"Close Encounters" Between Aliens and Humans Yield Interesting Results

Hello all!

Time for something new with the blog. This next piece you will read is actually a term paper I wrote for one of my film classes back in the fall of 2003. I cannot remember what the prompt was, but re-reading the paper, I feel like I'm reading a review for the film "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". I know that's not what I was supposed to do (re: write a review as if I was a movie critic, and that's not what I did anyway), but I can't remember the assignment. However, it looks as though I was supposed to write about the film as if the reader had seen it. So if you haven't seen "Close Encounters", well why the heck not?! Sheesh. I think you'll still get my main point.

Anyway, this is the paper, just as it was when I wrote it almost three years ago. And I'm pretty sure this was one of many cases in which I waited until the night before to start typing.

Enjoy!

--Cbake

Christopher Baker

Comm 146

9-24-03

“Close Encounters” Between Aliens and Humans

Yields Interesting Results

“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is director Steven Spielberg’s follow-up to his hit 1975 summer film “Jaws”. As with his previous movie, Spielberg once again takes an ordinary everyman and places him in extraordinary situations. This time, the everyman is Richard Dreyfuss, coming off the high experienced with the success of “Jaws”, as Roy Neary, an electrician in Muncie, Indiana who has a close encounter with extra-terrestrial beings.

The film begins as somewhat of a mystery in that the audience never quite knows the intention of the alien beings, though it is obvious they have been here before and are planning some sort of big event. Portents include the opening sequence, in which World War II fighter planes are found in the middle of the Sonora Desert, Mexico in pristine condition, and a research team led by Claude Lacombe (played by French filmmaker Francois Truffaut) appears to investigate. The planes disappeared in 1945 along with the pilots, and yet as the young French translator, played by Bob Balaban, notes to his colleagues, no one can account for what happened to the missing pilots. “I don’t understand,” he cries. “How the Hell did it get here?” He is speaking for the audience at this moment, and the film sets out to explain this odd phenomenon, though the events get stranger.

A single mother Jillian, played by Melinda Dixon, is woken from her bed one evening in a particularly creepy scene in which all the toys belonging to her young son turn themselves on and come to life, and she leaves the house in search of her excited boy who is presumably chasing aliens. At this time, Dreyfuss’ character Roy is lost in the area on his way to help restore the failed power to the region. He experiences a close encounter when a spacecraft appears above him and causes all the electronic equipment in the car to go on the fritz. This leads him to chase down the spacecraft and he almost literally runs into Jillian and her son on the road. There together, they share an experience that they will never forget.

It is after this experience that some of the film’s themes are explored. Of course, the idea that we are not alone is not new, but the way in which this particular theme plays out is. Roy finds himself becoming more and more obsessed with his experience, and this obsession begins to eat away at his personal life and his relationship with his family. The signs of this fixation are apparent almost immediately when Roy wakes his family up at four in the morning to share in the experience. Though the trek is fruitless, Roy will not give up, not even as his wife tries to romantically attract his attention. It is interesting that Spielberg places the actors back to back as his wife (Teri Garr) reminisces of the times they came to the same spot as youths “just to look at one another”. Roy is not fazed by her come-ons, and as she speaks and even kisses him his eyes remain fixed upward to the sky.

The audience witnesses the almost complete deterioration of his home life as Roy explores an image he cannot get out of his head, a psychic push that drives him to create mountains out of shaving cream and mashed potatoes. This is symbolic of an element of the human condition, the drive that pushes some people to ends they cannot understand, but ends they believe will have significant meaning. This can be any person, artists, writers, or musicians, anyone whose desire and work has pushed them to the edge, causing them to sacrifice family to achieve success and discover the truth. It is like a search for God, a quest to discover something bigger than oneself.

There is also the theme of communication and how it can make or break relationships. Roy and his wife through the entire movie are either not listening to what the other has to say or not understanding what the other is going through. Yet, communication is what will bring, for the first time, the aliens into contact with the human research team led by Lacombe. It is interesting that the form of communication chosen in this movie is musical and made of five various notes and tones, as well as its counterpart in sign language for the doe-ray-me aspect. The movie suggests music, like numbers, is universal and can be understood by all, or at least those with hearing.

There is also something here to be said about the power of communal experiences. Roy is not alone in his visions and obsession. Jillian and her son are experiencing them as well, and it is presumed there could be countless others who shared in this vision. Another portent early on in the movie comes from India, where hundreds of Indians joyously chant the same five note tune spoken of above and claim they heard it come from the sky. It is comforting to know one is not alone, that the experience did not just happen once to one person but to others who can speak about it together. Shared experiences bring people together, and the overreaching idea of the film is that it should be comforting, not frightening, to know that there are others in this galaxy we can communicate and share experiences with.

Spielberg knows about this power of the collective and the feelings involved when one understands he/she is experiencing an event with someone else, and he uses it to great effect during the scene in which the aliens make first contact. He pushes the camera in to specific characters to show the emotion on their faces, or pulls out to show a large group of people experiencing it the same way during this intensely emotional scene, revealing the amazement shared by all; the look he is famous for having his characters express during scenes of magical wonder in all his films. Not only does this work in terms of those onscreen that are sharing in this incredible event, but it coalesces with the audience’s feelings of wonder as well, feelings of wonder that stem not only from what the onscreen characters are experiencing, but that shared communal feeling that comes from sitting in a theater with a large group of people and knowing everyone is watching the same events and presumably feeling the same way about them. One can believe it when he/she tells oneself “This is really happening.”

Even the title “Close Encounters” expresses this desire and ability to be near someone or something else, and that is the crux of the film. It is about the search for truth, the search for others like oneself, the search for comfort, the desire to know more and to know there is nothing to fear. Above all, it is a film about the human condition, a theme Spielberg explores well within the context of the search for, and contact with, extra-terrestrial life.