I also learned that Arnold had played a much greater role in his son’s life, especially his early filmmaking, than Steven had previously acknowledged. He said the movie had made him laugh and that he wished he’d gotten to know me better.” But in reality, as Spielberg once recalled, his tormentor, after seeing Senior Sneak Day, “came over a changed person. He confronts Sam, who stands up for his creative expression and Jewish pride in the face of Logan’s Aryan hostility, which turns grudgingly into respect as the bully breaks into tears, confessing his weakness. Logan is smart enough to realize he’s being mocked by the filmmaker’s slow-motion, low-angled faux-valorization, exposing him as a phony with a shiny façade. With a mixture of mischievous and unconscious retaliation, Sam’s film portrays Logan ironically as a sort of Leni Riefenstahl Nazi Übermensch. The hulking WASP bully in Saratoga named Logan (Sam Rechner) reacts with anger when Sam Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) makes a movie about “Senior Ditch Day” (a facsimile of an actual Spielberg film called Senior Sneak Day, filmed on the beach in Santa Cruz). With its protective coloration of semi-fictionalizing, The Fabelmans provides another layer of mythification in Spielberg’s life, or, to put it more positively, imaginative rewriting, such as with what is perhaps the subtlest dramatic scene in the film. Send me updates about Slate special offers. The fictional veneer, in these cases, also allows the filmmakers to accuse some of the guilty parties who made their adolescences “hell on Earth.” That was the phrase Spielberg used to describe the year he spent at Saratoga High School in Northern California, when he suffered his most acute episodes of antisemitic bullying, painfully reenacted in the screenplay Spielberg wrote with frequent collaborator Tony Kushner. When I was in the early stages of researching my unauthorized Steven Spielberg: A Biography (published in 1997 and since updated twice) and approached his office to request an interview, he declined through a spokesman, who said, “He’d be happy if there are no books” about him, but “He’s not going to stop you from writing a book.” Like The 400 Blows by François Truffaut, a Spielberg role model he directed in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fabelmans is a lightly fictionalized autobiography, a version of its author’s early life with the names “changed to protect the innocent,” as Dragnet used to put it. One of the principal jobs of a biographer is to distinguish the facts from the myths, rather than simply printing the legend, to borrow a phrase from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, another formative film repeatedly quoted in The Fabelmans.
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