History and Hope: How Spielberg Remembers the Past Through Objects
“Nothing matters more than memory. Without memory we learn nothing, without memory there’s no coherence, no progress. I’d image that’s why historians ultimately write history and why human beings hunger for history and, I have to add, for fiction based on history. It’s the hunger we feel for coherence, it’s the hunger we feel for progress for a better world. And it’s much the same hunger, in other words, that compels soldiers in a just war to fight — the hunger for justice. Because I think justice and memory are inseparable. Without remembering what has happened, what went wrong, what went right, the blessings that justice brings — dignity, real prosperity, individual and social health, peace — these blessings will not and cannot arrive. History lights a path towards justice, so without history there’s no hope.”
Steven Spielberg discusses the importance of history during a speech at an event marking the 149th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 2013.
When Steven Spielberg stood at Gettysburg to give that speech on the 149th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s iconic address, he was standing at the centre of history. President Barack Obama had recently been voted into his second term and the economic and social change he’d promised five years earlier was starting to come into fruition. Spielberg himself was feeling the hands of history weigh heavy as well. Lincoln was enjoying critical success, garnering awards recognition and, most impressively of all, proving an unexpected box office smash. The fascination with the film, and the way it reflected not just America’s past, but also its present and, potentially, its future, was pleasing reward for the director, not only because he’d been planning it for over a decade, but also because it fit in with his personal vision of history. As he said in his speech, this look back at what had been was giving hope for what could be.
Spielberg has always been interested in history, and from a young age he was taught the importance of remembering it. When he was growing up, his grandfather Fievel (for whom the mouse star of Amblin’s An American Tail films is named) would tell him stirring stories of his life 19th Century Russia. With the number of Jews able to attend school restricted, Fievel had to be inventive with his education, even if that sometimes came at the cost of his own well-being. “They [allowed] Jews to listen through open windows to the classes,” Spielberg has said. “So he pretty much went to school — fall, winter, and spring — by sitting outside in driving snow, outside of open windows.”The telling of such stories was a common occurrence in the Spielberg household. The boy who’d grow up to make Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan learned to count by studying the numbers tattooed on the arms of Holocaust survivors and got his first glimpse of conflict through his father Arnold’s memories of service. “He never did it because he was trying to teach me something. It was just his life,” Spielberg told The Independent in 2011. “I was born a year after the war ended. And all of his friends were veterans, from the Second World War. They used to hang out together in years and years, so I grew up with these stories… That’s the great thing about making movies and telling stories. History opens up new worlds to film-makers all the time.”
While Arnold’s storytelling may not have been geared around imparting any particular life lesson to his son, Spielberg’s storytelling most certainly is. His historical films are accessible tales that are designed to compress large and unwieldy periods into something more manageable. It’s why he insisted writer Tony Kushner focus his initial, hugely comprehensive 500-page script for Lincoln on just a small part of the President’s life, and why he repeatedly employs the storytelling technique I’ll explore in this essay: the symbolic use of special objects such as toys, pictures and dogtags. It’s history through microcosm and these key objects cease to be mere items under Spielberg’s direction, they become totems that the characters, and by extension the audience, must learn from.
The four films I’ll study in this article are listed below, alongside the items they feature.
Empire of the Sun: In this story of a young boy (Jim) and his attempts to survive life in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, Spielberg uses a couple of different key items: Jim’s toy plane and a replica of Norman Rockwell’s famous painting ‘Freedom From Fear’. These help comfort Jim in times of distress but also act as a reminder of how disconnected from reality he is.
Schindler’s List: Spielberg’s Holocaust drama uses the list itself and the ring given to Oskar Schindler at the film’s conclusion as its key objects. The ring is inscribed with the Jewish saying ‘He who saves one life saves the world entire’ and acts as an ongoing reminder of the Holocaust and those who suffered and died in it. The candles that bookmark the film, and perhaps even the Schindlerjuden themselves, are also important objects in the film.
Saving Private Ryan: A few items are dotted throughout this film, with Private Carparzo’s letter home and the dogtags of deceased soldiers that Captain Miller looks through being the most prominent. Like in Schindler’s List, Spielberg also uses humans as the object, with Miller (and his grave) this time becoming the item via his dying insistence that Ryan ‘earn it’.
War Horse: Albert’s horse Joey is both lead character and significant item here. Criss-crossing through multiple stories involving multiple characters, Joey becomes the thing that ties them all together. The war pendant attached to him (an invention of Spielberg and screenwriter Richard Curtis that’s not a part of Michael Murpurgo’s source novel) also performs this role.
There are a number of historical films not included in this list, including Amistad, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies. These have been excluded so the essay doesn’t run too long, but they still contain key items: the Presidential busts John Quincy Adams gives his speech against in Amistad, the photographic plates of slaves Tad views in Lincoln, the painting given by Abel to Donovan in Bridge of Spies. While it’s a shame to remove these items, the list of Spielberg’s totemic historical objects is simply too long to allow for total comprehensiveness, and I feel that the four films chosen illuminate his use, and the way his use has changed, well.
In the rest of this essay, I’ll break each of these films down and explain how Spielberg’s use of significant objects highlights his representation of historical events as something we must carry with us and learn from.
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