Stories From the Silver Screen: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

This should scarcely come as a surprise to anyone, but between Steven Spielberg and myself there is very little in common. Save for the fact that we both happened to have been born in the same year (1946), I cannot think of a single kindred connection. Certainly not in the area of cash, of which I have very little; as for Mr. Spielberg, at seven plus billion he’s practically in the same neighborhood as Elon Musk.  

And then there are all those movies he’s made, 35 and counting, of which I’ve managed to see a few, some quite unforgettable. Jaws, for instance, which came out 50 years ago last summer and so terrified audiences that whole stretches of New Jersey shoreline suddenly became empty. Or Saving Private Ryan (1998), with its bookends of heartbreak—i.e., the scene at Omaha Beach at the beginning, where mayhem and misery mark the landing of thousands of frightened young soldiers, followed by, at the very end, the scene at the American Cemetery where so many lay dead while, close by, an old man in tears remembers the sacrifice they made to save him.

And while I may have turned out a few books of my own, mostly unread, I’ve yet to make a single movie. In fact, I don’t even own a camera, much less know how to operate one. 

But I love watching movies, especially if they remind me of the world I once knew as a child, a world suffused with a sense of mystery and, yes, even menace—but not terminally dangerous because, in the end, the lights in the theater turn on again and the darkness will have been banished. A world, come to think of it, not so very different from the one Steven Spielberg grew up in, where, at any moment, an attack from an alien planet might take place, in which sinister pod people are sent out in search of the souls of innocent earthlings to corrupt and destroy—but who ultimately are defeated, thus restoring the contours of a good and gentle universe. 

Welcome to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in other words, a mid-’50s sci-fi classic before which, I suspect, a young Steven Spielberg sat spellbound. I know I did. 

And when he grew up and started making movies of his own, one in particular would stand out and, for me at least, prove especially enchanting. That would be Close Encounters of the Third Kind. When it came out in 1977, Spielberg was just 30 years of age, an astonishing achievement.

So, what’s the big deal, why this movie? Because it plunges the viewer into the numinous depths of another world, a world both fearful and fascinating, both terrible and tame; it is a world only the very young and the childlike are qualified to enter and, in the end, survive triumphant. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” says Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, “the reign of God is theirs” (5:3). And who are the poor but those little ones whose eyes remain ever open, eager to take in everything, who, not having anything of their own to defend, desire only what is true, avid in their search for it. 

Like the little boy at the center of the story Spielberg tells, who, suddenly awash in a light not of this world, leaves his little bed at night in order to find the source of its brightness, its beckoning warmth. It will draw both he and his mother far beyond the things of this world, to a place they cannot know yet strangely intuit must be more real than anything they already do know. Or the character played by Richard Dreyfuss, an ordinary fellow from Muncie, Indiana, whose life will be completely upended by that same light, the radiant source of which he, too, will give up everything in order to possess. 

It may not be “the pearl of great price,” of which the Gospels speak; to think otherwise is to risk falling into idolatry. But it is an intimation, a hint, of something more; a bit like the universe St. Bonaventure speaks of, which is but “a ladder we ascend to God.” Or the insight lifted from one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poems: “Earth’s crammed with heaven / And every common bush afire with God: / But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, / The rest sit round, and pluck blackberries.”

There are no blackberries waiting to be plucked in this movie, and if they wear shoes it is only in order to speed them along their way to the Great Rendezvous in Wyoming, the staging area for the promised flight into Deep Space. It is not fear, by the way, that drives them to seek out and climb up the ladder into the realm of the numinous. They are not in flight from an imagined terror cast by some Unknown Other, from which, at all costs, they must flee. Spielberg is not spinning tales of horror here. 

It is the attraction rather, the intense longing itself, that draws them on—a sense of primal awe, awakened by the discovery of something beyond anything they’ve ever known before. It is the undeniable sensation of what they had both seen and heard—this mysterious light which, while dazzling to the senses, is yet a source of some dread to the spirit. In short, it is more spectral than physical. Indeed, it is transporting, carrying them completely outside the space/time continuum, even as the encounter itself, what Spielberg calls a “close encounter,” will necessarily transpire from within the sensate world. If we are not finally alone in this world, destined therefore to leave behind all that is banal and boring, then the search for it will have to begin amid the things of this material world.    

The figures in the film, transfixed by the light, are not entirely unlike the prophet Ezekiel, the “rings” of whose Theophany, he tells us, “were so high that they were dreadful” (1:18). Or the prophet Jacob who, upon rising from a deep sleep during which he wrestled with the very Angel of God, declares: “How dreadful is this place!” (Genesis 28:17). Who will not desist, by the way, will not cease to press on with his quest, until, having extracted a blessing—which is the name Israel, meaning one who contends with God himself—an entirely new life opens up before him.

This is the mission they have been given, to follow the light as best they can, athwart every obstacle thrown in their way. Do they make it? That is for the film to reveal, not the reviewer. At least not this reviewer, whose only task is to try and entice as many readers as possible to go out and watch it—and then decide.