from the vault: an essay from 2015 about steven spielberg and conspiracy theories
for my elite paid tier... the first piece i ever had published online and some thoughts on the origins of my writing career
as i mentioned in my last dispatch, going forward i am going to make it a point to use this newsletter as a place to reclaim and re-publish some of my old writing that has been lost to time. writing gets “lost” for a variety of reasons: sometimes the publication goes under, sometimes it gets removed from a site for one reason or anything, sometimes you change your name and can’t get anyone to update it on things that were published years ago. today’s post is actually the very first thing i ever published on a website that was not my own blog.
some context here: around 2014 and 2015, i had started to dip my toes into the ecosystem known as “F*lm Tw*tter” in the hopes of finding like-minded people and maybe figuring out how to be a professional film critic like i wanted to be. at that time it was actually a pretty good place for finding out about #obscure and #rare cinema and not just irony memes, which is another story, but basically i started seeing a lot of people my age online who seemed like they were really embarking on their writing careers and had written for a lot of different outlets and i wanted to catch up and figure out how to be one of those people with a bunch of bylines in my bio.
so, like many young writers do, i set out to find basically any publication that would have me, making a list of places that other young writers contributed to and that seemed accessible to me as someone with negative bylines. unfortunately, there is a whole tier of the media economy predicated on exploiting young naive writers like i was at that time, who don’t have any connections and are desperate to get published anyway they can. some of these sites are very obvious clickbait content farms like screenrant, others are more respectable “real” publications that just pay absolute shit or are basically some weird dude’s glorified blog. this is especially rampant in film writing i think which basically has like, the least money compared to almost every other kind of media/arts writing. there is unfortunately a necessary amount of dues-paying in freelance writing and digital media and i think it is mostly accepted as a resigned fact of life that it’s “just reality” that you have to exploit yourself for years to Make It in this business. i was fortunate to start on that grind during college so i wasn’t trying to entirely subsist on writing income at least not yet. but it’s also really easy to get sucked up in that content hampster wheel and i think a lot of people get stuck in this tier of like bullshit film content or they start gofundme-ing to pay their way to sundance, just total mark for the business behavior
but ANYWAY that is beside the point here
i say all this because today’s essay was published for a site that is the epitome of junk publications. at the time i wrote this, it was called “Sound On Sight” (dumb name) and then it changed management and became “PopOptiq” (somehow an even dumber name name) and then it changed management anagine and kept the name but became a total zombie site with lists of like “15 Celebrities With Their Own Tequila Brand” copy-pasted from Wikipedia. i don’t think i was paid for this piece but i wrote a few more things for them before they kicked the bucket, including a month-long series on sci-fi horror movies for halloween one year, and they did start throwing me like 20 bucks a piece at that time. to which i was just basically like “Gee whiz some guy is paying me money to write about Jackie Chan movies!!!” and i was like 21 so what the fuck did i know.
anyway i thought this would be a good piece to share not just because it was a milestone in my personal career but because it’s actually somewhat timely? i have not seen the new indiana jones and i don’t know when or if i will, but online discussion about the indy movies and historical conspiracies got me thinking about this essay, which was basically Baby’s First Auteurism and an attempt at unpacking some recurring paranoid imagery in spielberg’s films. a lot of my writing from this era annoys me a little bit because i was trying sooo hard to be clever and witty and cutting, because i read too much AV club and thought critics were supposed to be smarmy. you can also tell i wasn’t really politically radicalized at this point because there were a lot of like, sociopolitical points i think i would have made if i had written it a few years later. but i was actually surprised at how well some of the logic and argument holds up? like i was really freaking thorough in my textual analysis… so perhaps this will still hold interest or resonance for some. i also lightly edited it to bring it more up to par with my standards today
unfortunately this one is gonna be behind the paywall but maybe that will encourage some folks to subscribe and support!!!!
“Reflections of Evil: Steven Spielberg and conspiracy theories”
Originally published at Sound On Sight / PopOptiq, 2015
There are few real-life figures more beloved in American cinema than Steven Spielberg. He’s earned that adoration without question, but his worship hinders the dialogue around his work. Like his buddy Colonel G. Lucas, Spielberg is a brand first, a businessman second, and a filmmaker last.
It’s time to loosen up the conversation. Spielberg is less an auteur and more Hollywood’s greatest journeyman, a master craftsman whose natural talent allows him to tackle almost any material. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t common themes that run throughout his work. A lot of breath has been devoted to his sense of wonder and awe, his parent’s divorce, his love of children. But there’s a darker current to his work, one that appears less subtly in thrillers like The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, and other conspiracy films of the New Hollywood era. It’s a sense of paranoia, of suburban invasion, of small men stumbling into much larger worlds that begin to unravel around them, of alternate histories and hidden truths. Just like we rarely speak of Star Wars as an allegory for the Vietnam War, despite its story of a guerilla faction taking on a mechanized empire, Spielberg’s films are always viewed as what brought about the end of Hollywood’s supposed renaissance, not as the logical continuation of that era’s post-Watergate fears.
I’d never thought about Spielberg’s films in this light until I saw filmmaker Damon Packard’s camcorder-and-chemtrails conspiracy treatise, Reflections of Evil. Packard is one of the few true underground filmmakers of our day, the modern gatekeeper to Kenneth Anger’s Los Angeles, or the Kuchar brothers if they made YouTube fan films. Like Anger, Packard obsesses over the cult-like sway popular entertainment has over American (and global) audiences. Throughout his career, he’s devoted much of his artistic energy to those two cinematic star children, Spielberg and Lucas. Packard seems equally in awe of and haunted by the impact films like Star Wars had on him and millions of others as children, and he’s spent much of his career exploring and lampooning the influence of the blockbuster brats. He’s a visual critic with the gall and the balls to take on the most untouchable figures in American cinema.