THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
mean by "acceptable" motivation unless they mean that white liberals would rather see a biack man become a political activist over .the death of a Jewish dwarf than over the wrongs done his own...
...For one thing it is, like Star Wars, made up of bits and pieces out of all kinds of other movies...
...Even though it's only the first scene, the fi~n builds up a pretty good head of drama and susas Lacombe finds that the plane gauges respond when tapped, ignition switches click on una_rtly, and when the starter buttons are pushed, de~ite having li~eral]y disappeared off the face of the earth for thirty years, the engines immediately spring to life, Just to make sure that none of us miss the point, the space ship has dropped off these antique ptanes in mint condition in the middle of an automobiIe junkyard...
...What puts Roy and Jill in touch with each other is a UFO sighting, but ~vhat they have in common are slightly kooky personalities...
...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...
...Whoever it is that's out there, in space, they are obviously able to move with technology, not against it like us...
...l~ Reeaoc~m~ InStal Fund...
...What Roy and Barry share is an uncanny intuition, for technology...
...j. Fahey...
...the lines on "my belief in the principles of scientific socialism" seem to have gone directly from Here I Stand into the play...
...He's ready for one that's diminutively, affectionately near...
...That's what the third kin( of encounter is, of course: "actual contact" with extra terrestrial beings...
...pared . . . . It is a white quest...
...The night that the UFOs touch down in Indiana, Barry is awake even before 9 the force field that they create has inadvertently set a[I his motorized toys scurrying about the house...
...The difficulty here is that too many of the speeches and scenes--singing at the Russian border, visiting wounded soldiers during the Spanish Civil War--come across as conventional leftist rhetoric and gesture...
...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...
...David J. Bovm~n, SJ...
...Ju~ice md Peace...
...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...
...Bra-less and wearing thread-bare, out-off jeans constantly, even when she goes to bed, Jill lives alone with her son Barry (Cary Guffey) on a remote farm...
...He gets out o] this world altogether...
...and alt things, good and had, go by us like a torrent...
...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...
...Finally he leaves his wife and kids and goes on the road with Jill, "looking for more UFOs...
...It is an aesthetic oreafion, a persona that lacks personality but a tough and flex~e consistency derived f~-~n its creat~'s strict atten4kyn to his semte of the real that resides behind the apparent of everyday actuaIRy...
...They rumble in the walls and quake the furniture as they move about...
...Maybe there's a new day dawnin...
...Predictably, some of them are recent science-fiction films...
...David Stevens, ~ D ~ I~ Cou~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Intl~r~ Fu~, ~ ~ sum ~ d ~ are non.v~ reca~ ~ ~ . wlvm...
...It's a film made ou of, and for, our touchy-feely culture--the culture o group therapy and group grope, of EST, TM, ant (close) encounter therapy...
...The ~rst of two parts) COLIN L. WESTEItBECg, JIL B O O X S ,,,,,,,,,,,,raIm I I Illll...
...in fact, it has no sex...
...An Amerkan marahlq far Recmnctlis...
...American tragedy and that Dean might be the ma to write it, but that Paul Robeson cannot be that pla because, whatever the protesters say, it really tries t celebrate Paul Robeson as an American hero...
...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...
...At another point toy police cars from Scorpio Rising also cruise into Close Encounters, which has made Anger even angrier than usual...
...The furtive H~wtho~e who .forks behind the ironic nart~ors of his novegs and stories, told chiefly /n ~he ~rd person, hes been sounded, and F~nerson's misrept~tation as an aloof Yankee quickly dlsi~esrates when his writings are ptaced in the context of his journals and letters as the late Stephen Whither did in his excellent anthology...
...But Spielberg's film takes that cdterio] more literally, or perhaps more metaphorically, than the Air .Force does...
...It is other-worldly in its focus, listening to deep space...
...She is a fusion of two recent American sub-cultures that usually seem to us pretty different...
...But it must be in its ability to syncretize social myths, rather than merely cinematic ones, that Close Encounters affects such a vast audience...
...Such a crisis oco.lrred in "I~oreau, he knows, because it occurs in all men, and so he places Fx4k H. Exikeon's model Commonweal: 181...
...Maybe, the movie seems to say, everything that's going wrong in America will work out for the best a(ter all...
...If the rejection of the life implicit in the celebration is really in Paul Robeson, then the protesters have some grounds for complaint...
...Besides, the second act presents both his anger over black wrongs and his specific political position...
...My complaint, I suspect, is that such a play about a hero-dupe-martyr might make a re...
...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...
...mean by "acceptable" motivation unless they mean that white liberals would rather see a biack man become a political activist over .the death of a Jewish dwarf than over the wrongs done his own people, but I doubt that that is true...
...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, particnlarly human nature, and technology...
...Hh The Days of Henry David Thoreau is a documented account of the outer man, an invaluable assemblage vf first-hand reports of Thoreau's movements...
...This now family has no sexual hang-ups...
...Well, Con III i., NO, IT IS NOTA RELIGIOUS WAR...
...Thoreau, the man, he believes, grew from the identity crisis of Thoreau the ~dolescent...
...Even Roy's name tells us he's ready...
...As both Freeman and I/ You Can't Sing, They'll Make You Dance, which was recently staged off-off Broadway, indicate, Dean is fascinated by the kind of man ~vhose rhetorical sense of himself is belied by his ineffectuality, and I began to feel that character invade Paul Robeson as the play turned back ,to Othello...
...But as soon as he gets mixed up with UFOs, Roy begins to get freaky too...
...W:rth thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense;' Thoreau Walden, there/ore, is the record o! the Vision quest of a Transcendental savage, and I would like to study it in this way, rather than in reference to the European, Puritan, or Emersonian traditions to which it has often been com...
...By a conscious effort of the m/rid we can stand ~doof /torn actions and theO consequences...
...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 (Franfois Truffaut) who has been called to the Mexican desert because an entire squadron of fighter planes reported missing in 1945 has suddenly reappeared...
...He's Neery (It's such a cutesy name, like hippy, or Yalie, as Charles Reich refers to himself...
...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...
...If Jilt is something of a hippy, for example, she is something of a divorcee---or divorcyJas well...
...10027 OR Pax Christi USA, duilnmd hor CWS Reconciliation Ireland Fund Manhattan College, Ri~rdlle, New York 10471 Co~irectors: Rev...
...Perhaps this outer man and the created "I" are a~l ~ve can or should know of Thoreau, but Richard Lobeaux sees a way in...
...YOU CAN SOM HING TO HELR A broken flmce where thole d~iidnm were killed by 9 hijacked car...
...In The Man Who Fell to Earth, for instance, the 'big crisis for Candy C~ark is also being touched, literally and intimately, by a lover from outer space...
...But the 'T' of Thoreau, omnipresent is also onmimaldng...
...He's not just ready for a nearmi.e., close-encounter...
...She has in fact fallen asleep with the TV on...
...Even if he wants to take Robeson at that level, the play finally denies the possibility by borroscing the Othello image from Edwin P. Hoyt's biography, which was subtitled "An American Othello" and ended by seeing Robeson as one who loved not wisely, but too well...
...The novelty of Close Encounters, however, is that it also ranges far afield of sci-fi in what it draws upon...
...A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers speaks in the first person of a journey he took wRh his brother...
...On the contrary, even litt4e Barry, like Roy, immediately and instinctively pursues the UFOs avery chance he gets...
...mThoreau and the American Indians wrote...
...At one point the extra-terrestrials invade Jill's home like the demons in The Exorcist, invisibly...
...This is not a capacity that Jill shares as well, as we also see that first night when the UFOs touch down...
...Sometimes it penetrates beyond these fictions into truth...
...It is held together, where Roy's old-fashioned family failed, by its belief in UFOs...
...Paced ~ith an o~hor ~who is thus ~vays ar home but ~teps out the door to ~lk veith you rather than letting you in, Walter Harding in his monumental ~'eseaxches suwounded Thoreau...
...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...
...Since his wrRinss come ~from a such a conscious effort of the mind, the "I" he constantly offers us is, in ~b_is sense, not Idmse~ but beside himseff...
...But it bears comparison with Indian ones because the white fictions of Indian liye helped inspire it...
...Their escapade together builds some new castles in the air too, for out of the dissolution of his conventional family, the old nuclear fami4y, comes the new atomic family of him, her and her fatherless son, Barry...
...Plea~ tell us where you mw this Ad) Commonweal: 179 the state which third encounters induce...
...and fourteen of ~e tweney volumes o/ the 1906 ~ of his works axe t~ken up by his ~u~nals...
...INd*r/hlla-tra~inl foe ~m, adult pete ~lu~don, community md P~ wmkm, ielu, bet~ Iwminl, Mttdws in ~ Ire~md for ~e poor...
...He is a lineman for the county-how much straighter can you get than to be out of a Glen Campbell song?mand he lives with his wife and three or four kids in a housing development in the suburbs of Muncie, Indiana...
...Yet Thoreau the man ~ho had paxents, siblings, hopes of marriage, and petty jealousies eludes us fax more effectively ~Tan any of his conCempormies...
...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...
...First he loses his job with the power company, then he starts growing a beard and thinking the Air Force is full of b~rllshit...
...Wo r ii~l t l i ehildnm s bm~ f~tuml Tmz EXW~lX contribitlem r h lint to idli~: Chulch Wm, kl $4ntm (CWi) RImmicililtlen I~dand Fund Room 626, 475 Ri,,~"lide Drive, New York, N.Y...
...9 It chmmlll tlmds 1 ~ the imirl:lml~h Emllllncy Fund foe i rl~lmt, indudlne the Rom,~ P..Mlmli~ Church: 9 Your t~-exempt c:cml~buU~ eNdUes Amer to work in Northern tndmd m ~mtum~rJ ~! r r p~r edua~m, m~l funds Irid~ Ix~ects ~ and n~mlendod by Dr...
...Walden, again in the first person, is concerned with his famous experiment in living...
...Roy is the kind of guy who never gets anywhere in this world, but in this movie he gets some place even better...
...and Dr...
...In both films mere man stands on the sidelines in a-,re because, as a scientist in Close Encounters remarks, "It's the first day of school, fella...
...GERALD WEALE KEEPING IN TOUCH 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 Sr N Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Thin Kind is a touching film, literally...
...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...
...9 lU 7 ~ m ~ ~ Am~r, am from four Pm~t ~~, ~ m ~ ~ ~ ~ I~, as ~1 u R~ C ~ ~ ~ri~ USA...
...Such encounters are only available to peo#e who are ready for Con HI like Jill Guiler (Melinda Dillon) and, especially, Roy Neery (Richard Dreyfuss...
...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...
...IJlll Illllll HIII III II I I ~11 -~ ,,_ TIlE OUTER MAN AND THE,CREATED T ZIFF You~ Ilia# Thorecau RICHARD LEBEAUX U. of Massachusetts, $12.50 T/m, eeat, a~ t~e Amerleam hulla~ ROBERT F. SAYI~ Princeton University, $14.50 Just about every'~log Henry David Thoreau wrote was auto~iograp~cat...
...There is obviously a whole lot of syncretism going on in Close Encounters, which must be the reason for its extraordinary appeal...
...Remember "Con III," that thirc stage of cosmic consciousness described a few years age in The Greening o/ America by Charles Reich, the Timothy Leary of Yale Law School...
...There she does a little gardening on the side, but mostly cultivates her talents as an artist...
...It shows, too, in the fact that neither of them is afraid in the presence of the space ship's enormous technological power...
...Teenqen and 9 d'~cl: The futu~ of Northern ImMnd...
...Even his short piece, "Civil Disobedience," affirms its doctrine on the basis of what "I" did and why "r' did it...
...We are not wholly invoiv~ in Nature...
...It provides us w~th an everyday Thoreau with wC~ich to envelop ~he missing man who produced the great wfi~ngs...
...Roy, on the other hand, seems a pretty straight type...
...An ~ty to do the same, rare for an earthling, must be what they find at'u-active in Roy...
...Like Roy, she is at the same time both a drop-out and a graduate of the silent majority...
...This is apparent right away with Jill, who is clearly part of the love-and-beads set...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 6
