There are two ways to look at the USA film director Steven Spielberg: one, he is the greatest scribe of middling US culture, establishing in PG-13 genre films the 20th century Pax Americana values of not-too-sexy, not-too-violent, not-too-funny, not-too-scary. Two, he is a geeky synthesizer and poacher of true greats out of Europe and early US filmmaking, borrowing liberally from the juicier talents of directors who take real risks, make real hits and misses, and are less comfortable to watch.
These could be reconciled: he could be a great expressor of a middle class culture as well as a poacher of more dangerous talent. I should say here I'm a USA middle-class supremacist. I think the middle class is unequivocally the best class - not so rich as to be mentally unstable, and not so poor as to be fiscally tortured. This is a topic for another time. I say it here because I want to make clear that I think Spielberg's stubborn middle-class and middle-of-the-road story-telling style, in which we are never too scared, too titillated, or too thrilled, is a positive thing.
Spielberg activates what I think of as Shakespearean solipsism, or the Great Myth/Man of History problem. He appears to be a singular artist driving towards a vision wholly on his own. His name, above actors, producers, writers, crew, sticks in our collective mind and culture, and thus our histories. No amount of credits and accurate books can undo the damage of the Great Man. Abraham Lincoln is another Mythical Man US Americans chose to think of as standing alone, with great singular vision, and help along the way sure, but mostly he did it himself. He won that war himself.
In the Anglophone world I was raised in, Shakespeare is the prototypical Mythical Man of history. Of course he existed. But to believe he drafted, wrote, and directed those plays on his own is to ignore one's own experience of daily life. It is to fall into a tricky contemporary trap of radical individualism at best, dogmatic neoliberalism at worse. The actors who performed Shakespeare's plays, just as actors in Spielberg's movies, were a large percentage of the perfection process undertaken. The real events of the day and the hundreds of reports, rumors, and stories circulating and being heard and read by WS all contributed to the writing process.
How do I know this? I'm not a Shakespeare scholar (unbelievable there can be such things), nor a historian, nor a time traveler. But think for a moment, just for a moment, about how many people were involved in putting on productions as famous, popular, and constant as Shakespeare (and Company). What was that Company, exactly?
When we collaborate in real life, we find very quickly that nothing big is ever done alone. Watch any number of interviews with writers, actors, and directors in the dramatic arts today, and count the number of times they thank others and attribute key memorable points in the art to others' ideas. It is a constant collective recognition, a union and reunion of ideas and actions between, not above, others.
Why have we fallen into these easy stories about Great Men being driving forces in history? Like storms, we think the center is the key. Climate is a collective event, occurring not from the whimsy of a particular cloud but the mass of weather systems clashing together. And one can draw the metaphor down to the molecular: clouds are only pretty because oh so many water particles fell in together. Their changing shapes and forms are not the result of a grander supernatural will, but natural physics and time.
Perhaps USA culture, among others, falls into traps of believing there are only Great Men in the overall narrative because for all the imaginative force of our art and artists, we are still stuck in holding patterns flying over core fairy tales: the son of God, the death of God, the forgiveness of humanity by a singular, anthropomorphized sky force. Fairy tales such as those found in the Bible are inspiring, entertaining, mystifying. There is great force in faithful belief; it alleviates pressure for truth and curiosity, lets the mind wander into whatever corners it wants to, talk to itself in a pantomime of divine dialogue called prayer. It is, in a word, psychically fun to believe in metaphysics and magical morality.
That empirically minded historians and theorists should functionally worship recognizable names like Shakespeare, Freud, or Spielberg is maybe not their individual fault, but proof again that collective effort makes culture, not individual people. For it is the collective practice of cultures to pick winners and heroes out of the goings-on, and make of these humans indelible symbols of something the culture wants to hold dear and represent itself as having: wit, insight, vision. Ironically then, it is a collective decision to celebrate myths of individualism. Were people truly acting individually, we would not recognize Great Men at all, for it would be understood that no human can enact their will, appealing or not, upon the utterly individual minds of others. Put another way: either we're all Shakespeare, or none of us is - if genius individuals were real, then we'd all be one, since we are all individuals. Furthermore, what would Shakespeare have to teach me? My life and perspective being entirely independent from his, I would see nothing in his works to relate to, since we share nothing in common. This is the logic of individualism carried out.
We don't do this. Instead we imagine ourselves to be individuals - just like Shakespeare - and others to be the undifferentiated, unremarkable masses. Our internal worlds are as rich as we can imagine them to be, and we recognize that Spielberg is good stuff, but that's it in the world. Picture those droves in the shopping malls or airports. The chuckling or gasping masses in movie seats. Everyone laughed at that joke but me; they're juvenile. I'm the only one in the theatre who got the joke; I'm insightful. The masses - surely they cannot have true individuality. Surely they have no real voice. They may be the main character in their story, but that story sucks.
This is where solipsism makes its appearances in the Great Man Myth. We have to accept these famous names because we're indoctrinated in that way; but we also have to establish our own ego against this greatness and against the anonymity of all the strangers we see in the street. So we form a tidy worldview in which we can only know ourselves to be genuinely individual - and the famous artists to be abstractly individual, in the sense that the art speaks to us and we can know its voice - but really it is our life and our story that matters most. Great art is acceptable to the extent that it serves our construction of ourself, and the great artists we name and celebrate culturally are able to be categorically removed from the human race. Spielberg cannot be human, because that would make him equal to me, and if he were equal to me and I've won no Oscars by the same age he did, then my life is a failure. So he must be godlike in some way, special and supernaturally gifted, and therefore his success is unattainable and unnecessary for me. Another man made god, like the fairy tales.
If this sounds male-centric, consider beauty and bodies, singing and dancing, or scholarly achievement. Any area of life will find its Mythical heroes, and we will separate them for the sake of our ego. We make heroes not to celebrate them, but to make ourselves feel better for not being so good.