Spielberg: Close Encounters of the Third Kind part one
Roy Neary sees the light.
(For those who wish to read some of my earlier thoughts on this movie, I direct you to here.)
WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? Roy Neary is a perfectly ordinary man who receives a powerful, mysterious message from above. He is driven To Solve the Mystery of this message at the expense of everything in his life.
WHAT STANDS IN HIS WAY? His wife, occasionally his children, his job, his responsibilities as a husband and father, the mores and customs of his suburban town, the UN, the US Air Force and Army.
To make things more interesting yet, each one of the minor protagonists in Close Encounters has their own little “buddy protagonist.” Lacombe has Laughlin, a cartographer who is pressed into service as Lacombe’s translator, and Gillian has Barry, her three-year-old boy, the kid who has no trouble receiving the message from above and achieves in 48 minutes what takes Roy over 2 hours — to get aboard a spaceship and meet creatures from another world.
Okay, and let’s get one thing straight, for the purposes of simplifying this whole thing — these creatures, the aliens, the extraterrestrials — we’re talking about God here. The inciting incident in Close Encounters is that God makes an announcement that He’s coming to Earth, and anyone interested in meeting Him should show up on such-and-such a day at such-and-such place, ’cause that’s where He’ll be. Roy is given a message from God and spends the first two acts trying to decipher it. Once he has deciphered the message, he spends the third act getting to the rendezvous point against formidable odds, and then, in Act IV, meets God. That’s the movie we’re talking about here. Many are called, few are able to answer, and of all who receive the call, only Roy is chosen as worthy. And look, it’s another Spielberg protagonist whose goal is To Prove His Worth.
Spielberg would make plenty more good movies, but Close Encounters is the first, and in some ways his truest and most deeply felt, most personal work. In this movie he finds a great subject, agreat metaphor and the purest expression of his aesthetic. If you weren’t around in 1977 to experience how new and exciting and original all this seemed, I pity you. There’s a reason why Spielberg is Spielberg and Spielberg qua Spielberg begins here.
ACT I we could call “Roy Gets The Message”, ACT II is “Roy Interprets The Message,” ACT III is “Roy Acts On The Message” and ACT IV is “Roy Meets The Messenger.”
The first thing we note in Close Encounters is Spielberg’s use of light as quality unto itself. Light is to Close Encounters as Water is to Jaws — it’s a stand-in for the creatures at the center of the narrative, creatures we are told about from the very first moments of the narrative but won’t really get a good look at until Act IV. Instead we see their lights, their shadows, the effects they have on things around us. Because not only do the creatures in Close Encounters generate light, they also generate darkness and manipulate light to their purposes. I am reminded, of course, of God’s first words in the Old Testament, and also Henry Jones’s goal in The Last Crusade — “Illumination.”
The first thing we see in Close Encounters is car headlights approaching toward us through a dust storm, and given the buildup we get approaching this image, the creepy music in the blackness building to a crescendo as we cut to blinding whiteness, we are forgiven for thinking we’re about to see something otherworldly. Spielberg will play off our desire to “see the light” to comic effect more than once in Close Encounters.
We meet Laughlin and Lacombe and the first clue to the mystery is discovered. (And here begins Spielberg’s fascination with WWII-era fighter planes, which would return for 1941, Raiders of the Lost Ark and especially Empire of the Sun, where they are elevated to the level of godhood themselves.)
Next we have the air-traffic-controllers scene, perhaps my favorite in the movie, but the screenwriter asks “What is this doing here? What does it get us? Why did they build this set, hire these actors, spend days shooting this scene?” The answer, I think, lies in the utterly brilliant dialogue between the controllers, the unemphatic, technical jargon they monotonously recite back and forth. The point of this scene is to show that THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING. Real UFOs, in a real world, not just some hallucinations in the minds of some lost souls. There is nuts-and-bolts reality to this phenomenon, which is one way Spielberg has of raising the stakes: God is coming, and he’s a measurable quantity.
(The casting in the air-traffic-controllers scene, like all the casting in Close Encounters, is simply perfect. Each one of those dozens of faces we see is exactly right, and each contains worlds of experience that we wonder about long after the movie is over. Spielberg obviously loves all these people and has a real knack for casting, which is why it confuses me that he sometimes casts dull, obvious or uninteresting actors in key roles in later movies.)
It takes until 11:00 into the movie to meet our principal protagonist Roy Neary. That’s a long time but not as long as the 17 minutes it takes to meet Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, the only movie of 1977 to make more money than Close Encounters.
What does Roy Neary want? When we meet him, what Roy Neary wants is to play with his train set and go see Pinocchio. He’s an archetype new to the movies, the Spielbergian man-child. He’s more immature than his own son Brad — when Brad asks Roy to help with his homework, Roy’s response is to say that he graduated high school so he wouldn’t have to do homework any more. He then proceeds to try, not very hard, to help Brad with fractions by wrecking one of his trains. He’s the father and paterfamilias of his brood, but he’s the one who wants to see the “dumb cartoon rated G for kids.” He has obviously stumbled into marriage and children without any plan — his wife is more mother than sweetheart to him and his toys take up more room in the house than his children’s. One suspects that, any day now, Roy is going to have a mid-life crisis where he suddenly looks around and says “Oh my God, who am I and how the hell did I get here?” Which, interestingly enough, is kind of what happens.
(The Nearys are watching The Ten Commandments on TV when we meet them. They watch that sluggish spectacle the best way one can — while doing something else, anything else at the same time. The Ten Commandments is inserted into Close Encounters as the third or fourth religious reference in the narrative, and is there to link together Roy Neary and, of all people, Moses, as men who are contacted by God and must lead a group of people to deliverance in a promised land. Roy falls a little short of Moses’s achievement of establishing a nation in the desert — he only leads two people to the mountain, and one gets knocked down by Pharoah’s army. He does, however, meet God finally and get The Message. It is not recorded whether or not his hair turns gray in the process.)
(Pinocchio, the reader will recall, is about a puppet who longs to become a real live boy. A blue fairy comes along to grant him his wish, but the wish comes with certain conditions: Pinocchio must, yes, Prove His Worth before he is granted boyhood. Young screenwriters, pay attention: familiarize yourself with the classics — they became classics for a reason. Spielberg not only lifts plot strands of Exodus and Pinocchio to suit his purposes, he tells you he’s doing it. They’re classics, they exist to be stolen from.)
The lights go out in Muncie, but I get the feeling the lights were never really on for Roy, and he sets out in his truck to find, yes, illumination.
Next we meet little Barry Guiler, one of the few characters in the movie more childlike than Roy. Spielberg teaches us to fear the light before we understand its meaning, but little Barry understands it immediately and runs to it. The implication, I think, is that Roy would climb in a UFO in his very first encounter if his relative maturity, and its attendant fear, didn’t prevent him from doing so.
(Barry, of course, is a classic Spielberg child — a boy living in a rumpled suburban house with a single mother and absent father. The fact that Roy abandons his wife and children in order to run off with Barry’s mother, only to abandon her, too, in her moment of hesitation, in order to pursue his vision, speaks to a corner of Spielberg’s psyche that is beyond the reach of this humble journal.)
Roy trundles down the road in his truck in the dark. “Help! I’m lost!” he exclaims. Well, when the student is ready the teacher will appear, and as soon as Roy admits to being in darkness, he is shown the light. Roy’s Gap opens wider than any Spielberg protagonist’s yet — he expected to go out and repair some electrical equipment, and instead he is called upon by God.
The architecture of these sequences, of course, is pure cinematic genius, the full flowering of the one critic’s dictum that Spielberg is the bastard child of Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock. The impulses of Disney and Hitchcock — Wonder and Terror — are balanced magnificently throughout Close Encounters. Take the first appearance of the UFOs: after minutes of nail-biting suspense, they finally appear and drift along that mountain road, frightening and startling and peculiar. They pass by, then there’s a beat, and they are followed by a little red pixie UFO. Classic Hitchcock meets classic Disney. Throughout Close Encounters Spielberg promises terror then delivers wonder, then promises wonder and delivers terror instead, keeping you constantly on edge, not knowing what to expect. God moves in mysterious ways, and a movie about God that’s all wonder and no terror doesn’t understand its subject.
(The mountain-road sequence also marks, I believe, the debut of what I’ve come to think of as “The Spielberg Shot,” a slow dolly into the face of an ordinary person, gazing in wonder at some incredible thing offscreen, usually from a low angle to give the ordinary person a noble stature. This is not a coincidence, and it’s part of what I mean about Close Encounters being Spielberg’s purest statement — one of the bold theses of Close Encounters, and all Spielberg’s work, is that God is available to everyone, and that the most ordinary of us are sometimes the most valuable. I’d love to see a Youtube compilation of those shots — they can be found in almost every Spielberg movie from here on out.)
Anyway, Roy receives the message, but he receives it in a way that he can’t readily explain. He races home and wakes up his family, in the hopes that they too will receive the message, but he can’t even adequately describe it. “There was a red whoosh!” is the most coherent he can get. His wife Ronnie tries to help, but she is too mired in the everyday world to grasp Roy’s vision. It’s telling that she can only translate Roy’s ecstatic ramblings in terms of consumer products — “Was it like a taco? Was it like one of those Sara Lee moon-shaped cookies?” Ronnie, like Roy, has been thrust into adulthood long before she’s ready — she misses the early days of Roy’s courtship and would rather “snuggle” on the mountainside while Roy watches for signs of God. In another movie, even another Spielberg movie, the protagonist would come to learn that a family is more God than anything that might appear from a thundercloud, but this is not that movie, and in Act II Roy will throw away his job, responsibilities and family to get nearer to God.