Revisiting Steven Spielberg's "E.T.", and seeing The Extra Terrestrial anew
This one hits different to me now
Why am I writing about Steven Spielberg’s E.T. on a random Saturday night in 2023? Late last year, the great video essayist Lindsay Ellis did a, well, video essay on the film, premised on the idea that while E.T. is one of the most successful films of all time, and has even achieved a certain level of cultural ubiquity – everyone has seen it, everyone knows the references, etc. – it isn’t frequently discussed, isn’t continually returned to and re-evaluated as a capital-G Great movie. It’s an extremely smart and insightful video, as Ellis’ work always is, and I’d highly recommend you check it out. I was rewatching it recently, and it made me realize I hadn’t watched E.T. – or really even seriously thought about it – in many, many years, probably not since I was a kid and it came out on DVD in the early 2000s. Ellis had a good point – why don’t we talk about E.T.? Dissections of Spielberg’s work regularly pop up on Twitter and YouTube, with people sharing clips to demonstrate his preternatural gift for visual storytelling, but E.T. isn’t one that usually makes the rounds in that context.
So, in short, I thought I should give the film another watch, as an adult, to find my own answers to Ellis’ question. E.T. isn’t exactly a movie I bounced off of as a child – I’ve always liked it, and many of its images have been burned into my brain for decades now – but it’s one I never knew exactly how to feel about or process. Revisiting it now, I think the reason for that is simple: It is, by design, something of a difficult movie to process. It has some of the markers of a sci-fi adventure, but really isn’t one, lacking antagonists or lore or even much in the way of plot; it’s an aggressively small-scale and profoundly intimate movie about a child, his siblings, and the alien he befriends, and the introduction to love, loss, and letting go he confronts through that encounter. The most sensationalistic thing in the film is the flying bicycles, and otherwise, it’s a pretty quiet, slow work. The shape of E.T. – boy befriends alien/monster and eventually helps it escape – has been recreated countless times (even by Lindsay Ellis herself, in her excellent debut novel Axiom’s End), but always with a significantly higher degree of action and incident. In terms of the actual experience of watching the movie, it's hard for me to think of another film that feels quite like it. There’s a little bit of Hayao Miyazaki in here, as Ellis argues, an affinity with My Neighbor Totoro in its quiet, sometimes whimsical contemplation of heavy childhood emotions. I think there’s also some Francois Truffaut, with moments that recall The 400 Blows and its naturalistic depiction of adolescence. The movie E.T. made me think most of, watching it now, is Victor Erice’s 1973 Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive, about a six-year-old girl fascinated with James Whale’s Frankenstein. Empire Magazine explained that Spanish censors at the time of the film’s release felt “few people would bother to see such a slow-paced, thinly-plotted and ‘arty’ picture,” while The Criterion Collection,which brought the film to DVD here in the States, describes it as “a bewitching portrait of a child’s haunted inner life and one of the most visually arresting movies ever made.”
The thing is, both of those sentences work pretty well as descriptions of E.T., which is absolutely slow-paced, minimally plotted, and ‘arty.’ So much of its 2-hour runtime is spent simply inhabiting quiet moments, watching Elliot introduce E.T. to his toys, or learn how the alien mimes his actions; the film soaks in mood and atmosphere and trusts the audience to recognize that’s the point, rather than any major narrative momentum or payoff. It doesn’t at all have the rhythms of a Hollywood blockbuster – even when the G-Men come in, they’re quickly shown to be well-meaning and gentle in their own way, not nefarious and violent – and watching it now, it’s crazy to me this was the monster hit it was (E.T. outgrossed Star Wars in its theatrical run), because it is inconceivable a film this quiet and contemplative and nakedly emotive, without even the slightest trace of irony or cynicism, could be a hit in today’s landscape. But all those things that make it unusual also make it special. It is, like Spirit of the Beehive, an absolutely “bewitching portrait of a child’s” interiority, and it is absolutely visually arresting. Many of the best images Spielberg has ever captured or conjured are in this film – that recurring shot of the house’s backyard at night, with the moon shining down from above, is transfixing – and moreover, his mastery of visual storytelling is at its absolute sharpest here. There is so much confidence on display in telling a story through images and edits, to the point where dialogue is often minimal and usually naturalistic or incidental; the story happens through the pictures.
If you watch the film again, pay close attention to how Spielberg depicts subjectivity in this film; it’s one of the most impressive feats of his career. E.T. opens with a long, slow scene amidst the Redwoods, where we’re mainly in the perspective of E.T. and the other aliens without ever clearly seeing them, and the humans pursuing them are made alien through framing and editing choices. We don’t see a face, human or otherwise, in clear view for nearly 10 minutes into the film. And from that point on, we are firmly in the point-of-view of children, to the point that for the first 80 minutes, the only adult face we see is Elliot’s mom. It’s essentially the Charlie Brown idea, but without the funny voices – adults exist out of view, out of reach, maybe even out of mind. Elliot’s teacher is a pair of legs, a voice otherwise disembodied, and the G Men are shadows cast along suburban streets at sunset. When we finally see them at full view, they’re wearing NASA suits, their faces completely obscured. When we finally see another adult, it’s Peter Coyote as the kindly scientist who makes a point of connecting with Elliot, empathizing with what he’s going through, rather than intimidating or threatening him. The film is almost eerily adept at putting us in the perspective of these children, where the world is big and unknowable and scary, but also full of possibility – where the redwood forest a few blocks away might as well be an alien planet.
As a special effect, E.T. himself is, of course, one of the most incredible in film history, one I will never fully wrap my head around. Spielberg is able to do fully expressive, completely uncompromised close-ups with him as though he is any other actor, and those eyes are so full of life and personality. While there are some visible limitations in how much movement the creature can enact, the sheer tactility of his face and body more than makes up for that. This is a film that literally could not exist with CGI effects, because we simply would not have the same physical connection to E.T. as a character – and more importantly, the child actors wouldn’t have that relationship, that tangible touchstone to react off of, and the performances would not work the way they do.
And those performances are the heart of this movie. E.T. is on the shortlist of greatest child performances in the cinema, next to films like the aforementioned The 400 Blows and Spirit of the Beehive, or Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and Yasujiro Ozu’s I Was Born, But…. Like those masterworks, Spielberg builds spaces for these kids to perform naturalistically, to act and react in the fullness of time, and sometimes to just be. It’s incredible, and it sometimes verges on uncomfortable, because it all feels so real. It is easy, even as an adult, to forget this is just a movie, and that Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore did not actually go through these things, and just get caught up in the moment like you’re looking through a window onto a child’s life (which happens to include an alien). The film is deeply harrowing at points, sincere and emotional and unflinching in ways that are truly hard to watch. Spielberg’s masterstroke is the long sequence of Elliot saying his goodbyes to what he thinks is a dead E.T., shot almost like it’s being captured illicitly, like this isn’t staged acting, but a genuine display of raw, uncomfortable, barely-coherent grief – not histrionic, but devastatingly quiet. And just when you don’t think you can take any more of the sheer naked sadness of it all, that’s exactly when E.T. wakes up, and the movie becomes celebratory, and Spielberg puts his foot on the gas to give these kids a win. That is, perhaps, what separates E.T. from films like The 400 Blows or Spirit of the Beehive – that it has a triumphant ending, bittersweet in that Elliot and E.T. have to say goodbye, but ultimately hopeful in that they do it on their own terms. Life doesn’t really work like that, of course. The truest moment in the entire movie is Elliot standing over E.T.’s lifeless body, trying to find the words to explain what this being he barely understood meant to him, when the alien’s life and death were both completely inexplicable. It echoes the kinds of grief we encounter over all sorts of loved ones, from pets to parents to friends, and how simultaneously sad and beautiful it is that love remains so strongly felt even when they are suddenly snatched away. Everything after that point in the movie is fantasy – flight and escape, the world made right where it had been wrong. That’s nice too, and especially for a film that played on every screen to every audience in America, we’ve arguably earned that fantasy, as viewers. But still – there’s an even artier, weirder, sadder version of E.T. that is a bit more unresolved and unresolvable, and it lives within one of the most popular blockbusters ever made.
Maybe that’s why we don’t talk about E.T. – that even as it ultimately delivers fantasy, it haunts us with the sheer, solid, unshakable reality of the sad, existential beauty it shows us along the way. That it isn’t setting up sequels or spin-offs or bothering with lore and ‘world-building’ is probably part of it, too; as a culture, we’re gradually losing the language to talk about big movies made for everyone that aren’t trying to sell you something, aren’t simultaneously serving as a commercial for future investment. Everything the film has to say is here, within these two hours, and it is gorgeously and poetically expressed, every inch of it as skillful and confident as John Williams’ incredible score. E.T. exploded as a movie, as an event, but it remains a powerfully personal cinematic statement, intimate and prickly and sometimes even challenging. It is a film that deserves to be seriously talked about and discussed more, in part because the more I write about, the more I realize how difficult we’ve made it to talk about movies like this, let alone get them made.
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