Very high sci-fi

...In a famous essay, "The UFO as a Religious Symbol," C. G. Jung suggested that modern man appropriates machine images to his own magical purposes, and turns the stuff of science to myth and...

...A child befriends him with offerings of M & M's, Coke, and Pez (an evocative anachronism from Spielberg's childhood...

...Spielberg's defects are glaring: escapism, romanticism about children, a counter-cultural depiction of alienation, both literal and figurative...

...no E.T...

...If in doubt, check out the print ad for E.T., borrowed from the Sistine Chapel...

...America in the 1960s, when "Spielberg grew up, was simply the apex of these developments...

...His "materialism" is thus an inversion of the so-called "post-materialism" of those in his generation who dropped out or pursued unlucrative careers...

...With the child at school, E.T...

...in sci-fi, there are only two options, angels or devils...

...In E.T., the sanctity of home is threatened too, but not by the alien, who is cloaked in extensive religious symbolism...

...One notes, moreover, that the operative demon gains leverage because of human evil-developers careless about some old cemeteries when bestowing progress on one of Spielberg's archetypal condo wastelands...

...His UFO has a spire...

...has a "field day" at home, learning the letter "B" from TV's Sesame Street, mastering computers, raiding the refrigerator, and finally guzzling Coors, another communion symbol-by telepathy, when E.T...

...Nevertheless, he has great power to lift the soul and move the heart by combining great effects with small, and in the past such gifts have usually been called art...

...He can make bikes leap into the sky at a single bound...

...in Poltergeist, although that film is not exactly sci-fi but the closely related ghost genre...

...Such imaginings would demythologize the skies, and bring us back to square one, where real belief in the spiritual was required...

...be morally mediocre, however bright at engineering (like the Swiss, for example...

...In effect, the camera thus mimics a child's physical point of view...

...Consider only the opening scenes of E.T.: we are saturated in an atmosphere of Fresca and Coke, game boards and Softball mitts, video games and ringing telephones, pets and unwashed dishes...

...Spielberg's roving camera shots of sunlit but emotionally vacuous California settings underline in panoramic terms what his details imply: amid all these things, something is missing, something (as in Poltergeist), is unaccounted for...

...We never see their whole bodies...

...or mashed potatoes-in a classic scene from Close Encounters-become a key to finding extraterrestrial life...

...Despite this hocus-pocus, however, the haunting is chilling and well prepared: beware the dead pet bird at the film's opening and the initial excavation for the swimming pool...

...despite all the fuss over his creation and engineering, belongs to hallowed moral tradition-from films like 2001, Superman, or the earlier Red Planet Mars and The Day the Earth Stood Still-where something or someone Godlike or Christlike saves, or at least renews, humanity-or reaffirms its best impulses...

...Produced, co-written, but not directed by Spielberg, the film suffers from several divisions of responsibility, and the plot involving the demonic is weak...

...But other worlds aren't other, and salvation is more uncanny than special effects...

...the stage business of his films reads like a combined Sears catalogue and grocery list...

...it also turns the adults into disembodied, dissected, humanoid forms of power without heart or head...

...is thus not just the center of his story, but an expression of Spielberg's own religious longing for a transfiguration of earth...

...In addition, the crucial events of the plot occur on Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls...

...According to Kennedy, however, "Steven became so uncomfortable with the idea of horrific aliens descending to earth and hurting people, which was completely an opposite point of view from what he had done with Close Encounters, that the story had to change...

...can be the kind of I'homme moyen sensuel who lives in one of Spielberg's Villes Nouvelles Condeaux...

...His article on ' 'Chariots of Fire" appeared in the April 23, 1982 of Commonweal...

...Second, despite all the novel gizmos, something old remains at the center of the best films, a strong if heterodox religious sensibility which uses special effects to evoke the marvelous and uncanny...

...First, the price of special effects may have risen from a dime a dozen but a good story is still hard to find...

...When they finally invade the house, the child's mother protests, "This is my home," echoing some of E.T.'s homesickness...

...The real aliens in E.T...

...when E.T...

...when her little girl tries to introduce them, she knocks him down with a refrigerator door, missing him amid all the things in her kitchen...

...According to their plots, whatever comes out of a spaceship must either save us or destroy us...

...the camera views them at waist level, like the biology teacher whose frog dissection class the child disrupts when inspired by a new respect for life...

...Spielberg's limit is that things inhabit the other side of his things...

...His own E.T...

...the whole scene looks curiously like a sacramental ritual...

...drinks, his friend at school belches and grows woozy...

...dies, he" has the power to rise again...

...They first patrol the house after their suspicions are aroused by geiger counter readings...

...Science fiction as a genre developed historically in concurrence with science, the industrial revolution, and modern material civilization...

...Watch Spielberg's pizzas, watch his toys, dolls, and train sets...

...Spielberg's televisions are always on and always full of-what else?- commercials...

...The poltergeists belonging to the corpses aroused by this mistreatment are enlisted by a satanic force, terrorize a family, and are finally, if fitfully, exorcised...

...Instead of revolting against things, however, Spielberg presents a private vision: he sees through them...

...E.T.'s plaintive cry, "Home...

...In effect, Spielberg gives us something like the rejected E.T...

...If extra-terrestrial intelligence exists, however, it might just TOM O'BRIEN teaches literature at Manhattan School of Music...

...Beneath affluence and rational exteriors, the film implies, lie unrepented sins ready to explode and destroy the (slightly funky) sanctity of a Spielberg home...

...As much as Spielberg's change of heart, "completely the opposite" is the key here...

...According to Kathleen Kennedy, who co-produced E.T., its original plot was "about an extraterrestrial siege, an attack," in which we would see "ten or twelve creatures in a rather unsympathetic light-scared, frightened, and, at the same time, very aggressive...

...In E.T., watch his use of Coors beer and Pez candies...

...like the developers in Poltergeist) are the "establishment": scientists, police, teachers...

...Curiously, Spielberg almost made a science-fiction film in the other tradition-alive in films like Blade Runner or The Thing (an awful remake of a 1951 classic)-where humanity must confront demonic and sadistic threats and where Apocalypse hovers in every special effect...

...But only someone so overwhelmed by this proliferation of things could so need religion that he has to invent one-or at least something supernatural-to believe in...

...Their substitute religion is based on an unspiritual premise: something physical is going to save or destroy us, depending on whether the E.T.'s involved are angelic or satanic...

...In the film's best scene, she misses him in a closet because he looks exactly like the dolls stored there...

...But even she can't see him...

...On another level, however, these physical, almost palpable recreations of the material world are not the antithesis of Spielberg's interest in the uncanny...

...No filmmaker does this better than Steven Spielberg, a suburban animist with a tinge of Manicheanism...

...When he leaves, his message to the child parallels some words of Christ at the Ascension...

...religion...

...As a mythmaker, however, he shares the defect of other creators of science fiction, not excess but defect of imagination...

...they hover around like a stalking pervert from "Quincy" or, with a radio car to listen in, like the Gestapo in resistance films...

...rather, their intensity explains it...

...In Spielberg's universe, only as a child can you enter the kingdom...

...In his films, kitchen chairs suddenly become possessed (Poltergeist), a woodshed becomes alive (E.T...

...On one level, this mass of details explains part of the appeal of his films-the lovingly nostalgic recreation of American life, particularly suburban life, that engages viewer sympathy, tickles humor, and establishes credibility for the weird events about to happen...

...It never occurs to any sci-fi director or writer, "except Swift-who was, naturally, thought mad-that alternate physical worlds, whatever the differences of their creatures in size and shape, must in the nature of things be as gray as ours, as haunted by defect and excellence...

...Spielberg's animism is complicated by the religious extremism which he shares, to some degree, with other directors of science fiction...

...To the spiritually enlightened-the kids in the recent films, or Richard Dreyfuss in the older one-ordinary things open up to reveal unearthly wonders...