By Adam Piron

The city of Phoenix has a legacy of unfulfilled aspirations and things that never quite were. From the legend of the Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine, to the Suns’ countless playoff eliminations, or even Barry Goldwater and John McCain’s respective failed runs for the presidency, the Arizona capital is emblematic of always being—and staying— just on the cusp of greatness. Despite being the fifth largest city in the US, it’s an amorphous locale within the iconography of the nation’s metropolises. It’s seen as a place in the sun where Canadian snowbirds go to thaw out, where Californians come to retire, and the last major stop before the long stretch of Sonoran Desert in all directions. 

When it comes to Phoenix on film, it could be that this liminality has contributed to its faint presence on screen. Ranging from the bullet-ridden climax of Clint Eastwood’s The Gauntlet (1977) to the openings of both versions of Psycho (1960/1998) or even the pop-up-book landscape of the Coen Brothers’ Raising Arizona (1987), the Valley of the Sun has been the backdrop for a number of major films, despite none having dealt with the city’s character in any real way. It’s not an easy place to figure out, or for outsiders to find the “real” heart of the city. That’s perhaps what makes its presence in Steven Spielberg’s recent autobiographical endeavour The Fabelmans so unique. As the titan director, himself a Phoenician, reflects on his youth, the city itself becomes a focal point for everything in his life until he quite literally steps onto a studio lot.

The origin story within the larger origin story begins in New Jersey in the early ’50s, with seven-year-old Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryna Francis-Deford), Spielberg’s alter ego, going to the movies for the first time with his parents, Burt and Mitzi (Paul Dano and Michelle Williams). Young Sammy is overwhelmed by the unknown of what he is about to walk into, and his parents attempt to sooth his fear by explaining what moving pictures are. Burt, like Spielberg’s father Arnold, is a computer engineer, and he breaks down the bare mechanics of how movies work as a combination of 24 frames per second being projected on a screen; Mitzi, a musician (like the director’s mother Leah), illustrates that he is about to see something akin to a living dream.

That balance of the practical and mystical marks not only how Sammy will filter the wonderment of what he’s about to see—Cecil B. DeMille’s circus drama The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)—but also the tension between his parents’ respective natures. Seated between the two in the theatre, he’s also figuratively placed in the middle of them: an amalgamation of their two personalities, and about to experience for the first time a medium built on both technical and artistic precision. The film washes over Sammy, and he’s particularly struck by a catastrophic train crash sequence. Like the apocryphal account of the Lumière brothers’ 1895 audience, sent rushing to the back of the room at the sight of the incoming locomotive onscreen, Sammy’s creative genesis is a mixture of fear and fascination, inspired by cinema’s magic.

Dreams and echoes of the train wreck continue to follow Sammy into the Hanukkah season, a fixation that does not go by unnoticed by Burt and Mitzi. For holiday gifts, they buy him a Lionel train set and an 8mm camera, both of which he utilizes to obsessively recreate the disaster from DeMille’s film. This creative awakening continues to blossom as we’re introduced to the other elements of Sammy’s home life: his sisters (Alina Brace and Birdie Borria); his father’s jovial best friend and the kids’ surrogate uncle, Bennie Loewy (Seth Rogen); and the growing strain between Burt and Mitzi.

In the first of the family’s many relocations throughout the film, Burt takes a job in Phoenix where both he and Bennie will be given more autonomy and room to grow professionally. Historically, the high-tech manufacturing industry established itself as a staple of Phoenix life in the late ’40s, when the promise of cheap land and desert living made more hospitable thanks to air conditioning was a draw for both businesses and post-WWII Americans looking to move west. Additionally, the increase in GI Bill–educated veterans (like Burt), who drew in higher wages and contributed to the nation’s growing middle class, saw Phoenix boom from a population of 106,818 in 1950 to 439,170 by 1960. The country was turning a new leaf, and, true to Spielberg’s penchant for Americana, the Fabelmans themselves are emblematic of the possibilities of this specific moment in the American Dream.

As the film jumps forward 11 years, Burt and Bennie now sport bolo ties, Mitzi dons turquoise jewelry, and the Fabelman household’s walls are decorated with Southwestern Native American artwork, indicating just how firmly rooted they are in the Arizona cultural landscape. Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle), now 16 and never without his camera, lives and breathes movies. This period is presented as his halcyon days, shooting moments of bucolic family life or making adventure films with his Boy Scout troop. He’s moved beyond his initial awe of moving images and is now actively seeking to master his craft. Both the city and the nearby desert are proving grounds for his burgeoning practice and cinephilia, and although Spielberg did not shoot The Fabelmans in Phoenix (as the city no longer exists as it did when he lived there), he recreates moments and locations that form this critical period in Sammy’s life with an incredible attention to regional specificity. From flipping over a rock and finding a nest of scorpions, to dipping into the Kiva Theater (the Scottsdale cinema that Spielberg once frequented for Saturday matinees) for a screening of John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the edge of the desert becomes the primordial stage for Sammy’s swings at making increasingly larger-scale productions. It’s there, as he creates a Western and later a war epic, Escape to Nowhere, that we see Spielberg nodding to the provenance of his signature action style and the seeds of what would become a fixation on WWII woven throughout his oeuvre.

Just as Sammy’s storytelling skills reach new heights, he begins noticing a false narrative before him. A family vacation to the Northern Arizona woods, with Bennie in tow, later reveals the extent to which Burt and Mitzi’s marriage is a shambles. Reviewing footage from the trip while editing a reel to cheer Mitzi up after the recent passing of her own mother, Sammy stumbles upon evidence of his mother’s affair with Bennie. The ugly truth, caught on camera, is too much to bear, and Sammy all but gives up on his medium. This revelation coincides, and perhaps even spurs, Burt’s decision to relocate his family to Northern California as he takes up a new engineering position, one beyond Bennie’s skillset and destined to leave him behind in the desert. It’s a move that will eventually shatter Burt and Mitzi’s marriage and the Fabelman children’s idyllic world, as they reluctantly leave their desert home.

There’s a poignant moment between Bennie and Sammy in which the latter tries to assuage any ill will felt by the young filmmaker. The two cross paths after he finds Sammy selling his camera, abandoning any creative ambition he once had. Bennie gifts him a 16mm camera and tells him to hold onto it, because quitting film altogether would break Mitzi’s heart. The Kachina Theater, the now-demolished Cinerama venue of Scottsdale, haunts the background behind Bennie as Sammy takes off down toward Camelback Mountain (digitally recreated and displayed prominently throughout the film), resting on the horizon. It’s an illustration of Spielberg balancing the memories of what no longer exists with what remains of his Phoenix youth.

The tonal shift from Arizona to Northern California is stark, marked by the family’s continued disillusionment with who they are. In contrast to the seeming multiculturalism of their hometown, the Fabelmans are the only Jews in their new neighbourhood, and Sammy faces overt instances of antisemitism at his new school. Despite this, he slowly starts to dip his toes into moviemaking once more, a reawakening that crests just as his parents’ marriage implodes. Mitzi announces that she’s returning to Phoenix to be with Bennie, a choice accepted by Burt but not their children. Her move effectively breaks the family, with Sammy moving yet again with his father to Los Angeles a few years later and the Fabelman girls going with their mother. The spectre of Spielberg’s parents’ divorce has long loomed over his work, but the nexus of this event and Sammy’s decision to forge a path forward as a filmmaker is something the director definitively and painfully marks as the catalyst for his complete devotion to his craft. One gets the sense that by revisiting this painful period of his life, Spielberg is continuing to reconcile with not only what happened, but also how far he’s come since being that kid shooting films in the desert with his friends and family.

In the film’s much-talked-about finale, Spielberg closes Sammy’s Phoenician youth with something like a baton pass. By pure chance, he finds himself in the lobby of an office of a certain unnamed director, coming full circle from his time spent in the Kiva Theater and making films in the desert. He notices that the walls of the space are decorated with one-sheets of Westerns by this storied filmmaker, glorifying the legends of the Arizona West. For a few quick minutes, he’s granted an audience with his hero and is given a terse lesson on the balance of the purely practical and the aesthetically aspirational nature of filmmaking—before being told to get lost. The promise of his parents’ explanation of what movies were is now validated by the gruff advice of the master artist before him. It’s Sammy’s final breakthrough from being a passionate amateur to taking his first steps on a path that will lead to him becoming one of history’s most influential film artists. In its own way, it’s the desert sending its favourite cinematic son to ride off towards the horizon.