[This is a BETA version of the first part of this review. Storm preparations (I’m within the path of Hurricane Sandy) and other factors make me slow down on my work on this. But it’s probably for the best; as the storm passes through, I can get a better sense of wonder and awe that can help inform my discussion of the movie in Part 2. And maybe I’ll be able to fathom such mysteries as, Did a black hole pass nearby the Earth in the past couple days that had a selective affinity for D batteries in northern New Jersey? They all just vanished from stores…. Good luck, folks who are in the path of Sandy!]
This movie is complex and still valuable, despite its numerous flaws. It can be seen as both atypical and not-quite-typical of the work of director Steven Spielberg. It is one of his 1970s successes that seem to fit squarely within his tradition of fantasy-featuring stories, especially his wildly famous (or notorious, depending on how you view Spielberg) E.T.: The Extraterrestrial (1982). And yet Close Encounters seems ’70s-bound and dated in some ways (as I’ll return to). And it is not quite a modern outer-space movie, aligned to fantasy, of the type you can see in such franchises as the Alien movies (employing the horror genre, with the original standing as Ridley Scott’s first notable success), nor is it the “space opera” type of film as was George Lucas’ Star Wars, whose first installment was in 1977, or the (broadly speaking) imitators of the Star Wars type of stories.
I. Introduction
“Science speculation” as Spielberg’s presumed genre for this film, fitting 1970s attitudes and following a historical development of consciousness
In the recent DVD that features the original 1977 cut of CE3K, as it’s nicknamed, as well as the 1980 re-release version and a more recent, 1998 director’s cut, Spielberg himself in commentary takes pains to explain the genre of this film as being “science speculation,” not science fiction. He also notes, as a separate matter, that it’s the film of his that most “dates” him, because the notion of the hero, the electric-company worker Roy Neary played by Richard Dreyfuss, going off into space with the aliens on their massive spaceship, as if he was fulfilling some kind of long-held dream, was something Spielberg sympathized with when he made the movie, but would never endorse today.
To understand how all these factors—the “science speculation” premise, and the more idiosyncratic idea of going off with extraterrestrials—came to shape the movie, you have to understand something about people’s mentalities in the 1970s that today’s young people would find as old-fashioned and bizarre as bell-bottoms or Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, or the idea of disco music being contemporary/“edgy”. Today comments get made about how the U.S. space program is reduced, or neglected, or whatever, compared to what it used to be—unmanned flights to Mars are about the only new big news (and even so this isn’t so “big” nowadays), and the Space Shuttle has been retired (and given budgetary concerns, people draw the line at any new manned Moon landings). But the space program was all cutting-edge and a source of wonder for people at large. Clips of CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, in 1969, going “Wow!” at the sight of a manned ship landing on the Moon show what a place in public life the space program had.
Some honest-enough citizens might have complained at the time about U.S. poverty not being addressed while the country expended the huge sums to send space vehicles to the Moon, but the spectacle and achievements of the space program, which had its high-water mark from about 1969 through about 1974, were such that it comprised some remote, amazing, somewhat arcane national “item of business,” like some military action somewhere or the nuclear arms race, and yet it was also something we somehow could all “relate to.” That Neil Armstrong up there, he’s like me. I can be up there too. A man can actually go stand on the moon. (A philosophy professor I had in 1980 glibly joked about how now we could “put beer cans on the Moon.”) This was both an unprecedented scientific feat and relatable in some way. (An itch forms in my head—the Internet can be considered analogous to this idea of space travel, as a “big technical game-changer and yet access-provider to every Shmoe,” in some way…but let’s not start that discussion yet.)
Of course, the space program, in the 1960s and early 1970s, in some way was allied to the U.S.’s competition with the Soviet Union, and on the other hand it ended up being partially justified in terms of what technical benefits it incidentally brought to the average consumer—such as the invention of Teflon, which would end up in frying pans in our homes. But it also had, on the level of sheer meaning, a double nature: (1) it had an exalted status in terms of being something as unreachable as, say, the high-security development of a new nuclear weapon; and yet (2) it also was something that stirred the sense of “possibly being involved” within the consciousness of the man on the street.
It was in light of this double meaning that space travel, of course, started to appeal to people in the kind of “national stories” that could be so well engineered in movies. In the 1950s, though early technical developments were slow, outer-space stories started looking less like the bizarre fantasies as of the likes of H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and started to seem—even while the Cold War heated up (the Soviets’ Sputnik satellite installment would be in 1957)—a little more realistic, such as in Forbidden Planet (1956).
II. Historical background
Kubrick’s 2001 as turning the corner toward space realism
My history here might be too sketchy or flawed for some, but suffice it to say that when Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) came along (see my “Director’s dossier” on Kubrick), it was a huge landmark not simply for Kubrick’s career as a world-class director but as a way that popular art could be diverting and could actually give you a “window” onto the reality that formerly fantastic space travel was. It put you into an experience of so arcane and “way out of reach” as space travel, including into the intricate insides of a spaceship and faced with the weird sights you could be subjected to in a zero-gravity environment.
2001 also marked a major advance on special effects. In development for about four years, this film involved such advanced technology as used in movies that some of it was covered in an interesting article (“Special Effects in the Movies”) in the 1974 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s Yearbook of Science and the Future (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1973; the 2001-related material is on pp. 28-31). More recently published biographical work on Kubrick also described some of the production stunts used to achieve the special effects, such as a big donut-like structure that was built to create the stage for the round section of the spaceship in which astronauts jog around the circular floor, seemingly immune to gravity.
This film was produced by film studio MGM, and took years in circulation to make back its cost (this delayed its appearing on television for the first time until 1977). In making the film, Kubrick, I believe I read, consciously wanted to go beyond the hokier Forbidden Planet way of depicting space. In any event, it’s obvious that this was the first film, at least of major note, for which high-tech special effects and the related tricky logistics made it years in the making and quite expensive for its putative genre. It represented a qualitative leap—in terms of the kind of technology involved, not necessarily the level of expense reflected in more old-time production values—from such material as the Cecil B. DeMille pictures or the famed historical epic Cleopatra from about 1963.
Other future- and space-oriented films such as George Lucas’ THX-1138 (1971) and the now not-much-mentioned Silent Running (1972; the latter also was looked at in the Britannica article just mentioned) would try to capitalize on the “realistic-space” mode of making a film (by the way, special-effects technician Douglas Trumbull worked on both 2001 and Silent Running, among other films—hopefully I’ll return to him in Part 2 of this entry). But 2001 was a major landmark in terms of how far you could go to make it so realistic that it was like a rich educational show at a planetarium.
For Kubrick, 2001 could be called a “continental divide” in his career; see my “Director’s dossier” on him for an outline on his films. Just prior, Dr. Strangelove (1964) seemed to reach its own height in terms of his career, when it combined his various cinematic and story-related attitudes (cool depiction, action sequences, satire, and more subtly comic approaches) in a film that would seem both radical in its irreverent attitude and a masterful model of how to be sane about an insane situation (the nuclear-arms disposition of “mutually assured destruction”). It also involved a lot of close attention to technical detail; supposedly officer-level members of the Air Force (or the like) were upset at the film, wondering if Kubrick had somehow had a spy get information on the insides of B-52s for his depictions (Kubrick had not).
When Kubrick finally did 2001, it was as if he’d built up his capital as a sober young director (yet with a sense of humor) who was intent on making serious statements about our lives and fates in the post–World War II era, and he delivered with a film that both “put us in the passenger’s seat” in space vehicles. Yet a certain emotional “poem” was being presented too: he presented an opportunity for viewers to take a wondering, even slightly dreading look at what we could discover in space. The big black monolith symbolized both the movie’s ambitious, somewhat arcane attitude, and its thematic topic: in the sheer mystery we are witness to, do we find God? Kubrick himself said something like that the movie was about looking for God, or wondering about God.
The monolith was a classic whatsit: is it a spaceship? An extraterrestrial life form? Is it good or bad? Can it tell us anything (i.e., tell the characters anything)? Is it a not-fully-developed plot device, or a sort of “deus ex machina”? If it allowed the apes early in the film to develop the ability to use tools, and then invent weapons, how could it later, technically, seem to swallow Dave, after he had been for a while in the big spaceship, just before the light show?
Even if you took all the films Kubrick did after 2001 into account, while admitting or arguing that they didn’t rise to its quality, 2001 still represents the crest of Kubrick’s creativity—and could be considered as strong a claim to fame as any single movie could be for a director. And it did this in the process of allowing middle class Americans to have a rich esthetic experience of what it means to be out in space—and at the same time to ask the question, what does our conquest of space mean in terms of the sheer wonder, awe, and even fear that lead us to ask whether God is here too?
It also served as a sine qua non for Spielberg’s Close Encounters. But we have to look at some other cultural precedents for that latter firm, first.
By the 1970s, people on the street were enthralled with speculative, or newly interpretive, ways to look at outer space; a fantasy mode wasn’t big yet
The foregoing ideas about movies and space may seem highfaluting, or an “ambitious” way to regard films—and the following may seem a bit crazy today—but people did think in these terms, and it certainly wasn’t just twerps as I was then.
Symbolism in 2001 explained by some
In my first year of high school, during the 1976-77 school year, I remember, 2001 was shown on TV. I heard some older student talking to others in a study hall about the symbolism in 2001—it seemed as if that kid (I never knew who it was) was in some sense “wise,” with me the young sort I was, not only the second-shortest in my grade and rather forlorn for various reasons, but yet to beef up my academic skills for college. (I was also starting to develop as a writer, what I wanted to do as one career route.) The older kid talked about what the monolith meant, and so on. I was amazed. Not that I was a credulous fool, I was amazed to hear such fancy, credible interpretation of a puzzling movie. The monolith meant this; the transition from the apes scene to the space scene meant that, or such. 2001, to me when I first saw it, had seemed hard to interpret, as it did to many. And it certainly presented itself as, on the surface, arcane and not making an large attempt to be easily understood.
Today, it probably still impresses many as a well-crafted movie; no longer quite as “massive” as it first appeared, it’s still a solidly made, still-watchable movie (even my younger nephew liked it in a recent year). But I think today it’s easier to interpret for many film viewers who’ve cut their interpretive teeth on the acres of science fiction that have been consumed since—and the general increase of a certain literacy in the U.S. in the past 40 or so years.
Erich von Daniken’s theories
More dubiously, in 1968 had come the publication of a book that was certainly popular by 1976, Erich von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, which argued that pictures, stories, statues, symbolism, etc., in ancient cultures were evidence that spaceships with extraterrestrials had landed on earth in ancient times. (I believe I watched a TV program in the early 1970s that was based on this book, In Search of Ancient Astronauts. This book proved controversial almost right after it was published; see the Wikipedia article on the book for some indications of this.) In addition to many other things they allegedly did all over the world, such ancient astronauts, von Daniken claimed, even helped set up the “moa” (statues) on Easter Island. At the time, it all sounded pretty credible, or on the plausible side (to young half-educated sorts like myself). When I was in eighth or ninth grade, a teacher even had us do assignments discussing the von Daniken theories.
More soberly, in about 1979, another teacher at my high school, in the English department, had us watch 2001 as part of, I think, a science fiction class. This all may sound pretty nerdy today, but the important point is that popular art was used as means to have us square with the new discoveries we were making in outer space: what was out there, now that we could indeed travel to the Moon? The imagination was stirred; artists tried to extend speculation based on the foundation of what we already knew. For instance, what if a ship could travel as far as Jupiter, as 2001 depicted? (Not that this has ever been realistically achievable, in NASA’s eyes.)
CE3K came along just as Star Wars fantasy style was starting
All this is to show the environment in which Spielberg’s CE3K was made. Kids today who have grown up on Star Wars and other fantasy-related space-oriented fiction (whether books, movies, games, and/or whatever else) have looked at space as a sort of credible background for a more playful form of engaging the imagination. By the early 1980s, after Star Wars had been through two or three installments, space was a place for often-friendly “cartoon characters”—Star Wars’ Chewbacca and R2D2 and others…. Now space was an already familiar-enough “real place” in which to situate playful fantasies (per George Lucas), not a newly-familiarized but still awe-inspiring, intriguing place in which to situation speculation that hewed close to nonfictional attitudes (per Stanley Kubrick).
The change to the fictional mode almost made the ground uneasy beneath Steven Spielberg’s feet in the late 1970s. The change was such that, of course, what had initially been an idea he had when making CE3K, of an alien who stays behind on Earth, became—probably not least due to marketing considerations—formed into what surprised even Spielberg as proving to be his most successful movie, E.T., which in some ways still hewed to an extent to CE3K’s “science speculation” premise. Part of what made E.T. so popular was its playful, family-friendly side, not so much its awestruck nonfictional attitude.
Star Wars heralded a new space-story direction, but not so commandingly yet
When Star Wars was released in 1977, I think no one expected it would be the hit it became. I remember some of the movie theme music being big on the radio for a time. I never warmed to it much; my movie viewing was down in my early years of high school (if I saw movies, it was on TV, after they were no longer “current” in theaters); I wouldn’t start seeing movies a fair amount in the theaters until 1979. But for me, I think I found the whole Star Wars “cultural ethos,” if you want to call it that, puzzling. I knew the characters were a big hit to others; I was more a 2001 man, whatever wisdom led me to this when I was in my teens.
What George Lucas had the vision to recognize as an audience ripe for serving—and maybe he was surprised at what a hit it became, too—was those who liked the marriage of (1) a Saturday-movie-serials, almost-cheesy movie experience and yet (2) a fairly realistic outer-space background. I won’t further analyze this as to what it could objectively be said to comprise, or (subjectively) how it could be evaluated. But the fantasy/“space opera” approach to outer-space movies became a hugely popular—and industry-shaping—mode.
When Ridley Scott directed Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982)—neither of which I’ve seen (and would like to)—these took space (or future-life) movies into other genre directions: horror, and a sort of noir. So however artful and lovingly made space-oriented movies could be, genre treatment of space movies became the preferred norm. Realism—along with wondering about God, pessimism about man, whatever else—became old-hat, or not quite so desirable.
CE3K was arguably the last big-film gasp of cinematic awe at what space really meant
CE3K occupied an odd pocket in this development through the 1970s from 2001’s philosophy to the Star Wars philosophy. Spielberg’s own personal-life interest in space has been told as to why he developed CE3K, and I think he was really following his own muse at least as much as following market trends in making the movie. (I’ll try to look at this biographical aspect in more depth in Part 2.) But to a good extent, this movie could be called the last major attempt by Hollywood to address people’s almost religious attitude toward space: what, or who, was out there? Were they friendly? Could we (or they) relate?
In a way, CE3K seems to me to incorporate a lot more of 2001 than it does much of Star Wars or Spielberg’s own E.T. In fact, I am struck by how derivative of 2001 it seems in some ways. One particular way it shows this is in the use of John William’s nice and varying score. Williams is, by now, a longtime collaborator with Spielberg who is arguably the most important “analog-style” film scorer—using symphonies (and old-fashioned composition sense, maybe)—in terms of aiding a director’s work since Bernard Herrmann served Hitchcock. Though there are some “friendly” music styles in CE3K that are somewhat characteristic of Spielberg’s “friendly-cinema” approaches (which his detractors will readily point to as Exhibit A showing his “lightweight-ness”), there is also some atonal, mystery-conveying music, often linked to the extraterrestrial doings (especially toward the end). This atonal stuff sounds a lot like some of the darker music in 2001 (Kubrick used other composers’ already-recorded work, such as that of Gyorgy Ligeti; this is aside from the more famous, and older, music like the waltz [“Blue Danube”] material by Johann Strauss, or especially Richard Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, or Also sprach Zarathustra).
CE3K was the last major movie that took the 2001 stuff a step further: with Kubrick, we were out in dark space where a mysterious monolith seemed to be causing trouble; now, in 1977, we are safely on Earth, and we want to know that extraterrestrials are friendly, or at least that they will somehow return our benevolent wonder/awe with some sign of wanting to be peaceful. Mystery and a bit of fear color our questions in the latter movie also; some of the sequences when the humans are first interacted with by aliens, especially in the scenes with Jillian Guiler and her son Barry, seem like mild horror sequences.
Mind you, when CE3K came out, the Moon landings had ended about 1974; the Vietnam War, for what that was worth as ironically stirring some enthusiasm for the space race, was entering into the past after the 1975 fall of Saigon. The Cold War under the partial “stewardship” of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was in a kind of not-entirely-encouraging stasis. If people were “religious” about receiving some “connection” from outer space, maybe it was because, after all our trauma of the 1960s and early 1970s, we wanted some hint, or source, of promise, some start of smooth, newly paved roads, coming from somewhere, and outer space seemed as good a “store” for this as any.
Now that I’ve described the historical background of this movie, both in movie history and in political/social history (as sketchy as these may be), we can look at this old movie with more appreciation, and analyze it a bit for what works and what doesn’t, and understand why it has a peculiar place in Spielberg’s canon—even in the list of notable movies by all major directors from the 1970s until now. And we can see that, despite its seeming old-fashioned today, it still may be seen to “speak to us,” even if this is, to an extent, as a time capsule of sorts.
And though it became an obvious springboard for Spielberg’s E.T., which in a sense stands for Spielberg’s strength as a popular entertainer and a unique brand in terms of what he synthesizes, CE3K also is a quintessential 1970s movie in a way, and that not because of any pessimism, interestingly, but because of a certain (tempered) optimism.
To be continued.
