When it first came out, I went with my parents to the legendary Delaware Theater (formerly the Spectrum) in Albany, New York, to see Steven Spielberg’s newest film, The Fabelmans, which takes Spielberg himself—the genealogical story of his love of film and his family—as its subject.

What struck me first, even before seeing the film, was the place where I was seeing it and the audience with whom I was seeing it.

Because of the streaming revolution—Netflix, Hulu, Prime, and everything that has followed—fewer people go to movie theaters anymore. Of the few people who were sitting in this classic theater, which opened in 1941 and still bears traces of another cinematic America, nearly all were my parents’ age. Most of them, like Spielberg, were baby boomers.

Sitting there with my parents made me pause.

I realized that I was about to watch Steven Spielberg look back at his childhood while sitting beside the generation that had given Spielberg—and the movies—to me.

Like millions of Americans of my generation, I was raised on movies made by my parents’ generation. I was inspired by them and, in many ways, have lived my life in the light they cast across the shadowy film caves of my youth. Spielberg made some of our favorite films: Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and so many others. Even films he produced rather than directed—Back to the Future, for instance—belonged to the Spielbergian universe in which many of us grew up.

We entered those dark rooms and came out seeing the world differently.

But now the theater was nearly empty.

And Spielberg, the great maker of dreams, was no longer showing us dinosaurs, aliens, sharks, archaeologists, soldiers, or spaceships.

He was showing us his mother and father.

He was showing us himself.

And, perhaps most importantly, he was showing us the little Jewish boy who learned how to hide behind the camera.

The Man Behind the Blockbuster

This is what makes The Fabelmans such a strange film in Spielberg’s career.

For decades, Spielberg gave America images that seemed larger than life. His movies were exercises in wonder. Something suddenly appeared that shattered the limits of the ordinary world: a shark beneath the water, a spaceship in the sky, an extraterrestrial hiding in a suburban house, an archaeological object charged with divine power.

Spielberg was the magician.

The Fabelmans asks us to look behind the magician’s curtain.

And what do we find there?

Not Indiana Jones.

Not the heroic American filmmaker.

We find Sammy Fabelman: an awkward Jewish boy with a camera.

In other words, we find something remarkably close to the schlemiel.

Sammy does not dominate the world. He watches it. He is frequently confused by it. His family embarrasses him. His mother overwhelms him. His father does not entirely understand him. His classmates humiliate him. His Jewishness marks him as different. He wants desperately to belong to America, and yet he repeatedly finds himself standing slightly outside of it.

But this distance becomes his gift.

He watches.

And then he turns what he sees into images.

The Schlemiel Sees What Everyone Else Misses

The schlemiel has always occupied an unusual relationship to reality.

Everyone else seems to understand the rules of the world. The schlemiel arrives late, misunderstands the situation, says the wrong thing, trips over something, or takes literally what everyone else understands figuratively.

We laugh because the schlemiel doesn’t quite understand reality.

But the deeper comic possibility is precisely the opposite.

Perhaps reality does not understand the schlemiel.

Because he does not completely fit into the social order, the schlemiel sometimes sees something that those who are successfully integrated into it cannot see.

That is Sammy Fabelman’s situation.

His camera initially seems like an escape from reality. He recreates train crashes. He stages Westerns. He turns Boy Scouts into actors and the ordinary American landscape into Hollywood.

But Spielberg gradually reverses this relationship.

The camera is not simply a means of escaping reality.

It becomes a way of discovering it.

The decisive moment comes when Sammy edits the footage from the family camping trip and discovers something nobody else has noticed: his mother is in love with Bennie, his father’s best friend.

The camera knows before the family knows.

Or rather, the boy behind the camera sees what the adults cannot—or will not—see.

The filmmaker is therefore caught in a terrible position. The images that create wonder can also destroy illusions.

Film reveals.

The Jewish Family and the Birth of an Artist

This is also why Spielberg’s Jewishness matters so much in The Fabelmans.

Spielberg has made explicitly Jewish films before, most obviously Schindler’s List. But The Fabelmans approaches Jewishness differently. Jewishness is not primarily historical catastrophe here. It is family. It is embarrassment. It is difference. It is the mother. It is relatives talking over one another. It is being called names at school. It is the strange feeling of being Jewish while simultaneously wanting to participate completely in the American dream.

Sammy wants America.

And America beats him up.

Then Sammy films America.

And something extraordinary happens.

The antisemitic athlete who torments him at school becomes, through Sammy’s camera, a Greek god.

This is one of the strangest and most important moments in the film.

Why would Sammy make his tormentor beautiful?

The bully himself cannot understand it.

Neither, perhaps, can Sammy.

And this inability to explain himself is crucial.

Sammy possesses power but does not use it in the obvious way. He could humiliate his enemy. Instead, he transforms him.

This is not revenge.

It is something much stranger.

It may even be the ethical secret of Spielberg’s cinema.

The Schlemiel’s Revenge

The schlemiel’s revenge has rarely been revenge.

Sholem Aleichem’s characters do not conquer their enemies. Chaplin’s Tramp does not seize political power. The little man survives the powerful by transforming the world through gesture, fantasy, language, laughter, and imagination.

Sammy does something similar with film.

He cannot defeat the beautiful, athletic, antisemitic American boy on the boy’s own terms. But behind the camera, the hierarchy suddenly changes.

The outsider becomes the creator of the image.

The powerful person becomes his subject.

And yet Spielberg complicates this fantasy of artistic power because Sammy does not simply make his enemy ridiculous. He makes him magnificent.

This is the generosity—and perhaps the foolishness—of the schlemiel.

The schlemiel cannot stop imagining that the world might be better than it is.

Spielberg’s cinema has always been accused of sentimentality for precisely this reason. His movies repeatedly return to wonder, reconciliation, childhood, family, homecoming, and the possibility that the damaged world can somehow be repaired.

The sophisticated person knows better.

The cynic certainly knows better.

But perhaps Spielberg doesn’t.

Or perhaps he knows perfectly well and chooses wonder anyway.

“You Do What Your Heart Says You Have To”

One of the film’s most important characters appears almost like a messenger from another world: Sammy’s great-uncle Boris, played by Judd Hirsch.

He understands something Sammy’s parents do not.

Art will tear him apart.

Family pulls in one direction. Art pulls in another.

The artist loves people, but he also turns them into images.

This is the frightening discovery at the center of The Fabelmans. The camera gives Sammy the ability to preserve the people he loves, but it also puts distance between himself and them.

To film something is already, in some sense, to stand outside it.

Sammy therefore occupies the classical position of the schlemiel: inside and outside at once.

He belongs to his family and watches his family.

He belongs to America and watches America.

He wants the beautiful American girl and cannot quite believe she wants him.

He suffers antisemitism and then turns the antisemite into a movie star.

He participates in life and simultaneously converts life into representation.

This doubleness may be one of the deepest sources of Spielberg’s cinema.

The Movie Theater as a Cave of Memory

And this brings me back to that nearly empty theater in Albany.

There was something uncanny about watching this particular film there.

An old movie theater.

My parents.

An audience largely made up of people from Spielberg’s generation.

And on the screen, an aging Spielberg reconstructing the moment when a frightened Jewish child first discovered the power of cinema.

For most of Spielberg’s career, we looked forward with him.

What will emerge from the water?

What will descend from the sky?

What lies behind the next door?

What forgotten world will the camera reveal?

But The Fabelmans reverses the camera.

Spielberg looks backward.

And suddenly the great cinematic cave in which generations of Americans dreamed together begins to look historical.

People no longer need to gather in darkness to see moving images. The images follow us everywhere now. They are on our televisions, laptops, tablets, and phones. They arrive endlessly, privately, algorithmically.

Something has been gained.

But something may also have disappeared.

The movie theater made strangers dream together.

What Our Parents Projected

Perhaps this is why watching The Fabelmans with my parents affected me so deeply.

I realized that Spielberg’s generation had projected more than movies onto those enormous screens.

They projected a world.

And we inherited it.

We inherited their sharks and spaceships, their archaeologists and aliens, their fears and fantasies, their suburban homes, broken families, miraculous children, monsters, adventures, and dreams of reconciliation.

They taught us how to look.

But The Fabelmans asks a more difficult question: Who taught them how to look?

Spielberg’s answer takes us backward—from the blockbuster to the filmmaker, from the filmmaker to the boy, from the boy to the family, and from the family to a Jewish-American story of migration, assimilation, difference, longing, embarrassment, and imagination.

Behind Steven Spielberg stands Sammy Fabelman.

And behind Sammy stands his mother, dancing in headlights.

His father, believing in machines and reason.

His sisters.

His eccentric relatives.

The Jewish family.

America.

And a little boy holding a camera between himself and all of them.

The Fable-Man

Even the fictional name Spielberg gives himself is worth considering.

Fabelman.

The fable-man.

The man who makes fables.

There is something wonderfully schlemiel-like about the name because the schlemiel has always survived through stories. He does not possess the world. He narrates it.

Tevye cannot control his daughters, history, modernity, Russia, poverty, or God.

But he can tell us about them.

And through the telling, something survives.

Sammy Fabelman cannot keep his parents together. He cannot prevent desire. He cannot eliminate antisemitism. He cannot control America. He cannot even fully understand why he needs to make movies.

But he can make a fable from what happens.

That may be Spielberg’s deepest autobiographical confession.

Cinema did not give him control over life.

It gave him a way of responding to life’s uncontrollability.

That distinction matters.

The Schlemiel Behind the Camera

At the end of the film, Sammy encounters John Ford.

Ford gives the aspiring filmmaker one brutally simple lesson about the horizon: if the horizon is at the bottom of the frame, it’s interesting; if it’s at the top, it’s interesting; if it’s in the middle, it’s boring.

Sammy leaves.

And then Spielberg gives us one final joke.

The camera itself suddenly tilts.

The horizon moves.

It is an extraordinary little gesture because, after a film about divorce, antisemitism, desire, loneliness, generational conflict, and the painful birth of an artist, Spielberg ends with a gag.

The world is crooked.

So adjust the camera.

Perhaps that is the schlemiel’s philosophy in miniature.

The schlemiel cannot straighten the world.

He cannot undo the past.

He cannot keep his parents together.

He cannot prevent history from happening.

But he can change the angle from which we see it.

And sometimes that tiny adjustment is enough to transform suffering into a story, humiliation into comedy, memory into art.

Sitting beside my parents in that old Albany theater, watching an aging Spielberg look back toward his parents, I felt for a moment as though several generations were looking at one another across the darkness.

Our parents gave us these images.

We lived inside them.

And now, as the theaters empty and the generation that created this cinematic world grows older, Spielberg has finally turned the camera around.

Behind the spectacle we discover the family.

Behind the filmmaker, the Jewish child.

Behind the hero, the outsider.

And behind one of the most powerful image-makers in the history of American cinema, perhaps, there was always a schlemiel holding a camera, trying to figure out what in the world he was looking at.