark. But there is a benevolence and a hopefulness to this movie.

20:23Naomi Fry:So great. It's a wonderful movie because I think what you're saying, Alex, similarly to you, and I think you know this, I'm not a sci-fi person. I'm not a fantasy person. I'm a realism person, canonically. and uh and yet this is one of my favorite movies because it's a movie about people that's right

20:43Alexandra Schwartz:and just in keeping with our our theme here uh close encounters it's no jaws but it does really well at the box office he made it for less than 20 million dollars it makes more than 300 million yeah it's uh you know this is spielberg in his at the crest one of the many crests of his career.

21:03Naomi Fry:One of the many crests. And on to another crest. The crest. The crest. The crest of crests.

21:09Alexandra Schwartz:The crest of crests.

21:10Naomi Fry:Which was my blind spot. I shockingly had never seen Jurassic Park from 1993. And my co-hosts were shocked and dismayed to hear that that was the case. And so I hastened to rectify. Also excited. I hastened to rectify this and I watched Jurassic Park for the first time a few days ago. Great movie. I was glued to my seat. I was riveted. In this movie, we have these three scientists, Alan Grant, played by Sam Neill. We have Dr. Sattler, Ellie Sattler, played by Laura Dern, his colleague. And we have the kind of like submitted good looks mathematician, Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum. And they are chosen to go to this new theme park that is being kept heavily under wraps where scientists have managed to recreate dinosaurs.

22:10How fast are they?

22:11Alexandra Schwartz:Well, we clocked the T-Rex to 32 miles an hour.

22:16Vinson Cunningham:T-Rex?

22:18Alexandra Schwartz:Mm-hmm.

22:19Vinson Cunningham:You said you've got a T-Rex? Uh-huh.

22:22Alexandra Schwartz:Say again? We have a T-Rex.

22:27Naomi Fry:it's once again that thing about like the dangers of knowledge and what is done with knowledge that is hidden from many and used by few there's a kind of like scientific and it's actually kind of like i felt was very prescient about these kind of like elon musky type figures who are like I am God. I will create this like my own wonderland and nothing will go wrong. Of course. And then of course, when there's that hubristic impulse, all hell breaks loose. And it's a great movie.

23:06Alexandra Schwartz:Did you have a favorite among the dinosaurs?

23:08Naomi Fry:Okay. I thought the raptors were super scary.

23:11Alexandra Schwartz:Yes.

23:12Naomi Fry:Like I was like, okay, I don't want to tangle with them. I kept being like, why? Why? Don't do it. But I like the sick triceratops.

23:24Alexandra Schwartz:We like them sick.

23:26Naomi Fry:Yes. Yes.

23:27Alexandra Schwartz:The sicker the better when it comes to dinosaurs, I would imagine. Do you guys remember watching Jurassic Park?

23:34Naomi Fry:Oh, of course.

23:35Vinson Cunningham:Lara Fox is home on her kitchen TV in, I want to say, 1997. Yeah. I had not been allowed to see this. I was mesmerized. Absolutely mesmerized. And I didn't understand. I was watching something that had grossed$1.058 billion. One billion dollars. I mean, my Lord, did people love this film. And again, what Spielberg is so good at is bringing the human to the fore in these extreme sci-fi kind of circumstances. And Jurassic Park does that in an amazing way. I remember the dinosaurs when I think of Jurassic Park. But what I really think about is Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum and the people and how they faced this situation.

24:20Vinson Cunningham:And that's what makes a great blockbuster.

24:28Alexandra Schwartz:In a minute, from the classics to the present, Disclosure Day. Critics at large from The New Yorker will be right back.

24:45Naomi Fry:On Love It or Leave It, host John Lovett takes us through the biggest stories in politics and culture with jokes, analysis, and a little catharsis. But to be fair, mostly jokes. So who is he talking to? Comedians, Hollywood legends, politicians just trying to prove they can hang. Their publicists don't always love those conversations, but I think you will. You can catch the show live in L.A. or find full episodes and monologues on YouTube or wherever you go for podcasts.

25:22Naomi Fry:Before we get back to the episode, we want to tell you about a project we're working on and we're really excited about.

25:29Alexandra Schwartz:July 4th is on the way, as I'm sure all of our listeners know. 250 years of our country, America. And I've been wanting to develop a playlist made up of songs about America. I guess really songs about our feelings about America, whatever that means right now.

25:47Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, and we want this to be a joint project. We three are each going to pick some songs to share. And listeners, we really want you to help us pick some songs too. And we'll work all of our picks into a whole episode built around this idea of America seen through music.

26:02Naomi Fry:Right. I mean, the song that you pick could reflect, you know, the hopes you have for America or the fears you have for America or the things you hate right now about America. And get specific. Tell us about the lines that speak to you, the lyrics that speak to you. Yep.

26:19Vinson Cunningham:Give us a range. Contemporary, old, in between, whatever you got. We're here for it.

26:23Naomi Fry:I'm so psyched for this. And so I want you guys to pick up your phones, record a voice memo and tell us what song reflects your feelings about America today. And then please send these voicemails that you record to us at themailatnewyorker.com subject line critics.

26:47Elliot.

26:49Vinson Cunningham:I'm keeping him.

26:53Vinson Cunningham:What is it? He won't hurt you, Gertie. He won't hurt you, Gertie. I'm not going to hurt you.

27:04Alexandra Schwartz:Can we talk E.T. for a second?

27:06Naomi Fry:We can always talk E.T. I watched E.T. on the plane a mere few days ago. On him. And I was crying as if it was 1982, and I was watching it for the first time. That's right. That's right.

27:20Vinson Cunningham:That's right. That's right. I mean, I'm going to just come out and say it. E.T. is a movie I'm afraid to rewatch because I don't know if I can go to that place emotionally right now or ever. I will. This episode will inspire me, and I'll probably be sobbing within a number of days along to E.T. But the emotional nakedness of that wrinkled little alien and that shriveled up little old man baby. That little guy. And the abandoned children who care for him.

27:52Naomi Fry:Yes. It is the most— Again, the children of divorce. The children of divorce. That American scourge. What happened to the American family, my friends?

28:04Vinson Cunningham:The way that E.T. has been baked into the culture, I think it's still there. Growing up, not even just with E.T. itself, but with the commercials for the Universal Studios ride, E.T. ride, all I wanted to do in my one life on Earth was to get in that little bicycle ride and go. Go up.

28:24Alexandra Schwartz:Silhouetted against the moon.

28:25Vinson Cunningham:Amblin. Send me up. Send me up. Vincent, have you seen E.T. recently? What's your feeling about it?

28:32Alexandra Schwartz:Again, it's a very emotional film. Again, Spielberg's autobiographical penchant, you know, it's sort of based on an imaginary friend he created after the divorce of his parents. So he's always tugging at his own heartstrings first.

28:46Vinson Cunningham:Yeah.

28:47Alexandra Schwartz:And thereby tugging at ours. But yeah, I just remember it as maybe it was my, I mean, between E.T. and Alf. I'm not sure which one was my first engagement with the sitcom Alf, which centered around a furry puppet who was also an alien, right? Yeah, it came from Melmac. There you go. Never forget. These were my first aliens.

29:15Naomi Fry:Alf was sexy, though.

29:19Alexandra Schwartz:that's i don't even know i'm sorry but it's so you what because he's so her suit

29:26Naomi Fry:because he has like a little you know kind of hair tough yeah he's here her suit and he's a

29:32Alexandra Schwartz:little mean no me like tortured troubled chest hair the next in one second we're about to hear

29:41Vinson Cunningham:that elf had submitted good looks and we're just not going to know what to do with it i've been Sorry. Apologies to everyone. Whereas E.T. is merely heartbreakingly cute. Exactly. Yes. We brought it back. We brought it home.

29:52Alexandra Schwartz:Well, I think that just even the mention, the brief mention of E.T. is a great way to get now on to Disclosure Day. Yes. Which is in theaters now, doing very well, as we mentioned before. Who would like to offer a synopsis of Disclosure Day?

30:09Naomi Fry:I feel like we have only one woman. I'm kind of feeling it today, guys. You got it.

30:15Alexandra Schwartz:I'm feeling it. I see the spark.

30:17Vinson Cunningham:I'm feeling it. We got Josh O 'Connor, my man Josh O 'Connor, as a rogue. Of course. Josh O 'Connor the rogue has been working at a sinister corporation whose name I want to say is Hendrix, even though that's not its name.

30:32Alexandra Schwartz:It's close to that. What is it?

30:33Vinson Cunningham:It's like Wembex? Wembex. Windex. He's been working at Windex.

30:43Vinson Cunningham:Wardex. Wardex. Rolex? Windex? No, it's Wardex. Wardex. I just love thinking about how they workshop to find the appropriately evil name. Wardex has some information it doesn't want the people to know. Namely, as we find out very quickly, that aliens have made contact with the human race. The word is not out, but fortunately, Josh O 'Connor, whose name in this movie is Daniel Kelmer, has lots of little files that have all this evidence on them. He's stolen them from Word X, and now he's trying to get away. Meanwhile, over in Kansas City, we have Emily Blunt as Margaret Fairchild, a weather woman.

31:23Vinson Cunningham:And she, one day, sees this cardinal pop into her window and begins speaking every language on the globe. And this is because the aliens have made contact with her. And these two need to find each other. They are the pieces in the puzzle that will allow for Disclosure Day, which is going to be the day when Daniel Kellner lets the whole world know this has been going on. The nemesis of this movie is Noah Scanlon, an absolutely unrecognizable Colin Firth.

31:50Alexandra Schwartz:It took me a minute.

31:51Vinson Cunningham:Yeah. He has a little device that looks like a mezuzah, and he likes to hold it. And that evil mezuzah lets him drop in on other people and speak to them inside their own heads. And it's a chase. It's a chase. Are the good guys going to be able to reach the global population before the bad guys can stop them? Because this movie has a very clear ethics, which is people deserve the right to know.

32:18Naomi Fry:And something that is very painful is the mistreatment of these aliens that is being revealed. These poor aliens who seem kind of, you know, frail and sympathetic. They're very similar in appearance to aliens we've seen in Spielberg before, E.T. and Close Encounters, kind of Wemby-like. Wemby-like, perhaps slightly shorter, but, you know, kind of like. Many little Wembys. That is very painful. And in fact, you know, this also reminds me of Schindler's List. You know, there is, I think, in Spielberg's work, and this might be like the Jewishness or I don't know, I think there is this kind of fear or pain around the idea of abusing or repressing a more vulnerable race.

33:14Naomi Fry:or group or whatever you want to call it. I don't know. I mean, in terms of whether we liked this movie or not. Well, did you? Let's start there. I will say the first 45 minutes or so, I was like, fuck, this is great. Like Spielberg is so back. Like this is amazing. Emily Blunt is amazing. Emily Blunt is so good. She was great. She was great. She's funny and she's like, she's so talented and she does a great job and it's just like very gripping. You know, you're like, what's going to happen? Oh my God, it kind of starts in media stress. Immediately you're kind of tossed into this world of danger and intrigue and you don't totally understand what's happening.

33:59Naomi Fry:And so I was gripped and I was really enjoying and I was like, yes, Spielberg is like, yes, he's doing his blockbuster thing where it's like great performances, really well written, but also like really taught and kind of like action-packed. But then it started, I felt like there was a lot of, that was superfluous, I guess. I was like, there was the whole kind of like story with like Jane, the Eve Houston girlfriend character, her faith and her like coming up as a nun or aspirant nun and like those theological questions that kind of like, I felt like way down the kind of the main crux of the whole thing.

34:44Naomi Fry:I felt like Coleman Domingo, you know, great actor, love him. But I was like, how has he suddenly become like the new Morgan Freeman? You know, this kind of like soft eyed, you know, kind of like wise black man who knows everything and can lead us to the. It was like a little much I felt like. And also just like on the level of plot, there was a lot going on. And I was like, couldn't we have like whittled this down a little bit more?

35:16Alexandra Schwartz:What do you think, Alex?

35:18Vinson Cunningham:I think I appreciated this movie more than I enjoyed it. I appreciated a few things. I appreciated being at a movie theater on opening weekend with a bunch of people around me. That experience. Fun. Fun. I appreciated the chases. Enjoyed them very much. Bursting through buildings. A nice train chase sequence, which feels old-fashioned, just the fact that a train was involved. But trains still ride among us every day. They're out there. Use them. Good. Big train sequence. Big train sequence. Jumping around on trains. Loved Josh O 'Connor and Emily Blunt. And yet, I felt that this movie, I don't want to say it felt formulaic because it's not Spielberg exactly painting by numbers.

36:04Vinson Cunningham:I think it's Spielberg revisiting many of his obsessions and themes with a huge sincerity to him. You know, we did an episode on earnestness, listeners may recall, and this movie would fit right in there. This movie treats this question of human life and extra human life with great earnestness and religion with great earnestness. There's a nun has a very prominent role. It's the second big movie in recent memory. The other one is Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, where a nunnery, a convent, is treated as a place of refuge and political resistance. That was kind of interesting to me that that idea came up for both of these filmmakers.

36:42Vinson Cunningham:But all that said, I just didn't feel the human element in the way that I really want to in a movie and particularly in a Spielberg movie. And I felt Spielberg trying for it, but I just wasn't touched by it. And the intellectual ideas about what it would be like to make contact with another species, I feel that Spielberg has treated another more than species. I feel that Spielberg has treated more interestingly before, which is itself interesting to me because Spielberg has given interviews lately in which he makes it very clear that he does believe that alien life exists and that he would like to meet it.

37:20Vinson Cunningham:This is all coming from a very real place for him. Vincent, what did you think?

37:25Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, it's interesting because I do think that it's not really tugging at the heartstrings, partially because to me, of the Spielberg films that I've seen, it seems to be the most sort of conceptual and abstract. I think it's trying to sort of rearrange, again, our society and see it through the pain of a different window. it reminds me of a poem by robert hayden i might have even mentioned it on this podcast he has this poem it's called american journal and it's from it's from the point of view of an alien uh visiting america can i read a stanza please and so the poem is as the title suggests it's a journal by this alien who has been sent by his overlords to come and sort of take notes on America.

38:21Alexandra Schwartz:He's like an alien Tocqueville or something like that. Crowds gathering in the streets today for some reason obscure to me. Noise and violent motion, repulsive physical contact, sentinels, pigs I heard them called, with flailing clubs, rage and bleeding and frenzy and screaming, machines wailing, unbearable decibels. I fled lest vibrations of the brutal scene do further harm to my metabolism, already overtaxed. It's this being who—

38:55Naomi Fry:It's about UFC at the White House.

38:57Alexandra Schwartz:There you go. Just, like, confused by American bloodlust and dynamism. But also, as we see throughout the poem, we kind of come to understand that the alien overlords are also kind of softly authoritarian, and he's, like, sort of also attracted this alien to, I don't know, some, like, sort of charisma of the barbaric Americans or something like that. And we get to see through this film too, you know, there is this moment when the, I don't know, slight spoiler. There's a moment when the tapes are finally released and there is a newscaster who is seeing them concurrently with them being shown to people on television.

39:39And she's kind of almost crying and she's saying,

39:42Alexandra Schwartz:it's just like, this just calls into question our place and you can tell she means this existentially and like what is a human being and what are they for but also as they show these scenes of like you know alien aliens being whatever like operated upon or like proto waterboarded or whatever you know what is our place like what what what are we what that we would do this too you know so there's all these i think that question comes so much to the fore in this film that it overrides, and I think purposely, any human drama, which to me plays against the Spielbergian thing. I don't think it's ever trying to make us cry or weep or feel for a human being, or even the aliens, really.

40:30Alexandra Schwartz:It's a thought experiment where the existence of these beings and their sort of the unmasking of this fact, I don't know, creates this grand, like, counterfactual. So I was kind of riveted by that. I thought it was really funny. So I think I may, I think, and I'm still working through this. I saw it last night. I think I liked it, but I'm still thinking about it. I'm thinking about it.

41:01Alexandra Schwartz:When we're back, the state of the blockbuster and Steven Spielberg's legacy. That's in a minute on Critics at Large from the New Yorker.

41:25Alexandra Schwartz:So we've been talking about the state of the blockbuster. Does Disclosure Day, maybe it's box office success, maybe it's actual existence as an artifact, does it make you think differently about where this form, the blockbuster, is headed?

41:41Naomi Fry:I think one of the main things that we haven't really talked about yet is that this is not an IP-based movie, right? I mean, we've had blockbusters. We have blockbusters. We have all of the Marvel movies, which are enormously expensive and usually do enormously well in the box office, but they are not original stories and there was like before when i was sitting i went to see it in a theater on the upper west side uh friday afternoon so you know the theater was full yeah you know there were like 10 trailers before almost all of them were some form of like ip kind of like mega entertainment type thing.

42:34Naomi Fry:Yeah, like Supergirl. I was like, I could not be less interested than seeing a movie about Superman's cousin. How dare you? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The only movie that I saw that I was like, okay, this is maybe like super stupid, but I'm like so in, was the movie about like Brad Pitt and his dog. Did you see that? I didn't see that.

42:56Alexandra Schwartz:I didn't get that trailer.

42:57Naomi Fry:There is some action movie where Brad Pitt has a trusty dog and they go through to hell and back together. Holy shit. And I was like, okay, this is, I mean, it's Brad.

43:10Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah. And it's a dog.

43:12Naomi Fry:And it's a dog. It's Brad and it's a dog. Sounds like a formula. Heart of the beast. Heart of the beast. I was like, I'm going to fucking going to I'm going to see this movie because it correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it's also an original story.

43:27Alexandra Schwartz:There you go. And I was like, here we go. Set in the wilds of Alaska.

43:32Naomi Fry:Set in the wilds of Alaska.

43:33Vinson Cunningham:I'm like, we're so bad in a harsh landscape that would likely kill any other man or dog.

43:40Naomi Fry:I know. And so.

43:43Alexandra Schwartz:Yeah, man.

43:44Naomi Fry:And so I was like, OK, you know what? This might be like totally stupid, but I'm like, Hollywood still got it.

43:53Alexandra Schwartz:You know?

43:54Naomi Fry:A man and his dog. It's magic, yeah. But not just any man. Not just any dog. I mean, listen, Brad looks incredible.

44:02Alexandra Schwartz:I was thinking, and I'm going to offer my answer first because I've been thinking about him a lot. But I wonder what you guys think of who is working in the Spielberg vein these days. and it's it's hard to it's a hard answer because of course part of what the Spielberg vein is is working in many different veins right at least genre wise I've been thinking about Ryan Coogler a lot because like you know the movie like Sinners yeah

44:30Naomi Fry:doing like Sinners

44:31Alexandra Schwartz:but then also having Fruitvale Station is like it's like having Jurassic Park and Schindler's List you know he's this very versatile but also very commercially minded filmmaker who is nonetheless trying to really speak in language we can comprehend on the level of society or whatever. Are there other people doing the thing, this thing?

44:50Naomi Fry:I mean, I think that the combination of kind of history and fantasy, politics, you know, society and sci-fi, I think, yeah, I think Kugler and just within even Sinners in and of itself that combines so many of these impulses, I think that's a great read interpretation. I'm also thinking about someone like Jordan Peele, who directed the movie Nope, which came out in 2022.

45:21Alexandra Schwartz:Nope is very, very much in the van of this.

45:25Naomi Fry:Yeah, yeah. And this kind of like wonder of the 80s, you know, someone who grew up. Hands Across America and Us, yeah. Clearly grew up on Spielberg. And yeah, and the kind of like, I guess playfulness I would say

45:42Alexandra Schwartz:to me it seems like if there's a legacy there it's almost like what we call poptimism in music criticism that like the assurance that you can make art in the context of not only genre but the market the other person that I was thinking about in this van was Greta Gerwig who you know Barbie next is Narnia but also has, you know, very indie-seeming films at the onset of her career and seems unashamed to say, yeah, I can do all of that and put forward a vision, whether it's literally how could you get more commercial than Barbie or something else. So that's, you know.

46:22Vinson Cunningham:I think that's so right, Vincent. I think that one of the paths that Spielberg blazed was being a kind of auteur within the big capitalist commercial framework. And he's gotten shit from both sides for the fact that he straddles this divide, You know, whether it's being called not an artist or what have you. But when you talk about blockbusters and movies that are getting people in their seats, beyond a question, the movies to be talking about right now are Obsession and Backrooms. And those are what makes this an interesting story of the blockbuster where Spielberg fits in is that we have 79-year-old Spielberg going up against two guys who are roughly the same age he was when Jaws came out.

47:02Vinson Cunningham:So we have someone, he's not done making movies. I hear he's about to make his first Western. Can't wait to see it all in. But we have someone at the latter part of his career and the end of his career who's back again trying to use his own formula, reinvented, to make a big hit film. And then we have these two other super scrappy filmmakers. A lot has been said about them. They're coming from the internet. They're making these movies on shoestring budgets. But these are both original horror concepts that just keep giving and giving and giving and generating great excitement at the box office.

47:38Vinson Cunningham:So I think we're spying. I don't know, and no one knows if those things become a kind of Spielbergian formula. But we have like Grandfather's special, which is a blockbuster at the moment, and we have the young guys thing. And Spielberg's movie is very successful. About 59 % of its audience we've read was over the ancient age of 34, you know, us three included. I think there's a lot of general complaining about, of course, we know there is, about Gen Z killing the movies and they don't appreciate it with the screens in front of their faces. Like, actually, no. Here the young people are showing up to watch movies in the theater to enjoy them.

48:18Vinson Cunningham:And it's really older people who have not come back in force to the movies since COVID. So Spielberg has got them back. And for that, I'm very glad. But I don't think it is pointing a new direction in the way that Backroom's an obsession is. What do you think, Vincent?

48:32Alexandra Schwartz:I think that's probably right. Again, I do think it's trying to—it's almost like Spielberg is trying to bring sort of a space of like, I don't know, almost discourse about belief. This is, to me, the whole thing about the nunnery and the conversations. Get Z to a nunnery. I insist on going to the nunnery. Laura asking these questions, but by what right would you bring it to light? And all these, you know, I do think he's trying to do something else, which I think is interesting to do in the space of the blockbuster. It's almost like Spielberg created the blockbuster, but then also created a space within the blockbuster to not parody the blockbuster, but comment on it.

49:18Alexandra Schwartz:Like he's like, he created the blockbuster and the meta blockbuster or something like that. But it's interesting to me that these new films, Backroom's Obsession, are horror. And therefore they are still following a now time-tested path. It's like, we'll trust you if you could scare us real good first. Like, you could say that that's what JAWS is, you know? If you could do that, then we'll let you, you know, we trust you. You can take us anywhere you want to of a summer, you know? So I do think that they're still working in the tradition. To your point about the demographics of Disclosure Day, we should just say it made$44 million in North America over the opening weekend, which is quite respectable.

50:02Alexandra Schwartz:And, you know, as we have been saying, he is back.

50:05Vinson Cunningham:Yeah, I mean, we have no idea if this movie will turn out to be considered overall a success. It's funny. We're at the beginning of it. To make money back, it's going to have to generate a huge amount of money. The other thing we should say about Spielberg blockbusters, and I'm sure many people listening know this, is that the other thing that Spielberg did was not just deliver enormous opening weekends. It was keeping movies in theaters for a very, very long time. Movies that people – that kept generating intense interest that people wanted to see for months and months and months, which was and remains extremely rare.

50:37Vinson Cunningham:So that's going to be the test. Does it have staying power? But Spielberg is Spielberg. And, you know, I just keep thinking back on some episodes we've done and how nicely Spielberg could have fit into any – so many of them because like the suburban episode we did. You know, Spielberg, the bard of the suburbs, just for one example. and he really just is still going. Still going. Bless him.

51:08Alexandra Schwartz:That was the Critics at Large podcast and this is New Yorker Radio Hour. You can find them and us wherever you get your podcasts. We'll be back later this week with the hosts of the popular podcast The Rest is History. David Remnick talks with them about when it comes to the American Revolution, we've been thinking about it all wrong. That's next time on the New Yorker Radio Hour. I hope you'll join us.

51:43Alexandra Schwartz:Hey, everybody, it's me, W. Kamau Bell. This season on my podcast, who's with me, I speak with actor, rapper, producer, David Diggs. What doesn't he do?

51:52Naomi Fry:The jump off for me was Hamilton and it was the most popular thing in a very long time. But it was still for me, it was me and my friends making something dumb. I'm a relatively shy person. I play a lot of boisterous characters.

52:05Alexandra Schwartz:I'm really that way in life. Listen to Who's With Me with W. Kwan Bell wherever you get your podcasts.