'Close Encounters' 30 years after

As I'm sure most of you know, in the history of late 20th century American cinema as promulgated by David Thomson and Peter Biskind, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are the Guys Who Ruined Everything. And you know what, maybe they did (I don't think they really did, but I address the issue at some length in the introduction to A Galaxy Not So Far Away: Writers and Artists on 25 Years of 'Star Wars', an essay collection I edited a few years back and which you can get cheap if you're so inclined), but around the time Spielberg's sci-fi followup to Jaws was heading into theaters—that is, mid-November of 1977, just after the unexpected summer of Star Wars—that's not how movie buffs of a certain age (that is, fifteen to twenty years younger than Thomson and Biskind) thought the situation was shaping up.

Us cinema-crazed kids, e.g., myself and my buddies, myself having just turned 18, were utterly agog at the varied achievements of the so-called "movie brats"—Coppola and Bogdanovich early on, followed by Scorsese, DePalma, Lucas and, yeah, Spielberg—the fellows who inspired the plangent line uttered by William Holden's aged filmmaker Dutch Detweiler in Wilder's 1978 Fedora: "The kids with the beards are taking over." Yes, our preference was for the more idiosyncratic and perverse visions of Taxi Driver and Carrie. But we weren't so naive as to believe the blockbuster picture was just gonna shrivel up and die, Dennis Hopper's "we will bury you" railings at old Hollywood notwithstanding. "Big" movies were a part of, well, movies, and if they were gonna get made we might as well have these guys making them. Jaws, after all, was a mightily effective thriller that hewed to the classical verities where it counted. Star Wars—and you must remember, this was well before all the episode retitling/renumbering nonsense—seemed a clever and engaging bit of genre play. So Close Encounters? Why not? Hell, Spielberg cast Francois Truffaut to play a UFO expert! What studio hack woulda been hip enough to do such a thing?

The reality of the film itself, though...well, it didn't quite drive me off the bus so much as make me seriously consider pulling the cord for the next stop. Like Paul Schrader (who was going to script the picture but opted out on account of this very thing), I couldn't get with Spielberg's conception of the Nerd Everyman Chosen One, particularly as he—Roy Neary, that is, played by Richard Dreyfus—is presented in the original theatrical version. Despite the excellence of much of the filmmaking, the whole emphasis on "childlike" wonder really turned me off. Not just the concept itself, which as an 18-year-old male I was quite eager to distance myself from, but the sleeve-pulling insistence on the concept, which reached its risible apogee with the friendly face of one of the aliens, memorably described—I believe by the late Tom Allen, in the pages of The Village Voice—as looking like "the Pillsbury Doughboy after a motorcycle accident."

Sony's multi-disc 30th Anniversary DVD edition of the picture, which features the '77 theatrical version, the controversial 1980 "Special Edition" and the '98 "Director's Cut," all together for the first time, prompted me to check into the film further than I have in some time. One question I had was whether or not my initial reaction to the film was just on account of my being a brat. Answer: not really, and not really a hard question, as it turns out. What did pique my interest was Spielberg's reconception of Neary, which was instated in the Special Edition and remains in the Director's Cut. It really does change the whole timbre of the film, and does so in a fairly ruthless way. The new edition—particularly the quite delightful Blu-Ray version, via which you can call up visual prompts that articulate the differences between the three versions—makes comparisons easier than they've ever been, for what they're worth. In the original version, a shot of a ceramic music-box trinket featuring Jiminy Cricket and Pinocchio is the first shot set in the Neary household, whereupon we see an electric train on a track, followed by the sight of a rising bridge on the track, followed by the train crashing into the drink, because the ineffectual schmuck at the switch—our hero, Roy Neary—couldn't get the timing right.

Whereupon we are introduced to the remainder of Neary's family, who seem less awful than merely somewhat beset—after all, look at their pathetic patriarch. What was that old Dukakis line, about a fish rotting from the head down? Our first look at Neary practically screams "loser." Everything he does in the film from then on is marked by that.

Let's contrast with the Neary introduction in both the "Special Edition" and the "Director's Cut." First shot is a nightscape of the Neary's neighborhood. The shot of the Jiminy/Pinocchio music box is gone (along with its accompanying "When You Wish Upon A Star" music, a pre-echo of the notes that make up the aliens' signal). Instead, we're thrown in the middle of a conflict wherein Roy is giving the Noble, Instructive Patriarch role his best shot, trying to help his oldest son with his math homework and trying to make it fun by tying it in with model train activity.

This time the train falls into the drink because the kid's being an inattentive jackass. There follows some disapproving remarks from Neary's wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) and an argument over whether to take the kids out later in the week to Goofy Golf or Pinocchio. Roy's all for Pinocchio, but the inattentive jackass kid complains that it's a "G-rated cartoon" and Ronnie sneeringly calls Roy "Jiminy Cricket"...and now we all hate them. Ronnie goes back to the chair she had been sitting in; in the original version, this is the first shot we see her in, and it plays on the neutral side; but after watching her and listening to her, the sight of her reclining thusly reinforces the idea that she's an appalling indolent shrew.

A lot of critics gave the film stick because it ennobled a character who pretty much abandons his family—true, technically they walk out on him, but he drives them to it—but this new introduction posits a family so awful one would be a fool not to leave it. Here, Neary isn't the schmuck, and the family IS the monster. Ruthless, like I said. But effective.

That ties in to another reason I kind of resented this film...and resented Tootsie some years after it. I know actresses are supposed to act, but I always found it kind of unfair that a performer as naturally appealling as Teri Garr got cast in roles so nasty they're practically misogynist. That could be my Young Frankenstein crush talking, though. So sue me...

Comments

[Joel]

Although I'm an unabashed Spielberg-phile, I've only seen Close Encounters once, ten years ago (Special Edition?). I never really cared whether or not Roy was right to drive away his family. I could sympathize with them while still believing in the necessity of him continuing alone on his pilgrimmage. The movie has always seemed about the intersection of religious faith and artistic determination. An artist gets a vision of the ideal work in his head, and then, ill-mannered and obsessive, works himself half-to-death trying to realize this otherworldly vision with the paltry materials of this world. That is--he wants to remake the divine in its own image, but has to settle for mashed potatoes instead. Who wouldn't go crazy with this type of mission? Great movie, regardless of what a jackass Roy becomes.

[Matt Miller]

I've always seen Roy's story as an abandoned child's idealized version of "where daddy went," but one that still carries a strong undertone of "it was your fault" guilt.

[Jeffrey Allen Rydell]

"I've always seen Roy's story as an abandoned child's idealized version of "where daddy went," but one that still carries a strong undertone of "it was your fault" guilt."

DING! DING! DING!

-Jeff