The Manufacture of Wonder

There is a shot that is unmistakably Spielberg, and it is not the spectacle — it is the face watching the spectacle. The slow push-in on a character looking up, mouth slightly open, lit by a glow from off-screen, while John Williams swells: the children seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, the crowd before the mothership in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the boy and the alien in E.T.. Spielberg understood earlier and better than anyone that wonder is not in the marvel but in the witness — that we feel awe by watching someone else feel it. He built a near-infallible machine out of this: the reaction shot, the withheld reveal, the eye-level child's perspective, the Williams cue. It is the most effective emotional technology in popular cinema, and for a while it defined him so completely that "Spielbergian" came to mean a kind of manufactured, sentimental uplift.

But the machine was always more dangerous than its reputation. The same director invented the modern blockbuster with Jaws by withholding the shark — the wonder-machine running on dread instead of awe, the witness's terrified face standing in for the thing we don't see. And in the second half of his career he turned the apparatus deliberately toward the unbearable. The hand-held chaos of Saving Private Ryan opens on Omaha Beach with the wonder-machine inverted into pure sensory horror; Schindler's List points the reaction shot at the Holocaust; Munich, Minority Report, and A.I. run the machinery toward paranoia, complicity, and a despair Kubrick had bequeathed him. The face looking up in awe and the face looking up in terror are the same shot. Spielberg had built an instrument for making an audience feel something overwhelming, and it turned out to be agnostic about whether the overwhelming thing was a spaceship or a massacre.

That is the part his "sentimental" reputation gets wrong. The wonder and the horror are not two Spielbergs — the populist entertainer and the serious artist — but one technology pointed two ways. The reason his awe works is the same reason his dread works: he has mastered, more completely than anyone, the cinema of the reaction, the manufacture of overwhelming feeling through the witnessing face. To call it manufacture is not an insult; it is an accurate description of a craft so refined it disappears, leaving only the emotion it was built to produce. He is the great engineer of the popular sublime — the feeling, available to a mass audience, that something vast is happening just off the edge of the frame.

His influence is simply the visual grammar of mainstream cinema for fifty years; the blockbuster he invented is the water everyone now swims in, and the wonder-shot has been imitated so universally it no longer reads as anyone's signature. But the deeper lesson is the one his own career taught: that the machinery of popular emotion is not inherently shallow, that the same craft which sells you a friendly alien can deliver you to the gates of the worst thing humans ever did, and make you unable to look away. Spielberg manufactured wonder so well that we underestimated him — and then he aimed the wonder-machine at the dark, and we found out what it had been capable of all along.

---

The line: Duel → Jaws → Close Encounters of the Third Kind → E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial → Jurassic Park → Schindler's List → Saving Private Ryan → Munich

This line crosses:

• The Ten Years the Directors Won — Jaws is the film that ended New Hollywood and invented the blockbuster; Spielberg is the hinge of that whole history.
• The Cut That Stopped Meaning Anything — Saving Private Ryan's Omaha Beach is the wonder-machine inverted into sensory chaos, a key case in the story of post-continuity violence.

Read through: Molly Haskell, Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films · Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography.

A note on the argument: Spielberg's reaction-shot grammar, the Jaws blockbuster origin, and his later turn to historical horror are documented record. The framing of the awe and the dread as a single "wonder-machine" pointed two ways — the same shot serving the spaceship and the massacre — is this essay's reading.