First, we see Schindler at a party, where a Jewish woman and girl present him with a cake, apparently baked by Jewish prisoners at Plaszow (although the script doesn’t specify). He kisses the girl on the cheek and the woman on the lips, as the Germans in the room glare and the woman herself freezes in horror. So here, at the top of Act IV, Schindler, we see, is still a little clueless and still addicted to his passions: he kisses the Jewish woman in spite of the fact that he’s endangering her life by doing so. The scene works well enough as a character beat, but it’s real significance doesn’t get answered for another fifteen minutes or so.

Second, we see a group of Jewish women in a Plaszow barracks, gossiping about “what they’ve heard” about Auschwitz. This scene is a rough parallel to a similar scene at the top of Act II, where we see Jews amongst themselves instead of as in relation to Schindler. The scene in Act II gives us a glimpse of life inside the ghetto before it is liquidated; here, of course, there is a dark foreboding at work.

(Throughout Act IV the question keeps arising, who knows what about Auschwitz when? Goth seems to know so much about it that he’s sloppy about who he tells, which indicates that everyone in his circle knows about it. Schindler seems to know about it, or enough to know it’s a bad thing, but needs to find out that all his workers will be moved there before he is moved to act on their behalf.)

1:58:35 – 2:06: 44 — Act IV proper begins with the excruciating “Selektion” sequence. There is a “new shipment” of workers coming in to the camp, and Goth needs to winnow out the deadwood from Plaszow. He could be a manager at any large factory, faced with redundancy and needing to cut staff. The only difference is that instead of laying off redundant workers, he’s sending them off to Auschwitz to be murdered.

As with the previous three acts, this one begins with another roll call, another row of folding tables, another list of names. The “list of names” motif becomes a kind of incantation, each name a life. As we begin to associate names with faces the enormity of the tragedy begins to form in our minds.

As Nazi doctors inspect the teeth and muscles of the naked Jews on the camp assembly ground, another doctor examines Goth up on the back porch of his house. It’s as though Goth is saying “See? I have to undergo this process too, I’m no better than you.” Goth’s girlfriend, who was so appalled to see him shooting Jews from this same porch back in Act III, here comes out in her silk pajamas to adore Goth and his bloated, doughy physique. Later, Goth puts on a shirt (but not the rest of his uniform) to go oversee his workers work. At first it looks like he’s merely a stickler for details, but as his activities come into focus we realize that he’s separating the Schindler Jews from the ones doomed to Auschwitz. In his mind, he’s just upholding his end of his corrupt kickback scheme with Schindler — he doesn’t think any of these people are going to survive the war.

On the list of redundant workers are, apparently, all the children in the camp, and surely one of the most arresting sequences in this movie of arresting sequences is a kind of “liquidation in miniature” as we follow a boy in a cap, who we’ve only glimpsed before in Act I, as he tries to find a hiding place somewhere in the camp. As Spielberg indulges in a dependable emotional sucker-punch, mothers separated from their children, the boy tries to hide in a half-dozen places before finally ending up under a barracks latrine, chest-deep in human waste — only to find the space already occupied by a half-dozen other children, the “girl in glasses” among them. Like the scene with Levertov in the previous act, the “boy in the cap” sequence is so unbelievable that I’m inclined to believe it. The movie is asking us to believe that these escaped children ran from guards, hid, and then somehow escaped detection until they were able to get out of the camp? And yet, they do.

2:06:44-2:10:19 — Schindler stops by the camp, for reasons unrevealed, apparently to hang out with his Nazi pals while the redundant workers are loaded onto train cars bound for Auschwitz. He asks Goth to hose down the train cars, so that the Jews inside might have some water to drink on their way. Goth laughs at the suggestion but goes along with it, saying that Schindler is showing true cruelty by giving the doomed hope. In any case, we see here an incremental shift in Schindler’s attitude, and a desire to do something that will not directly benefit himself. (On the “Holocaust awareness” front, this scene indicates to me that Goth certainly knows at this point that the workers are doomed, and it almost indicates that Schindler knows.)

2:10:19-2:15:00 — The Gestapo arrest Schindler for kissing the Jewish girl at the top of the act. Goth, trying to protect Schindler in order to protect his kickbacks, defends Schindler as a free-range womanizer to the unsmiling Nazi officers in charge of the case. When that fails, he falls back on his standard argument: Jewish women are she-devils who lure good Germans with their evil magic. In the previous act, Schindler made the almost-fatal mistake of confusing his morality with Goth’s. Here, Goth returns the favor, presenting his own feelings about Jews as a defense for Schindler’s actions. This gets him into even more trouble, which he tries to get out of by bribing the official — again, bringing the whole narrative back to the level of “business.”

My DVD of Schindler’s List breaks the movie in two at this point, just as the Nazi official in charge of Schindler’s case informs him, in his euphemistic way, that exterminating Jews “is policy now.” Which is, I’m guessing, the first time Schindler has this eventuality made clear to him. In any case, my timecode, of necessity, starts over here.

0:00-2:30 — Next thing we know, Schindler is walking down the street and is disturbed to find ash falling down out of the sky. The war is pressing on, and the Nazis, feeling the pressure, have ordered Goth to exhume the bodies of the people he had killed during Act II and burned in a gigantic pyre. Goth handles this task the way a harried middle-manager would handle any cockamamie scheme dictated from above: he sighs and cavils and gets on with it as best he can.

The spectacle of the exhumation, and the emotional sucker-punch of Schindler noticing the dead body of the “girl in the red coat”, are both so strong that it’s easy to miss the expository point to the scene: the Nazis are shutting down Plaszow and shipping all the Jews to Auschwitz. To Schindler this means that his factory is shutting down again, to Goth it means that the gravy train he shares with Schindler is pulling out of the station without him. “The party’s over, Oskar,” sighs Goth, “They’re shutting us down.”

2:30-4:40 — Schindler goes to Stern, in another parallel to their Act I meeting, to dissolve the business and discuss further plans. Schindler has decided to quit while he’s ahead and take his money back to Germany. Stern asks him about the business, and Schindler, paraphrasing Scrooge, tells him “You were my business.” If that’s the case, it seems to only be occurring to Schindler now — it was only an act ago that Schindler was outraged that Stern was smuggling invalids into the factory. This admission seems to be enough for Stern, who finally acquiesces to his offer of a drink. Stern approves of Schindler now, so we do too.

4:40-5:54 — Schindler, at this point, could take his war-profiteering millions and head for the hills, but the next thing we see is him in his luxury apartment (the one commandeered from the Jewish family on the day of the liquidation) with his naked mistress-of-the-day asleep in his bed, packed and ready to go, his trunks full of Reichmarks filling the dining room. Looking around at all this (and with Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” playing on the radio) Schindler comes to a decision.

5:54-7:20 — Schindler goes to Goth, in a parallel to a scene from Act III, to set up another business venture. He’s going to open a munitions factory in Czechoslovakia, and he’s going to buy “his” workers from Goth to staff it. Goth can’t wrap his head around the idea: he can’t see the profit in the situation.

7:20-11:30 — In the movie’s signature scene, Schindler and Stern compose “the list” of names of the Jews who will be removed from Plaszow and taken to Czechoslovakia (intercut with scenes of Schindler trying, and failing, to persuade other industrialists to do likewise). The weight of all those earlier roll-call scenes is brought to bear upon this one. It is both a clever “reversal” of those scenes (roll is called in the earlier scenes to find who will die, here it is called to find who will live) and a distillation of the movie’s theme: business vs. lives. Schindler is taking all the money he made through his business and exchanging it for lives, just as, in Act III, he exchanged things for lives. Stern focuses the theme down to a pinpoint at the end of the sequence: holding up the papers like Moses holding the tablets, he says “The list is life.”

(And again, there is a meta-quality to this sequence as well. For, just as Schindler is, late in his career, forfeiting his wealth, in a crisis of conscience, to “save Jews,” Spielberg could be seen as doing the same. He could go on making Jaws and Jurassic Park for the rest of his career, but he has chosen, after 20 years in movies, to risk it all on a desperately un-commercial project, shot in a hugely un-commercial manner. To “save Jews”? Perhaps, but more likely to save his own soul as an artist. The fact that Schindler’s List went on to become a huge moneymaker obviously gnawed at Spielberg: it’s one thing to create a searing vision of the Holocaust, it’s another thing entirely to have that vision make a ton of money.)

11:30-13:00 — Schindler takes a suitcase full of money to bribe Goth to transport his workers to Czechoslovakia, and plays him a hand of 21 to get Helen away from him as well. (Goth, in what surely must be his weakest moment, anemically protests against Schindler taking Helen, and spins a fantasy of taking her “back home to Vienna” to grow old with him, a fantasy so absurd that he seems to recognize it for what it is the moment it leaves his lips.)

1:37-3:25 — The smoke from the extinguished candles cuts to the smoke billowing out of a locomotive’s smokestack as a train pulls into the station in Krakow. Obviously, smoke and trains will figure significantly in narrative to follow. The action of the scene is that Jews, forced by the Germans after the fall of Poland to re-locate to cities, are arriving in Krakow by the thousands to register with the German officials. The dramatization of the moment is a series of shots of Jews, liningup at folding tables, to recite their names for the German clerks, who type them up into lists. Smoke, trains, lines of Jews at folding tables in open spaces, Germans keeping careful track of the Jews’ names (“Name?” is actually the first line of dialog in the movie), and the list of names itself — all these motifs will be repeated in evolving contexts throughout the movie and they’re all here in the first scene.

The narrative of Schindler’s List is told mostly from Schindler’s point of view. It’s his gradual change from businessman to samaritan that the movie is concerned with. Therefore, the “plight of the Jews” in these early scenes is given relatively little importance. It is, dramatically speaking, “the weather,” the situation the protagonist is entering into. That is, Spielberg pares the information back to all we absolutely need to know to understand the protagonist’s pursuit. We don’t need to see Claudius plotting to kill Hamlet’s father, we only need to know that Hamlet is pissed off that his father is dead.

3:25-4:28 — A man gets ready for a night on the town. We see him select his tie, loot his wardrobe for spare cash, and pin his Nazi Party pin to his lapel.

4:28-5:17 — The man enters a nightclub. He heavily tips the maitre-d for a good table. The man, like Spielberg, is a manipulator of image — he wants to frame himself a certain way, present a certain impression.

5:17- 10:15 — The man scans the nightclub, looking resplendent and predatory. What is his prey? Well, here comes a comely blond lass. The man takes a drag on his cigarette (smoke again) and stares lustfully at the woman as she passes. And while we will soon find out that the man is a notorious womanizer, Spielberg here pulls a typically Spielbergian stunt — he “stands the idea on its head” and makes it that the man is not staring at the woman at all, he’s staring at the Nazi she walked in with. He didn’t come to this nightclub to seduce women but to seduce Nazis.

(Spielberg’s friend Brian DePalma put it thus in Scarface: “First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women.”)

And so the man, who is eventually identified as Oskar Schindler, pursues his agenda of “buying the friendship of local Nazis.” He watches each influential officer, notes his predilections, and caters to them, providing women, wine and song and receiving their patronage in return.

But of course we don’t know that yet.

Now think about this sequence for a moment. Here’s what is not shown: Oskar Schindler at home in Germany, bursts in the door and says to his wife “Honey, I’ve got a great idea! You know that old enamelware factory in Krakow? Well, now that the Nazis have conquered Poland, I have a unique opportunity to buy that factory and make mess kits for the German army. We’ll be rich! Rich, I tell you!” And Mrs. Schindler says “But Oskar, however will you do it? We don’t have that kind of money.” And Schindler says “It’s wartime, babe, all the rules go out the window in wartime.” And Mrs. Schindler says “I don’t know, Oskar, it sounds mighty risky.” And Schindler says “Aw babe, don’t you get it, this is my big chance, I can finally make something of myself and impress your father.” And Mrs. Schindler says “Oh Oskar, you know I can’t resist you when you have some crazy, pie-in-the-sky moneymaking scheme. Just promise me that when you’re in Krakow, no running around with the local ladies, okay?” And Schindler saying “I love you, Mrs. Schindler. Kiss me.”

That scene would be in any other bio-pic, mostly because for most movies, there’s always someone at the beginning of the movie-making process who says “But we don’t know what the protagonist wants, we need his big ‘I want’ scene so we can root for him.” But as we’ve seen with No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, the fact that the characters simply pursue their goals without explaining themselves is always much more dramatically interesting.

(That, and, of course, Spielberg doesn’t want us to “root” for Schindler exactly, not at this point of the narrative anyway.)

As Schindler discusses wine with the nightclub’s sommelier, we hear a couple of Nazis griping about the matter of governing Poland. This subtle, background exchange is the thin edge of a wedge that will become more prominent later: that for the Nazis of Schindler’s List, their activities are, essentially, “just business.” The Nazi officers in Schindler’s List talk about their occupation of Krakow and their treatment of the Jews primarily in terms of paperwork and bureaucracy, rarely in terms of hatred. (The hatred gets revealed in other ways, as we will see.)

10:15-14:45 — Spielberg cuts from Schindler leading the Nazis in a cabaret sing-along to German soldiers in the city singing a martial song. We get a little more “weather” as we see Germans harassing Jews as Schindler walks through the streets.

(There are those who complain that Schindler’s List does Jews a disservice by making them minor characters in the movie. And it’s true that the movie largely centers on Schindler’s story and tends to tell the story of “the Jews” as just that — a relatively undifferentiated mass of humanity, and helpless without a powerful, sympathetic friend to “save” them. What I see is Spielberg approaching the Holocaust the same way he approaches any other subject: by asking “how do we stand the idea on its head?” In this case, he’s decided to make a “Holocaust movie” about a German businessman who’s just trying to make a little money off the war. His impulse is the same for Schindler’s List as it is for Close Encounters or Hook: “how do I make people see this story in a way they’ve never seen it before?” And in that regard, the commercial returns of Schindler’s List speak for themselves.)

We still don’t yet know what Schindler’s game is. He enters the Judenrat, a kind of Jewish community center, where relocated Jews can air their grievances and sort out legal problems. Hundreds of Jews are lined up to get into the Judenrat, in a line that stretches down the block, but Schindler, a German and a badge-wearing member of the Nazi Party, strides to the front of the line and heads inside.

The small glimpses of life on the streets of Krakow and inside the Judenrat give real weight and perspective to the scene that follows. It’s hard for us to imagine an entire population uprooted at the whim of an invading army and forced to relocate, and Spielberg imagines the practical scenes of daily life of this situation with a detail and precision he hasn’t reached since the community scenes of Jaws and Close Encounters.

Schindler has come to the Judenrat to find an accountant named Itzak Stern. Why Stern we are not told, apparently Schindler got his name from someone as someone who can get things done in the Krakow Jewish community.

Stern is presented as a, well, stern, solemn, “pure” man. (His first line of dialog is “I am.”) He functions as a kind of Jiminy Cricket to Schindler’s Pinocchio. As Schindler outlines his business scheme to Stern, Stern can barely contain his disapproval of Schindler and everything he represents. The drama of Schindler’s List largely hinges on Stern’s gradual approval of, friendship with, and eventual lionization of Schindler. This drama is characterized chiefly by Sterns unwillingness to share a drink with Schindler, and this scene is the first to bring up this motif.

In what I consider a pretty incredible scene, Schindler presents his scheme, which comes down to: I have the contacts, you know how to run a business and you know investors, lets all get rich off this crazy war thing. If Schindler is aware of the implications of the Nazi occupation of Krakow, he doesn’t show it. His attitude seems to be, this is the situation, we can suffer from it or we can profit from it — I, being a German member of the Nazi party, stand to profit from it much more greatly than you, but that’s the way things are, you want in or not?

The capitalist imperative is presented as purely amoral in the least perjorative sense of the word — what does it matter what the situation is, as long as we can make some money off it? Schindler will get his money, the Germans will get field kits, the Jewish investors will be able to trade pots and pans on the black market, “everybody’s happy,” it’s a win-win situation. Schindler, at this point in the narrative, is not a “bad” man, not an anti-semite, merely an opportunist. It’s his opportunism that suggested he join the Nazi party, it’s his opportunism that allows him to pursue his scheme of opening an enamelware factory in Krakow when he has virtually no capital, later it will be the same opportunism that will allow him to hire Jews instead of Poles to work at the factory.

14:55-17:32 — Jewish black-marketeers gather in the local Catholic church to conduct their business. We meet Pfefferberg and Goldberg, who will enter into the narrative later on as a kind of “Good Jew/Bad Jew” team — Pfefferberg will prefer to retain his honor and live as a prisoner, whereas Goldberg will gladly turn policeman for its opportunities for graft and kickbacks.

For a moment, it looks like the narrative is branching off into a new direction, but we’re with Pfefferberg and Goldberg for only a couple of minutes before Schindler enters the scene. He’s been at the church the whole time, apparently, scoping out the joint, looking for Jews exactly like Pfefferberg to acquire luxury goods on the black market — he needs “good things” to present to his Nazi contacts, to grease the wheels of the bureaucracy and get him his enamelware factory.

17:32-21:53 — The Jews enter the Krakow ghetto. As the mass of humanity flows through the streets, Spielberg takes care to show us a few faces that will become important later. He casts a boy with a winsome face and a little girl with round, horn-rim spectacles, knowing that we’ll remember those details and follow along with their stories. There is another scene of Jews standing in line to talk to Germans with clipboards sitting at folding tables in an open-air space, and another recital of names. Goldberg is now a policeman, Pfefferberg and his fiancee sneer and make fun of him.

We pay close attention to a wealthy Jewish family being uprooted from their luxury digs and herded into the street by Nazi soldiers. Why this family? Spielberg keeps us waiting for the answer. The father of the family, a framed picture under one arm, pries the mezzuzza off his front door and heads out to join the parade of Jews headed for the ghetto. No sooner are the family led away and pelted with mud by Polish onlookers then Schindler pulls up in his car and is squired about the apartment by a Nazi officer. So Spielberg does take moments to tell us of what’s happening to “the Jews” but he doesn’t want the story to get away from him — he makes sure that everyone he shows has a direct relation to his protagonist. He cuts between the wealthy Jewish family entering the deplorable conditions of the ghetto and Schindler relaxing, pleased as punch with his swanky new digs. Again, if Schindler understands that he’s taking over an apartment which was, only moments earlier, the property of someone else, he doesn’t show it — it’s all just more good stuff for the opportunist.

21:53-23:37 — The Jews have all moved into the ghetto. Stern introduces Schindler to the investors he knows. Again, it’s a scene about business — the investors try to negotiate with Schindler, but Schindler knows he’s got the upper hand and refuses to cave. Again, he’s not an anti-semite, he’s just pursuing his goal of making a ton of money and the local situation puts his business partners at a disadvantage. This scene also features Schindler’s second attempt to get Stern to share a drink with him.

23:37-24:30 — The capital secured, the enamelware factory starts production. Schindler hires Jews from the ghetto not because he intends to “save” them, but because they cost him less money (and he pays them through the Nazi bureaucracy, which benefits his business). They are, literally, “worth less.” Money and life present themselves in stark terms when one can literally say that one kind of person is worth less than another kind, and Schindler, the opportunist, is happy to go along with the prevailing wisdom.

24:30-29:00 — Stern, now in place to run Schindler’s enamelware factory, canvases the ghetto looking for likely prospects. As the Jews are being sorted into categories by the Nazis (so many scenes of sorting people out in this movie) Stern sees that everyone who isn’t working at the factory is in danger of being put on the wrong list and pulls a number of ruses and schemes to get teachers and historians and musicians jobs at the factory. This is one of the few times we leave Schindler to see what Stern is doing behind his back, and we see that Stern is something of a canny opportunist himself — he’s hiring friends and aesthetes for jobs in a metalworking plant.

29:00-30:45 — We get a moment of character development and comic relief as Schindler auditions women to be his secretary. He plays close attention to the pretty young things who hunt and peck their way through the typing test and sits bored as a middle-aged batte-axe efficiently chugs along, easily besting them. So we also learn that Schindler has an eye for the ladies and is, in fact, a thoroughly shallow man, his knowledge of French wines and cognac notwithstanding. At the end of the brief sequence, Stern tells Schindler “you have to choose.” He’s talking about picking a secretary, but, as with many things Stern says to Schindler, the line carries a double meaning. You can’t, he implies, sit on the fence through this war, making your money and chuckling at your cleverness, you have to pick a side. Schindler, however, is still an opportunist and decides to hire all the auditioners — except, of course, the battle-axe.

30:45-33:00 — Schindler promotes his newly-opened enamelware factory. He’s almost to his goal — he’s made the contacts, raised the capital and staffed his factory, now he just needs to close the deal and get his lucrative army contracts. This he accomplishes by throwing banquets for his Nazi friends and sending baskets of luxury food items to all the officers we saw earlier in the nightclub sequence. The sequence ends with a series of shots of Nazi hands placing their official stamps on Schindler’s contracts — the bureaucracy again, the “business” of the Nazis showing its hand.

His goal achieved, there is a brief scene where Schindler calls Stern to his office and makes a third attempt to get him to drink with him. This time, Stern lifts the glass (on command) but still refuses to drink. Schindler’s moment of self-congratulation is soured and Schindler brusquely throws Stern out of his office. You can see that Stern is gettng to Schindler, you can see Schindler thinking “Christ, what is it with this guy? I give him a job, I give all his friends jobs, I make his rich friends’ lives easier, what does he want from me?” This question ends the act and points the way forward for the narrative.

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT? The problem with “Kick the Can,” unsurprisingly, begins here. Who is the protagonist of this short? The plot is: Kindly old Mr. Bloom comes to an old folks home and Teaches Folks A Lesson. The protagonists of a story like this would most effectively be the ensemble of elderly folks who are confronted with Mr. Bloom. What to make of the mysterious outsider who sees things differently from the status quo, who uses magic and wry irony to show us the error of our ways?

But none of the ensemble of “Kick the Can” is developed in any kind of interesting way. Each character is a stereotype for quick reading — the kvetching Jew, the faded romantic, the bitter loner, et cetera. They are thoroughly uninteresting, and Spielberg shoots them with unflattering lenses and lighting, turning them into cartoon characters. The only character Spielberg seems to be interested in is Mr. Bloom, who arrives with a twinkle in his eye and mischief up his sleeve. We are on the outside of the ensemble, on the side of the magician, looking down at the status quo, giggling with giddy joy at the mischievous lesson we’re about to teach the poor benighted folks who don’t know any better.

And so Bloom becomes the protagonist of “Kick the Can.” This is like making Peter Pan the protagonist of Peter Pan (which Spielberg would, of course, eventually figure out a way to do). More to the point, it’s like making E.T. the protagonist of E.T.

Why is this a bad thing? Dramatically, it instantly evaporates a great deal of dramatic tension. We know Mr. Bloom is magic and we can see that the ensemble is a bunch of easily-manipulated sheep, so as an audience all we can do is sit and wait for the magic to happen. Mr. Bloom comes to the old folks home, creates a desire in the minds of the ensemble, then caters to that desire, then points out with leaden earnestness the futility of the desire. Essentially, he comes to the old folks home, says “You know what you people need? You need to be tricked.” And the ensemble says “Say, you know? We do need to be tricked. Trick us.” And so Mr. Bloom tricks them and says “Now look at how foolish you look, falling for my trick. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” The intent is to instill a warm glow of magic, but the result is curdled and smug, demonstrating not the power of magic but the power of manipulation.

And so it occurs to me that, just as E.T. symbolizes Spielberg’s artistic talent, Bloom is a stand-in for Spielberg himself. Looked at this way, “Kick the Can” makes perfect sense — Spielberg sees himself as a magic wanderer, a trickster who arrives on a scene where everyone’s sitting around staring at each other and masterfully manipulates the crowd into a state of wonder and awe, makes them realize some profound truth or other, then moves on to the next unsuspecting bunch of rubes. It’s a movie very pleased with itself, which I suppose makes it a good adaptation of Rod Serling, who similarly had a dim view of society (and his audience) as children in need of a lesson.

ACT II (24:00-57:00) This act could be called “The Education of E.T.” Elliott secrets E.T. in his room and, first chance he gets, begins educating E.T. about everything important — Star Wars mythology being first on the list, with Jaws coming a close second, then expanding outward to food and entertainment, and eventually basic science and broader concepts. When Elliott goes to school, E.T. furthers his own education by getting drunk and screwing around, pursuing an afternoon of wild free-association. By the end of the act, he’s sufficiently educated to hit upon the idea of building a machine to contact his people.

ACT III (57:00-1:17:00) This act could be called “Building and Activating the Machine.” Elliott, Michael and Gertie all help E.T. build his machine and conspire to activate it on Halloween night. Their efforts are, or seem to be, spectacularly unsuccessful, even though there is much wonder and humor on the journey to failure. At the end of this act, E.T. is found face down in a stream bed being investigated by hungry raccoons, Elliott is ill and his house has been invaded by Keys and his men.

ACT IV (1:17:00-1:34:00) This is almost too short to be considered an act, but the arc is too pronounced to ignore. It could be called “Keys Invades,” and it involves Elliott’s family’s house being taken over by government scientists (at least I think they’re government scientists — I don’t think the script actually specifies who Keys works for). It climaxes with E.T.’s death and concludes with the first hint of his resurrection.

ACT V (1:34:00-1:50:00) Here we have, perhaps the first Dreamworks “race to the finish line” final act: sixteen minutes of pure cinema — Elliott and Michael slap together a hastily-considered plan to get E.T. to his spaceship and, miraculously, make it.

NOTES:

LOVING THE ALIEN: “Invert the cliche” is Bob Dylan’s advice to the writer. This sentiment is expressed in the halls of Dreamworks as “Turn the idea on its head.” This concept is central to Spielberg’s success. If you’re making a flying saucer movie, make the saucer-men friendly. If you’re making a WWII movie, take the most irreverent approach possible to the war and its causes. If you’re making a haunted house movie, make the house an anonymous suburban tract house. (In my case, if you’re making a movie about an ant, make him an individualist ant.) In the case of E.T., if you’re making a movie about contact with an alien, start by telling the story from the alien’s point of view.

I am now going to spend a little time writing a little about the very beginning of the movie. Because it’s sheer genius. This paragraph will take longer to read than it takes to watch the passage discussed, and much longer to write.

I’m watching E.T. at a Saturday matinee on opening weekend. The crowd is substantial and the energy is palpable. The lights go down and the Universal logo comes up, with its Earth spinning around in those odd little cosmic energy bands that hover around it.

Here’s what happens next: the Earth in the Universal logo zooms away from us, and out of sight, leaving us in empty space. The audience laughs at this mild logo-joke, but then Spielberg goes to black and gives us his simple titles on a black background, with spooky music that prepares us for, perhaps, a redux of Close Encounters. After the titles, space comes back up on screen, as though we are back in that logo. The audience believes we’re still in space and giggles with anticipation — the movie seems to be starting over, or even running backwards. We’re somewhere out in space, watching a movie called E.T.: The Extraterrestrial. What’s going to happen next?

What happens next is the camera tilts down, the sky lightens a bit, and we come to a tree-line. After a brief pause, we cut to a shot of E.T.’s ship, already landed, in a clearing. The shot is from a tree-height camera — one of the very few camera placements in the entire movie that’s above belt-level.

And there you have it — Spielberg, in that brief, wordless sequence, has essentially made his movie’s argument. By putting the logo joke up front, he got us used to the idea that we are out in space, far away from home. Then, as the titles end, he puts us back in that shot, then tilts down to reveal that, yes, we are out in space, far away from home, on Earth. We are put in E.T.’s POV before we even meet him. By shooting the ship from above, he deliberately removes any sense of threat or menace — the exact opposite of his approach in Close Encounters, where the alien ships are always above us, messengers from the heavens.

LOCATING THE METAPHOR: While watching E.T. during its 2002 theatrical re-release (with the superfluous extra scenes and the idiotic federal-agents-wielding-walkie-talkies redaction) it was my first viewing as a professional screenwriter and I pressed myself to locate the screenplay’s metaphor. All fantasy screenplays must have a metaphor or else they inevitably run off the rails. I hit upon this notion that Elliott needs to be noticed, and E.T. is God, leaning down and saying “It’s okay, Elliott, I see you, in your loneliness and fatherlessness. I see you and I love you — you’re the most special kid in the world.” This is a moving and worthwhile metaphor, but on closer inspection I’ve decided I’m wrong. Unlike the aliens in Close Encounters, and contrary to the Michaelangelo-inspired poster art, E.T. is not an emissary from Heaven.

Rather, he springs from a more internal location — Elliott himself. E.T. is a movie about a kid who knows he’s special but finds himself in a position where he is undervalued and overlooked. He needs badly to be noticed, to be counted — and so he creates a situation where that happens in a very profound, unexpected way. E.T. is a part of Elliott himself — that’s why the alien’s name is a compression of the protagonist’s.

Elliott makes the point over and over that E.T. is “his.” He is horrified when Gertie dresses him in girls’ clothes and disdainfully snorts “he’s a boy” when Gertie suggests otherwise. The bulk of Act II exists to demonstrate that they are psychically linked. E.T. is the “special” part of Elliott, as though Elliott has found a way to take his specialness and make it physical. When Elliott says “I believe in you” to E.T., he is really talking to himself.

From there it’s not too much of a leap to see that Elliott is the boy Spielberg and E.T. is his filmmaking talent — his artistic impulse. Like an artistic impulse, E.T. is weird, unpredictable, simultaneously ancient and innocent, powerful, wily and difficult to harness. Spielberg, like Elliott, grew up in a suburban house with an absent father, and it’s not hard to see in Elliott the young Spielberg, anonymous and slighted, convinced of his genius and determined to one day prove it to everyone. The fact that Elliott yearns to be recognized by his older brothers’ gang suggests (to me anyway) Spielberg’s yearning to be taken seriously as an artist by his older, better-reviewed director pals. If we say that Michael is Steven’s “brother” George Lucas, the rest of the gang could be seen as Scorsese, Coppolla and DePalma. That might sound like a stretch, but I can’t think of any other reason why the “gang” needs to participate in the action of Act V. Elliott and Michael simply need to get E.T. to his spaceship — the gang have nothing to do with the effort but tag along anyway, specifically to show that Elliott, once the tag-along squirt, is now the leader and center of the group.

On the other hand, one of the gang members wears a hat marked “Camus,” which, well, I don’t know what to do with.  Maybe Spielberg is shooting at bigger fish than his film buddies.

THE ARTISTIC IMPULSE: E.T. is thrust out into our world, abandoned and alone, fragile and terrified. Anyone who’s ever created a work of art knows this feeling. You feel tender, exposed and fearful — you created a thing out of love and who knows what people are going to do with it? E.T. is born into and emerges from the forest, which any folklorist will tell you is a metaphor for the subconscious. He is inspired by, and assembles his machine from, the detritus of suburban American homelife — toys and gadgets and comics and TV. In this way,E.T. the movie is exactly like E.T. the character, and Spielberg’s artistic impulse, finding magic and wonder in the pop-culture garbage that sits strewn around every American household. “Want a Coke?” pipes up Elliott when he isn’t sure what to say next to E.T., making America’s most universally recognized brand, well, more universally recognized.

If E.T. is Spielberg’s artistic impulse, then who is Keys? Is he “the critics,” eagerly pursuing E.T. in order to examine him, tie him down, quantify him and maybe kill him in the process? Or is he the studio hacks, the capitalists who can’t wait to get their hands on the artistic impulse to package it, brand it and make a ton of money off it? Elliott’s desperate cry in Act IV, “You’re just going to cut him all up!” takes on new meaning in this context — he could be talking about E.T., or he could be talking about the filmmakers terror at turning in an edit to the studio.

It is, of course, to Spielberg’s credit that he doesn’t demonize Keys. Whether Keys symbolizes critic or studio exec, he knows the artistic impulse and, in Act IV, admits that his impulse is identical to Elliot’s. “I’ve been to the forest,” he says, and, “He came to me too. I’ve been dreaming of this since I was ten years old.” Keys is not evil, and neither are critics or studio execs — they just don’t have the power that Elliott has to make their artistic impulse flesh.

OTHER THOUGHTS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

I very much appreciate Spielberg making Michael an Elvis Costello fan. And I imagine Elvis Costello appreciates it too.

My son Sam (6), of course, sat up wide-eyed and amazed when he saw the interior of Elliott’s room, festooned as it is with Star Wars toys. “Hey! He’s got a Hoth Rebel Cannon with Probot Playset!” is a typical exclamation from Sam as E.T. is shuffling around Elliott’s room.

(For those curious, Sam’s reaction to E.T. is curiously muted. He enjoyed it and had no complaints, but he didn’t spark to it the way he sparked to Jurassic Park or Raiders of the Lost Ark. I cannot account for this — I thought it would hit him like a sledgehammer.)

The Peter Pan references in E.T. seem to be there primarily to lift the burden of Christ comparisons from E.T.’s shoulders. E.T. doesn’t come back to life like Jesus, the movie insists, he comes back to life like Tinkerbell. Both plot turns hinge on issues of faith, but one doesn’t need to believe in Jesus to believe in E.T., one only needs to believe in fairies. And the power of storytelling devices.

Elliott’s father is missing. He, like E.T., has been abandoned. I don’t quite buy the scene in the garage where Michael and Elliott contemplate their father’s shirt, but otherwise I greatly admire the way the missing father is delineated. One of my favorite moments is in Act III, when Mom, storming out the door to go look for her truant kids, backs the car out of the garage and says only “Mexico,” the country, we are told, the father ran off to.

I love the slowly-uncoiling yellow extension cord, which is all we see of the scientists doing recon work on Elliott’s house. Perfect example of Spielbergism, the object standing for the thing, the thing more frightening because we can’t see it.

I do, however, have some reservations about the acting in E.T. and, really, all of Spielberg’s 80s work. The warm naturalism that abounds in Sugarland Express, Jaws and Close Encounters was turned into eye-popping cartoonism in 1941 and movie-movie shorthand in Raiders. Now, and for the foreseeable future, Spielberg’s actors are all very good, but never quite as human as the least supporting player is in his early movies. This is, I’m guessing, a symptom of the “high concept”, er, concept that E.T. created that went on to sweep Hollywood in the 80s. Story, it was decided, does not spring from character any longer — it springs from an irresistible “concept,” and the acting is there to help illustrate the concept.

Of course, no besieged family in a Spielberg movie can be left that way, and by the end of E.T. we are to believe that Keys, far from being an antagonist, will replace Elliott’s father. This is indicated by Keys checking out Mom’s rack as E.T. prepares to blast off.

In addition to Peter Pan, Spielberg also refers to Jaws, of course, and John Ford’s The Quiet Man, and also puts Wile E. Coyote in the kids’ closet, a reference to The Sugarland Express. Michael finds E.T. in a stream next to a storm drain, a visual reference to a key scene in Amblin.’ Spielberg then takes the most terrifying scene in Close Encounters, the siege on Gillian’s house, and stands it on its head at the climax of Act III, when Keys and his men invade. Mom in E.T. responds exactly the same way that Gillian does, and the otherwise-unmentioned suddenly self-operating electric train set makes the link permanent.

In addition, E.T.’s afternoon-long journey from innocence to experience echoes that of Dumbo, who, the viewer will recall, was also an overlooked child with hidden specialness. Spielberg forges the link to Dumbo by having E.T. make his breakthrough the same way Dumbo does — by getting drunk. A drunken alien and a drunken 10-year-old boy seem like odd things to put in a children’s movie, but Disney used to do it all the time — all the way from Dumbo through The Rescuers we find characters getting drunk, getting high and having hallucinatory experiences. For E.T., the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. E.T.’s technological breakthrough is echoed, cinematically, by Elliott’s sexual breakthrough. As E.T. brainstorms his machine, Elliott grabs his pretty blond lab partner and plants a juicy kiss on her lips. He is led off to the principal’s office as the blond swivels her foot in rapture. This sexual side of Elliott’s maturity is,oddly, out of the blue and never referred to again — I have the feeling Spielberg is working out something private in this sequence.

Then, for good measure, in the closing moments of the movie he throws in the tympani roll from 2001, not being able to resist forging a link between Kubrick’s masterwork and his own, taking the narrative conceit of the grandest of science-fiction movie of all time and placing it in a suburban back yard.