[Spoilers for The Fabelmans and The Souvenir: Part II ahead.]

Autofiction is a literary subgenre, combining autobiography with fiction. This term was coined in the mid-1970s in a blurb for Serge Doubrovsky’s novel Fils, though by definition it likely applies to a whole legion of literature. In a piece for Vulture, Christian Lorentzen aptly points out that “autofiction came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the real and the invented.” It is a term that frankly annoys me, and often carries with it a sense of diagnosing a laziness or coy demeanor onto the author, someone wanting to write their memoir without the social capital for a pure memoir to be successful perhaps. The ‘genre’ of autofiction often fits within the idea of a Bildungsroman, or a Kunsterroman in the case of the two pieces I’ll be exploring here.

This week I watched two films that fall under the autofiction label: Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir: Part II. Both films follow a semiautobiographical narrative of their respective directors in their youth and their growth as artists. For The Fabelmans, Spielberg depicts his early inspirations and his coming of age from childhood through high school, with a strong focus on the downfall of his parents’ marriage along the way. With The Souvenir: Part II, Hogg’s protagonist Julie returns to film school after the overdose and death of her lover, attempting to move on both by learning more about him through the people in his life, and by creating a film about their relationship as her final project. With both films it is unclear how much the narrative accurately reflects the lives of their creators, but there is a strong emphasis on portraying the growth of an artist through a chapter of their life.

Both films also explore the idea of creativity as catharsis, or more specifically, movies as a way to capture and reflect on important memories. In The Fabelmans protagonist Sammy creates an homage to a scene in The Greatest Show on Earth using model trains, fixated on a scene of an explosive collision. He also makes films out of camping trips with his family, multiple cross country moves, and a Senior Skip Day at the beach with his high school classmates. In a revelatory scene, one classmate in particular questions why Sammy, who he had previously tormented, portrayed him as a sort of hero in the Senior Skip Day film. Sammy doesn’t have an explicit reason, and the bully is torn by the difference between who he really is and the version of him that Sammy has given to him and all of their peers.

More important than the films Sammy shares is the one he keeps a secret. During the camping trip I mentioned earlier, Sammy captures moments between his mother and his father’s best friend: glances, smiles, meetings of eyes filled with knowledge of the forbidden nature of their feelings for each other. Sammy shows this film to his mother and promises not to tell anyone what he has seen, finding a kinship with her in the distance he feels from his caring but extremely logical father. Sammy holds a reality in his film that his father, his siblings, and even his mother do not. The audience is pulled into Sammy’s point of view through not only his status as the protagonist, but through the lens of his camera. Sammy’s film, which he keeps for himself, is a time capsule of a dark realization in the movement to adulthood. But he also finds peace with his film, carrying his mother’s love with him through his Hollywood ambitions.

Then there is The Souvenir: Part II. Where Spielberg’s story shows how film can preserve memory, Hogg’s shows how film can obscure it. Julie is in a creative stint following the death of her abusive lover Anthony. She throws out a plan for a final film the audience has been hearing about since the first film in favor of an autofiction account of her relationship with Anthony. Julie is immediately met with opposition by her classmates and her school board. Julie’s film is unclear and her direction unsound, and we watch several scenes of her struggling to construct the film clearly for her actors and crew. The production nearly falls apart, as Julie’s incomplete understanding of her own experience can’t translate into a film that has to be constructed from that understanding.

Outside of the film production Julie is spending a lot of time trying to create a more complete image of Anthony in her mind, asking anyone she thinks will have an answer for information or even simply opinions about him. Julie’s growth as a a character comes from the realization that her limited knowledge of Anthony cannot be transcended, and the direction of her film changes. Instead of a vérité style approach and create a complete replica of the original film, Julie creates a surreal depiction of her removing Anthony’s haunting voice from her life. It is a rousing success, but the process has a lingering effect on Julie.

The final scene of Part II takes place years later, Julie is now a director of music videos celebrating her thirtieth birthday. In a similar manner to a scene Julie staged during the failed earlier film, the audience sees the entire scene play out through the window of the room the party is occurring in. The camera slides away, revealing the house in fact stands on a film set. A disembodied voice (possibly Julie’s mother played by Tilda Swinton, though it’s unclear) calls out “Cut!” and the scene cuts to black. Hogg brings The Souvenir duology full circle, Part II as a reflection on the making of the original, ending on an external examination of the catharsis of creating Part II. By tying her memory and her growth to film - the act of creation, the act of redistribution for spectators - Julie has inevitably trapped herself in a cycle. The end of The Souvenir: Part II argues that this is sort of a Pandora’s box, an irreversible process of seeing your life through a consistent metanarrative lens. Spending every day wondering if this will be a day that appears in your biography - or your next film. By allowing her subjective memory to be observed by the outside world through the process of creation, Julie herself becomes a creation to be observed by the outside world’s own subjective memory. Hogg has replicated her life and then replicated the replication - now existing on a level where the line between the movie and the memory is consistently blurred.

I think that both of these films tell powerful stories of what film can do for the person making it, and for me enhanced each other in that I coincidentally watched them back to back. As someone who has expressed a lot of themselves through art - I try to root my criticism in who I am and what is important to me anywhere I can - the assuredness of Spielberg and the uncertainty of Hogg reassure and haunt me in ways I’ll likely never forget. Both of these movies will likely exist as complements of each other in my mind for a long time.