Movie Night With Urbaniak: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I’m a Spielberg fan. I’ve been a Spielberg fan for a long time.

How long have I been a Spielberg fan? I’ll tell you how long I’ve been a Spielberg fan, smart guy. When Duel came on the television machine in 1971 and I was ten years old, I remember I wanted to watch it because it was directed by the guy who had made a Columbo episode I really enjoyed (which IMDb tells me was broadcast a mere two weeks earlier.)

I loved Jaws, it changed my life, no doubt about it, but my confidence in Spielberg as the leading director of his generation was already well in place in my mind by the time Close Encounters opened in theaters, Christmas 1977.

I was, at that point, a 16-year-old usher who had just gotten a job working at what had once been a vaudeville house in the suburbs of Chicago. The first movie during my tenure there was Close Encounters, so I was blessed to see this movie thirty or more times in its initial run, with a crowd every night, and it never got old, never wore out its welcome, never seemed like anything less than an event. A symphony.

The truck on the lonesome highway, the police-car chase, the perfectly-observed scenes of casual suburban squalor, the attack on the country house, these are scenes I would race to the theater to watch over and over, marveling at them anew each time. I’ll tell you: I knew from the first that Close Encounters was great cinema, but somehow it’s never felt to me like Close Encounters was “show business.” I always felt, from the very beginning, and this goes for a lot of Spielberg’s movies, that I was watching something that transcended “show business,” that I was in the hands of a true believer. It hit me relatively early on that Close Encounters was a deeply religious movie, and the notion of godlike, benign extraterrestrials showing up and extending an innocent, questioning hand of greeting to our horribly wrong-headed world was one I found hugely seductive and almost unbearably moving.

God calls, and Roy Neary answers. God calls many people, but only Roy Neary has what it takes to push through all the bullshit in the world, the trappings of his stupid bullshit suburban family life, the chains of work, reputation and normality. Only Roy Neary has what it takes to answer the call, leave his life, make it through all the barriers that this awful world puts in his way (the government, who has also heard God’s call, desperately desires to exclusively control the discourse between humanity and the deity) and step up to the altar to be received into heaven. It’s a profound statement of faith, fortitude and perseverance.

I have no idea how it plays now. I’ve watched it so many times it barely feels like a narrative tome any more, it flows so naturally and so effortlessly. I can see the craft and care put into it, but I also still get utterly lost in its most powerful scenes. One day, when I show it to my children, will they see the same movie I saw at 16? Or will they look at the clunky 70s special effects, the gritty 70s-realism acting and production design, the low-key, humanistic story line and be all like “o-kay, Dad, whatever you say, is it okay if we go upstairs and watch Transformers III again?” Will they have to wait until they learn a little something about film history before they will be affected by its rhythms, its layers of references, the purity of its soul?

Anyway,

urbaniak

  and I watched it tonight over a bottle of pretty good wine and it was a blast. The air-traffic-controller scene toward the beginning of the movie, a scene that would be cut from any other movie today, stuck out for us immediately. I’ve always loved the scene and found it terrifically exciting, especially for a scene involving none of the principle characters, no special effects, and no on-screen confrontations. It’s a scene about a bunch of professionals talking on radios and yet somehow the tension is palpable. The acting in it is not only some of the best in the movie but some of the best in Spielberg’s canon. In a lot of ways, as Urbaniak mentioned, it’s hard to imagine Spielberg today directing that scene. It’s like a scene from All the President’s Men or something, all subtlety and nuance, the performances deriving their power from what the characters are not saying, not what they are saying. And the voice work of the radio voices could not be better.

Someone, I can’t remember who, once asked, regarding the opening scene, “Why doesn’t the UFO investigation team wait for the sandstorm to end before they go out into the field?” And it’s a good example of the pure cinema of this movie. The UFO investigators go out into the Mexican desert in the middle of a sandstorm because it makes a better scene — it creates pressure and urgency. These guys aren’t just investigating UFOs, they’re investigating UFOs in the middle of a sandstorm, which means they have to shout and cough and gaze in wonderment at things that appear mysteriously out of the sandstorm.

Compare this scene with the “Mongolia” scene shot for the otherwise-useless “Special Edition” from 1980. The Mexico scene in the original is weird, mysterious and deeply unsettling, the Mongolia scene is jokey, obvious, shot and cut in a completely different style, closer to an Indiana Jones movie in tone than Close Encounters. I like the idea of the scene but, basically, I can find no shot in the “Special Edition” that improves my understanding of Close Encounters and it gave me great heart to realize that Spielberg had expunged most of it for the current edition on the racks.

Now that I am sufficiently removed from Midwestern suburban life of the 1970s, I gaze upon the production design of Close Encounters with something approaching awe. The hell with the UFOs, I want to know who was responsible for the astonishing set-dressing of Roy Neary’s house. You can tell that Roy has gotten his “one room” to decorate, it’s the one with the milk crates stacked against the wall for shelving and the hobby crap piled up everywhere. But what about the rest of the house? All the tschotchkes and bric-a-brac, the Walter Keene painting over the piano, the ceramic chicken on the “good china” shelves, who picked all that out? Ronnie? She’s 30 years old, she picked out all that crap? How did she ever have the time? The house is full of crap, the stupid prints hanging in the bedroom, the ungodly wallpaper, the Snoopy poster in the boy’s bedroom, the mismatched glassware, the milk carton on the table at dinnertime, the casual blurring of personal boundaries, everything is absolutely godawful, everything is absolutely accurate, and everything is mounted with such great love and understanding of those characters and their world, and, best of all, it’s never pointed at by Spielberg. Spielberg never holds up these suburbanites as ridiculous, he loves these people and wants to capture their world with all the detail he can muster.