Spielberg's Children
It's Steven's world, we're just dying in it
The Baffer
By Jonathon Sturgeon
'This penchant for escapist self-referencing mocks all of us in the trailer for Spielberg’s forthcoming Ready Player One. The film, a spectacle of digital animation that should remind us, if we cared to remember, that Spielberg gentrified cinema with Jurassic Park’s radically animated dinosaurs, appears to be a work of intense contemporary realism, though it’s supposedly set in 2045. The trailer’s voiceover begins:
"I live here in Columbus, Ohio. In 2045, it’s still ranked the fastest growing city on Earth, but it sure doesn’t seem like it when you live in the Stacks. They call our generation “the missing millions.” Missing not because we went anywhere; there’s nowhere left to go. Nowhere except the Oasis. It’s the only place where it feels like I mean anything. A world where the limits of reality are your own imagination."
This voiceover could not better describe Spielbergism—and life under the sway of total entertainment—if it meant to. “The Stacks,” a trashscape of stacked mobile homes and broken-down vehicles, very much describes the rural Midwestern landscape in 2017. And it’s clear that we’ve already lost not one but two generations to “the Oasis,” a “world” defined by “imagination.” The Oasis is just any given Spielberg film, a fact driven home by what follows: a procession of characters and images from Spielberg’s entire output, from Back to the Future’s DeLorean to the giant from The Iron Giant. Spielberg is a net of crisscrossing references to Spielberg.'
It's Steven's world, we're just dying in it
The Baffer
By Jonathon Sturgeon
'This penchant for escapist self-referencing mocks all of us in the trailer for Spielberg’s forthcoming Ready Player One. The film, a spectacle of digital animation that should remind us, if we cared to remember, that Spielberg gentrified cinema with Jurassic Park’s radically animated dinosaurs, appears to be a work of intense contemporary realism, though it’s supposedly set in 2045. The trailer’s voiceover begins:
"I live here in Columbus, Ohio. In 2045, it’s still ranked the fastest growing city on Earth, but it sure doesn’t seem like it when you live in the Stacks. They call our generation “the missing millions.” Missing not because we went anywhere; there’s nowhere left to go. Nowhere except the Oasis. It’s the only place where it feels like I mean anything. A world where the limits of reality are your own imagination."
This voiceover could not better describe Spielbergism—and life under the sway of total entertainment—if it meant to. “The Stacks,” a trashscape of stacked mobile homes and broken-down vehicles, very much describes the rural Midwestern landscape in 2017. And it’s clear that we’ve already lost not one but two generations to “the Oasis,” a “world” defined by “imagination.” The Oasis is just any given Spielberg film, a fact driven home by what follows: a procession of characters and images from Spielberg’s entire output, from Back to the Future’s DeLorean to the giant from The Iron Giant. Spielberg is a net of crisscrossing references to Spielberg.'
