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Growing Up Absurd: Spielberg's Empire of the Sun
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13542 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
1,665 Words |
| Author
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Paul Coates
Paul Coates is professor of literature at McGill University,
Montreal, Canada. |
The idea that Steven Spielberg's imagination could ever become consubstantial with that of J.G. Ballard may seem unlikely--as unlikely as that a mogwai should become a gremlin. And yet in the cartoon Inferno of Gremlins, produced by Spielberg and directed by the appropriately named Joe Dante, just such a transformation of the cuddly into the menacing took place. Ronald Reagan's belief that there are no limits to what an American can become seems to be exemplified by the suburban whizkid with a gift for playful magic, who can turn himself into a Georgia feminist or a connoisseur of apocalypse. Or at least--as The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun show--he thinks he can.
Horrified Documentation
Ballard's Empire of the Sun is half a horrified documentation and half a celebration of his childhood experiences in a World War II Japanese internment camp near Shanghai. And prewar Shanghai is a place Spielberg has visited before, on a Hollywood set, in the stunning opening of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The return to Shanghai is nevertheless hardly a homecoming for Spielberg. Ballard's mind is in fact rather unheimlich (unhomely, i.e., uncanny), and his visionary detachment is alien to the Spielberg who lays such stress on identification and family relationships. The film seeks to counteract that detachment, even on the formal level of translating into actual speech many of the things Ballard's Jim only ever thinks (in the book he does not tell Mr. Maxted that he's become an atheist). Here, Spielberg is seeking to breach Jim's frightening solipsism, and also to generate some dialogue. In doing so, however, he often ends up scrambling the logic of the original scene by fusing thoughts (often thoughts from elsewhere in the text) with spoken text.
This is merely one instance of how the film dissipates the book's insistent sense of the uncanny. Where Spielberg's Jim is made in the director's own image, a boy bustling around the internment camp obsessed with flight and movement, Ballard's is obsessed with death--in particular, with the corpses of those Chinese and Japanese he dared never approach while they were alive, and considers with awe as soon as they no longer pose a threat to him, once they are dead. As he crouches in the cockpit of a rusted Japanese plane, Jim's identification with the dead pilot is not just an expression of a boy's love of planes; it is also a way of playing dead so as to survive, a source of the detachment that pervades Ballard's other fiction. The book shows Jim viewing events with the alienated eyes of the dead. Thus the death of others becomes an aesthetic spectacle for his--as in the scene
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