The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s largely autobiographical memoir of his childhood, traces the impact of his mother’s infidelity and his parent’s subsequent divorce. Showing Spielberg’s development as a boy cinematographer, we see a series of scenes of him filming family life with his camera, and his desperate efforts to use that lens as a barrier to keep the pain of his fracturing home life at bay. The message of the Fabelmans is that movies, and art in general, are a way of taking the painful memories of our lives and turning them in to something we can both bear and start to make sense of.
Spielberg’s father was an engineer, a prominent pioneer of the computer technology revolution of the 1950s, and The Fabelmans also depicts the tension between the scientific mindset of his dad and the artistic flair of his pianist mother. In the end, of course, Spielberg chose the redemptive power of art.
None of us, perhaps not even Spielberg himself, know precisely what happened with the fracturing of his family all those decades ago. Ultimately, in art, the point is not precisely what happened, but rather how the artistic process itself can, for the artist and their audience, make sense anew of our memories (the fables that the fictional family name in the movie points towards) and their intertwining with our emotions, and help us understand the difficulties and joys of our lives in the past and now.
Science however is different. It is about making sense of the world as it is. It is about understanding the order and regularity of the world and manipulating that order and regularity to improve our lives. The memories of the scientist, and the fables they tell themselves about their life, are not important. What matters is measuring things as they really are, or as close to that as we can get. Noone gets to help design the world’s first mainframe computer, as Arnold Spielberg did, by fictionalizing accounts of transistors and silicon.
The difference between art and science matters. And not just in engineering and technology. A scientific world view differentiates between the fables we tell ourselves about our lives, and how collectively we perceive things to be in the myths, and superstitions that comfort us, and the hard truth and reality of the world as it really is. This makes a difference in everything from medicine, agriculture and climate science through to the social sciences, and public policy in education, housing, and social care. Science in this wide sense is about truth, honesty, and rigour. It is arguments based on evidence about what works and what doesn’t. In art, memories are fluid, malleable, constantly open to reinterpretation and transformation. But if we want to profess our understanding of the real world, then a different set of rules apply. What really happened must have the first call in our list of criteria for judging excellence.
But some are not that comfortable with this distinction. For some, truth and honesty are not about how the real world actually is, but rather truth is about whose fable has the more emotional force. If a person or a group can create enough resonance with their account of their pain and difficulties, then how they perceive things becomes more important than what may have really happened. Memory as fable also becomes more important than what really happened. The actual sexual violence of October 7th, the destruction of property in BLM riots, the murder of people who have the wrong political views or come from the wrong group, become in their fables fights for justice. The fables of an upside-down world in which people who murder business executives in broad daylight and kill child hostages are transformed into saviours.
Perhaps rather than face the horror of what they have done, and what they have cheered for, the memory by necessity has to be transformed into a myth that can be borne. The myths perhaps that the classmates who called Spielberg a kike and Christ killer (and these parts of The Fabelmans are hard to see as anything but cold hard truth) spun in their later lives to justify their actions.
Life lived not as reality in flesh and bone and effort and thinking and truth and justice but in fable and myth. Life lived as art.
But life isn’t art. It’s about the real world and about recognizing that some things really happened and we have to deal with them and also that we need to own our pasts – what we did that was right and what we did that was wrong – whoever we are and whatever group we belong to.
Joseph Mintz is professor of inclusive education at University College London.
