I didn’t see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when it came out in 1982, but I was certainly aware of it. It was an unexpected smash hit and went on to become the highest grossing film of all time, at least for a while. At this point I don’t remember why I didn’t go to see it. After all, I’d enjoyed Spielberg’s previous film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Whatever.
I certainly knew the basic story: A weird little alien gets left behind and is befriended by a young boy. They do stuff together. Somehow the alien sends a signal back home – there’s that iconic line, “E.T. phone home.” His people come back for him. The end.
About a week ago I saw E.T. in my Netflix queue and thought, “Why not?” I started watching it. By about a half-hour in I was delighted, but also surprised, and even a bit disoriented. My rudimentary sense of the story didn’t give me any particular expectations, but my lack of specific expectations had not prepared me for, you know, THIS! This little note is an attempt to figure out just what it is that I saw.
The aliens have landed
There is a standard science-fiction “the aliens have landed” story. H.G. Wells’ late nineteenth century novel, The War of the Worlds is perhaps the progenitor of the genre. A race of intelligent aliens lands and proceeds to lay waste to everything, but somehow we survive. Wells’ novel inspired a number of derivatives, including a well-known 1938 radio broadcast by Orson Welles, and several movie. The first one came out in 1959 and Spielberg himself released a version in 2005. Independence Day (1996) is another film of this type, while Mars Attacks! (1996) parodies the genre.
Whatever E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is, it is certainly not this kind of film.
But there’s another type, which I associate with The Day the Earth Stood Still, from 1951, and remade in 2008. An alien visits earth accompanied by a powerful robot, Gort. Earth has just tested an atomic bomb and the alien, named Klaatu, delivers a stern warning, in effect, “don’t go any further or you will be destroyed.” Klaatu and the robot then leave. This movie left us with the enigmatic line, “Klaatu barada nikto,” which has broken free of the film itself.
Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind can be seen as a descendant of this kind of film. As far as I can tell, these extraterrestrials didn’t deliver any ultimatum, though they did leave us with a five-note musical motif. But they weren’t destructive and they didn’t seem particularly aggressive, just flamboyant and noisy. They leave with a group of earthlings who have been particularly obsessed with them.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial isn’t that type of film either. I knew this when I decided to watch it. But still, those are the kinds of films I knew, and I’d seen both of the Spielberg films.
One thing those two Spielberg films have in common (The War of the Worlds and Close Encounters of the Third Kind) is that the aliens themselves don’t get much screen time. They are present mostly through their actions. E.T., however, gets lots of screen time. So, let’s start there.
E.T. the Creature
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is about the relationships that are formed between the alien, E.T. the three children, Michael, Gertie, and especially Elliot Taylor, who is ten. Whatever else he is, E.T. is a creature who can plausibly enter into relationships with children and bond closely with them.
Physically, he’s sort, even shorter than young Gertie, who is five. He’s also rather squat, with a bulbous wedge-shaped head atop a long skinny neck, two bulging eyes, long skinny arms that reach the ground, slender fingers, and very short legs. His skin is rough and dark. The overall vibe is cute-grotesque.
The kids treat him as a both a pet and a companion. In the course of interacting with them, and watching TV, he picks up a bit of English and demonstrates his telekinetic ability by tossing some balls in the air and moving them about to illustrate his home planetary system. At one point he sees a pot of desiccated flowers and brings them back to life. Elliot injures his finger and E.T. heals it by touching it with one of his. When Elliot and Michael are in school E.T. stays at home, playing dress-up with Gertie, watching TV, and drinking beer. When gets becomes drunk, his drunkenness is conveyed to Elliot in school, who then becomes variously disruptive. Somehow, amid all this, E.T. gets an idea from a comic book and manages to cobble together a radio-transmitter so he can send a signal home, though actually doing so requires help from the kids.
None of this is standard alien behavior. It’s a strange conglomeration of capacities and actions which only makes sense in the context of this film. What would a whole world of such creatures be like? The question simply doesn’t arise.
How the Story is Staged
Thus while the standard “aliens have landed” movie involves interactions between an alien race and the earth as a whole, this movie concentrates on one alien and a handful of kids. Much of the action in Close Encounters involves high-level government officials collaborating and coordinating. Spielberg’s version of War of the Worlds moves from Brooklyn to Boston. Both films show TV newscasts about the aliens. None of this is present in E.T. Yes, at the beginning we see men beating the bush with flashlights looking for, just what do they think they’re looking for? We don’t know. We see men in a surveillance van listening in on conversations in the neighborhood where the kids live. Even when the officials finally come for E.T. in their hazmat suits we have no sense of anything beyond the immediate events. Has this hunt for the alien made the news? What levels of government are involved? We don’t have a clue.
And then there’s the use of the camera. Much of the time it seems to be positioned relatively close to the ground, at the eye level of children, not adults. There is an overall sense of looking up and out at the world which is quite different from what we have in other alien-landing films. In those films camera use positions us outside the action so we have access to the broad sweep of things. Here there little or no broad sweep, just the events unfolding around and in front of us.
Into the Bopi
On the whole, my sense is that, in making this film Spielberg ventured into the bopi. And just what, pray tell, is that? I have the term from by friend, Charlie Keil. Early in his career he did fieldwork among the Tiv of Nigeria. The bopi is an area that’s set aside for children’s play. Moreover, adults are forbidden to enter the bopi. When I was a kid there were areas that more or less functioned like that in my neighborhood. It’s not that adults were forbidden to go there, or even that these areas were unofficially understood to be ‘kids only.’ But adults simply didn’t go there. They were interstitial spaces, liminal, boondocks.
When Elliot takes E.T. into the woods so he can activate the radio transmitter, they go to an area in the woods that the kids use for play. They return to that area so that E.T. can meet his compatriots returning to pick him up. But the whole film feels like an imaginative bopi. It’s a kid-centric world in which adults are an intrusive presence.
That becomes clear when officialdom invades the house in their hazmat suits and quarantine the place. E.T. is exhausted and debilitated from having been out the previous night (signaling home). E.T. is hooked into a panoply modern medical gear, but to no avail. He’s dying and, finally, appears to be dead. The apparatus is unhooked, but Elliot is allowed to see him. Elliot tells E.T. that he loves him and that’s sufficient to bring E.T. back. How could it be otherwise? At this point the kids unite to return E.T. to his companions, fending off the adult world to do so.
Ultimately the story of E.T. seems to be almost an allegory or metaphor for art itself, a zone apart from the world into which we move to revivify and reconstruct.
Steven Spielberg reflects on the film
This is a short film in which Spielberg talks about the film, revealing at one point that E.T. is reminiscent of an imaginary companion he’d created from himself when his parents divorced.
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