We become more like each other, and yet more and more strangers. Somehow we have to put up with each other, but now we’re talking about friendship. The point here is not to fight “microaggressions”, but rather to fear losing your boyfriend or girlfriend. True friendship is a gift, it is said, or, as systems theory would say, it is “unlikely”. Steven Spielberg’s film ET – the alien tells the story of an extremely improbable friendship. You can learn a lot from her.
An eleven-year-old boy from the Californian suburbia befriended an ancient being, “read manly” by the boy, who comes from the planet Brodo Asogi, which is three million light-years away from Earth. Normally one takes the boy’s perspective when telling Steven Spielberg’s film from 1982: Elliott’s father has left the family, he feels lonely, this gap is filled by the discovery of the being in the shed, which he then hides in his room. Let’s tell the story from ET’s perspective: They only want to take a few plant samples on earth when they are disturbed and ET loses contact with his people. A young Earthling is his salvation, at first nothing more and nothing less.
Elliott introduces him to his world in the nursery, the toy soldiers, etc., but he doesn’t seem to really care. Not because he has a lack of empathy, he actually has nothing but empathy. It is so strong that it carries over to Elliott; when ET drinks beer for the first time in his life in the family’s empty house, Elliott gets drunk at school too. He’s just about to do a stupid experiment with frogs, at that moment Elliott recognizes, if you will, the “philosophy” of ET, namely that everything living is interconnected, and lets the frogs free.
E.T. tells of heart communication. She knows no age and no cultural boundaries. Even if ET, who to a certain extent has a maximum migration background, learns the American language quickly and even builds a telephone with a circuit according to Brodo Asogi, the “communicator” with Elliott, their friendship is based on what the communication theorist Marshall McLuhan calls a “hot medium” called. You don’t see exactly how this medium works, but it literally makes its transmitter glow from within. For the recipient, on the other hand, it creates nothing but feeling. When NASA examines the terminally ill ET in the laboratory, Elliott’s brother Michael is asked about this puzzling type of communication: “So Elliott is thinking ET’s thoughts?” – “No, Elliott feels his feelings.”
ET speaks the language of the heart that the German romantics could only dream of. It is clear that such a friendship would have to end in kitsch if it did not just end. ET would have to die of homesickness if he stayed. Realizing that and letting him go is probably the greatest service an eleven year old can do.
The story – or, as it is called in New German: the narrative – comes later. The real friendships, especially among young and old, are also made for the time afterwards, that is their imposition. Friendships live on when they’re over. The family (there will be a dad again soon, and he is very much okay, Spielberg suggests it in the final scene) can now tell how it was when they escaped ET, who was already clinically dead, under adventurous circumstances from the laboratory of the NASA released them, even flown them on their BMX bikes, and took him to the spaceship in the forest on the hill, which was brought with the “communicator”. Then the door of the spaceship closes.
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