Since Steven Spielberg put so much of himself into his recent film, Munich, let us see what it really says about him rather than about Israel and terrorism.

Central to the film, running like a dream throughout is the situation of the terrorists and hostages. One group is murdered, the other group murders but dies, too. Evil vanquishes good, but evil is also vanquished (by an outside agency).

The main plot centers on a man and his team who set out to kill evil people, but who gradually are worn down, lose conviction and passion, and die one by one until two are left, who fail to achieve their final action, and then one is left in despair. Evil has won. There is no defeating it. It defeats you.

Jungian analysis suggests that every thing in a dream represents something of the dreamer. The same is true in art we create. It's a definite projection of the Self. Men deny it, but it's inescapably true.

Spielberg is not a particularly intelligent or wise individual, but he is an exceptionally driven and egotistical one. He has a great gift for staging action sequences, but no gift at all for human complexity and social realities. Spielberg has won all the accolades he needs in terms of creating popular entertainment. Now he also wants to be hailed as a genius for the deep, serious art which he attempts in movies like Schindler's List, Amistad, and now Munich.

So, we have a popular entertainer who finds that being loved by the hoi polloi isn't satisfying. After all, his energy and ambition were expressly driven by an overwhelming rage yelling to the world, ?Look at me! Look at me! Love me, love me, love me!? Well, they did, and that wasn't what he wanted. It didn't satisfy enough. Nothing ever can, but Spielberg changed his tack, and decided that serious movies would do the trick and make him happy with himself and feel loved in the way he wants.

Ever since Schindler's List he's been muddling through. Not making any great commercial movies (repeating his success in Jaws with Jurassic Park [twice] and the misguided sci-fi films Minority Report, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, War of the Worlds) not making any great serious ones (Amistad, Saving Private Ryan [great opening lousy follow through on the story], Munich) or serio-comic ones (The Terminal, Catch Me If You Can).

We are seeing his midlife crisis playing out in his films. They aren't great. They aren't horrible. They mark time, but they aren't accomplishing what he wants. He wants to be the greatest filmmaker of all time, but he keeps coming up short. Particularly now when he should he at his prime in terms of mastery and artistic judgment.

Let's go back to the movie as dream work, though (pun intended). The most obvious tale in it is that that which is truly good and innocent in him gets slaughtered by that which is evil, bad, or weak. And when he sends out his forces to redeem the loss of his goodness or innocence by attempting to strike down (or discipline and control) those parts of himself which kill his goodness, his virtues fail miserably and give in to despair.

He cannot overcome himself. He cannot redeem himself. He cannot fix himself and acquire that love which would put him at peace and triumphant over the winter of his discontent. Why? Because he cannot submit to the help of an outside agency.

Basic wisdom tells us that having been born into an imperfect world, we all develop defense mechanisms of various kinds due to our perceived pain and suffering. We are all ?bent? to some degree and seek to be straightened out and uncorrupted by wounds, scars, and the attendant armor we've donned. Because we know that unless we reclaim our innocence, our eternal youth, goodwill, delight and wonder, we shall never be happy or at peace.

To assuage that gulf, humans can try to escape it and seek their bliss in artificial ecstasy, sensuality, or adrenaline thrills. They can try to assuage it by hard work hoping that productivity will result in long lived joy. Or one can turn to a great cause, political or spiritual.

Religious conversion can be very fruitful in helping people find an outside agent who can help them find peace and joy. AA and twelve step programs stimulate conversions also with their reliance on submission to a Higher power.

Christianity, though, may be the most efficacious when it comes to changing people's lives for the better. Why? Because it has the most truth of any program, and offers the most effective means of grace to save people from themselves if they are willing to avail themselves of it.

Others may dispute that, but I think the numbers tell, and the effect through the celebration of salvation through the ages in the immense outpouring of art, architecture, music, literature, science, government, and morality speak volumes. No one writes more books about religion and God than Christians do about their faith. Same with music and art.

The Terminal. A man loses his identity, his country, his family and lives in a limbo existence where he's spends his time fooling around and trying to get along. He accomplishes his original mission, but it doesn't really matter. It was a meaningless scheme, all in all. A fool's errand.

Catch Me If You Can. A boy runs away, becomes a successful thief, loses his identity, his nation, his family as he is relentlessly pursued by the inevitable Furies, or dogged Avenging Father.

Minority Report. A miserable and lost man discovers his wretched fate (doomed to be evil) and undoes it through the help of an outside agent of grace (a clairvoyant). He is not the true villain of his lousy life. Instead, it is his trusted father-figure who betrayed him. The man had lost his family, then his work (identity), there is no real nation in the story to be lost.

Artificial Intelligence: A.I.. An unreal boy loses his family, his identity, and world. He believes in an illusion, but is rescued by an outside agency and made real and at peace before he dies or dissolves into nothingness.

Now we could do this sort of thing with any story, boil it down to a set of terms to a particular agenda, but this isn't quite as easy when we turn to other films like Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, or Schindler's List.

In Saving Private Ryan, who loses their identity, family, or nation? You might suggest that the soldiers do by suffering in war, except they are reminding themselves throughout the movie of who they are and have been. They are their own family as it happens, and are portrayed as nationless insofar as they do not regard what uniform they wear as important. They never stop being Americans whereas in War of the Worlds, everyone stops being Americans except the son who wants to fight back and those who do fight back.

Amistad features a man taken in slavery who can be said to lose his identity, family, and nation. Except the movie goes to pains to show that he doesn't feel such loss, but in fact has faith and makes a parallel between Jesus and his own beliefs. His faith is rewarded. He is restored like Job.

Schindler's List illustrate people who lose their nation, but not their tribe, their identity, their families (I'm talking about the ones who are saved from the death camps). Schindler loses his identity for a new and better one and is saved by the grace of his actions. The Jews are restored like Job, also.

Earlier in Spielberg's career, he often featured people who were out of place. Jaws features a town police chief who doesn't like to be around water and belongs in a city. It features a fisherman who can't get along much with others because he's out of time, stuck in the past, and an oceanographer who's a rich kid looking for somewhere he can belong.

E.T. is about a creature who doesn't belong on Earth at all. He has lost his identity, his family, his nation although he acquires new ones and then is restored to his home. He is also miraculously resurrected, and that's all to parallel Jesus of Nazareth who loses his Jewish identity, his family, his nation, and his life but is rewarded or restored to life and his supernatural home. Or rather is an alien visitor to this world having lost his original heavenly family and reality.

A great many stories are based on the idea of misfits or those who unintentionally become misfits (Schindler, for example). Stories have to start somewhere, after all. And all stories boil down to a Quest or the cycle of the seasons which become one, also.

These later stories of Spielberg are thwarted quests, though. Munich is about a failed quest. War of the Worlds is a failed quest in that except for divine intervention in the form of microbes, the hero will fail. The director resorts to deus ex machina here and in Minority Report and A.I. The latter which become hopelessly confused about what they're about or meant to be. Rather like Spielberg himself, who is hopelessly confused about who or what he should be as a man, a Jew, an artist, an American.

Spielberg's problem is his shallowness, the very quality which, coupled with his skill at producing fine action sequences, made him such a commercial success since he was one with a mass audience which isn't given to much depth in self-examination or reflection either.

But Spielberg had pretensions of greatness. He wants to be regarded as a genius, a cinematic Shakespeare, or at least an Orson Welles (hence War of the World), a John Ford (hence Saving Private Ryan), or a Frank Capra (hence The Terminal).

But those directors didn't flit from one persona to the next. They were themselves in each movie they made in their maturity. Ron Howard, a relatively young director, always makes a Ron Howard movie. He doesn't try to emulate anyone else so much, or rather his influences aren't as obvious.

The Color Purple, for another example. What was that? Who was he trying to be with that awful thing? Stanley Kramer? And Hook? Clearly someone else, but I can't bring him to mind.

Why so much motion? When a man doesn't know who he's supposed to be, he can't make up his mind on who he wants to be, so he tries out being different people all the time looking to make a true fit. When a man does that in his daily life, trying to be all things to all people, we usually see a pathological liar like Bill Clinton, or other con men and politicians.

When an artist does it in his artistic life, we see a kind of dilletante; someone who never really masters a craft. Spielberg got to where he is by mastering The Pitch and making things happen fast. That translated well into popcorn action movies that have a pretense of human characters. When he tried to move into serious drama, his power of manipulating emotion fell flat by falling so heavily upon the action in the very absence of action.

In Munich, action hides the falseness of the characterizations, the moral realities, the actual dilemmas until things become still enough for them to shout their absurdity as in the many false endings.

So long as Spielberg is trapped in the La Brea tar pit of such an ego, he will continue to produce one hopeless thing after another, trying to cover them in ambiguity to hide how empty the vessels are which are all he can produce now.

In his youth, he had hope that he could escape his human dilemma through fantasies where people left this world for better ones: the dream of a better day. But time has exposed such hopes as foolish. He has everything he ever wanted and he is not satisfied. He can't add one iota more to what he has except prove himself an even greater artist which would make him a Great Man. But he's floundering and failing. He's smart enough to, if not know it, feel it. Don't ever expect anything worthwhile from him again. He just hasn't got the soul for it, and his movies show just how lost a man he is.

This is cache, read story here