The short version first. There has never been another movie experience quite like E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) for me. No other movie has impacted me so much and so deeply and so sincerely. In the pantheon of movies I’ve seen throughout my life, E.T. is the Big Cheese, the King of All Shit and the One That Hooked Me. It’s the Red Pill.
Funny then that I don’t really remember seeing E.T. for the first time. Like so many movies, I know where I watched it. I certainly remember seeing it at least two more times in the weeks that followed (one instance – my favourite instance – was at the 5 Drive-in with the unlikely partner of Night of the Comet.) However I can’t say that I have any memories of the actual theatre experience. It’s the days and weeks afterwards that stay with me instead, because the damn movie buried itself so deep in my waking mind that it was all I could think about. I was a kid possessed: E.T. sketches on my notebooks, E.T. posters in my room, E.T. toys, E.T. books, E.T. everything. I must’ve made quite a site in my grade 4 classroom, turning a potato art
project into a tribute to E.T. Though I couldn’t have told made the connection at the time, the final product probably looked a little like Andy Warhol’s famous portrait of Marilyn Monroe, but for E.T. heads in different colours spread across the paper. The obsession may have only lasted for months, but in my mind it went on for years. Later in school, people still remembered me as the "guy who really like used to like E.T." Not too freaky that label.
I recognize that E.T. is a strange movie to provoke this kind of roof-blasting reaction, but I must've been sitting bullseye for the target audience for the film. I was 9-years old. Most of my days were spent on my bike cruising the suburbs or exploring the woods behind my house. Nighttime was a scary place. There was no one in a better position to relate to the movie. But don’t misunderstand – I wasn’t projecting myself into the movie or even developing any "alien friend" fantasies like you might expect. I didn’t see the movie as any sort of daydream. Rather, I was delirious with what the movie did and where it took me. More than any other movie I had seen, it was the movie itself that ensnared the 9-year old. The overall experience of sitting in the dark theatre, with the smell of popcorn and the sticky floor and waiting for the lights to go all the way down: it was, if you don’t mind me rolling out the dusty cliché, pure magic. Bicycles over the moon kind of magic. The movie swept me away.
It was probably the first movie that I cried in. I know for certain that it was the first movie to frighten me. I was tense, emotional, excited, delighted and terribly sad. It was the first movie that didn’t have an easy handle or a quick solution for the question, what did you like about it? There was no shortcut like giant boulders or Wookies or Muppets. The movie sort of danced around me until I was dizzy, unsure what to isolate as the reason for the odd blend of feelings, and that made it an enigma. Not that I’m going to pretend that E.T. was any kind of Lynchian masterpiece, but I remember vividly that it was mysterious. Prior to seeing it, I had no clue at all what it was about. I didn’t know what an extra terrestrial was and from the TV commercials, I only knew that the boy in the red hooded sweater cut his finger on a saw. Then someone raised a hot poker towards it (after Raiders, I believed that the glowing finger was exactly that.) These were pretty fleeting impressions and tough for a kid to nail down. But there was also E.T. himself who seemed to look different to me in every photo I saw (different sculpts probably), lending to the feeling that he was part of the dream. As an adult, the movie has lost that complexity, but as a child, I remember that it was the most sophisticated experience of my short life.
Which brings me to adulthood. I was delighted by the opportunity to take my wife to see E.T. again in the theatre in 2002, with an amped-up digital soundtrack and a remastered picture. Forget about the crumby new CG effects (thank you Spielberg for leaving the original film intact on the DVD release), the treasure of seeing E.T. again on a monstrous modern screen was invaluable. The movie made very few bones at the box office, but I am so grateful for the decision to re-release it.
Seeing the film as an adult was startling, because it was like watching an entirely different film. I could see Spielberg pulling many of the strings that were invisible to me as a child, and I could appreciate the mastery with which he did it. The movie pushes buttons, there’s no question about that. But there was also an added layer to the film that I could appreciate as an adult: a sort of sentimentality about childhood that was sweeter for the fact that the movie figures so strongly in mine. It’s a rare experience for a film to allow an adult to revisit the world from the level of a child.
I think that’s what makes it special to me now.
No comments:
Post a Comment