One of the iconic images from the now 40-year-old movie, E.T.
E.T. was released in New Zealand on December 3, 1982. Nicholas Sheppard looks back on the significance and impact of the film.
The 80s are synonymous with Cold War Russki ass-kicking, greed-is-good Reaganomics and testosterone-addled action flicks. But for all the Arnold Schwarzenegger quips before brutal kills, the F16 pilots feeling the need for speed, and the yippie ki-yays, the 80s also produced films suffused with sensitivity that the powerhouse modern Hollywood production companies, with their ranks of digital effects artists and $200 million budgets, seem incapable of equalling.
As a sensitive boy of the 80s, I saw myself reflected in Gordie, the lanky, diffident storyteller in Stand by Me; and Bastian, lonely and harassed by bullies, reading a book up in the attic in The Neverending Story, and Mikey, delivering a sensitive soliloquy to the skeletons of the crew arranged around a table on a lost pirate ship in The Goonies.
The most poignant and gorgeous of these flicks was E.T., which, this year marked its 40th anniversary.
Shortly after George Lucas had revolutionised sci-fi by creating the grimy, lived-in world of Star Wars, Steven Spielberg set about innovating a domestic realism for his sci-fi project, a single mother struggling to maintain a household with three kids, in a Californian housing development where the American dream seemed more of a spirit than an actual reality, in an America uncertain of itself in a post-Vietnam, post-Iranian hostage crisis era.
The bare bones of E.T. is a boy and his dog story. The film, without the right lead, could have lapsed into schmaltz, been too mawkish or twee. One of the most incredible things on YouTube is the audition tape of Henry Thomas trying for the role of Elliott. Spielberg lays out a scenario – a man from the Government has come to Elliott’s house, intending to take away the alien Elliott is hiding in the house. Thomas listens attentively then the scene plays out, with one of Spielberg’s assistants playing the part of the man from the Government. What follows is three or so minutes of rhetorical tug of war, with the member of Spielberg’s crew insisting he be let into the house and Thomas descending into tears at the prospect of losing his new best friend. The scenario ends at an impasse, Thomas saying warily and tremulously, “I think he’s afraid of you …” At this point, Spielberg, off camera, having seen enough, says, “Okay, kid, you got the job.”
Originally intended as a scary picture, the film evolved into something unique – until then, from Cold War metaphorical invasions of body-snatchers, and flying saucers from outer space piloted by slow-moving and hostile Martians with ray guns, aliens from beyond the stars arrived with bad intentions. E.T. and his family arrive on some kind of benevolent expedition. E.T. is marooned, and in peril – a mysterious man, identified for much of the movie by his chain of keys, is stalking the lost alien, creating an extraordinary inversion for young viewers: in this film, the humans, or rather the adults - and this adult in particular - function as the antagonists.
In this way, for kids sceptical of the desensitised adult world with all its banality and disappointment, adults and, at a deeper level, adulthood, looms and encroaches threateningly closer to the warm emotional core of the boy, and, by the same inference, boyhood, as Elliott struggles to keep his newfound friend a secret.
E.T. is so affecting because it resides right at the solemn moment when the reveries of childhood are first receding and giving way to the incursions of responsibilities, and the early adoption of protective, performative roles.
Thomas is able to convey all of this through an almost preternatural emotional range – from the terror of his first encounter with the alien in his backyard, to the wonderment of E.T. summoning up a whirling display of the cosmos, to his flustered attempts to curb E.T.’s disruptive domestic curiosity, to the tender bond that emerges between the two, to the anguish of loss, and euphoria of E.T.’s reanimation.
None of this would have worked if the alien itself didn’t strike a chord with the audience, who were unused to the idea of an endearing creature from outer space. A $700,000 prototype was designed, which Spielberg deemed useless. The replacement creature’s face was inspired by the faces of Carl Sandburg, Albert Einstein and Ernest Hemingway. Producer Kathleen Kennedy visited the Jules Stein Eye Institute to study real and glass eyeballs. She hired Institute staffers to create E.T.’s eyes, which she felt were particularly important in engaging the audience. Two little people were hired, as well as 12-year-old Matthew De Meritt, who was born without legs, and whose performance lent the alien its distinctive shuffle. A professional mime wore E.T.’s prosthetic hands. The finished creature, with all its animatronics, cost $1.5 million.
The film would also depend on its supporting cast. Drew Barrymore added an even cuter bond with the creature, and Dee Wallace, as Elliott’s mother, grounded the film in lower-middle-class struggle and emotions subsumed into troubled domesticity, so much so that, as Wallace explains it, her character is so wound up by pressures that when the alien is finally revealed to her, her reaction is a gasping little laugh, a beautiful and earned moment. From then on, the film is a cascade of iconic scenes, many of which would enter the popular culture, and the popular lexicon: “E.T. phone home”, Elliott’s face lit up by a glowing fingertip, Drew Barrymore squealing and E.T.’s neck rising and eyes widening, E.T. dressed up as a doll in the cupboard, Nasa personnel invading the house through airtight tubes, the pot-plant returning to life, the children on flying bicycles silhouetted by the moon …
As if enough lightning hadn’t already been captured in a bottle, John Williams composed a lush and plaintive score that would also become iconic. Using a technique pioneered by Richard Wagner, the score’s main theme continually crests and fades on a suspension. In other words, instead of resolving to a warm major chord, it withholds that release throughout the film, so that the listener, half-consciously, is wound up by unresolved melodic suspensions. It is only at the end of the film, when E.T. has been rescued and his spaceship is ascending into the night sky, that Williams finally lets the music swirl to a crescendo and the cathartic release of huge major chords, so that, already teary, most viewers are tipped over into a gushing, snotty-nosed, lower-lip-trembling emotional mess.
It is common in childhood to finish the last page of a story or reach the end of a film and feel a hollow ache at having to return to the real world, with all its dispiriting certitude. E.T. is surely the most elegiac example of this: the one film, more than any, that leaves you yearning to linger behind, in the Republic of Childhood.
The Kiwi actor has been part of the Star Wars universe for more than 20 years.