THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
THE SCREEN THE AGE OF AqUAnl~S The scariest scene in Close Encounters o] the Third Kind is the one where little Barry is kidnapped by the extra-terrestrials. This is the scene where, as I...
...For one thing it reveals how far we have come from the past...
...Vietnam has made the Chinook helicopter into an archetype that a filmmaker can call upon any time he wants to arouse instant dread...
...It has been about twenty years since science fiction has had the sort of boom it currently enjoys...
...That's what Roy's "actual contact" with the extra-terrestrials becomes now...
...Even while the scene is going on, however, the mood of ominousness is being undercut in certain ways...
...What brings Jill there is the opposite: retrieval--her desperate, ceaseless hope that, Commonweal: 213 if she goes there, somehow she'll get Barry back...
...Mear~while, Roy is having such a bard time getting the shape in focus that he's become obsessed with it...
...Family life now means no more .to him than a soap opera, as Spie~berg has implied by having one come on TV after Roy's wife and kids leave home...
...They unscrew the screws with invisible hands first...
...She is, it turns out, heavily into motherhood...
...31 March 1978:214...
...As I was saying in my previous column, the premise of Spielberg's film is that close encounters of the third kind will be a kind of encounter therapy...
...The horrific images in this filn are the ones of our own civilization...
...The one difference is that Roy's wife does manage to keep their kids out of ~s clutches...
...The visitations by the UFOs are always exhilarating But when a group of people who think they're aboul to encounter a UFO realize that the craft descending or...
...Maybe he was never meam for this world in the first place...
...In the interim, the e~tra-terrestrials have by-passed all the scientists and astronauts present and selected Roy to ~ompany them back into space...
...We accept this view of ourselves...
...Perhaps the most gruesome gesture Spielberg makes in this direction comes when the Army evacuates the people around Devil's Monument, claiming as a cover story that some toxi~ gas has escaped there...
...For one thing, che invaders have a ludicrous respect for other people's property...
...Sometimes they were of a subversive nature as in Invasion of the Body Snatchers...
...Spielberg proves it by making a film which depicts us this way and is enormously popular anyhow...
...When the two of them at last crouch in the rocks overlooking the space port that has been built at Devil's Monument, Roy urges her to come down where the space ship itself is landing...
...The morning that he gets a phone call saying he's lost his job with the power company, his wife starts demanding he tell her wbat he plans to do about it...
...In the final analysis, the atmosphere in the scene is such that it might almost have had that old pop tune "Close the Doors, They're Comin' in the Windows" for its theme music, There is a more clearly comical reprise of this scene, too, when Roy Neery (Richard Dreyfuss) decides to build a model of that shape he keeps seeing everywhere...
...The space creatures invade the house unseen, l~ike poltergeists, and rip Barry right out of the arms of his mother Jill...
...Sometimes the invasions were overt aggression...
...We've made such a mess of our own world now that it's impossible to believe one invading us from outer space could :be any worse...
...The shape has been implanted in the minds of the people who saw the UFOs, and it is in effect a set of farther instructions for them...
...Now it's Roy who's "comin' in the windows," and his wife has about the same reaction that Jill did when something from another world invaded her kitchen...
...Once they reaiize it is the shape of a Wyoming landmark called the Devil's Monument, they wilt all rendezvous there for a close encounter of the big kind...
...This is the scene where, as I was saying in my previous column on Close Encounters, we feel as if we are watching The Exorcist...
...Finally, after he's built the Devil's Monument in the living room, there's a brief scene where Roy looks out the window at normal people mowing their lawns, cooking out on their barbecues, etc., and he turns away again at once with anguish and disbelief on his face...
...This is the kind of imagery in which we have come to see ourselves...
...The message is clear...
...them is a U.S...
...It's no wonder, then, that sci-fi has done a turn-around in the last two decades...
...This is where Roy ultimately differs from Jill...
...In Close Encounters, on the other hand all the ideology that inspired the sci-fi of the fifties in the mouths of military personnel who are depietec as fools and knaves...
...She abandons the house to Roy, taking the kids with her in the family station wagon...
...She plays the wifely role that his real wife couldn't fulfill...
...Although these two are meant for each other--the perfect space-age couple--it seems there is still a difference between the sexes...
...It's an image of the Nazi deportation...
...Whether Close Encounters takes us into the future or not, it certainly takes us deeper into the present in revealing ways...
...In effect he is already leaving the cares of the world behind...
...What brings Roy to the Devil's Monument is departure...
...One morning his family finds him throwing dirt and bricks in through the kitchen window --materials for the model of the shape which he suddeniy feels compelled to build in the living room...
...At a railhead where Roy searches for Jill during the evacuation, the Army is loading huge masses of terrified people into boxcars...
...It's a surprisingly old-fashioned difference, in fact, when you consider how ready this movie has been to bust up the nuclear family and jettison other traditional values...
...When they come Up through a heating duct, they don't just rip the grate out of the floor-boards...
...Army helicopter, the occasion turns intc panic and rout instead...
...But the inten was the same...
...It's his readiness to leave for outer space...
...Even when he is kissing his wife on a starry night, he continues to scan the heavens as he does so...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...But she herself doesn't come down until it's clear that Barry is going to be let off the ship, and then she hurries back up into the rocks with him as soon as he is...
...The point of this scene, as of many others, is that Roy is not long for this world...
...The greeting they instinctively extend as he enters their spaceship is to start touching and feeling him...
...That was back around the time of Sputnik, and the predominant sci-fi myth was the myth of U~ vs...
...All the films dealt with the efforts of clean-cut Americans like Roy to fend off invasions from outer space...
...THEM...
...But he sees that shape again in the folds of a pillow, and her crying, insistent voice just fades away on the sound track...
...Unlike Roy's wife, she is understanding of his need to go down...
...For another thing, Barry isn't all that unwilling to go with them...
...Maybe he is one of them, as a scientist later suggests Einstein was...
...She hasn't severed all the umbil.ical cords the way Roy has...
...It's hard to tell whether they drag .him from the house, or he scampers out to join them...
...On the contrary, it would almost have to be better...
...The minute he sees his first UFO, Roy begins to prepare for his departure...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 7
