Close Encounters of the Third Kind
The profoundest fear of my childhood was aliens. Somehow, somewhere, I got the notion, as a small child, that strange lights in the sky meant I was in danger. Close Encounters emancipated me from that irrational, childish fear, and set the tone (five tones, actually) for a life changed by cinema.
Spielberg set out to make a movie about UFO’s and Watergate, and he did so magnificently. Government conspiracies aside, CE3K resonates with an agenda that surely represents a high-point of movie studio money and individual vision. Like Welles before him, Spielberg spills his Jungian guts out, here: Devil’s Tower, a beacon metaphor for the collective unconscious – confused but ripe for evolution; a positively Zauberfloten score by John Williams; a cameo by Francois Truffaut, who was studying for a book he was writing on acting; Melinda Dillon, in her nightshirt and short-shorts, as vulnerable and imperiled as any screen heroine; Teri Garr, her tragicomic foil; Dreyfuss, Dreyfuss, Dreyfuss; the dazzling light show and concerto crescendo (No Dark Side of the Moon synchs, please...) All this and more from the Jaws wunderkind. CE3K is a movie about hysteria and vision, and how the two commonly intersect in the creative mind. It’s the anti-Apocalypse Now. It’s Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead without the creepy comb-over.
Roy Neary’s quest for meaning in his mashed potatoes unfolds like a puzzle. The protagonist loses his mind and his family in pursuit of the truth and “cosmic enlightenment.” All the childish toys and train sets and Pinocchio music boxes (hear Roy’s wife call him “Jiminy Cricket” to capture his distracted toddler attention span) are left behind as the boy becomes a man, bathed in the reverent, approving glow of the mothership. Those strange lights in the sky are no danger. They are, instead, a modern manifestation of hope (and vindication) for the seekers and travelers among us. We are not alone, after all.
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Nice! :)
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