Spielbergian Hauntings

Steven Spielberg, having arrived as an exciting director of suspense, wonderment, and adventure in the 1970s with Duel (1971), Jaws (1975), and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), would enjoy another strong decade of success in the 1980s with hits like Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), and Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985), which Spielberg produced. There is an ostensible whimsy to much of his output from these years, with the tone of productions like 1941 (1979), Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984), and Batteries Not Included (1987) contrasting starkly with the moralistic solemnity of later, more overtly race-conscious and hostile projects like Schindler’s List (1993), Amistad (1997), The Last Days (1998), and Saving Private Ryan (1998). Even much of Spielberg’s classic and seemingly apolitical output of the seventies and eighties, however, is preoccupied with Jewish themes. Three projects of the 1980s, all concerned in one sense or another with hauntings – Poltergeist (1982), The Money Pit (1986), and the 1985 Amazing Stories episode “Ghost Train” – furnish instructional examples.

Poltergeist was written by producer Spielberg in collaboration with Mark Victor and Michael Grais and was officially directed by Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) helmer Tobe Hooper, whose creative control over the set, however, has been disputed, with Spielberg being credited by some as Poltergeist’s de facto director. Whatever the truth of the details, Spielberg’s hand in the making of the movie was undeniably strong, as it bears the unmistakable mark of the Spielbergian sensibility. A first question that presents itself to the viewer is why this piece of American entertainment has a German title – “poltergeists”, though previously a subject of paranormal inquiry, not having been widely known to the public before the movie’s release. The short answer is because it is Jewish. While reinforcing the long Hollywood association of scary things with Germanness, the ironic result of the Ashkenazic experience in Europe is that Poltergeist might just as easily be mistaken for Yiddish, lending the title a German-Jewish sound – like Spielberg.

Poltergeist’s opening credits appear over a television station’s sign-off signal employing the national anthem, indicating that this is a story concerned with American identity and with the power of media. Tellingly, suburban father and real estate agent Steve Freeling (Coach’s Craig T. Nelson) has fallen asleep in front of the TV – recalling the theme of loss of consciousness as a vulnerability to attack in Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Freeling and his family are already asleep – already in danger before the action begins. Steven and his wife Diane (JoBeth Williams) smoke marijuana while he reads a book about Ronald Reagan, marking the couple as people who passed through the meatgrinder of the 1960s counterculture and emerged as rootless, capitalistic, and libertarian (“Freeling”) materialists in the 1980s, relocating to the fictional Los Angeles suburb of Cuesta Verde, which translates as “green slope” but might also be playfully translated as “costs green”, hinting at the burdens imposed by “keeping up with the Joneses”. (In perhaps a winking acknowledgment of the financial parasitism empowered by debt-financed lifestyles, a swarm of mosquitos inexplicably plagues Steve in a moment of comic relief.) Arguably, Cuesta Verde could also allude to the “grassy knoll” and the dark inheritances of the sixties political occult. Diane wears a jersey bearing the number 65, probably emblematic of her generation and the events – black riots, the implementation of the “Great Society”, the passing of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, and general Jewish ascendancy – that would do much to shape their future. They also belong to the first generation raised on television.

The Freelings’ son, Robbie (Oliver Robins), is a spectator sports fan like his father, and obviously obsessed with Star Wars (1977). Everything in his bedroom, in fact, points to an ersatz American identity – informed by reading Captain America comic books, for example – wholly shaped by the mass media and by consumerist trends. A superficial Christianity appears to persist in the family, with Robbie’s little sister, Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke), reciting a prayer over her dead pet bird. Older, more cynical sister Dana (Dominique Dunne) has no faith, however. “Oh, brother,” she scoffs at Carol Anne’s display of belief in God. Carol Anne – who, unlike her siblings, has fair hair – remains unspoiled and therefore becomes the focus of the malevolent force that accesses the Freelings’ home through their television. “TV people” – Jews – begin to speak to her through the device, misleading her, and eventually trapping her on “the other side” of the screen, holding the little girl’s consciousness captive. “A terrible presence is in there with her – so much rage, so much betrayal,” explains psychic Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein). “I don’t know what hovers over this house, but it was strong enough to punch a hole into this world and take your daughter away from you,” she continues. “It lies to her. It says things only a child can understand. It has been usin’ her […] To her, it simply is another child. To us, it is the Beast.” The Jewishness of television is more than evident when Gene Shalit’s painfully ethnic face appears on the set in the Freelings’ kitchen during a breakfast scene, and the damage and havoc unleashed in the house through the supernatural medium of television, therefore, is only a literal representation of the cultural project of disrupting Americans’ domesticity as part of a postwar initiative to prevent the reemergence of political anti-Semitism, intact white families being perceived as the principal source of danger. As Carol Anne’s mother teases her earlier, goldfish (i.e., blond Christians) threaten to grow up and turn into sharks (i.e., great white Nazis).

As the Freelings discover, “what hovers over this house” is the fact that it was built over a cemetery. The modern American way of life, this narrative would have it, was constructed on death and desecration and so is haunted by the sins of the fathers and the resentments of the dead. There is no indication that the graves under the property are those of Jews, but Poltergeist does communicate a vague sense that the prosperity enjoyed by the family is tainted – a feeling not unrelated to the fostering of white guilt, another major postwar undertaking of the mass media and academia through “Holocaust” education and anti-white interpretations of US and European history. Ultimately, Steve is able to reclaim Carol Anne, but only by asserting his authority as the head of the household, relinquishing his claim to the ill-gotten real-estate, and – after temporarily relocating his family to a motel – removing the TV from the room. Poltergeist, after humbling and humiliating the family, concludes with the Freelings’ survival, but only after they are again uprooted.

Some confusion exists among viewers as to whether the Freelings’ home was built on an Indian burial ground because of a scene in which real estate developer Mr. Teague (James Karen) mentions Indian burial grounds in a general way, but without seeming to refer to Steve Freeling’s property specifically. It is interesting to note, however, that one such site was “unearthed in 1969 during the construction of a supermarket in Agoura Hills, the Los Angeles suburb where Poltergeist would film in 1981,” according to Gary Susman. Spielberg would promote shame over the conquest of Native America with “Ghost Train”, a story he wrote, produced, and directed for the debut episode of Amazing Stories in 1985. This supernatural tale concerns the oddly named Globe family (perhaps in reference to the concept of the “Cosmic Man” advanced by Wyndham Lewis, who asserts that “the global society of the future has actually started already on the North American continent”) after they flee Chicago, presumably to escape the blacks, and find themselves displaced much like the Freelings. The cheesy Amazing Stories intro depicts a family bonding around a TV set, and this is what Fenton Globe (Scott Paulin) appears to have in mind for his family when they move into a safely remote and newly constructed home equipped with a dish for satellite reception. Fenton’s son Brian (Lukas Haas) is disturbed by the move, however. “But I never get to play with anyone – ever,” Brian complains. “The kids at school can’t come out ‘cause it’s too far on their bikes.” “Well, you have your toys to play with,” rejoins his materialistic mother (Gail Edwards). “I hate my toys!” young Brian rebels: “I hate this house! I wish we never left Chicago!”

Brian’s grandfather, Clyde Globe (Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s Roberts Blossom), is also wary of the new home, but for different reasons. As a young boy living in the area, Clyde had fallen asleep on a railroad track, which prompted an engineer to derail his train to avoid running over the lad. Decades later, Clyde remains tortured by the guilt of having been responsible for the deaths of everyone on the Highball Express and is alarmed by the fact that Fenton has built their house directly over the site of the derailment. Doubly weighted by persistent feelings of tragic responsibility, Clyde also harbors misgivings over the treatment of Native Americans, which he now imparts to his grandson: “Little Brian, the Indians were the first people on this land. It was theirs. All of it. You ask me, they had a right to do what they had to do to protect their families, their land, their way of life.” Though not explicitly articulated, there is the sense that the unresolved injustice done to the natives has cursed the spot and even could have played a role in the railroad disaster. Continuing with Poltergeist’s theme that ghosts of historical wrongs sometimes demand redress from those living in the present, Clyde admits that he ought to have died all those years ago as a boy and so he eventually boards the titular “Ghost Train” to be conveyed into the afterlife. Interestingly, the path of this White Guilt Express takes it straight through the Globe family’s satellite dish – echoing how the evil entered the Freelings’ home through their television. “Sorry about the house, ma’am, but you never shoulda put it here,” says the conductor (Hugh Gillin), who might just as well be addressing America’s entire white population.

The 1986 comedy classic The Money Pit, also produced by Spielberg, was intriguingly scripted by frequent Walter Hill collaborator David Giler and capably helmed by super-Jewish Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) star Richard Benjamin. Though not concerned with literal ghosts or a haunting in the conventional sense, the story bears strong thematic connections to Poltergeist and is similarly preoccupied with problems of American identity and belonging. As the title indicates, the film is concerned with finance, with the opening credits appearing over images of Manhattan, including multiple shots of the World Trade Center. Talented young attorney Walter Fielding (Tom Hanks) works for a once-respectable family firm now plunged into chaos after Fielding’s father (Douglass Watson) absconds with ill-gotten gains and takes an exotic bride in Brazil. “He steals the money, I get the bills,” the younger Fielding frets, again introducing the theme of the sins of the fathers: “Dad, why did you do this to me?” “My son has problems,” Fielding Sr. admits in the film’s prologue: “He has problems because he has a father like me.”

Much of The Money Pit conveys the moral decomposition and corruption fostered in American life by capitalism. “The point is, you get to capitalize on a fellow human being’s misfortune,” says Walter’s real estate agent acquaintance Jack (Josh Mostel): “That’s the basis of real estate.” Jimmy (Joey Balin), another of the movie’s representatives of the self-serving 1980s capitalistic ethos, manages a rock band (White Lion) comprised of his siblings, but screws them out of revenue anyway, as he confides to Walter – greed dissolving the bonds of blood in Reaganite America. Even tackier are the transvestite rock outfit Cheap Girls, clients of Walter’s, who are juxtaposed with the majesty of European cultural achievements of the past as embodied by the impressively Aryan figure of symphonic conductor Max Beissart (Alexander Godunov), whose ex-wife Anna (Shelley Long) is now Walter’s lover. Walter’s replacement of Max as the man in Anna’s life is the first indication of Walter’s status as the American successor to European man in the world arena. Walter, largely uncorrupted, longs like Steve Freeling for the American Dream of domestic security, a “white picket fence”, and a family, but liberated Anna, who uses birth control pills, is reluctant to formalize their relationship. She and Walter have been cohabiting in Max’s New York City apartment, but are abruptly obliged to vacate when the maestro unexpectedly returns home. Suddenly, grotesque Russian Jew Yakov Smirnoff barges into the bedroom and blurts, “Oh, my God. You’re still here?” Smirnoff, in the context of the scene, refers to the couple’s continued occupation of the maestro’s apartment, but might also be read as voicing general Jewish frustration that latent Nazis still exist, even if only in the guise of a culturally degraded but still family-aspirational host population of relatively prosperous European-Americans.

Needing to move in a hurry, Walter snags what seems like a miraculous bargain in a spacious home removed from the hassles of the city, but which ends up being a sanity-sapping fixer-upper of apocalyptic proportions. It is, in a sense, a haunted house, owing to its previous owner. The seller, an old woman named Estelle (Maureen Stapleton), who complains that “goddamn, bloodsucking lawyers are bleeding me dry”, explains her urgency in unloading the property: “You think you know somebody after twenty-five years, and then one day Israeli intelligence comes to the door. […] That’s why I’ve gotta sell the house. Turns out, Carlos was Hitler’s pool man.” Her husband (John Van Dreelen) is to be extradited imminently, again situating Walter as the American successor to European man – in this case, an actual Nazi, even if only an embarrassingly low-stakes target for Mossad – America being in some regards the sad, distorted culmination of European civilization, and therefore the inheritor of its sins in Jewish eyes. Art Shirk (Joe Mantegna), the sleazy carpenter Walter hires to rebuild the house, for instance, gratuitously parodies America’s Christian heritage, with slick Shirk making a pass at Anna and zoologically classifying her as “good-lookin’ wool”. “Hey, I’m sorry about that,” he apologizes to Walter: “You know, usually, [when] a woman calls a carpenter, she’s lookin’ for the old hammer and nail,” he insinuates, making a lewd gesture with his hands – humor that is particularly insulting in view of the fact that The Money Pit was originally scheduled for a Christmas release.

The house, with its disintegrating staircase, collapsing floors, crumbling masonry, groaning, goo-spewing plumbing, and kitchen appliance pyrotechnics, rivals the paranormal goings-on in the Freeling home, and can be interpreted as an allegory for Walter’s romance with Anna. Shelley Long, in the featurette The Making of The Money Pit, explains, “The house begins to fall apart around them, and at the same time, their relationship begins to fall apart.” More pertinently, however, the house can be interpreted as a microcosm of the United States, the structural problems reflecting those of the country itself. The fallen staircase, for one example, augurs poorly for the putative meritocratic ladder of socio-economic advancement. Then, too, the purchase of the house and its renovation are made possible by borrowing hundreds of thousands of dollars. “In spite of all the problems, in spite of the prospect of indentured servitude for the rest of my life and debt beyond my wildest dreams, I love the house,” Walter insists: “Life is good.” Not long after speaking these words, Fielding – like Freeling – finds himself swatting at flies or mosquitos that swarm around him in a barely disguised characterization of moneylenders as bloodsuckers. “Here lies Walter Fielding,” he imagines his epitaph saying: “He bought a house and it killed him.” “What the house offers,” as Hanks puts it in The Making of The Money Pit, “is stability, security, warmth, you know, hearth, home – that’s what it offers. What it delivers is Jaws.” In The Money Pit’s most elaborately mounted sequence, Walter bumbles his way through a Rube Goldberg gauntlet of missteps, tumbles, and splashes that finds him dunked in plaster and accidentally draped in what appears as a funeral shroud, turning Walter into a picture of his own ghost – a visualization of a still-idealistic, high-on-his-own-supply American dreaming his utopia, stumbling, and even perhaps destroying himself in the building process.

The reconstruction of the house requires the recruitment of an army of bikers, idlers, freaks, and outcasts of various backgrounds as laborers – a motley cast of characters representative of America’s crazy-quilt demographic incoherence. “As soon as you have a stranger in your house with a tape measure on his belt, you’re doomed,” Hanks jokes in The Making of The Money Pit, adding innocently: “And so, you’re at war. You’re like the host country of the war.” A running gag is that the construction site resembles a missile testing ground, the implied concept of the construction site as a ruin complementing the vision of Walter the aspirational American as a ghost-in-the-making. In winning the Cold War, one could also read into the film, the US ironically risks defeating and even demolishing itself. Walter’s plumber (Carmine Caridi), however, reassures him after the work is finally complete that “the foundation was good […] and if that’s okay, then everything else can be fixed.”

In its sexual dimension, The Money Pit considers the tensions engendered interpersonally and in society by women’s liberation. Max, who continues to pose a threat to Walter in competition for Anna’s affections, is more masculine and cultured, but less likable than the humorous and accessible but jealous and insecure Walter. “What’s he got,” Walter demands, “that I haven’t got?” “Walls,” Anna replies as a cold wind blows into their bedroom. Ultimately – and this is perhaps The Money Pit’s most subversive aspect – both suitors will be rewarded for debasing themselves. “Thanks to that fall,” Walter tells Anna after plunging through one of the floors, “we’re now the same height” – a bitterly facetious accounting of the sexual revolution, with equality of the sexes entailing not so much the elevation of women as the fall and diminution of men. Max, failing to win back his ex-wife, tricks her into believing that she had sex with him while intoxicated, which she in turn confesses to Walter, precipitating the possible dissolution of their relationship. Max eventually reveals to Anna her innocence, however, and she exonerates herself to Walter in the end – but not before Walter degrades himself by embracing his imagined cuckoldry, walking the sensitive man walk he has only previously talked, and winning Anna’s hand in marriage. Maestro Max, meanwhile, will come to peace with America’s trash pop culture, a tawdry-looking video vamp catching his eye at Walter’s wedding – offering, if not necessarily meaningful companionship, then at least a cheap erotic thrill. With Walter and Anna married, it remains to be seen whether neo-Nazi children will issue from the union, but – rather upliftingly – Hitler’s fugitive pool man remains at large as the credits roll.