On My Shelves: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Close Encounters of the First Kind:

A UFO is seen at close range.

Close Encounters of the Second Kind:

Physical evidence of visitation

Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

Unknown entities from the UFO are sighted

 

I have often said that in my view, Stephen Spielberg produced two masterpieces. One of them, reviewed earlier, is Jaws.

The other is Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

CE3K, as it is known, is a classic SF story: it takes one strange, out-there premise and then builds a story on it. For CE3K, the premise is: what if the tales of UFO encounters described in the literature of the time (up through the late 70s) were, at least in considerable part, true?

Spielberg did not do this "what-if" casually; among other consultants, he brought in J.Allen Hynek, perhaps the first somewhat respected "UFOlogist" to provide him with information on the common phenomena associated with UFO encounters, and particularly on the titular Close Encounters, and the then relatively new "abductee" phenomena.

Using this modern mythology, Spielberg constructs a dreamlike vision of bizarre events – decades-old aircraft found in a desert, a ship high and dry in the mountains, a crowd of people repeating a strange, haunting sequence of notes – and then takes us to the lives of two ordinary people who are about to encounter an extraordinary phenomenon: Roy Neary, an electrical worker with a nice family, a regular job, and only wistful regrets for things he hasn't seen or done, and Jillian Guiler, a single mother with a young son named Barry.

Jillian's encounter with the bizarre actually begins with her son, Barry, who is awakened by his electronic toys coming on by themselves. For an adult, this is a supremely eerie sequence, but for Barry it appears to be simply strange and magical; the little boy then wanders downstairs, seeming to see something or someone outside, and is about to leave the house when Jillian stops him, afraid of the lights that are outside of the house and without any known source.

Roy Neary is simply following reports of power outages when he suddenly finds himself spotlighted from above by some unknown object that also generates enough powerful magnetic fields to cause large roadsigns to wobble like tissue paper in the wind, and kills his truck's engine temporarily. As it finally moves off and the truck restarts, a terrified but curious Neary gives chase, a pursuit that ends up including three police cars as well. For a short while the objects stay just a little ahead, following the course of the road at high speed, but finally they simply shoot off the road and vanish into the sky.

Following the encounter, Roy becomes increasingly obsessed with UFOs and erratic in his behavior, with vague but repetitive visions of some tall, looming shape.

During the same time, Jillian begins to have the same visions, and the lights return with a vengeance, culminating in Barry being taken into the light.

Meanwhile, we also see scenes of a UN team led by Claude LaCombe (played by Francois Truffat) investigating the increasing surge of UFO activity around the world, including a repeating five-note motif associated with the apparitions and, eventually, a sequence of numbers that are interpreted to mean a specific location near Devil's Tower, Wyoming. The government proceeds to evacuate the area with a story of a spill of toxic gas.

Roy's obsession reached the breaking point for his family in the painfully poignant dinner scene, when he begins obsessively sculpting the mashed potatoes into a likeness of the mass he has been seeing in his head. His wife, now terrified of this apparently unbreakable obsession, leaves him. Freed of this last restraint on his behavior, Roy throws himself wholly into trying to re-create the image, building a tower of clay that nearly fills his living room, sculpting it with minute detail, and finally screaming "What does it mean!?"

Nearly broken with despair, he is sitting numbly in front of the TV when the news of the "gas leak" breaks, and one of the cameras tracks across Devil's Tower… an image-perfect mirror of the massive sculpture he has just completed. Some distance away, Jillian sees the same thing, reflected in the pictures she has found herself uncontrollably drawing.

The two know that they have no choice; both set off for Wyoming, to find out what awaits them at the enigmatic Devil's Tower…

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is an almost Van Vogtian story. It does not "hold together" in a rational fashion if examined at all closely, yet it has a great and almost hallucinatory power of imagery that makes thoughts of rationality almost inconsequential. The climactic scene, in which the alien vessels finally make contact and the impossibly huge mothership makes its staggering appearance are some of the most powerfully perfect distillations of "sense of wonder" ever filmed. The quest of the two tormented people to find their answers is conveyed through desperate emotion and conflict not just with other people but with themselves; it is clear that even when they realize that there really is meaning behind the obsessions they have been subjected to, they do not know if that meaning is one they want to find.

The imagery and concepts shown in CE3K are almost all drawn directly from UFO lore – the shaking signs and dying engines, the brilliant light that leaves an unexplained sunburn, strange nightmares or dreams, the impossible movements of the ships, and the alien visages, all of these and more are to be found in the reports of UFO witnesses around the world. Spielberg, as they say, "did do the research" and we see much of it on the screen.

The John Williams score for the movie has a great deal to do with its impact, a powerful, haunting, sometimes uplifting score that carries the same beauty and ethereal power as the shimmering crystal lights of the alien craft. Roy Neary's journey from terror and obsession to wonder is the core of the story, and the music reflects all of these moods.

To those who view the movie in a more critical light, it is not without flaws; the largest of these is probably the character of Neary himself. While the imagery and plotline drive us to sympathize with him, and to be uplifted by the ending of his journey, in cold fact he is leaving behind a family he has alienated and presumably disappears without a trace.

Similarly, while the ending paints them as wondrous and even benign creatures, the aliens' actions are as mysterious and often capricious and terrifying as those of the Old Testament God – channeling madness-inducing obsessions into Neary and Jillian's minds, kidnapping a child in full view of his mother, abducting countless people to return them decades later to a world they will hardly be able to understand; none of these actions make sense if we are to simultaneously accept the aliens as good creatures finally choosing to contact us.

Nonetheless, taken on the level it was intended and designed to be viewed, CE3K remains a masterpiece of cinema, a powerful visual symphony to the sense of wonder. It has had considerable influence on the imagery and presentation of UFO phenomena in media, ranging from other movies to books; Dean Koontz' Strangers strongly echoes many of the initial frightening themes and events in Close Encounters. The combination of terror and wonder is also one that has influenced my writing, although I have not attempted to directly copy any of the events or images therein. Yet, anyway!

If you have never seen this movie, I can highly recommend it!