You can go home again

Twenty years after its first release, "E.T." remains the most wondrous of all Hollywood fantasies -- and the apex of Steven Spielberg's misunderstood career.

By Charles Taylor

Mar 22, 2002 | Returning to a movie that delighted you when you were younger can be a dicey proposition. We've all re-viewed some once-beloved picture only to find that we no longer connect to it, that our previous affection was based on who we were and where we were in life when we first saw it, that experience has shaped our outlook in a different way. Watching "E.T." 20 years after it was first released (half my life ago), I can't say that the movie holds the same sense of discovery it did in 1982. (Narrative discovery is a casualty of knowing what's going to happen in a story, for one thing.) But for people who saw "E.T." on its first go-round, particularly moviegoers who were kids back then, the pleasure of seeing it now is the joy of feeling your responses deepen. It's no news to anyone that "E.T." is one of the loveliest and happiest of American movie entertainments. It's also a greater picture than we could have known.

Introducing a screening of Steven Spielberg's first feature, "The Sugarland Express," at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last week, my friend and Slate colleague David Edelstein remarked that it might strike some people as strange to be showing a Steven Spielberg movie at a nonprofit repertory house. I know the people he was talking about, those who are convinced that popular American movies (even American culture) are beneath the serious consideration of anyone interested in the art of movies. For some critics and upscale viewers, Spielberg is a convenient symbol of Hollywood dreck and the triumph of commerce over art, even a stand-in for American cultural imperialism.

This reaction against Spielberg is based at least partly on his optimism, and the false assumption that tortured and tormented artists are more profound than happy ones (try applying that notion to Mozart or "A Midsummer Night's Dream" or "I Want to Hold Your Hand"). Part of the problem is simply timing. Nobody really objects to the serious consideration of commercial directors like Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor or John Ford. But these filmmakers belong to Hollywood's "golden age," a time far enough away and different enough from our own that critics and moviegoers can mythologize it (and sometimes, in the process, falsify it).

Spielberg began his commercial career late in the second Hollywood golden age of the '70s, and his contemporaries were Francis Ford Coppola, Brian De Palma and Martin Scorsese, directors whose relationship to classic Hollywood genres was more complex, ironic and tragic than Spielberg's. These filmmakers were updating the conventions of westerns and gangster pictures and horror films to see what they still had to tell us about American life. Spielberg simply wasn't interested in that kind of sociological study. He loved the old genres for their sheer pleasure, and he wanted to be the best entertainer he could be.

Deciding to give pleasure to an audience is one of the most honorable ambitions any artist can choose. Only the greatest are able to achieve that ambition and respect the emotions of their audience, to bring laughter or tears or thrills without cheapening themselves or their material. That's the tradition that Spielberg belongs to. From "The Sugarland Express" in 1974 to "E.T." in 1982, he had what may be the greatest run of any entertainer-director. (No, I'm not forgetting "1941." Spielberg's cut, available on DVD, is a wildly ambitious funhouse slapstick, the work of a director constantly upping the ante, testing himself to see if he can make the laughs as big as the movie's gargantuan scale. It's a roadshow-size version of a Preston Sturges picture, and the fact that Spielberg succeeds so much of the time is a marvel.)

Every one of those movies -- "The Sugarland Express," "Jaws," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "1941," "Raiders of the Lost Ark," "E.T." -- is, at heart, a comedy. Sometimes, as in "Close Encounters" or "E.T.," the comedy comes from the way the movies act as wish fulfillments, validating the moonstruck dreams of their protagonists, the very dreams we in the audience have been made to share. (Think of the big goofy grin on Richard Dreyfuss' face as he boards the mothership in "Close Encounters.") And sometimes the comedy lies in the way Spielberg makes us aware of how susceptible we are to the manipulations of movies. I've never heard anyone talk about the experience of seeing "Jaws" without relating how, after every jump scene, the audience broke into laughter at its own fright. When Indiana Jones smiled at a Nazi before sending him spilling out of a speeding Jeep, the audience grinned with him. The sadistic pleasure we took in seeing the bad guys get it was right out in the open, a shared dirty joke.

Spielberg is often spoken of as a heartless manipulator. But in these movies, his sense of comedy defuses any impulses toward jerking tears. Toward the climax of "The Sugarland Express," essentially a chase movie, he allows a feeling of inevitability to take over the movie's constant sense of forward motion, like a slow leak in the tire of a souped-up Chevy. In "E.T.," the scenes other directors would milk for tears are the most dry-eyed -- it's in the happy moments that the tears come.

Next Page: Like all great fantasy -- from "Oz" to "Buffy" -- "E.T." is grounded in emotional reality

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