‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ or — Wonderfully Stupid?

I absolutely adored Steven Spielberg’s ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977) as a kid. Sure, I always felt belief in flying saucers and UFOs was deluded to the point of insanity but the power of Spielberg’s imagination with all that technical pizzazz on display was undeniable and rapturous. So would watching it again for the first time in years return me to a state of wide-eyed innocent wonder or leave me retching down my toilet bowl after consuming the overly saccharine foaming ravings of a deranged QAnoner? Let’s find out!

We all know the story — a mentally unstable asshole abandons his family in order to attend a Jean-Michel Jarre concert halfway up a mountain before climbing onboard a spaceship in order to escape being arrested by social services on charges of domestic neglect.

Along the way he acts like a selfish prick, emotionally and psychologically abuses everyone he meets, plays with his food and, ultimately, flies off in a spaceship before being thrown out the airlock after the aliens eventually discover how insufferably annoying the dickhead they’ve let onboard actually is.

What’s undeniable about ‘Close Encounters’ is that despite the idiotic stupidity of its premise (NASA were justified in having concerns about the script in that it might do to credible astronomy what ‘Jaws’ did to sharks) is that it contains some of Spielberg’s best work. Seriously, if you want to study how Spielberg achieves some of that magic of his then this is the one to watch. Technically it’s a marvel: Vilmos Zigmond’s cinematography is breathtaking; John Williams’ score one of his best and Douglas Trumbull’s effects work mind-blowing, although I suspect the special ingredient here is Michael Kahn’s editing.

But that still doesn’t solve the central problem of Neary himself, how annoying he is or the fact he’s a complete psychopath (can you imagine his mental state if the aliens HADN’T turned up at the end?). At one point his children are openly weeping in front of him, in desperate need of their father, but he’s more interested in his mash potatoes or dreaming about flying off into outer space on a set of trombone playing Christmas tree lights.

Also, why, exactly, was Neary chosen? Why was he so special? Did the aliens just like collecting bad fathers for fun or is this some sort of intergalactic asshole removal system they provide for our benefit? Or is it because the film is heavily neoliberal with the proto-Reaganite aliens elevating blue-collar workers into the realm of the white? (Neary betrays not only his family but also his class)

And Dreyfuss’ Neary isn’t the only major issue.

For one, there’s a shocking level of product placement on display meaning it frequently feels less extraterrestrial in nature and more like being trapped in a Madison Avenue exec’s wet dream, and what’s magical about that? (Don’t believe me — at one point in Spielberg’s original script a scientist hands a can of Coco-Cola to an alien who, after drinking it, bounces about in a fit of low gravity glee)

Then there’s the blatant emotional manipulation at work which doesn’t so much aim to return us to a state of childhood as fully re-insert the viewer back into the womb like a bemused foetus. This manipulation of the audience is both skilled and precise, even down to the casting. So yes, Truffaut’s films frequently focused on children and childhood, hence his inclusion here as Lacombe, but Truffaut treated these subjects with sensitivity and respect whereas in ‘Close Encounters’ children are something to be actively avoided being either drone-like little automatons devoid of any agency (Barry Guiler) or screaming, obnoxious nightmares to run away from (Neary’s entire family).

In fact, for a movie about childlike wonder it’s amazing how staggeringly contemptuous of children the film actually is as it’s the adults who are wanting to reclaim that state of innocence for themselves resulting in them engaging in a form usurpation of the sovereign realm of the toddler. The grown-ups have annexed the nursery as their own personal playground and the kids can go fuck themselves while the middle-aged, middle-class men bliss their tits out.

And all the while a giant, glowing ball hangs over everything like a baby’s nightlight dangling above its crib and when ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ kicks in on the soundtrack at the end the jig is finally up with the incandescent lights revealing us in their glare as nothing more than drooling infants dazzled by a soothing, yet empty, luminescence. (Little man, you’ve had a busy day?)

Now you might want to denounce me a cynical meanie for calling the movie profoundly ‘infantile’ (which it is!) but I only do so because, again, it’s explicitly baked into Spielberg’s script (SCENE 278 — The entire form suddenly resembles a soothing nightlight), a script whose sole intention to is render us into a state of dribbling imbecility. But then again, this isn’t a film about the possibility of extraterrestrial life or humanity’s place in the universe in the slightest; it’s a Disney fairy tale for adults deftly exploited to demonstrate the capabilities of contemporary special effects, and taken purely as that the film’s an outstanding success. Indeed, for all my moaning about its inherently puerile concepts this might just be my favourite Spielberg film, and by quite some way. So yeah, I still adore the bloody idiotic thing.

Spielberg himself has since stated that ‘Close Encounters’ is the only film of his that dates him, that it’s the work of someone with an immature outlook and now freely admits that Neary abandoning his family was a mistake. My only question is — what took him so long to realise that?