He sees dozens of smaller UFOs whizzing about, all heading into a kind of enormous central pillar that’s closing. All the smaller UFOs we’ve seen so far get appearances as they enter this central hub, including the little red UFO that brought us so many laughs earlier in the movie. The central hub closes its hatches and then Roy is all alone at the base. The narrative impression is that the aliens are packing up to leave, and we are witnessing their final closing-up-of-shop. Then Roy, overcome with emotion, gets showered by some sort of magic glowing UFO pixie dust.

The movie then reverts back to its original ending, showing the lone alien traipsing down the landing ramp to say hello to Lacombe, an indelibly touching moment in the original, now reduced to an afterthought. The little last alien then traipses back up into the Mothership and it takes off.

Sitting in a theater watching this back in the day I remember thinking “There’s something wrong with this, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is.” It bothered me that we got to see the inside of the Mothership, partly because I thought that if one is making a truly religious movie (and Close Encounters is certainly that), one oversteps one’s bounds when one chooses to depict Heaven. No vision of the interior ofthe Mothership could possibly match the vision that any member of the audience has in his or her imagination. The new ending rankled, it smacked up hubris and spectacle, not faith.

Then, as I’m leaving the theater, I hear a young lady turn to her date and say “So they turned Roy into an alien? Huh.”

And I realize that not only is the “Special Edition” flawed, it’s a serious work of sabotage on a masterpiece. I go see it again and I realize that, objectively speaking, there is no other possible interpretation of the new ending. There’s Roy, there are are the aliens, nowhere near Roy, there are the aliens closing up shop, there’s Roy getting showered with magic UFO pixie dust, there’s an alien coming to say goodbye to Lacombe. Oh. My. God. The young lady with her date isn’t confused, she’s interpreted the ending the only possible way it can be interpreted. So not only is the Lone Alien’s hello-and-goodbye not the first face-to-face communication between an alien and a human, the Lone Alien isn’t even an alien, it’s ROY! And, by extension, the aliens in the movie must all be transformed humans as well! And the Mothership becomes nothing more than a gigantic human-into-alien transforming machine.

The “Special Edition,” quite apart from adding illumination to the original, completely ruins the original. And I spent the next couple of decades trying to figure out how a director as clever as Spielberg, someone with such a firm grasp of cinematic language, could make such an obvious blunder. When the 2002 “Final Edition” (or whatever they call it) DVD came out, I gave an elated sigh of relief to find that Spielberg had come to his senses and relegated the “Special Edition” ending to the dustbin of “Deleted Scenes.” In an accompanying interview, he mentions that the interior of the Mothership was a cinematic mistake, made because the studio pressured him into including it.

I note that the Gobi Desert scene is still in the “final cut,” which does not please me, partly because Lacombe is not in it, which makes it seem ersatz, and partly because the tone of the scene is off — it is jokey and antic while the other UN scenes are mysterious and a little scary — and partly because Laughlin’s beard doesn’t match his beard in the other scenes. I can let this scene go if Spielberg likes it, and the other little additions don’t offend, but oy that ending.

Now I find that they’ve released a three-disc “Ultimate Final Comprehensive Edition” that gathers together the three different cuts that have been issued over the years. Which I suppose is harmless, but as Sheryl Crow teaches us, the first cut is the deepest.

As Act III of Close Encounters begins, we have what I’ve come to recognize as a common Spielberg forte: a scene of a mass crowd mobilization, displayed as an American carnival. These scenes are in all his theatrically-released movies up to this point, and always link together mass mania with old-fashioned American hucksterism. In Sugarland Express the residents of small towns across Texas come out to support fugitives Lou Jean and her husband, but their enthusiastic support quickly turns into desperate celebrity worship. In Jaws the massive influx of tourists into Amity’s harbor is laced with the commerce of turning tragedy into profits with the sales of shark souvenirs and video games. Here, Spielberg cannot let a scene of mass exodus pass without having a barker right out of a Mark Twain story selling gas masks to the panicked crowd. (I note that the salesman’s dog wears a gas mask, but he himself does not bother.)

Roy Neary has broken through a number of psychological and administrative barriers to get where he’s gotten, but in Act III of Close Encounters he breaks through a number of literal barriers as well, crashing his car through fences and roadblocks to keep his appointment. This is good screenwriting, to find ways of making the mental physical, and is of course another of Spielberg’s fortes.

As the Light in the first two acts of the movie stood as a stand-in for the extra-terrestrial, here Spielberg uses Devil’s Tower as a stand-in its own self. Devil’s Tower may be interesting to look at, but let’s face it, it’s just an unusual rock formation, it’s not the throne of God (or the Devil’s Tower, for that matter). But Spielberg shoots it with such awe and majesty and mystery, he imbues it with a primal, almost mystical power unto itself, so that every time we see it in a shot we’re sure that something profound is going to happen there. Very much the same way he gave Water itself the power to make us jump out of our seats in Jaws.

Royfinds Gillian in the crowd and they, literally, head for the hills on a monomaniacal tear toward their appointment with God. Something tells me that there was once, in an earlier draft of the script or even in longer cuts of the movie, something of a romantic nature to their adventure. Roy finding a soulmate in Gillian would explain Ronnie’s jealousy of his obsession, and they give each other more than a friendly pat on the back after they’ve achieved their common goal. If there were romantic sparks between them once, they’re gone now, and it’s probably just as well. It’s one thing for Roy to abandon his family in order to meet God, it’s something else again for him to shack up with the local lonely single mother while on the road to Damascus.

Even though Spielberg has already told us that the nerve-gas in Wyoming is a hoax, he still makes it look like maybe it isn’t, and we still buy that maybe it isn’t. The US government, it seems, is willing to stage a positively enormous hoax in order to keep proof of the existence of God a government secret. (Although given the size of the military operation on display, not to mention the hundreds of scientists involved, I find it hard to believe that the government could keep quiet every single participant in the eventual proceedings. They just can’t all be getting paid enough.)

Roy and Gillian are caught and captured by some Governmental thugs and detained, leading to the Act III centerpiece of Roy talking to Lacombe and Laughlin. The movie’s two primary plot strands come together for the first time and the electricity in the scene is palpable as the two approaches to God, the artistic and the scientific, come head to head. Roy is as inarticulate as ever, sputtering with anxiety, cynicism and rage as he’s interrogated by the calm, unflappable Lacombe and Laughlin. And yet Roy, despite his confusion, already “knows” more about the message and its meaning than Lacombe and his army of scientists (not to mention his army of army guys). And of course, Lacombe senses this, which puts him in conflict with Major Walsh, the head of the military part of the operation. And in some ways they’re both right — the aliens in Close Encounters are happy to appear to all kinds of people, but Roy and only Roy is selected to join them in their spaceship.

I sometimes wonder what Lacombe’s Monday Morning plan is, and Walsh’s too. They have unapologetically assumed that the existence of God (or aliens, if you will) should be protected as a state secret — an international state secret at that. Why? Lacombe doesn’t seem like a bad guy, why isn’t he inviting everyone in the world to come to Devil’s Tower and meet God? Maj. Walsh I understand is an army guy and so is naturally secretive, paranoid and elitist, but why Lacombe? Aliens are coming, they’ve clearly stated that they want to meet everyone, and Lacombe knows that — why does he keep it a secret? Is there some part of him that is also an elitist, that feels that a thing this profoundly significant can only be known to a select few? Or is he worried that maybe the aliens aren’t friendly?

The audience of Close Encounters, of course, totally buys that the US government will be secretive and elitist because that’s just how the US government is. But Lacombe is shown heading up a UN force of scientists — why is he playing by the rules of the US government? The short answer, of course, is that it makes for better drama — Lacombe, nice guy though he may be, must have a point of view in direct opposition to that of the protagonist — if the protagonist has a vision that God is available to everyone, his antagonist must be of the point of view that God should only be available to the select few — in spite of God’s emphatic demonstration to the contrary.

The audience, of course, is also not sure the aliens arefriendly, because they abducted Barry Guiler and, let’s face it, they haven’t been exactly forthcoming about their intentions. Spielberg uses our natural fear of The Other, and our built-in understanding of science-fiction movies, to help keep us in suspense as to the aliens’ intent. He balances Wonder and Terror right up to the closing moments of the movie, keeping us on the edge of our seats, ready for things to turn ugly at any moment.

Now then: here’s an interesting flaw in the screenplay of Close Encounters: Roy and Gillian have an overwhelming desire to get to Devil’s Tower. What do they think is going to happen when they get there? Roy emphatically states that he has no clear idea of what to expect, he just knows that he has to get there, just as Major Walsh emphatically states that it’s his job to keep Roy and his tribe of artists off the mountain. Neither of them really know what’s going to happen there, and that goes for Lacombe as well. Here’s the thing: where does it say the aliens are coming to visit tonight? Roy pursues his goal with great urgency, the army defends their goal with great efficiency, the stakes are high and climb higher as night falls. Who says the aliens are coming tonight? What if they don’t? All we’ve heard about is a set of map coordinates, there was never any date mentioned, the numbers that Laughlin interprets never say “And you guys better get your ass in gear, because we’re going to be there in less than two weeks.” Indeed, if the aliens are contacting people all over the world about their arrival, why are they giving us such a short time frame to meet them? Don’t they know we have lives? We have to book airplane flights, arrange for babysitting, rent cars. Come to think of it, they’ve got seemingly unlimited resources, why can’t they have a number of different meet-n-greets in different locations around the world? I get there’s only one mothership, but surely if they can drop off a freighter in the Gobi desert they can have representatives drop by to say hi in more than one place — what kind of organization are they running?

In any case, Roy keeps pushing, determined that nothing is going to stop him from keeping his appointment with God (even though God thoughtlessly has forgotten to put a meeting time on his invitation — which is, after all, typically God-like. When he invited the Jews to the promised land, he had them wander around in the desert for forty years before finally getting around to keeping his promise. I have this image of the Old Testament God sitting around in Heaven watching TV and eating pork rinds, then suddenly jumping up and saying “Oh shit! I forgot to lead my chosen people to the promised land!”). He succeeds in leading Gillian and Larry to the mountain, but only he and Gillian make it to the other side. Larry seems to be there as a suspense device, to show that even at this late date, not everyone who is called is worthy to receive the message.

Anyway, Roy and Gillian make it over the mountain (who told Roy the big event was going to happen on the other side of the mountain?) and Act IV begins. And the curious thing about Act IV of Close Encounters is that there is very little actual drama to it. The conflicts have all been cleared away, the protagonist has made it to his appointment, and the rest of the movie is, largely, a list of increasingly cool things that happen. It’s like: “Okay, some UFOs have shown up. That’s cool, right? Well what if a whole bunch of UFOs showed up? Now how much would you pay? But wait, before you answer, what if we told you a gigantic, quarter-mile-wide UFO was going to show up? And if you act now, little aliens will come out of the big UFO!“

Here’s a serious screenwriting question: what to the aliens in Close Encounters want?

This is what they do:

1. They drop off all the stuff they borrowed
2. They leave a message about where they’re going to be when they drop off the people they’ve borrowed
3. They encourage ordinary people to please come and meet them
4. They show up at the meeting place, drop off the people they’ve borrowed, then pick one guy to go off with them

Was this their plan all along? Did they only plan on taking one guy? If Gillian had accompanied Roy down to the landing strip, would she have been accepted along with him? It’s clear that the aliens turn their noses up at the “professionals” offered by Lacombe, but would they have taken the rest of the artists on the helicopter as well?

Little Barry Guiler is among the folks returned, of course, and there are few images more sacred in the Spielberg canon than a parent and child reunited — unless of course the parent is Roy and he’s abandoned his family to pursue God.

(A family reunited forms the climactic moment of so many Spielberg movies, which is why the moment in the second half of Schindler’s List where Schindler sees the body of the girl in the red coat is so shattering — there will be no reunion for this parent and child and Schindler lives in a world that doesn’t recognize Spielberg’s priorities as a storyteller. Which is one reason why Schindler’s List is such an important movie in Spielberg’s list, but we’re a long way from there yet.)

The returning of belongings and the dropping off of people implies to me that the aliens are breaking up with us, like they’ve had all they can take of our bullshit and they just want our crap out of their spaceship. They’re going home, but if we can give them one reason to think we’re nice people, maybe they’ll think we’re okay after all. That one reason, of course, turns out to be Roy.

Another thought occurs to me: maybe the aliens aren’t God after all. Maybe they’re an inter-dimensional art school looking for commercial artists to do work for posters and brochures and whatnot, and their message to the people of earth is “DRAW DEVIL’S TOWER! YOU MAY HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A PROFESSIONAL ARTIST!” And Roy wins first prize. Or maybe he didn’t win first prize, maybe they take him because he’s the only entrant to show up to the prize ceremony.

(Up on the ledge with Barry by her side, Gillian takes photos of the little aliens. Spielberg here is saying, I think, “don’t forget, film is an artform too, and the movie you’re watching is my own attempt to capture the divine impulse in art.”)

The obvious point is that Roy, not Lacombe, not the scientists, not the Army or Air Force or US government, not the UN or any other official body, only Roy is worthy. God chooses Roy out of everyone else to ascend into Heaven, to make it to the promised land. This is an emotional point, not a rational one, which is why Close Encounters is obviously such a personal story for Spielberg. His philosophy is that through hard work, devotion to craft, constant artistic struggle and relentless opposition to obstacles, one can make it. Roy’s devotion to building his sculpture, his intent need to “get it right,” is a corollary to Spielberg’s attention to hiscraft, and Roy’s obstinate refusal to follow orders and sneak through barriers is a corollary to Spielberg’s sneaking onto the Universal lot, pretending to be a director. Close Encounters‘s message is that through hard work, devotion to craft, insistent pursuit and a little bit of stealth, one can overcome any obstacle and be lifted up from the masses to achieve something like godhood. It’s Spielberg’s self-fulfilling prophecy, which is why Close Encounters will always be the cornerstone of his singular achievement.

But first, Roy goes back to the mountain road to try to re-create his initial encounter. He brings his camera, which he barely knows how to work. If he’s going to have another encounter with God, by gum he’s going to record it this time.

Of course, that’s exactly what Lacombe and his team are doing in India. While Roy and his kind struggle to understand divine will through drawing and painting and sculpture, Lacombe has a formidable team of scientists on his side. Who will win? Science has numbers on its side, as science will, but when Lacombe is confronted by the artworks of the contactees in Act III he immediately understands that science can only list and quantify the divine, it cannot understand. “They belong here more than we,” he says of the contactees at Devil’s Tower (although the casual viewer would be forgiven for thinking the line is “Zey belong in Mozambique”).

Roy’s Gap widens evermore throughout Close Encounters, which is one reason why it’s such compelling storytelling. Every time he thinks he’s on the road to understanding what’s going on, the script throws another curve at him. When he (and we) think the UFOs are coming back to the mountain road, Spielberg brings in US government helicopters instead and the mystery becomes bigger.

(Historical cinema note: helicopters in 1970s American movies are always metaphors for US government bullying and omnipotence. This stems from Americans seeing helicopters almost solely through the eye of their use in the Vietnam war. If you were a filmmaker in the 1970s and you wanted to show a populace beaten into submission by the government, you put a hovering helicopter in the top of the frame. I am not making this up. Helicopters have a more neutral symbolic role in movies today — perhaps they were taken down a peg by Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down.)

45:50 — In case we’re getting too used to the Wonder of the UFOs, Spielberg here inserts one of the most terrifying scenes in his oeuvre, the abduction of Barry Guiler. This scene is probably the only reason why I haven’t shown Close Encounters to my own son yet. And again, there’s an Old Testament/New Testament dichotomy at work here. God wants to contact us, but He also seems to demand sacrifice as well. He takes Gillian’s child, an action that seems unthinkably evil and cruel to her, the understanding of which will drive the remainder of Gillian’s narrative. Gillian goes to Devil’s Tower in Act III not to “meet God” but to find out what happened to Barry. Just as Roy is motivated to try to understand God’s Wonder (LACOMBE: “Mr. Neary, what do you want?” ROY: “An answer! That’s not crazy, is it?”) Gillian is motivated to make sense of God’s Terror — what kind of God would take her child from her? The answer, of course, is a Spielberg kind of God, a God who only appears to be Old Testament, but is at heart New Testament. Mother and child are reunited at the end of Close Encounters, and Spielberg seems to be saying with the release of all the abducted that we will all be united in the afterworld (“Step into the light,” says the midget lady in Poltergeist, “everyone is waiting for you in the light.”)

(And let me take this moment to just say: Cary Guffey — best performance by a three-year-old ever. EVER.)

(And as long as I’m here, let me admit that I’m not quite sure about the ultimate beneficence of the aliens in Close Encounters. Sure, they bring back all the people they’ve kidnapped, but how is that even remotely okay? What the heck are the abducted folks from WWII supposed to do in 1977, after 35 years in a UFO? This is not a healthy situation for them. Where are the lawyers on the Dark Side of the Moon?)

For those still unsure of the God metaphor at work in Close Encounters, let me remind you of the “government conspiracy” scene where we are first told of the landing site — Devil’s Tower. Major Walsh brushes aside all his colleagues suggestions and says “I need something so scary it will rid the area of every living Christian soul.” Now, this is Wyoming we’re talking about after all, so Major Walsh is probably within his bounds to guess that “every living Christian soul” would include everybody, but the “Christian” remark on top of the visual of “Devil’s Tower” on the map is too much to ignore, and again points to Spielberg’s two-handed Wonder/Terror approach in his narrative. He wants to keep us guessing right to the very end — are the aliens here to enlighten us or wipe us off the face of the earth?

Back in Muncie, Roy is in the grip of an obsession. He sees this mysterious vision everywhere he looks. Any artist out there reading this will know this experience, being in the grip of a vision and the weird looks one gets from one’s family and friends when one is pursuing the articulation of that vision. “This means something, this is important” is the best Roy can come up with to defend his mashed-potato sculpture as his son cries and his wife goes crazy. And this scene is parodied so often because for an artist it’s a daily occurrence, having to defend one’s unfinished drawing/sculpture/collage/website/blog entry against the stares and accusations of ones peers. Roy is struggling to express the divine, which is all any artist is trying to do, and Act II of Close Encounters would work as a free-standing narrative about the life of an artist whether is was about UFOs or not.

Roy, caught in the grip of his vision, struggles and struggles, not quite getting it right. He doesn’t want his life to fall apart, he didn’t ask to be chosen, he didn’t want this message, but he’s received it and he has to figure out what it means. He rails against God, throwing clay up at the sky (let’s not forget what man is made from after all) in revolt. He has a rip-roaring fight with his family in the middle of the night and collapses in exhaustion, on the brink of losing his faith.

He wakes up in front of his unfinished Galatea. His young daughter is watching cartoons on TV and in the morning light, all of this looks silly. Again, man, I’ve been there. All the struggle, all the rage and bitterness and desire to express, suddenly looking pointless and childish in the face of daily reality. Roy smiles and starts taking everything down. And maybe, in a way, we’re with him — we’ve seen his family torn apart by this nonsense, why should he keep pushing on with this obsession if it’s so unwilling to give up its secrets? How is it worth it? Roy has no abducted child to pursue, he only has this vision — who would care, who would know if he just gave up pursuing it?

But then, ah, the breakthrough comes and, in what has to be one of the most powerful, personal, nakedly emotional scenes of all Spielberg’s work, Roy’s vision suddenly snaps into focus and he knows what he has to do. Close Encounters is Spielberg’s most personal movie because it’s about art’s ability to express the divine. His protagonists, Roy and Lacombe, attack the problem of the divine from the artistic and scientific angles respectively — and what is the art of motion pictures but a wedding of art and science? Who is Steven Spielberg if not the wedding of Art and Science? Who else has made such a career for himself from of producing such profoundly emotional experiences out of the most carefully planned, calculated, scientifically calibrated work? Only Walt Disney achieved more, and even he had long stretches of “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing” in between artistic breakthroughs. This is the reason Spielberg has become the most successful, the most lauded artist in the history of his medium, and if you had told me he would end up so in December of 1977 I would have answered with a resounding “duh.”

Still not convinced of the God metaphor yet? When Roy has finished his masterpiece and is arguing on the phone with Ronnie, a commercial for Budweiser appears on the TV. “Here comes the king, here comes the big Number 1,” goes the jingle. “The king is coming, let’s heed the call.” Which is, of course, what the whole movie has been about up to this point. The very next thing we see on the TV is the news report about Devil’s Tower.

Roy, true to his nature, still doubts his vision. He’s finished his masterwork but he still doesn’t know what it means (and once again, man, I’ve been there). He looks out his window and sees the harmless activity of everyday suburbia and again feels stupid. When the final clue clicks into place, he’s still trying to work out things with Ronnie. Once he sees the image of Devil’s Tower on TV, his artistic life is over — now he’s achieved his goal and is ready to move decisively into action.

Close Encounters has, in addition to Roy, two lesser protagonists — Lacombe, a French scientist in charge of the UN mission to solve the same mystery as Roy, and Gillian, a single mother, contacted from above on the same evening as Roy. Lacombe has to battle against the secretive mind-set of the US government, while Gillian must struggle with her own conflicting feelings about the beings at the center of the mystery. She, like Roy, is driven to solve the mystery, but whereas Roy is motivated by a kind of ecstatic fervor, Gillian’s fervor is mingled with the fear and dread she feels because the mysterious beings swiped her kid.

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.

1:34:45 — The shark attacks the Orca. The boards bend inward and water spurts inside the hull. Our breathing stops because THE WATER IS COMING IN THE BOAT, and Spielberg has done such a masterful job of establishing that THE WATER itself is an object of dread. Seconds later, the shark rams the boat and Brody FALLS INTO THE WATER. It’s only a couple of inches of water, but he reacts as though it’s acid, and so do we, and this is why.

The overhead light spins with the impact. Spielberg would later go on to use “things dangling from the ceiling” as a visual cue, but it’s worth noting that he got mileage out of the same spinning overhead light in Something Evil.

1:35:58 — Brody comes out on deck and loads his gun. A meteor passes through the sky, traversing his eyeline. Pure genius. I remember the first time seeing the movie thinking I was imagining it — exactly like when you see a meteor in the night sky. I know that meteor showers take a prominent place in Spielberg’s life story, but 30-odd years later I still have to sit and wonder at the presence of mind it took to put, at considerable expense I’m guessing, an animated meteor into the background of this shot. Was the shot planned that way, or did Spielberg decide to put the meteor in in post? In any case, in the midst of this already extremely-heightened experience, it takes a special kind of mind to say “Oh, and let’s have a meteor go by in the background — because the scene where the shark decides to attack the boat isn’t interesting enough.”

The shark, of course, at this point is no longer a shark, it’s an actual bad guy, with an actual Bad Guy Plot. The shark, fully confident of its abilities, is going to taunt the men on the Orca, get them to squander their resources, pick them off one by one, and then I guess proceed to eat every person on Amity Island. (It jumps up on theboat — I can easily imagine it leaping up onto the dock, stealing a car and driving to City Hall to eat the Mayor. Or maybe it would let the Mayor go — professional courtesy and all.)

It’s important to keep in mind that Spielberg keeps his protagonist helpless and ineffective to the very end of the narrative. Brody watches and reacts to the very end — his one attempt at action, calling for help, is negated by Quint destroying the radio. Keeping the protagonist helpless winds up our anxiety about his predicament to such a high degree that when Brody finally blows up the shark the release of tension is so great it’s hard not to stand up and cheer.

Quint destroying the radio, of course, is an allusion to Moby-Dick, where Ahab destroys the sextant. In case the Moby-Dick fans in the audience don’t catch the reference, the screenplay calls for Hooper to exclaim, moments later, “Fast fish,” a reference to Moby-Dick‘s “fast fish and loose fish.” (The novel Jaws is even more explicit about Quint’s Ahab-ness — he dies in an almost identical manner.)

1:38:20 — Quint and Hooper have to lean out way over the water to snag the ropes on the barrels. Again our breath stops, as we equate the water itself with danger and unspeakable evil.

1:43:20 — The shark, stuck full of harpoons, pulls the boat backwards through the water. The oxygen tanks almost fall over again, our second reminder of them.

1:45:40 — The “machete beat.” Quint cuts the ropes and sticks the machete in the rail of the boat. This shot perplexed me for decades, until I realized later that Quint grabs the machete to stab at the shark as it’s eating him. Live and learn.

1:47:20 — Now that the shark has decided to wreck the boat, a plan is announced to lead him into shallow waters and drown him. Quint is visibly disappointed by this plan and proceeds to destroy the boat’s motor. Why does he do this? For the same reason he destroys the radio — he wants the boat to sink. He’s expecting to die, we can tell because he starts singing “Ladies of Spain”, his “goodbye” song.

Act IV of Jaws is all about “moments of truth.” Quint has been waiting 30 years to get back in the water with a shark, to see if, through his intense hatred, he can triumph over his nemesis. Hooper has brought along all his equipment to prove that, through his love of sharks, he has gained the scientific knowledge to destroy it.

And so he proceeds to try to do that. There is a short “preparation” montage where we get our third reminder of the oxygen tanks. (I love the shot of Hooper carefully measuring the poison into the syringe — careful, not too much.) Hooper goes into the water to prove his worth and fails miserably.

I love the shot of the interior of the boat, the wood a sliding to one side as the boat tips in the water. It strikes me as typically Spielbergian, an understanding of exactly the shot that will sell the physical reality of whatever the action sequence is trying to get across. A cousin to the screw coming out of the grate in Close Encounters and a hundred others.

The shark jumps into the boat. Quint, I think, would like to fight the shark, but this, it seems, was not his battle plan. He grabs hold of a table, but Hooper’s oxygen tank rolls over his fingers and he lets go. And so we could say that the “new idea” of Hooper’s science has triumphed over the “old idea” of Quint’s hatred. Which seems like a New Testament-Old Testament debate, but probably for a different movie.

Quint gets eaten, and Brody, who has been clumsy, inefficient and hapless throughout the second half of the movie, improvises a solution. He fuses Hooper’s science (the remaining oxygen tank) and Quint’s hatred (the rifle) and blows the damn thing up. Finally, in the last moments of the story, the protagonist Proves His Worth and shows that One Man Can Make A Difference. The tank and the rifle indicate that Brody has gained his triumph by paying attention to the warring warriors who went before him.

(In the book, they simply wear the shark down and it dies inches away from attacking Brody, apparently from exhaustion. Benchley’s protagonist is much more related to Melville’s Ishmael, an innocent bystander who survives through dumb luck — good enough for a book but a severe setback for a movie. I remember the cheers echoing through the theater when seeing it the first time, thinking “well, of course they went for the more spectacular ending, and the crowd seems to like it, so…”)

The shark sinks in a cloud of blood in an almost exact visual echo of the truck falling off the cliff in a cloud of dust in Duel. The visual parallel occurred to Spielberg and he put a modified version of the same sound effect from the truck scene over the shot of the sinking shark.