Despite the many accolades (rightly) showered upon Steven Spielberg’s latest addition to an auteur’s oeuvre, The Fabelmans, quite a few critics seem to be overlooking the fact that the character based on Spielberg himself, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), bears many similarities to another youthful filmmaking aspirant: Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek). Granted, the creator of Dawson’s Creek, Kevin Williamson, could have easily modeled Dawson, in certain respects, on Spielberg, perhaps nodding to that very fact by making Dawson (doubling for Williamson as well) obsessed with Spielberg…far more than the latter is with John Ford (memorably played by David Lynch) in The Fabelmans. But what was less public knowledge at the time when Dawson’s Creek first aired in 1998 was the affair Spielberg’s mother had with a man named Bernie Adler—his name changed to Bennie Loewy (played by Seth Rogen) in the movie. Yet, coincidentally, Dawson’s own mother, Gail (Mary-Margaret Humes), is having an affair as well. Like Sammy, it is Dawson who unearths his mother’s indiscretion—one that his father, Mitch (John Wesley Shipp), would prefer to ignore the signs of due to his own worshipful attitude toward his wife.
This, too, mirrors the way in which Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), the character based on Spielberg’s father, Arnold Spielberg, worships Mitzi Fabelman (Michelle Williams), based on Spielberg’s mother, Leah. Then, of course, there is the ultimate connection between Dawson’s Creek and The Fabelmans in that Michelle Williams played Dawson’s first major crush (much to Joey Potter’s [Katie Holmes] dismay), Jen Lindley. Not to get too Oedipal, but Sammy clearly does a bit of crushing on his own mom, even if “solely” from the point of view of placing her on a pedestal like some kind of goddess. As Spielberg once said of Leah, “My mom didn’t parent us as much as she sort of big-sistered us. She was Peter Pan [so no wonder he wanted to direct Hook]. She refused to grow up.” Much the way Dawson (and Spielberg, for that matter) does with his fantasies of being a director and remaining in a pre-puberty state wherein Joey doesn’t start to question the “ease” of sleeping in Dawson’s bed anymore. With Dawson as an OG of having the aforementioned Peter Pan Syndrome, it bears noting that Spielberg is, in his own way, certain to remind the Peter Pan Syndromers known as millennials and Gen Zers—via the tagline, “Capture every moment”—that the very existence of the camera has long spurred people to do just that even before the advent of social media. Hence, Sammy’s constant filming of various “snippets of life” from his family’s day-to-day. Some of it even imbued with a vague plotline (as shown in The Fabelmans, a young Sammy uses all the toilet paper in the house to transform his two younger sisters into mummys).
Like Sammy, Dawson is also an unapologetic cinema geek—his room decorated with movie posters for Schindler’s List, The Color Purple and Always, among others. As Williamson noted of the hyper-specific set design, “Dawson’s bedroom was sort of a temple to Spielberg, and so I had to write a letter to him because he retains the rights to all that stuff. And I was like, ‘Please, Mr. Spielberg, you don’t know me, but I was this kid. I had this bedroom. I had all your posters in my bedroom. Can I please present Dawson the way that he really was?’” Surely, Spielberg knew something about being the film nerd, in addition to wanting a character and his world to come across as authentically as possible.” Thus, Spielberg “wrote back and he wrote the loveliest response. He was like, ‘You can use everything.’ [But] he gave one condition: no mention of his wife or children. ‘Just keep it to me, and you can do whatever you want.’” That stipulation seems especially poignant when understanding, thanks to The Fabelmans, how much making movies ultimately tore Spielberg’s nuclear family apart. To boot, Spielberg is likely protective of his personal life so that he might use it for his own material later. This resulting in The Fabelmans.
Itself resulting from Spielberg’s dad insisting on “Sammy” cutting their camping trip footage into a movie. But had he not done so, he might never have realized his mother was stepping out on Burt with Bennie. Said camping trip home movie technically being a “Spielberg film,” such a fact cuts to what Dawson tells Jen in season one of Dawson’s Creek: “I believe that all the mysteries of the universe, all the answers to life’s questions, can be found in a Spielberg film. It’s a theory I’ve been working on. You see, whenever I have a problem, all I have to do is look to the right Spielberg movie and the answer’s revealed.” Jen replies, “Have you ever heard of a twelve-step program?” Funnily enough, it’s Sammy’s great-uncle, Boris (played by Judd Hirsch, who steals the movie), that informs his great-nephew, “We’re junkies, and art is our drug.” Dawson is much the same, even if the “art” he made didn’t always come across as quite so promising in the same way that Spielberg’s early 8mm movies did. Yet both adolescents were decidedly “late bloomers” with women because of a combination of their social awkwardness and a preoccupation with turning life into art instead. Things are just so much more controllable that way.
Boris also states in his foreboding speech to Sammy, “Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but it’ll tear your heart out and leave you lonely. You’ll be a shanda [a.k.a. disgrace] for your loved ones. An exile in the desert.” This much happens to Dawson when he proceeds to make a movie (called, lamentably, Creek Daze) about his botched romance with Joey, who breaks up with him in season two—after all that hemming and hawing about wanting to be together, too. And so, since he can’t get it right in life, he tries to in art. Much the same way as Sammy, who partially blames himself for unearthing an unwanted reality through film to begin with (something of an irony, considering film was founded on a premise of escapism). Alas, as Spielberg himself remarked of watching what he found on those home movies of the camping trip, “The film told me the truth, where my eyes couldn’t perceive it.”
That Dawson ends up turning his own life into sellable fodder in the form of a WB series (what else?) called The Creek provides an added element of Spielbergness—what with the auteur eventually unable to resist the urge to tell this story of his mother. Not just of her “affair of the heart” with Bernie, but the fact that Leah was an artist forced to repress that urge for the sake of family. Hence, Boris’ other warning, “Family, art. It’ll tear you in two.”
Appropriately, Spielberg seemed to have waited for both parents to die before rehashing the tale in cinematic form. Dawson likely wouldn’t have been as generous. But it seemed karma was on his side regardless in the final episode of the series as he tells Joey and Pacey (Joshua Jackson) over the phone, “You’ll never guess who I’m meeting tomorrow.” “Spielberg?!” Joey and Pacey shout at the same time in delight. And maybe Dawson really did meet him…and affect him enough for Steve-o to take some inspiration for his own stylized character. A prime example of those (i.e., Williamson/Dawson) inspired by someone giving unwitting inspiration to that very person later on (à la Billie Eilish with Lana Del Rey). Or maybe Williamson simply had the idea sooner to loosely dramatize Spielberg’s early life.
