“The Fabelmans” is the semi-fictional life story of filmmaking legend Steven Spielberg’s (“Jurassic Park”) experience growing up in his fraying Jewish family while simultaneously learning to make movies. Much more than just an autobiopic, the film stands as Spielberg’s contribution to the currently popular “movies about movies” canon, as well as a reflection on what preceded the decades of masterpieces he’s brought to the silver screen — films like “Jurassic Park,” “E.T.” and “Jaws” that have been some of my favorites ever since my father introduced me to them.
A pivotal moment of the movie is when the protagonist Sammy’s (Gabriel LaBelle, “American Gigolo”) mother Mitzi’s (Michelle Williams, “Showing Up”) estranged Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch, “The Goldbergs”) grabs the boy’s face to stretch and strain his cheeks while explaining how his mother gave up her art. As Sammy cries out and tears himself away, his uncle commands him: “I want you to remember how that hurt. Because when they say, ‘All this,’ ” he continues, gesturing to Sammy’s film editing machine, “when they say, ‘What you do, that’s cute, it’s a hobby — it’s like stamps, or butterfly collecting,’ you feel your face how it feels now.”
As I sat in my airplane seat with my father and sister asleep beside me, it was difficult not to feel my own cheeks hurt. It’s hard to put into words (ironic for a writer, of course) what I consider my own art — my writing — to mean to me. It’s even more difficult to explain it to others: why I would do this when I’m already a physics major, why I would choose to isolate myself to type away when there are a million other clubs I could socialize through, why I would write at all. But I can try, right?
Before Uncle Boris grabbed his nephew’s face, he predicates his monologue. “Family,” he begins, crossing one arm over his chest. “Art,” he continues, crossing the other — then rips them apart with a growl: “It’ll tear you in two.”
Later on in our flight, my father woke up and became confused upon seeing me watching “The Fabelmans” instead of sleeping, instead of making sure that jet lag didn’t completely screw up my sleep schedule by the time we reached our destination. I was making the wrong decision, I knew this, but flying through the air in a hunk of metal scares me to an end that I can’t even describe. Being with my family makes me feel safer, but it’s in art I also find my anxieties alleviated. It’s with my family and art I feel safest. I need both to feel safe and I need both to coexist for me. I hate airplanes, and I hate flying — but my mother and the rest of my family are in India, so fly we must.
Uncle Boris cries out, “Oh! You love those people, oh: your sisters, your mama, your papa. Except — ” Boris walks over and places his hand on Sammy’s editor. “Except this. This, I think you love a bit more.” Sam protests, “No, I don’t.” The boy runs for the door.
Except, I can feel how art pulls me away from those I love. Pragmatically, the time I spend writing is time locked in my room, away from my family and friends. I’ve already damaged relationships that way. After arriving, I had nights in India where I had to withdraw and plug away on my laptop, both for the responsibilities of my summer position on the Arts section and for times I felt I had to write. More than that, I know my family’s hope for me isn’t to become any kind of artist. Art won’t house me, art won’t feed me, art won’t pay my medical bills. My family has. For me, family is a complicated concept, a word that means different things to me than it does to most, except those who have also experienced the diaspora like I have. When they were my age, my parents packed everything they could into two suitcases and left their families, dividing our family across oceans for better opportunities for the family they were going to make. I know they didn’t do that so I could just throw away those opportunities to die for a dream.
Uncle Boris exclaims, “Oh! Run all you want, boychik, but you know I ain’t whistlin’ Dixie here.” He points right at Sammy, right at me. “You will do your art. And you’ll remember how it hurt.” His voice lowers. “So you know what I’m sayin’. Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth — but it’ll tear your heart out. You’ll be a shanda (“exile” in Yiddish) for your loved ones.”
I won’t let it. What “The Fabelmans” contends with is that as documentation of Spielberg’s parental problems, it’s put at odds with his family by airing out all their laundry for the sake of his art. When Sammy’s father (Paul Dano, “Little Miss Sunshine”) and mother explain the divorce to their weeping children, Sammy sees himself in the reflection moving through a shot, holding a film camera — as if Spielberg is telling his child stand-in that this pain too shall become his art. Art, in many ways, is how we make the painful parts of our life beautiful — and family is a rich, rich treasure trove to mine for this purpose. I can write on how lonely and miserable it is to not experience extended family the way everyone else around me seems to, to search for it desperately in every fellow Desi immigrant family or every friend group I’ve ever had. I’m struggling not to cry now while I write this.
But I don’t need art to make my family beautiful, I only need art to recognize it: the way my cousins imitate my actions and remind me that they look up to me, the way my aunts and uncles squeeze hundreds of little bits of advice into our conversations during the time they get to talk to me in person, the way my grandmother hugs me like I’ve never been hugged before — first an embrace around the waist, then holding to my forearms as we come apart, then the wrists, then the hands, until our fingers finally come away. I make this art because when my father wanted me to improve my penmanship, he mandated I fill one page a day, so I would write stories like the books we brought on our library trips; I make this art because my mother read a story I wrote about the Titanic and had the pages laminated to share them with everyone she could; I make this art because my sister writes better than I ever could when I was her age and I need to stay on my toes; I make this art because one of the only times I’ve seen my parents cry from happiness is when I wrote something for them; I make this art because this is how we can understand each other.
Family and art can pull us apart because they are as intrinsically intertwined as Uncle Boris’s crossed arms. They are both how we experience the universe — these people in our lives and their representations through art. They are how we experience the act of creation, whether it’s the creation of art or how we bring new family members into our life, the way I one day want to — no, need to. I need to be a father someday and an artist for the same reason: to bring beauty into the world as those before me have.
But there’s still the cautionary tale — when Sam is in high school after the split, his sister Reggie (Julia Butters, “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”) comes into her room crying, and instead of doing anything to console her, Sam asks if she can look his newly finished film over with him. And there they sit, Reggie still sobbing as Sam unflinchingly watches his film back.
I wonder if one day I will forget what I’ve written here, and will one day wordlessly be proofreading an article while a loved one cries into my arms.
I don’t think that’s possible, though, because it’s impossible for me to separate my emotions and family from my art: whether it’s my motherland’s colored iconography in film, reflections on my parents and our shared hair, writing recollections on India’s smellscape, musings on Kali Maata and my mother or being unable to not mention my sister when just reviewing “Never Have I Ever.” And, of course, my father showed me my first Spielberg films. My mother made me pay attention to every Bollywood film’s choreography so we could perform them later. The first time I drank with my extended family was at a hotel in Rajasthan, and I listened as they fervently discussed their favorite movies. On the flight back, I was about to watch “Pulp Fiction” to stay awake before my father stopped me, saying it wasn’t the kind of movie meant for a plane and we’d watch it when we got home. I met with my mother’s uncle one day during that trip to India, and through the bit of Hindi I’ve managed to learn in four semesters and a life as a first-generation immigrant, I explained what my summer job was. He asked if we put on local events like shows, and I explained that we most often analyze them. “Analyzing these things,” he said. “There’s potential there.”
I am under no illusion that I can achieve everything on art alone — that I will submit screenplays that fill up the cinemas, that I will write the next Great American Novel, that I could even scrounge up a position as a scientific journalist and combine my major with my art. Similarly, I know that my family will not always be perfect and beautiful and always within reach, always ready to make me feel safe. That’s okay. I need both to feel safe, to feel understood, to feel alive — so I will never stop pursuing both. It may tear me in two, pull my face apart and tear out my heart. But then they will put me back together, cradle my face gently and restore my heart. I’m going to see my art through, and I’m going to see my family whole again.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Saarthak Johri can be reached at sjohri@umich.edu.