Finding Your Voice

What is a writer’s voice? It is different from a theme—the same underlying theme can be
expressed in a wide variety of ways. The theme is separate from the images and language
through which it is expressed. Voice includes both.
Steven Spielberg has a consistent theme across a variety of different kinds of stories:
What makes a hero? In Jaws, a hero is willing to face the thing that everyone fears, a
threatening force that invades their peaceful community. At first, that means simply admitting
that the threat is real—later it means going out into the water to face it, despite knowing its
immense power. In E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the threatening force is faced in
a different way—and the hero is the one who is willing to be open and unafraid. Humility comes
up again and again for Spielberg’s heroes. The Indiana Jones films reimagine an archetypal hero
from the 1950s for a new era. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, what is required of Indiana Jones to be
heroic changes over the course of the film. At first, he must be strong enough and smart
enough to steal the precious artifact from its hiding place. In the climax of the film, he must
recognize that some artifacts are too sacred to be owned or even looked at by mortal eyes.
Heroism means having the humility to look away. The Color Purple, as imagined by Steven
Spielberg, is a retelling of E.T. from the alien’s perspective. Heroism here is merely surviving in a
world that tells you again and again that you don’t deserve to live. When Celie says, “Everything
you done to me, I already done to you,” we understand that she doesn’t need violence and
domination in order to have power—she is a different kind of hero.
Spielberg continued to explore these themes for forty more years, in Schindler’s List,
Jurassic Park, Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Lincoln—a catalog of humbled heroes. But if
we want to see Spielberg finding his voice, we have to look at more than just his underlying
theme. We have to see the images and language he uses to tell his story. I will set aside the way
Spielberg uses the camera, which could take a book length study of its own, and just look at the
things he points the camera at. Again and again, with few exceptions, for the first ten years of
his career, Spielberg’s films took place in and around suburban family homes. We saw families,
often under strain from their own internal tensions, in single-family homes with children. These
were highly recognizable settings even for people who never lived like that. Into this setting, the
foreign threat arrives. After Spielberg achieved widespread acclaim with Jaws and E.T. he makes
a very different film with Raiders of the Lost Ark. The hero, Indiana Jones, avoids these
surburban settings almost entirely—it is like a photo negative of Spielberg’s previous formula.
Indiana Jones is a college professor who goes from the safety of the classroom into a world
entirely made up of foreign threat. Put another way, Indiana Jones is the shark from Jaws. In
The Color Purple, Celie is torn screaming from her sister and sent to live far away—another
version of E.T. longing to phone home.
Spielberg moves from settings he knew well from his own experience into settings more
and more unfamiliar. The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun are the first in a series of period
pieces that take us outside the suburban milieu that Spielberg had become known for up until
then. Spielberg found his voice within a certain context and then was able to move beyond that
context. This movement, similar to White colonialism, is a marker of a certain kind of ambition.
Spielberg’s success is indicated by his ability to tell any story he wants—this is a feature not
only of his power as an artist but also his clout in Hollywood, the budgets he can raise, and the
artistry of his collaborators, all among the very best in their respective fields. We can see this
kind of ambitious artistry in the work of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, and John Singleton.
They begin staying close to “home,” so to speak, and once they have found their voice, tell
increasingly ambitious stories with a wider and wider scope.
The problem with this model is that it depends to a certain degree on your ability to
market your voice. The Age of Innocence is no more or less authentically Scorsese’s voice than
Mean Streets, but it would have been difficult or impossible for him to marshal the resources
needed to make The Age of Innocence as his first film—not only because it had a higher budget,
but because he would have to convince people that he was capable of making a movie about
something so far from his own experience. He might not have had the skill yet, and he certainly
would have needed help from powerful collaborators to achieve his artistic goals. But what if
your vision isn’t as marketable as Scorsese’s? What if when you get the chance to make your
Taxi Driver, it doesn’t translate into box office gold?
What if you’re James Bidgood, working on Pink Narcissus for years in your apartment
with your own money? What if you’re Lynne Ramsay, making masterpiece after masterpiece
without a major box office hit? Finding your voice and marketing your voice are two separate
actions. Everything about finding your voice has to do with accepting your limitations.
Limitations of budget, of experience, of ability. Those limitations are obvious in Spielberg’s first
films—even Jaws has those limitations. Finding your voice means becoming the right size for
where you are at that moment—and then having the audacity to speak from there.
Artistic expression always makes our experience seem bigger, because it connects our
experience with the outside world. It is the difference between a thought unspoken and what is
said aloud. It is natural for our expression to spread, to seek new images and stories. You can
see that movement in a single film with Bidgood’s Pink Narcissus, shot mostly in sequence. The
early scenes take place in a bathroom, while for the film’s final sequence Bidgood built an
entire fantasy cityscape. You can see it in the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s short career,
with its wild changes of genre and tone. You can see it in Ava DuVernay’s rapid movement from
intimate drama to epic science fiction. Our imaginations will not be contained.
But finding your voice means starting from where you are. Accepting what you know,
what you see, what you can imagine today. Your voice is already there, and it is enough.