Mar 5, 2017
Films A — Z March 6, 2017: E
A yearlong series of essays about my favorite films from A — Z
This is dedicated to Elizabeth Hatmaker, because I owe her.
CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK
E.T. the Extra Terrestrial
1982, Color, Universal
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Melissa Mathison
Starring Dee Wallace, Peter Coyote, Henry Thomas and Drew Barrymore
“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Matthew 18:3
I grew up during the last days when parents allowed their kids to go off into the world unattended. We were inspired by Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, the Chronicles of Narnia, and Saturday morning cartoons; fueled by a diet of cereal, Pop Tarts, Twinkies, Pepsi, Carl Buddig and Wonder Bread. We would venture forth early in the day, sometimes on solitary wanderings (like Elliot trekking E.T. with a bag of Reese’s Pieces), sometimes in tight exploratory groups. Parents were always certain their chicks would return to them at sunset.
In the sliver of unincorporated Cook County where I grew up, we’d ride our bikes through undeveloped tracts of land to find the last pond unspoiled by industrial run-off, or walk a beaten path along Route 45 to study Pete Rose’s rookie card at the memorabilia shop in the mall, encased in glass like an Egyptian find. Sloughs, cattails and cornfields lurked behind every school, subdivision and dealership, and we made the rounds through all of them until the day a missing child was found in one.
And after that it seemed like a rogue wave containing all the sordid things of the world had crashed on our shores, and those who weren’t carried away ran for higher ground. On TV the cold-blooded media showcased stories too awful to make up: a seven year-old snatched from a Florida shopping mall in broad daylight, found weeks later in a culvert without a head; a disturbed woman walked into a school in Winnetka, Illinois and shot several children; in DuPage County a little girl was taken from her sick bed (presumably by a goblin), raped and murdered, and for decades an innocent man rotted on Death Row for it.
Maybe all this attention was just an illusion conjured to raise ratings during the first rash of media proliferation; maybe it was just the rite of passage every generation experiences during adolescence. Whether real or just a vision seen only through a prism of hysteria, it seemed clear that suddenly the world was no longer safe — someone, or something, was out to get us.
Looking at the films I selected this week, I see in so many of them the same dark cloud, drifting on the horizon with bad intent.
In The Emerald Forest (1985, John Boorman) the white son of an engineer is kidnapped by natives in the Amazon, grows up with them and then, on the cusp of manhood, goes on a kind of vision quest, during which he encounters his father.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974, Werner Herzog) tells the true story of a young man discovered living in a cellar, which is as much of the world as he knows; when he’s rescued the world he emerges into has no idea what to do with him.
In Empire of the Sun (1987, Steven Spielberg) young Jamie Graham loses his British parents and spends the duration of World War II fending for himself in a Japanese internment camp. His only friend is John freakin’ Malkovich.
The horror films I selected also feasted on the young:
Eyes Without a Face (1959, Georges Franju) weaves a macabre tale of a mad doctor obsessed with finding a new face for his disfigured daughter. He kidnaps several young women and harvests their faces in a cruel enterprise meant to assuage his own guilt.
The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin), a disturbingly violent horror film, takes a level gaze at the idea of demonic possession, playing it with such verisimilitude that you can’t help but believe this is what a possession, and subsequent exorcism, would be like. As with Alien, the filmmakers concluded that the element of fantasy so crucial to earlier horror stories was unnecessary for their ends, because playing up the plausibility of their supernatural tales gave them the emotional torque necessary to seize an audience traumatized by assassinations, riots, and warfare.
In their own lives, that audience dealt regularly with kidnapped children, serial killers, and school shootings. Three of the best examples I can think of look carefully at the causes and effects of those disturbances:
Tommy Lee Jones showed off his trademark intensity as the doomed Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song (1982, Lawrence Schiller), a homicidal parolee who dooms everyone who crosses his path.
In Elephant (2003, Gus Van Sant), a roving Steadicam whistles through classrooms and hallways like a specter, tracing a serpentine path through the minds of two students as they plan and execute a mass shooting at their high school.
Exotica (1995, Atom Egoyan) observes a middle-aged man grieving the murder of his daughter by a stalking the young woman who helped find her body, who he finds working as an exotic dancer in the thrall of other men who seek to exploit and control her.
Each film shows characters distorting reality to suit their own selfish ends, often in ways so relatable and familiar that our sympathy for them curdles into a condemnation of ourselves.
Two films told frightening stories of the havoc caused by fin de siècle boredom:
Before there were First World Problems, there were Superfluous Men: a type of educated, intelligent 19th century person who, disgusted with the military class after the Napoleonic Wars and lacking any forward direction, dropped out of the orderly structure of European society in search of a new identity. Unfortunately for most of them, that search led only to ennui. The Earrings of Madame de… (1953, Max Ophuls) examines a love triangle between a French general, his spoiled wife, and an Italian diplomat at the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of the story Madame sells off a set of prized diamond earrings to pay off her debts. The general gets wind of this and sets in motion a series of exchanges that culminates in a fatal duel. Madame and the general are married in name only; free to pursue other lovers, Madame meets the idealistic Baron Donati, who wins her heart as Ophuls’ camera swirls around them on the ballroom floor. Ophuls’ use of the stately tracking shot seduces the viewer and mimics the confusion Madame feels for this man, who she insists she does not love but cannot bring herself to leave. The diamond earrings keep returning to her in ways that run the gamut from romance to farce; they serve to remind her — as well her companionate general and her beloved diplomat — that while they strive to remain free of emotional commitment, they aren’t sophisticated enough to overcome their own desires and insecurities.
During the cold winter of 1999, Stanley Kubrick passed away suddenly, but not before scheduling his Eyes Wide Shut for release later that year. The source material (Arthur Schnitzler’s novella “Dream Story”) was nearly a century old, but Kubrick adapted it to perfectly capture the snug and oblivious moment of the 1990s, when money was easy, sex was fraught with danger, and the middle class smugly assumed (as they did in the 1920s, another era of easy money and nervous sex) that nothing could impede the march of liberal progress. In Eyes Wide Shut the situation in Earrings is neatly inverted: the husband and wife, both professionals, are certain nothing could burst their monogamous bubble, and their worship of the sanctity of marriage makes it impossible for them to see each other as active sexual beings. Inevitably, a single conversation about the wife’s temptation to cheat sends the husband out into the wintry streets of Greenwich Village, and thence to a country mansion, where he infiltrates an elaborate orgy staged by a secret society of ultra-rich perverts. The scene is an overdose of everything a red-blooded man is supposed to want: money, power, women, and Dr. Bill finds out the hard way he doesn’t measure up. He returns home to the wife on his hands and knees. At the end of the 20th century, the Marriage of Romance that replaced the Marriage of Convenience had become just another convenience for living your life half-asleep.
I saw plenty of movies as a child I was not emotionally prepared for: Alien, which I’ve already mentioned; The Shining, seen on cable when I was the same age as Danny, a very bad idea for which no one ever took responsibility. But many of them are favorites in this series, because Stockholm Syndrome takes many forms, including having a secret fondness for the visceral cinematic images that scar you for life.
The first film I remember seeing in a theater was The Empire Strikes Back, which had an encore run the year E.T. came out. And what I recall most clearly was the climactic light saber duel between Luke and Darth Vader. I remember how black Vader seemed, how he loomed over everything, how his mask reminded me of a skeleton dipped in pitch, how I feared looking directly at him, that he might turn me to stone. Suddenly Vader attacks Luke and pushes him to the edge of a pier overlooking a bottomless ventilation shaft. Luke does his best to match him, and even wings Vader, but Vader responds immediately by cutting off Luke’s hand. In a climax full of upsetting developments (Leia loves Han, Han gets frozen, Threepio gets dismantled), this was the most stomach churning. And then, as Deadspin writer Albert Burneko wrote in 2015:
and then, only then, [Vadar] figures the time is right to go, Oh and also, I fucked your mom… That was his son he did that to! Just now! Luke’s reaction, horror and revulsion and shame so great he literally chucks himself into a bottomless pit over it, feels downright understated. Darth Vader, at that moment, is as stark and evil a villain as any movie has ever had.
These films stick with me because they know how to play on that anxiety, the competing drives for danger and safety, and no filmmaker I can think of is so successful at exploiting that tension than Spielberg. He knows a storyteller should not be afraid to drag his most loved character down deep into misery, and in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial both Elliot and his friend touch the deepest bottom of life before the mother ship comes back.
Though it’s clever enough for an adult to appreciate, E.T. is foremost a beautiful movie about childhood: the awareness of so many things that adults can no longer see or appreciate, like how lovely it is simply to be alive in this world, no matter your troubles; the uncanny knack of attracting small creatures while also posing a great threat to them; the shock of knowing that when something is gone it almost never comes back.
I was old enough to have seen E.T. during its first release, at the just-opened Plitt Odeon Theater in Orland Park, IL, so new the vast parking lot surrounding it was still unpaved. I was spooked from the start: the distant atmospherics of atonal music haunts the opening titles, rendered in purple and black and listing only the most essential credits. I remember sitting in theater, feeling terror, awe, wonder and later deep sadness, but I don’t recall feeling joy. I was too young, like Gertie, and when I first saw the alien I yelped and shut my eyes.
I did better the second time. I noticed that most films could make me feel just one or two things: Star Wars made me feel excitement, The Shining made me feel terror, The Blues Brothers made me laugh with those car crashes and guys who never took off their sunglasses, and The Blue Lagoon made me feel, um, grown up, but E.T. made me feel all the emotions I was capable of feeling. It seemed to contain the entire world, all its joy and disappointment, anger and love, fear and happiness.
Several years later I saw the film again on VHS, when I was, coincidentally, the same age as Elliot. A single flute plays the famous theme over the first shot of the stars, which tilts down to the darkened tree line of the forest. In the second shot of the film we see the mother ship, and in the deep left background an old-fashioned matte painting of the suburbs indicates where Elliot lives; all the adults — except Mom — are filmed from behind or below the waist, replicating Elliot’s and E.T.’s vantage point and keeping the audience in concert with them; a man who keeps his jangling keys on his belt loop is revealed in the end to be a scientist named Keys. In example after example, Spielberg strips his story down its essentials, using every cinematic technique at his disposal, employing dialogue only when he has to, leaving out any technical information about the alien and his visit that doesn’t contribute to the overwhelming emotional experience he has planned for us.
And his performers never strain for effect. Watch the scene when Elliot introduces E.T. to his world. Elliot shows him the food he likes, the toys he plays with, the fish in the bowl (a clever nod to Jaws), the money that goes in the peanut bank (“You see?” Elliot asks E.T. over and over). Spielberg lets much of the scene play out in a backlit medium shot with Elliot hanging off the right edge of the frame; our attention is drawn to the alien experiencing his new environment, but the music and the feel of the scene reflect Elliot’s excitement to share everything with his new friend, and the effect is both intimate and achingly sweet.
Much of the film’s narrative rhythm is dictated by Carol Littleton’s editing and John Williams’ iconic score. Elliot becomes linked to E.T., experiencing what the alien experiences. When E.T. raids the fridge and drinks all the beer, Elliot becomes intoxicated. At school he turns the frog dissection class into a riot, and when E.T. turns on the TV and watches John Ford’s The Quiet Man, Elliot is inspired to do this:
But all this sweetness and light do not last. Elliot fetches some food from the kitchen, and we get the first hint that Elliot and E.T. are linked when Elliot spills milk on the floor. We linger on this image of spilled milk — it’s repeated later when Mom discovers the alien and spills her coffee in shock. Whether it stands for all the pain Elliot has endured during his parents’ divorce, or all the heartache he’ll have to endure before E.T. can get home, this film makes us feel the pain of loss before delivering us to its joyful ending. E.T. is a symphony of elemental filmmaking, an ode to childhood, and a tribute to all the cherished memories we keep deep down inside.
THE E FILMS
The Earrings of Madame de… (1953 Max Ophuls),
Easy Rider (1969 Dennis Hopper), L’Eclisse (1962 Michelangelo Antonioni),
Ed Wood (1994 Tim Burton), Eddie Murphy: Raw (1987 Robert Townsend),
Edvard Munch (1974 Peter Watkins), Eight Men Out (1988 John Sayles),
Elena and her Men (1956 Jean Renoir), Elephant (2003 Gus Van Sant),
The Elephant Man (1980 David Lynch),
The Emerald Forest (1985 John Boorman)
Empire of the Sun (1987 Steven Spielberg),
The Empire Strikes Back (1980 Irv Kirschner),
The End of the Affair (1999 Neil Jordan),
End of the Road (1970 Aram Avakian), End of Watch (2012 David Ayer),
Enemies: A Love Story (1989 Paul Mazursky),
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974 Werner Herzog),
Eraserhead (1977 David Lynch),
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982 Steven Spielberg),
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004 Michel Gondry),
Excalibur (1981 John Boorman),
The Executioner’s Song (1982 Lawrence Schiller),
The Exorcist (1973 William Friedkin), Exotica (1995 Atom Egoyan),
The Exterminating Angel (1962 Luis Buñuel),
Eyes Wide Shut (1999 Stanley Kubrick),
Eyes Without a Face (1959 Georges Franju)
