He captures the experience sensationally (in both senses of the word), with all the immersive physical violence that movies are capable of, and also as an abrupt change in awareness. Spielberg has created, with skill equal to Dickens’s, the strangeness felt by an innocent-the bewildering oddity, the physical enthrallments and terror of something entirely unprecedented. Yet the boy in “Close Encounters” stands before an open door, and the reddish-gold light beyond beckons him to some adventure he couldn’t possibly have had before.Īt the start of “Great Expectations,” Young Pip is terrified by the convict Magwitch rising up in a graveyard and threatening to eat his liver. By nature, most of us are busy with small tasks and immediate pleasures we are self-interested and literal-minded. The people don’t know, so to speak, that they are part of a movie with a fantastic premise: they go to the beach oblivious of the shark they tidy up the kitchen without noticing the alien in the house. In Spielberg’s movies, transcendent or threatening forces enter ordinary existence, where, despite them, children play and couples quarrel, make up, and split. The American consumer world is thrilled into electric activity, the rubbish scintillated and redeemed. The aliens extend a galvanizing finger, reaching out not like the Sistine God to a naked and powerful Adam but to a boy, to toys, and to appliances. In Muncie, Indiana, something has definitely arrived. The first hour or so of Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”-a movie that opened forty years ago-is unparalleled in its combination of scary and funny ideas. Out in the street, while light pours down from above, a row of mailboxes rattles furiously, as if under siege from a tornado. A little later, the house is invaded again, this time not so gently: a Hoover suddenly sweeps across the floor, like a column of Roman soldiers, terrifying the boy’s mother. The boy, who has a snub nose and wondering hazel eyes, is not at all afraid. A few feet from his bed, a toy monkey claps its cymbals together-like a stick banging the floor three times in a French theatre, announcing the beginning of a show-and tanks and police cars spin and race around the room. Illustration by Paul RogersĪ boy, asleep in the country, is awakened by a strong light outside his window and some strange rustlings in the house. With many Spielberg movies, the audience is the child harbored in the adult-the viewer open to fear, excitement, and exaltation.
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