- Origins
Steven Spielberg's desire to make a
low-budget film, more expressive of his personal attitudes than those he
had directed before, ironically led to his greatest box-office triumph.
A fully-blown statement of the ideas about childhood and escapism that
had been present in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E. T.
The Extra-Terrestrial is the tale of the fulfilment of a young boy's
greatest wish; the arrival of a creature from another planet whose magic
can compensate for the harshness and loneliness of pre-adolescent experience.
Spielberg clearly saw the film as the culmination of the escapist streak
in his work:
- “I'm probably going to be married.
I'm probably going to have kids. Maybe E.T. represents my last summer
vacation before going back to school.“ 1
This is known as the Kelly-Hopkinsville case. On the night of 21 August 1965, a UFO was seen by one witness near his farmhouse. When he reported this to other members of his family they ridiculed him. A few minutes later everyone in the house saw a small, glowing being, with large eyes and long arms. The occupants of the farm shot at this and similar creatures that appeared outside. To their dismay the creatures fell over, scurried away, and then re-appeared again!
Spielberg became fascinated by the ending of Sayles' script, in which the one benevolent alien among the marauding clan was left behind on earth. The idea began to merge with Spielberg's plan to direct a small-scale film about the experiences of a group of schoolchildren, a project which had been variously entitled Growing Up, After School and A Boy's Life. Spielberg was by now so taken with the project that he decided to direct it himself.
Also present on the Raiders location
was Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter responsible for The Black Stallion
(1979), who was visiting the set to see her boyfriend Harrison Ford. After
discussing the idea with her, Spielberg asked Mathison to write the film.
She refused at first, since the experience of re-reading some of her earlier
work had persuaded her to give up screenwriting. Spielberg persisted, and
Mathison finally agreed. Each week during the editing of Raiders of
the Lost Ark, she would bring Spielberg new pages of the screenplay
and review with him the existing material:
- "on the whole, it was not hard to write.
I found it terribly moving when I was writing it. When I got the last page,
I was in floods of tears." 2
"She's a genius at rhythm, adding a frame here or there." 3
E.T.
himself was a mechanical creation designed by Carlo Rimbaldi who had worked
on Close Encounters, the remake of King Kong and Alien
(1979). Rimbaldi's three E.T. models were capable of eighty-six movements
and reactions between them. In scenes in which the alien was required to
walk, he was 'portrayed' by the late Pat Bilon, by Tamara de Treaux (during
the final walk up the spaceship gangplank) and by Matthew de Merritt (the
scene in the family kitchen). Schoolteacher Pat Welsh provided the voice
of E.T. and not, as some reports suggest actress Debra Winger .
E.T. was shot over sixty-one days at Culver City High School, in the Los Angeles suburbs of Northridge and Tuguna and at Laird International Studios in Culver City. For the first time in his career, Spielberg abandoned his practice of storyboarding each shot, instead allowing improvisation and filming all first rehearsals in order to preserve spontaneity. The film was completed for 10.5 million dollars (half the cost of Close Encounters or Raiders) two days ahead of schedule, and went on to become the most successful movie of all.
E.T. And The Audience
The success of E.T. astonished a gleeful film industry and amazed of the film's harsher critics. As with Star Wars before it, the film's images and dialogue quickly passed into the popular mythology and became repeated, parodied and merchandised to a huge extent. In the face of such an enormous public response, it is perhaps best to begin any study of E.T. by attempting to account for its popularity.
Perhaps the keynote to any understanding of E.T.’s appeal emotional intensity which the film presents. Audiences across the were invited to weep as the film approached its climax, and even the First Lady of the United States, Nancy Reagan, was reported to have been in tears. Hard-bitten New York film reviewers such as Pauline Kael and Reed were moved to describe the film as "a classic tale of enchantment” and "A fabulous masterpiece that leaves all who see it with a warm and radiant glow of optimism and joy." 4 What perhaps drew audiences more than any other factor is the heightened emotional experience that E.T. entails; the film emphatically rejects emotional repressiveness.
Beginning with E.T.‘s abandonment, the film takes us through a succession of emotional high and low points: the early meeting with Elliott; their triumphant bicycle flight through the skies; E.T.'s sickness and apparent death; his sudden resurrection; and finally the characters’ separation as E.T. returns to his own planet.
Interestingly, British critics were
less enthusiastic about the film, perhaps bearing out the contention that
E.T.’s
anti-repressive emotionality is its most striking feature. Middlebrow reviewers
in Britain tended to respond to E.T. by either damning it for sentimentality
or by accusing it of being insincere and calculated in its presentation
of emotion. Hence, Richard Combs in the
Monthly Film Bulletin refers
disapprovingly to the "high spirited kids-and-indestructible-families ethic
of Disney" and adds:
- Spielberg is ready to sacrifice any
logic of plot or character, and certainly of theme, for his celebratory
climax. 5
- "this movie is about as innocent as
the World Trade Center in New York.” 6
In portraying an alien that represents positive instincts - love, wonder, compassion - which human society represses, rather than negative or disruptive impulses, E.T. thus seems to take the traditional form of the science fiction tale and turn it on its head. The film also presents a sort of science fiction narrative in reverse in the way its early scenes establish the alien. As the film begins, we are identified with the alien's point-of-view as he surveys the mysterious new landscape of the Earth, and this identification establishes the arrival of human scientists as an intrusion instead of a salvation. The rest of the narrative consists largely of an endeavour to repel the intrusion of the human scientists. In the traditional Hollywood science fiction film of the Cold War era {the kind of movie Spielberg says he felt unhappy with, since he always sympathised with the extra-terrestrials), an alien force would intrude into human society, to be eventually repelled by the forces of science. Yet E.T. represents completely the opposite position. For those who believe that the form of the conventional science fiction narrative is inherently conservative, E.T. provides a startling reversal of generic conventions.
Without doubt, E.T.'s success
is also due in part to its narrative structure, which Spielberg has compared
to the stories of Rudyard Kipling,
- "...where you really sort of knew what
the story was going to be about, where the story was going to end and who
was going to be in it quite quickly. But then all the homework of exposition
was out of the way and you took a very pleasant ride with a lot of surprises
in the storytelling process". 7
The film disregards narrative complexities and plot devices. The audience knows that scientists are pursuing E.T., but their specific purpose is not known; the film establishes that E.T. is dying on Earth, but does not specify the reason; we know that the return of his people revives E.T. from death, but we do not know specifically how. In all these cases the audience fills in the gaps in the exposition, and does so gladly because the film is basically structured as a succession of emotional peaks, with the narrative serving essentially as the means of travelling from one of these peaks to another.
A further interpretation that has been offered to explain the success of E.T. has been that the film presents a number of parallels with the Gospels. This theory has been advanced by more eccentric writers, such as AI Millar in his pamphlet E. T. -You're More Than A Movie Star (9), and by film periodicals. Its validity has been somewhat undermined by the insistence of both Spielberg and Melissa Mathison that no religious allegory was intended. (Spielberg is Jewish; Mathison is Catholic but maintains she only noticed the religious parallels in the script during filming.) Nonetheless, critics have defied Spielberg to deny the significance of incidents such as E.T.'s discovery in Elliott's shed (taken as an approximation to a stable), the name of the alien's earthly mother (Mary), the message of love that falls on deaf ears among those in authority, and E.T.'s death, resurrection and final ascension to the heavens. Such theory seems too often to take the religious interpretation as a starting point and then select and distort textual evidence to support the assertion. Some of the religious parallels in the film are indeed striking, but to suggest that the film is a specifically Christian allegory or that its success is a result of its religious message would be to wildly exaggerate.
It has been suggested that E.T. may have struck a deep psychological chord with audiences. Spielberg's assertion that he wanted E.T. to be “a creature that only a mother could love" has been concurred with by those who have suggested that the film's popularity among women is due to the resemblance between E.T. and a human foetus. A more serious psychological study of the film was embarked upon by Jeffrey L. Drezner, who has argued that the film speaks of the problems of "Iatency age” children, i.e. those who are starting to become independent of support and making their own sense of the world.
At latency age, Drezner notes that children
are struggling to choose between rational thinking and magical thinking.
Elliott, a latency age child, trying to cope without a father, regresses
to magical thought; discovering E.T., he knows he must keep the creature
safe from the forces of rational thought. Drezner notes perceptively of
the non-latency age children in the film that;
- Michael takes longer to believe in
the magical thing, yet Gertie is immediately terrified by E.T. Her fantasy
world consisting of inanimate objects being subject to her total control,
E.T. challenges her prelatent omnipotence. She reasserts her omnipotence
by dressing E.T. as a doll. 10
Drezner argues that audiences are
attracted to E.T. because they recognise Elliott's traumatic situation;
since all adults have experienced the loss of our "omnipotent and magical
thinking", we completely empathise with Elliott. Drezner's argument is
convincing and lucid; yet put crudely it seems to suggest that audiences
appreciate E.T. because they long to recapture a sense of wonder
and belief that belongs only to children. This is a very similar explanation
of the film's success to that which Universal's publicists would have the
world believe.
References
1. Spielberg interviewed by London Weekend Television’s The South Bank Show, 1982.
2. Cited in Crawley, Tony, The Steven Spielberg Story, Zomba Books, 1983, p. 114.
3. Ibid., p. 143.
4. Kael, Pauline, New Yorker and Reed, Rex, New York Daily News, cited in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial Movie Special, Movie Publishing, 1982, p. 14.
5. Combs, Richard, ‘E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial’ in Monthly Film Bulletin, vol. 49, no. 587, December 1982, p. 282.
6. Shipman, David, A Pictorial History of Science Fiction Films, Hamlyn, 1985, p. 154.
7. Spielberg interviewed by London Weekend Television’s The South Bank Show, 1982.
8. Cited in Crawley, Tony, The Steven Spielberg Story, Zomba Books, 1983, p. 115.
9. Privately published, 1982.
10. Drezner, Jeffrey L., ‘E.T.: An Odyssey of Loss’ in The Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 70, no. 2, Summer 1983, pp. 271-272.
Web Reference
This unofficial site contains up-to-date news about Spielberg's films and productions. Contains essays and information about most of his output and aims to be a complete database.
Part Two
In part two we will look at E.T. in the context of Spielberg’s other work and influences, and we will look at the critical backlash to E.T.
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