Sammy Fabelman lives in suburbia between two poles, real and metaphorical: his artist mother, who makes music, and his scientist father, who makes machines. Both parents are, in their own ways, thwarted and incomplete: his mother cannot have her art — she is a pianist, but gave it up to raise her children — and his father cannot have his family, because he is a workaholic. Sammy learns, as artists do, to create a world he can control.

He can change the world by filming it: change its emphasis; change his place in it. Sammy films, without realising it at first, his mother’s touch on his father’s best friend during a camping trip and learns that she is unfaithful. The insinuation — and this is the most self-aware thing in The Fabelmans — is that cinema is a poisonous medium: eat from the tree of knowledge and be cast out of paradise. But Sammy collapses to its incredible power to transform. The antisemitic bully of his schooldays in Arizona becomes a hero through Sammy’s lens, so much so that even the bully is humiliated by it. Sammy makes him small by making him big and sends him back to the world with his shame.

The shame, though, was Spielberg’s: in making The Fabelmans he is collapsing to the very power that he describes. Why can he not be honest about the scale of his ambivalence? According to his biographer, Joseph McBride, Spielberg was so ashamed of his Judaism he once pretended he did not know his own grandfather. “And suddenly,” Spielberg said, “my grandfather, with the yarmulke, comes out of our house, two houses down, and yells: ‘Shmuel! Shmuel! [Steven’s Hebrew name]. I’m not answering him. I’m pretending I don’t know him. I’m denying that name. My friend is saying, ‘He’s looking your way. Does he mean you?’ They point at me, and I’m saying ‘No, it’s not me’.”

Like all 20th-century American Jews, Spielberg grew up among stories of the Shoah — his parents talked about it constantly, inappropriately. I suspect this unimaginable loss was magnified by the loss of his family’s happiness, which shattered when his mother’s adultery was exposed: apparently by him. He was spoiled, though. “We never said no,” his mother Leah said in an interview. “Steve really did run us. He called the shots.” He describes her too: “We never grew up at home, because she never grew up.”

So, a shattered, gifted child: making himself big where he was once small. His sister Anne wrote the script for Big, in which a 12-year-old boy is given the body of an adult. He is fearful — what else could he be? Spielberg’s films are about anxiety. The truck (Duel) or the shark (Jaws) will kill you. Or the suburbs will: your own home. Suburban children are terrorised in Spielberg’s work. Their alien friend (though Spielberg is both Elliott and E.T.) is threatened; corpses rise from the ground (Poltergeist). He was very afraid as a child: “I used to be afraid of my hand shadow.”

Cinema is a solution to this, and this explains his monomania, and his skill. It is an act of survival. “I had no way to sublimate or channel those fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs.” Later he found a bigger audience. “One of the best ways to cope with it [fear] is to turn it around and put it out to others. I mean, if you are afraid of the dark, you put the audience in a dark theatre. I had a great fear of the ocean.” After Jaws, we all did. The great white shark was collateral damage.

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An obvious theme develops across his work: this man is preserved in childhood. He “can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood”. The mother is tortured; the father is lost. There are few politics in Spielberg’s films, and there is no sex. The sex scene in Indiana Jones is a man having sex with his mother. “Where,” she asks him during foreplay, “doesn’t it hurt?” Sometimes the child finds the absent father. In the final Indiana Jones film, I thought the grail was his father. Indiana says to Henry: “We never talked…”

And like a child, Spielberg is covetous, often unkind. He bought one of the Rosebud sleds in Citizen Kane, but he wouldn’t help Orson Welles, its creator, get work. Julia Phillips, his producer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, called him “a writer fucker”. He can be amazingly obtuse, because he has lived his life in Hollywood and because he is always transmitting. He was so confident he would be nominated for the best director Academy Award for Jaws, he invited a news crew to film him watching the nominations. Only four came, including editing: no best director. According to Phillips, he had the editor, who won the Academy Award, kicked off his next film.

He had a public adolescence in 1993, with Schindler’s List: his acknowledgement of his Judaism. “The experience of making Schindler’s List made me reconcile with all of the reasons… I hid from my Jewishness,” he said in a 2017 documentary. “And it made me so proud to be a Jew.” Even so, it is a film about Jews non-Jews can live with, because it is about non-Jews: Oskar Schindler and the commandant Amon Göth.

It was Schindler he identified with, of course, as David Thomson noted: the morally complex showman, the maker of enamel, then souls. “The closest Schindler’s List comes to art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to back into the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature.” Again, it came from his childhood. He told The Jerusalem Post that the antisemitic school bully “never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred by, in a way, doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator… Schindler consorted with the enemy, and he got what he wanted.”

He had wanted to film in Auschwitz but was forbidden. I had thought — how could he even ask? — but then I read about him: he is Steven Spielberg. He felt he could. His fake concentration camp outside Krakow is still there. I have seen it. I think he did Jews a real disservice with Schindler’s List, though unconsciously: his Nazis are glamourised while his Jews are a mute and terrorised mass.

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Remember the last scene: the imposition of a redemptive ending, which felt more horrifying than anything that went before? How could he make such a film and then miss the point of it? A film-maker friend saw a rough cut of Schindler’s List: he reported no music, no child in a red coat, and no redemptive ending. He thought it was a masterpiece. But that is Spielberg. He cannot stop editorialising because he does not trust the audience, only himself. “I am the audience,” he said.

The usual complaint about Spielberg is that, a gifted child making cinema for less gifted children, he has turned cinema from the sophisticated art form of the Seventies into an anaesthetic. Pauline Kael said the problem isn’t Spielberg but his acolytes: “It’s not so much what Spielberg has done, but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilisation of the culture.”

His response to this is typically hurt: “I think some people would like me to make a movie that explores the dark side and provides no easy answer to make the audience feel better when they return to their cars. If those critics want more pain in my films, they can give me $2 million — that’s all it would take to make a film about pain — and I’ll make that movie.” I like to think that the only thing standing between him and greatness is his self-deception — his insistence on his own affability — but the awful thing is I know he could make it. And I wish he would.

I wonder how much he understands himself: The Fabelmans, despite its beauty, suggests not at all. His wife, the actress Kate Capshaw, who starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, once asked him what happened to her career. “He said, ‘You weren’t supposed to have a career. You were supposed to be with me.’” It’s what happened to his mother precisely: it was the source of her anguish. He says so in The Fablemans. But I am not surprised that he forgets this. His films don’t deal with the characters’ relationships with one another. They deal with Spielberg’s relationship with himself. His work looks ever backwards to the glittering, and limiting, landscape of the child.

On the one hand, our societies are desperately keen to assert that all people are the same: not just equal under the law or equal in dignity, but equally capable and with the same abilities. One demonstration of this is that there are no currently acceptable explanations for unequal outcomes that do not currently fix solely on prejudice or lack of opportunity. The era insists that we are all equally capable, and if we are not in the same place at the end of it, then that is only because the playing field has not been sufficiently levelled.

As the same time, we also like to believe that certain groups of people bring special attributes to the table, the phenomenon I have tried to identify as “Equal and also better”. So, for instance, there is the example of Christine Lagarde, who regularly asserts — without of course having any skin in the game herself — that women bring attributes to the table that men do not.

Last month she was at it again, claiming that world leaders who happen to be female are doing a better job at dealing with coronavirus than their male counterparts. Putting aside for a moment whether that is provable or not, or indeed correct, the deep assertion is what is important: there is something about women which makes them more capable in coping with pandemics. Equal, but better.

And that may be even be true — but you cannot run this programme at the same time as the programme that says we are all the same and that the justification for women being at the top table is that they have precisely the same competencies as men. Or you cannot do so without some serious grinding of gears.

Now Hollywood — like all other areas of the entertainment industry — is at present contorted by this same underlying contradiction. With an eye on the prevailing winds, this week it was announced that only films which are “diverse” will now be considered for the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Specifically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared that certain diversity criteria would need to be met in order to satisfy the judges.

For these purposes the Academy is focusing on “underrepresented groups” and lists these as “women, racial and ethnic groups, LBGTQ+ and people with disabilities”. To be considered, a film must fit at least one of the following criteria, among them:

— “At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors: must be from “an underrepresented racial or ethnic group”

— Underrepresented people must be in creative leadership positions, as departmental heads or as part of the crew.

— There must be paid apprenticeships, internships and training for underrepresented people.

— Audience development, from publicity and marketing to distribution, must also include people from these categories.

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Cinema is already one of the most diverse industries on earth, a place where human life in its fullest is already on display, from Gandhi and The Last Emperor to Dances with Wolves to Rain Man — all previous Oscar winners – not to mention the all-black Moonlight, which in 2016 was finally given the award after it had been wrongly handed to the rather bland, all-white La La Land. But by then already the demands for more representation were in full-flow, the #OscarsTooWhite campaign showing what the real problem was. Hollywood might be diverse, but it is not diverse in the right way. Diversity means minorities being equal, but better.

Yet the film and entertainment industry is unusual, and trying to use Hollywood to address underrepresentation is as doom-laden as trying to use it as a test-pad for global sexual etiquette. It thrives on untypical people with exceptional talents, tall poppies who don’t reflect the wider population. Although Hollywood is a town where progressive views are almost mandatory, it is also a land of almost brutal, Darwinian competition, and the last place to enact an egalitarian experiment. Rather than being fair, success is won or lost by most unjust of criteria — beauty, wealth, nepotism personal connections, and raw talent.

None of the Oscar winners of the past decades has been the product of fairness or equity, but of unusually talented and exceptional artists. Few previous Oscar winners would have passed this diversity criteria – which is perhaps the point – but then it’s hard to see how any of them would have been improved by diversity.

Would The Godfather have been a better movie had it featured more “LBGTQ+ people” or “people with disabilities”? Would The Departed or Shakespeare in Love be improved by its producers being compelled to offer training opportunities to people from underrepresented groups?

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The assumption behind criteria like those introduced this week is that the answer is that, yes, The Godfather would have been a better movie if it had had better representation. But that is a difficult, bold claim to make, so the only acceptable argument to make would be to state that The Godfather would have been exactly as good a movie if it had fulfilled the new criteria. Diversity equals the same, or better.

Nor will it end there, because it never does, not when a group of people are determined to hold two impossible things at once: that diversity in itself is good, but that diversity must also mean equality (except when minorities are overrepresented, of course). The #OscarsSoWhite campaign of recent years has not concerned junior apprentices and there is not a chance it will be satisfied by it; the real goal is onscreen representation, a criteria by which very few of the past winners could ever be made today.

Perhaps The Godfather, about a clannish Sicilian society unwelcome to outsiders, would have to feature some people of colour to pass the test, although obviously not as fellow criminals because visibility only counts if it is positive in its portrayals. Titanic is full of quite unfashionably white people drowning and would have to feature black working-class Irish passengers in Third Class (a BBC production might actually do this). Schindler’s List could obviously present a problem on the representation front, with the famous lack of diversity in the Third Reich, and casting black actors as victims or perpetrators of the Holocaust could be deemed insensitive.

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Still the diversity demands will expand, because the film industry is stuck in that same logical conundrum as Christine Lagarde and everyone else – that the representation of certain groups is desirable because members of that group have exactly the same abilities as everybody else. And also that they bring something which makes the end product distinctly better.

It is possible that the diversity criteria will mean that Hollywood movies from now on will be distinctly better, in which case everyone — not least any cinema-goers who still exist — can celebrate loudly. Or it is possible that it will make no difference.

But of course a third possibility exists, which is that the results are worse, that the films – their plotting and casting – are more obviously contrived, and that the audience does not take to the films which Hollywood wishes them to. And there lies a possible end-point to this commonly held contradiction in our age – that the great play for equity will have been made and the end results will be seen to be not just the same or better, but in fact visibly worse. What a story that will be.