The World That Spielberg Made

It’s a cliché to say that Steven Spielberg played an essential role in my life, partly because he did for so many people. More than any saint or historic figure, Indiana Jones was my hero, and Spielberg my role model. For Halloween, I always wore a fedora, my dad’s leather jacket, and a real bullwhip, which he was irresponsible (or wise) enough to buy me. I spent hours forcing my cousins to play a part in my ingenious homemade movies, which I then forced the grown-ups to watch. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My answer was always, “a director like Spielberg.”

Unlike him, however, I did not have the fortitude to follow the path of the filmmaker (a journey Spielberg beautifully portrays in The Fabelmans). After deciding that I wasn’t cut out for the life of an artist, a single scene in Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies persuaded me to go to law school.

Over the years, however, as I became disillusioned with the moral lessons and worldview the Boomers imparted, I fell out of love with their art—and no one embodies Boomer art better than Spielberg.

His latest film, Disclosure Day, follows whistleblowers trying to expose the existence of benevolent alien life against the wishes of a shadowy organization tasked with keeping it a secret. The film, which is essentially a chase thriller in the mold of The Fugitive, is crafted with the technical mastery one would expect from the director of Jaws and Jurassic Park. To the extent that it is an action-thriller, it’s a success. The film also attempts to grapple with the theological consequences of alien life, but does so superficially. The film’s other themes are lacking—and the explanation is simple: like the rest of Spielberg’s movies, they’ve become dated.

Many have called Disclosure Day a “Boomer project,” and they are not wrong—not because interest in UFOs belongs exclusively to that generation (belief in UFOs is actually rising across demographics in America), but because the idea that a secretive government-adjacent organization is withholding the truth from the Spielberg’s “ordinary” Americans is, at its core, pure Boomer mythology: that some authoritative power must be confronted and defeated by those awakened to the possibility of a brighter future. And the stage for this confrontation? Legacy media and broadcast television.

This is Steven Spielberg’s world; we’re just living in it. Spielberg came of age at a time when the Woodstock generation dreamt of sticking it to “The Man.” Spielberg all but invented the Hollywood blockbuster, shaped the template for artistic production in Hollywood for decades, and defined the cultural and moral landscape for three generations of Americans. For good or ill, Raiders of the Lost Ark shaped the American idea of what a Nazi is—against which many Americans have defined their own national identity; Saving Private Ryan and Empire of the Sun informed our view of World War II; Daniel Day-Lewis’s Lincoln is the one that lives in the American imagination; Jurassic Park stands as an early environmentalist film; A.I. taught us to look for consciousness in LLMs; and, as Alec Ryrie points out in The Age of Hitler, “[W]ith the award-laden Schindler’s List, Hollywood looked the Holocaust in the eye for the first time.” He fails to realize, as most Boomers do, that by any definition, he is The Man.

Disclosure Day has failed to connect with young Americans because it’s completely disconnected from their concerns and anxieties. During a pivotal scene, the leader of the whistleblowers (played by Colman Domingo) tells the villain that disclosure is necessary because people “are starved for the truth.” This gets it exactly backward. The internet, for all its chaos, has cursed us with the truth. In many ways, “disclosure day” already happened when we were disabused of the lie that our ruling classes knew what they were doing. Not only were the adults not in the room, but there were never any adults to begin with.

Over the past few weeks, cultural critics have been trying to explain the massive and unprecedented success of the Zoomer-directed indie horror films Backrooms and Obsession. The answer is deceptively simple: Directors Kane Parsons and Curry Barker understand what young people are actually afraid of—and it has nothing to do with the concerns of an older, out-of-touch Boomer class. Zoomers stare at the uncertainty caused by the lack of competent leadership that previous generations failed to provide. The Boomer worldview has fractured the society that it aspired to bring together through the exultation of empathy that runs through the heart of Disclosure Day. Barker and Parsons have decided to make art that speaks to more relevant fears and are being rewarded for it. Let us hope that Steven Spielberg realizes he is no longer the underdog and hasn’t been for a long time.