THE STAGE

...Roy, on the other hand, seems a pretty straight type...

...Just to make sure that none of us miss the point, the space ship has dropped off these antique planes in mint condition in the middle of an automobile junkyard...

...He's Neery (It's such a cutesy name, like hippy, or Yalie, as Charles Reich refers to himself...

...It is held together, where Roy's old-fashioned family failed, by its belief in UFOs...

...On the contrary, even little Barry, like Roy, immediately and instinctively pursues the UFOs every chance he gets...

...Well, Con III is the state which third encounters induce...

...It shows in Barry's coming awake even before the presence of the UFOs has set off all his toys, and in Roy's performance at the generating plant to which he's called because of the blackouts the UFOs cause...

...He gets out of this world altogether...

...If Jill is something of a hippy, for example, she is something of a divorcee—or divorcy—as well...

...He's not just ready for a near—i.e., close— encounter...

...He's ready for one that's diminutively, affectionately near...

...It behaves just like a mite of pixie dust falling from the fairy godmother's wand in Cinderella or scattered to the winds in Peter Pan...

...Like Roy, she is at the same time both a drop-out and a graduate of the silent majority...

...Finally he leaves his wife and kids and goes on the road with Jill, -looking for more UFOs...

...For all their similarity, though, Roy and Jill are not finally so compatible as they seem, nor does their relationship break the new ground it at first appears to...

...For one thing it is, like Star Wars, made up of bits and pieces out of all kinds of other movies...

...In the very first scene of the film, before we have met either Jill or Barry or Roy, we meet a French scientist named Lacombe (Francois Truffaut) who has been called to the Mexican desert because an entire squadron of fighter planes reported missing in 1945 has suddenly reappeared...

...Maybs there's a new day dawnin...

...17 March 1978: 180 While Barry is already up and exploring the electromagnetic field which has invaded the house unseen, Jill is still asleep, dead to this presence to which Barry is so acutely tuned...

...Maybe, the movie seems to say, everything that's going wrong in America will work out for the best after all...

...This is apparent right away with Jill, who is clearly part of the love-and-beads set...

...Here she is living as if she were in a commune, yet doing so chastely and in essential America, in Muncie, Indiana, rather than out on the fringe in southern California or Canada...

...At one point the extra-terrestrials invade Jill's home like the demons in The Exorcist, invisibly...

...in fact, it has no sex...

...This is not a capacity that Jill shares as well, as we also see that first night when the UFOs touch down...

...And at the beginning of the next scene, we find Roy living in essentially the same boy's world as he tinkers with the electric trains which are his hobby...

...Roy is the kind of guy who never gets anywhere in this world, but in this movie he gets some place even better...

...It shows, too, in the fact that neither of them is afraid in the presence of the space ship's enormous technological power...

...There is obviously a whole lot of syncretism going on in Close Encounters, which must be the reason for its extraordinary appeal...

...The sources reconciled in Spielberg's film run a gamut not just from 2001 to Star Wars, but from sci-fi to The Exorcist and from avant-garde classics like Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising to Walt Disney kitsch...

...Whoever it is that's out there, in space, they are obviously able to move with technology, not against it like us...

...What Roy and Barry share is an uncanny intuition, for technology...

...In both films mere man stands on the sidelines in awe because, as a scientist in Close Encounters remarks, "It's the first day of school, fella...

...Even though it's only the first scene, the film builds up a pretty good head of drama and suspense as Lacombe finds that the plane gauges respond when tapped, ignition switches click on smartly, and when the starter buttons are pushed, despite having literally disappeared off the face of the earth for thirty years, the engines immediately spring to life...

...But as soon as he gets mixed up with UFOs, Roy begins to get freaky too...

...That's what the third kind of encounter is, of course: "actual contact" with extraterrestrial beings...

...Bra-less and wearing thread-bare, cut-off jeans constantly, even when she goes to bed, Jill lives alone with her son Barry (Cary Guffey) on a remote farm...

...Remember "Con III," that third stage of cosmic consciousness described a few years ago in The Greening of America by Charles Reich, the Timothy Leary of Yale Law School...

...She is a fusion of two recent American sub-cultures that usually seem to us pretty different...

...There she does a little gardening on the side, but mostly cultivates her talents as an artist...

...At another point toy police cars from Scorpio Rising also cruise into Close Encounters, which has made Anger even angrier than usual...

...When we meet Roy near the film's opening, in fact, we are given the impression that it isn't Jill, but Barry who is Roy's true soul mate...

...The novelty of Close Encounters, however, is that it also ranges far afield of sci-fi in what it draws upon...

...An ability to do the same, rare for an earthling, must be what they find attractive in Roy...

...The night that the UFOs touch down in Indiana, Barry is awake even before the force field that they create has inadvertently set all his motorized toys scurrying about the house...

...It's a film made out of, and for, our touchjHfeely culture—the culture of group therapy and group grope, of EST, TM, and (close) encounter therapy...

...The first of two parts) COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...First he loses his job with the power company, then he starts growing a beard and thinking the Air Force is full of bullshit...

...Beyond the syncretism represented in the film by Jill and her relationship with Roy lies this even more optimistic promise of a reconciliation between nature, particularly human nature, and technology...

...He is a lineman for the county— how much straighter can you get than to be out of a Glen Campbell song?—and he lives with his wife and three or four kids in a housing development in the suburbs of Muncie, Indiana...

...In The Man Who Fell to Earth, for instance, the big crisis for Candy dark is also being touched, literally and intimately, by a lover from outer space...

...Close Encounters rips off a whole cycle of sci-fi myth from Star Wars all the way back to 2001 (not very far back, admittedly, but the tremendous pull of the future always tends to shrink the sense of the past in sci-fi...

...Even Roy's name tells us he's ready...

...And little touches of Disney magic are sprinkled all around, from the song "When You Wish Upon a Star" to a space vehicle that is nothing more than an impish blip of light...

...It is other-worldly in its focus, listening to deep space...

...But it must be in its ability to syncretize social myths, rather than merely cinematic ones, that Close Encounters affects such a vast audience...

...and in The Forbin Project when two computers have to learn each other's language, the effect is much the same as when a computer plays a duet with a visiting spaceship in Close Encounters...

...Such encounters are only available to people who are ready for Con III like Jill Guiler (Melinda Dillon) and, especially, Roy Neery (Richard Dreyfuss...

...Their escapade together builds some new castles in the air too, for out of the dissolution of his conventional family, the old nuclear family, comes the new atomic family of him, her and her fatherless son, Barry...

...But Spielberg's film takes that criterion more literally, or perhaps more metaphorically, than the Air Force does...

...What puts Roy and Jill in touch with each other is a UFO sighting, but what they have in common are slightly kooky personalities...

...They rumble in the walls and quake the furniture as they move about...

...She has in fact fallen asleep with the TV on...

...This new family has no sexual hang-ups...

...Predictably, some of them are recent science-fiction films...