"This means something"
Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" is an unsettling work of genius.
Image via Sony Pictures Entertainment
Two major sci-fi movies came out in 1977. One of them was Star Wars, which revolutionized the movie industry forever, and went on to spawn a sprawling media empire and one of the biggest cult followings in pop culture history. One could say it was a success.
The other was Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg’s follow-up to his breakout hit Jaws is a very different brand of sci-fi. While Star Wars is firmly in space opera territory, Close Encounters is an Earth-based story about humanity’s first contact with aliens. Both films have scores by John Williams and some nifty VFX work done with scale models. Both films feature governments doing some shady stuff, in keeping with the post-Nixon, post-Vietnam sentiments at the time. The similarities pretty much end there.
Perhaps Spielberg intended for Close Encounters to be a depiction of two cultures learning to communicate with one another with a hopeful ending. Perhaps he wanted to tell that story while also commenting on the lack of trust in the American government and armed forces.
The angle about the government and military is certainly there. What wound up on screen alongside it is an intimate look at two families being ripped apart and unsuspecting people being driven to madness. The result is something that I’d argue is even better than Star Wars.
Close Encounters is mostly made up of three plotlines that wind up weaving together. The first follows globetrotting scientist Lacombe (French New Wave auteur François Truffaut, in a wonderful bit of stunt casting), his translator Laughlin (Bob Balaban) and their Project Blue Book-adjacent team as they investigate alien activity. The second is about single mom Jillian (Melinda Dillon) and her young son Barry, (Cary Guffey), whom she has to chase into the woods after the aliens lure him out of the house. They soon cross paths with electrical engineer and family man Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) when the aliens start using eastern Indiana as their personal playground and cause rolling blackouts.
I say mostly made up of those three threads because after the movie opens with Lacombe finding Flight 19’s planes in the Sonora Desert, the film cuts to an air traffic control center in Indianapolis, kicking off one of the greatest scenes in cinema history.
It’s classic Spielberg. The concept is simple enough. There’s something up in the air with the planes, and the controller is trying to talk the pilots through it. We never leave the room and the camera only looks in two directions; up the aisle and at the screen. Spielberg sets the tone for his entire film here. He creates tension with crackled voices over the radio and the activity in the jumble of voices in the room. Between the scene in the desert and the near-miss in the air, the viewer plainly gets the sense that something is wrong.
Jillian, Barry and Roy all become obsessed with UFO’s after having their close encounters. Jillian and Roy compulsively see images of a mountain in their everyday surroundings. Barry is eventually abducted by the aliens in a terrifying scene that would feel at home in Poltergeist. Spielberg has not made a creature-feature horror movie, but a tragedy.
Close Encounters makes sure to show that on some level, Roy knows that he’s losing it.
It’s a far cry from the dinner table in Spielberg’s previous film, Jaws. This isn’t Chief Brody being cute with his son after a rough day. It’s a man begging for forgiveness from his horrified family. Spielberg turns the comfort and intimacy of a family dinner on its head. The table isn’t a shelter for Roy. It’s a trial.
His home life is ripped apart by his mania. His wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) eventually takes the kids and leaves. The breaking point comes when he starts building an even larger mountain inside the house, not out of mashed potatoes but soil and chicken wire and plants from the garden, tossed in through the kitchen window. He simply can’t help himself. The aliens won’t let him.
Roy begs her for forgiveness over the phone. He’s rebuked, leaving him despondent. And he immediately forgets about it when he sees Devil’s Tower on the television and realizes what his visions have been of. He makes for Wyoming, leaving a shattered family behind him.
Close Encounters doesn’t judge Roy as much as it pities him. It’s Lacombe and Laughlin who provide what might be closest to the film’s moral backbone, and even they begrudgingly go along with the military’s massive coverup that results in tens of thousands of people being displaced from their homes.
Eventually the aliens do arrive in force. Roy kisses Jillian, all thoughts of his family long gone, and gleefully takes the opportunity to join the aliens in the stars. Lacombe is all too happy to send him on his way. The climax is presented in a wondrous, hopeful manner. The viewer has become just as indoctrinated as Roy has been.
That final scene at the mountain, in which the humans and aliens use music as a way to communicate, and the ship opens up to release everyone they’ve kidnapped over the years (including little Barry), is an aberration. It’s one of the few scenes that Spielberg forcefully injects positive emotion into. The rest of the film, be it Roy’s breakdown or Lacombe investigating a chanting crowd in India, is played straight or tinged with dread. Williams’ score is tactically deployed here and there, but Spielberg often opts to instead use diegetic sound from televisions, toys and radios to inform the mood.
The TV seems to always be on in the Neary household. Between that, the clutter and the frenetic energy of three young kids, there’s always a bit of chaos that adds to the anxiety of Roy’s mental state. His total breakdown happens while music and explosions from an episode of Looney Tunes his son is watching. It’s a brilliant tactic that Spielberg would again deploy in E.T.
You can see Spielberg really flexing his muscles in Close Encounters. It’s his first true epic, as even though Jaws is a movie that feels big, its scope never grows as large as the follow-up. The way he and cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (who won an Oscar for his work) shoot crowds is awe-inspiring. There’s a scene where Roy and Jillian find each other in the middle of a sea of people that probably would have won Zisgmond the Oscar had the studio submitted that and nothing else.
Close Encounters is the sort of thing that people try to replicate but can never quite capture. It’s the mystery box that Abrams has been trying to turn into great work for decades now and has barely mastered, if ever. Watching it multiple times increases how rewarding it is, because you catch all the little hints and gestures and bright dots moving in the night sky that you missed the first time.
It’s one of my favorite movies. So is Star Wars, for that matter. And as brilliant as George Lucas’ journey to a galaxy far, far away is, I have to give Close Encounters the edge. Star Wars is an old serial done up in a delightful new world. Close Encounters touches on some very real troubles at home and asks us to consider who we really trust, and whether the government is allowed into that inner circle. It shows us a creeping madness and paranoia that unsettles you in ways Darth Vader can’t.
If you haven’t seen Close Encounters, you should. It’s Spielberg at his best.