This year marked the eleventh (!!) annual Winter Marathon, and after two consecutive years of getting in our meat (say, a foreign director such as Fellini) and potatoes (say, an old-time Western director such as John Ford), it was probably a good year to get in some dessert. Enter probably the most-successful director of the modern era in Steven Spielberg. It may actually be impossible to oversell Spielberg’s achievements. To date, he has directed 31 theatrical feature films, you’ve probably heard of 30 of them, and it would be hard not to rattle off 20 of them just by memory.
Spielberg’s work seems to be very bimodal – he generally either works in serious historical drama (e.g. Schindler’s List, The Color Purple, Amistad, Lincoln, Empire of the Sun, War Horse, The Post…) or in the blockbuster somewhat fluffy Fantasy/Sci-Fi/Adventure realm (e.g. the Indiana Jones 4-tuple, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, War of the Worlds, Minority Report, Hook, The BFG, The Adventures of Tintin…)
As much as I was tempted to include Schindler’s List in any Spielberg marathon, after some discussion with Kevin it was decided that for this marathon, we should keep it light. (No, seriously, I literally laid awake several nights thinking about whether one could even consider doing a Spielberg marathon without one of the you-must-see-it-once films of all time, to the point where I nearly decided against doing Spielberg at all simply because Schindler’s List just doesn’t work in this context.)
So, having decided to stick with Spielberg’s fantasy side, we went our typical route of selecting films from the director’s early, middle, and late career. In doing so, we managed to run the preteen dream gamut of aliens, dinosaurs, and, well, virtual reality treasure hunts. I think it really worked out well. And we started with what has to be Spielberg’s most beloved film aimed squarely at children – 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
It Came From The Fabergé Planet
E.T. does something a bit unusual for films of its genre – it starts with the aliens. None of this teasing you for 45 minutes before the monster-suit reveal, nope, we jump right in and spend the first five minutes or so of the film with a group of what appear to be alien botanists on a field mission. They’re short, squat little naked fellers, with a waddling gait and protractile necks and hearts that appear to glow during periods of telepathic communication.
The Mag-Lite-ificent Seven
But when government agents come on the scene, the aliens, presumably following the Prime Directive rules about not interacting with species that have not established first contact, flee the scene – unfortunately leaving one of their own (later to be eponymized “E.T.”) behind.
There are probably two things worth noting now so that I don’t need to touch on them later. First, and to the film’s slight detriment, how do I say this? It’s not like the alien botanists don’t know how to count. They clearly must be aware that they have left one of their own behind – yet they don’t come back to look for him or pick him up until he sends a signal. Perhaps they assume he has been captured by Earthmen and they’ve abandoned him to his fate of being medically probed, or barbecued, or whatever it is that Earthmen do to alien botanists when they manage to catch them. But they’re clearly the more advanced species, and a big part of the disbelief that needs to be suspended for E.T., at least for me, is centered on the idea that the alien botanists really should have had a much easier time of it, basically throughout. E.T., for instance, is clearly telekinetic, but he just doesn’t go to that well very often even though it would probably have made things a lot easier.
The second, much more to the film’s credit, is how Spielberg treats adults in the film. With the exception of Elliott’s mother, almost all of the adults in the film are nameless, faceless, and shot from a very low floor-based camera angle. This movie is, at its heart, shot from the point-of-view of the children, in a world where adults are some distant things no more relatable than alien botanists – in fact in many ways less relatable. The way Spielberg shoots his adults, anonymizes his adults, makes them mysterious with uncertain and untrustable motivations is a key to the creation of the wonderful atmosphere of E.T. OK, on with the recap.
Well, Gertie, at least he’s better looking than Adam Sandler!
E.T., having avoided the clutches of the government agents, retreats to the suburbs in search of food and is discovered by the young Elliott, who takes him in and lets both his younger sister Gertie (played stellarly by a young Drew Barrymore) and his older brother Michael in on the secret. They manage to keep E.T.’s existence a secret from their mother for at least a while, but then things get a bit strange. Elliott and E.T. appear to develop some sort of telesymbiosis. (It does crop up a bit suddenly.)
E.T. decides to bail on 1980s Earth after learning he’d have to downgrade to 480i on a CRT
You see, E.T. has stayed at home while Elliott went off to school, and has unknowingly gotten into the family stash of Coors while watching John Ford’s The Quiet Man on TV (note: the very first instance of a former Winter Marathon film being featured in a current Winter Marathon film…I almost squeeeeed out loud when I was watching this I was so happy!)
Elliott decides to try his hand at wrestling up three weight classes
This leads to Elliott getting drunk, releasing all of the frogs in his biology class, and performing an iconic Quiet Man kiss with a girl that would go on to become Erika Eleniak, famous Playboy playmate and Baywatch star. Go, Elliott!
But this lighthearted scene is really only in place to establish the developing connection between E.T. and Elliott, which will be paying off soon.
Let me run with you tonight/I’ll take you on a moonlight ride
Despite the fun times on Earth, E.T. is desperate to go home, and with Elliott’s help, he manufactures a crude signalling device out of household items and the two of them go on a late-night Halloween telekinetic bicycle ride to set out the signalling device back in the meadow where the alien botanists originally landed. But at this point, E.T. and Elliott are both getting very ill, and in the morning Michael finds them and brings them back, just as the government agents have finally closed in on E.T.’s location.
It’s like The Andromeda Strain, but for kids!
At this point, I remember the film becoming actually scary for me as a child. Was I scared of E.T.? No. But was I scared of the faceless, space-suited doctors from the government? Yes. And despite their obvious (mostly) good intentions, I had a lot of trouble not making them out to be complete bad guys, if I remember my original viewing of this film from probably 35 years ago. But really, they are trying their best to figure out what’s going on with both Elliott and E.T., and when they announce that the EEG evidence indicates that the two are somehow “connected”, E.T. seems to decide to break it off. E.T. “dies”, Elliott returns immediately to health, and the doctors offer Elliott a bit of time alone with E.T. before an unwithering pot of chrysanthemums (established earlier in the film) indicates to Elliott that E.T. is coming back to life.
Crazy internet theory #3987166: E.T. is a Jawa.
Elliott then does what any child hero would do – he fools the adults and together with his gang of kids, they rescue E.T. from the clutches of the government and get him back to the signalling meadow (with a second telekinetic bicycle assist from E.T.) in time to meet the alien botanists’ ship. For some reason, the alien botanists are a lot less shy about being found out this time around, I can’t quite reconcile that.
Following that six-pack of Coors, E.T. administers a field sobriety test to Elliott
Anyway, there’s a teary farewell where Elliott points at his heart and says “ouch” and E.T. makes his finger light up and and points to Elliott’s head and says “I’ll…be…right…here” and then he slowly waddles up the ship’s gangway instead of doing the telekinetic thing, which would obviously be much faster.
The More You Know
And E.T. and the alien botanists fly off, with nary a sequel in sight. The End.
Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site 