“Kibinimt, why not grow up ?! Think about how other people feel for a change!”. This reprimand that Michael is targeting his younger brother Elliott is the key phrase of Steven Spielberg’s ET – A Friend from Another Planet, which hit screens in the US this week 40 years ago. 2006 The American Film Institute conducted a poll among about 1,500 film experts and compiled a list of the 100 most “inspiring” American films (without defining what it means). “And ‘Save Private Ryan.’ This is an expansive autobiographical fantasy, which is also a clever reflection on adolescence, without the typical clichés. Spielberg’s personal films are always his most exciting, and here the personal and the cosmic blend in perfectly.
Steven Spielberg grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family in a Christian environment, and more than once suffered from bullying and anti-Semitism. When he was 19 his parents divorced, and for many years he blamed his father for breaking up the family, not knowing it was his mother who fell in love with Dad’s friend. The two did not tell him what really happened thinking it was better that way, and the anger at the abandoning father was expressed in “Third Kind Encounters” (Richard Dreyfus leaves on an alien spaceship without looking back) and “ET.” Only in “Catch Me If You Can” in 2002 – a biography of someone else that he also turned the director into a kind of autobiography – Spielberg changed his attitude to the role of parents in breaking up the family. In 2012, the three of them posed in front of the cameras of the program “60 Minutes”, and revealed the family story as part of the promotion of the film “Lincoln”. But let’s go back to ET.
In 1981, during the filming of “Pirates of the Lost Ark,” Spielberg told screenwriter Melissa Matheson, who was then married to Harrison Ford, about an imaginary friend in the form of an alien he had in his youth. He asked her to write a screenplay about his parents’ divorce and that alien friend. A humorous hint about the imaginary friend is found in the name given to the family dog in the movie – Harvey. It was also the name of the most famous imaginary friend in American cinema – a tall, invisible rabbit who accompanies James Stewart in the endearing 1950s comedy “Harvey.”
Elliott, played by Henry Thomas, who won the role following a stunning audition, feels rejected by his older brother’s friends, and the alien left behind on Earth is a kind of reflection of him – the letters of the name he gives him are the first and last of his own name. At the dinner where Elliott tells his mother Marie (Di Wallace), his brother Michael (Robert McNuton) and his little sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore) about the strange creature he met, they do not believe him. “Dad would believe me,” he says defiantly. The disadvantage of the father is emphasized by the fact that the family sits down to eat around a triangular table, which seems to lack a rib (the head of the table is the place reserved for the fathers). “Maybe you should call your father and tell him about it,” the mother replies. “I can not, he’s in Mexico with Sally,” Elliott mutters. Thus, without thinking, he sends her a double insult, because the absent father hates Mexico, meaning he is willing to do for his new spouse things he refused to do with the mother of his children. Then Michael says the sentence at the top of the text.
The fact that Elliott is focused on himself, his feelings and needs, and does not notice the feelings of others, is intensified in the way the film is shot. Most of the time the camera is placed at a child’s height, and until the 85th minute (in a two-hour film) Elliott’s mother is the only adult whose face is exposed to the camera. Throughout the 85 minutes the film takes place entirely in the world of children, and the adult characters – a teacher, a policeman, government agents – are left faceless. They are photographed as shadows, in the distance, behind, or with their faces outside the frame. Only Elliott’s mother is seen in the picture because he considers her a sequel to him, as someone who is there just for him. He does not notice her as a person with feelings to consider. As mentioned, his older brother Michael ties adolescence to attention to the feelings of others, and here comes into the picture ET, who will teach Elliott to do just that.
As stated, ET. Fills in the missing father place, but does so by inversion. An emotional telepathy develops between him and Elliott, which causes some funny moments – when ET. Getting drunk at Elliott’s house behaves like a drunk at school. On the dramatic level, this telepathy brings Elliott to identify with ET. And to understand his desire to return home, to his star, even though his private interest is that IT. Will stay with him as his friend. Elliott also longs for home, in the sense of a united, warm and supportive family, and that word is repeated in the film over and over again. But ET. Makes him come out of his four mothers and try to help him fulfill what he wants. And so, Elliott who wanted a father to understand him, understands ET, and through the parting from him he reprocesses his parting from his father.
The identification with ET. Peaks when the alien dies due to the distance from his star, and Elliott physically collapses along with him. While connected to the soul machine, he was approached by a government agent (Peter Cutie) who had so far only been identified by a bundle of keys hanging from his belt. “He needs to go home,” Elliott tells him, “he calls his people.” When Elliott shares with the agent the need of his friend, Cutie’s face is first revealed in a close-up. In the following minutes, the faces of masses of other adults are also exposed to the camera – scientists, police officers and more. Elliott is finally able to see them, and realizes they are not trying to harm him.
The same agent, who tells Elliott “he came to me too, I longed for such a thing since the age of 10,” will be present at Elliott’s farewell scene from MT. Elliott’s entire family is there, and the agent is standing next to the mother, filling the father’s place in the picture. The ending scene is full of references to the previous great American children’s film, which also told of the desire to return home. When the spacecraft, which looks like a hot air balloon, takes off, it leaves a colorful rainbow in the sky, like the one that Dorothy sang about in The Wizard of Oz from 1939. The Harvey dog also contributes to the resemblance between the films, as he ascends the spaceship following ET, and then descends from it – a reminder of the moment when Dorothy’s tutu escaped the hot air balloon and caused the hot air balloon to take off without it, like IT. At the beginning of the film. Spielberg seems to not only hint at sources of inspiration, including “Peter Pan” read in the film by Mother Legerty (named after the dinosaur from the famous 1914 animated film), but also signifies “ET.” As his successor and successor to that classic film.
As is well known, “The Wizard of Oz” has had various sequels over the years. Spielberg himself had plans for a sequel to ET. – He and Mattson have written a treat for a movie in which Elliott and his friends are kidnapped by bad aliens and try to contact ET. It stopped there, because Spielberg decided to give up, saying that a sequel “would rob the original of its virginity. ET it’s not about returning to the planet.” But you could say that he did make him a kind of sequel – autobiographically. Twenty years after “ET” Went on to screen “Catch Me If You Can” which tells the true story of the crook Frank Abgeniel, who in the 1960s cashed fake checks in the amount of $ 2.5 million and became wanted by the FBI. Abgeniel fled his home in New York at the age of 16 following the breakup of his parents’ marriage, and impersonated a pilot, doctor and lawyer before being captured in France at the age of 21. The script submitted to Spielberg consisted of a sequence of predictions and acts of fraud. Spielberg added a dramatic arc of his search for the father, turning the film into a teenage story of a son of divorced parents looking for an identity.
In reality Frank did not see his father again after he ran away from home. In the film, however, he continues to try to impress him. In the most moving scene towards the end of the film, Frank escapes from the FBI and returns to the house where he grew up. On Christmas Eve he looks out over the house, and through the window he sees that his mother has a new husband, and a new daughter, even if there is no room left. Aside from the understanding reflected in the film that it was not his father who broke up the family, one can decipher the moment when Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) looks on from the outside at the family celebrating Christmas, as an emotional memory of the boy Stephen, who felt alienated as a Jew especially during Christian holidays. He said his father refused to put in the house even colorful lights that would look from the outside as if they were participating in the celebration. When the film hit the screens, Spielberg said that “ET.” “He’s the metaphorical result of what happened in my life. ‘Catch me if you can.’ He’s the literal result.”