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    Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Close Encounters of the Third Kind
    Ebook189 pages4 hours

    Close Encounters of the Third Kind

    By Jon Towlson

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    About this ebook

    For many, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE3K) is not so much a movie as a religious experience. On its release in 1977, CE3K virtually redefined the science fiction film, shifting it away from spaceships, laser guns, and bug-eyed monsters into a modified form of science fiction that John Wyndham once called logical fantasy’. What would it be like if extra-terrestrials made contact with people on Earth? How would it feel? Like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Steven Spielberg’s primary inspiration, CE3K is concerned with mankind’s evolution towards the stars, towards a state of transcendence. But Spielberg’s vision hinges not so much on cool scientific intellect being the key to our next stage of evolution, as on the necessary development of emotional intelligence. To that end, we must regain our childlike curiosity for what lies beyond the skies, we must recover our capacity to experience wonder. Intensity of emotion is inherent to the film’s meaning, and the aim of this book is to explore this in detail. Along the way it delves into the film’s production history, explores Spielberg’s remarkable cinematic realisation of the film (including a comparison study of the three different release versions), and considers in detail how CE3K fits into the Spielberg oeuvre.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAuteur
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781911325086
    Close Encounters of the Third Kind

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      Book preview

      Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Jon Towlson

      1. Close Encounters: Genre and Context

      Early Sci-Fi

      In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds the industrial revolution saw a response in literature to the way science and technology was reshaping the world. Jules Verne’s stories of fantastic adventure, From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Around the World in 80 Days (1873) explored technological devices and transportation. H.G. Wells wrote cautionary tales of scientific inventors – The Island of Dr. Moreau (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) The Time Machine (1895) – and imagined Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds (1897). In America, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote of extraordinary realms in his Martian Adventures Series (1912-1964), and of prehistoric reawakening in The Land That Time Forgot (1918).

      Science fiction exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, partly because of the popularity of cinema, itself a wondrous time machine and magic show, but also thanks to pulp magazines. The monthly Amazing Stories (1926) introduced writers like E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, and later Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin, whilst Astounding Science Fiction (1930), which would be later renamed Analog (and is still published today) debuted Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. Van Vogt and Robert Heinlein. Its most famous editor was John W. Campbell Jr., author of Who Goes There? (1948) – later adapted for the cinema as The Thing From Another World (1951) (Telotte, 2001: 63-122; Sobchack, 2001: 17-25).

      After World War Two, pulp writers began publishing novels, helping to move science fiction further into the mainstream. Key writers of this era include Ray Bradbury (Martian Chronicles 1946-); Asimov (I, Robot, 1950, The Foundation Trilogy, 1951-); Heinlein (The Puppet Masters, 1951) and Arthur C. Clark (Childhood’s End, 1953). The emergence of speculative fiction within ‘serious’ contemporary literature took place at the same time, with the works of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1931), George Orwell 1984 (1948), and later J.G. Ballard (The Drowned World, 1962) and Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, (1963). These novels sought to combine fantasy with philosophy and politics, drawing on allegory to comment on (often disturbing) trends within modern society. Closely aligned are the traditions of utopian and dystopian literature. Utopian novels date back to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Erehwon, written in 1872 by Samuel Butler, which contrast idealised worlds with the failings of the present reality; dystopian works such as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), on the other hand, depict a future characterised by oppressive social control and human misery (Sanders, 2009: 150-151; King and Krzywinska, 2000: esp. 13-22).

      In cinema, Georges Méliès became the first sci-fi filmmaker of sorts. His A Trip to the Moon (1902) featured rocketships, interstellar travel and aliens. The age of modernity after World War One led to optimism about science and technology creating a better world, but also to fears about the inequalities of a technological society. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) depicted a divided city where workers would become virtually enslaved by machines while the idle rich enjoyed the fruit of their labour. Class struggle in a futuristic (dystopic) environment has become a recurrent theme of science fiction cinema due to the lasting influence of Metropolis (The Hunger Games, 2012, Snowpiercer, 2013, Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015). By contrast, Things to Come (1936), adapted by H.G. Wells from his novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933) predicted a utopian future after war causes society to collapse and be replaced by a new improved one (Sanders, 2009: 140-154).

      The film serials, Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck Rogers (1939) popularised pulp science fiction cinema in the form of rocketships, ray guns, alien invaders, evil intergalactic emperors and damsels in distress; and employed a machine-like narrative strategy of incessant cliff-hanger situations to hook the viewer into returning to the theatre each week. We can see them as the inspiration for the likes of Star Wars and the myriad superhero blockbuster movies that continue to dominate Hollywood today.

      The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in an atomic age which could be seen reflected in the radiation/alien-invasion fears of 1950s Cold War science fiction. The Thing from Another World, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds (1953), It Came from Outer Space, Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), clearly play on Cold War paranoia and the attendant national obsession in the late 1940s/ early 1950s with UFOs. Fears of radiation from atomic testing, radioactive fall-out or nuclear war found expression in films about atomic mutation and monster bugs: Them! (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Tarantula (1955) – the last two films directed by Jack Arnold, arguably sci-fi’s first ‘auteur’ director. At the same time, space exploration films showed a more optimistic side of technology in the 1950s, as America and the-then U.S.S.R. competed in the ‘space race’: Destination Moon (1950), Rocketship X-M (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956) (Warren, 2010).

      Aliens attack in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers [1956].

      More saucer shenanigans in This Island Earth [1955]. This one’s beaming up a plane.

      Modern Sci-fi Cinema, 1968 onwards

      In 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey returned science fiction to its origins in Greek mythology. Kubrick’s landmark film can be seen as a culmination of the space exploration themes of the previous decade and one of the first to broach the need to evolve beyond imminent destruction at our own hands. As such it is perhaps the first example of ‘transcendent’ science fiction cinema, exploring the human need to place trust in a force larger than ourselves; given its lofty philosophical ambitions, however, its influence unsurprisingly took time to catch on in Hollywood mainstream terms (Cowan, 2010: esp. 3-71).

      Science fiction films of the early seventies were instead more overtly concerned with identity and environment, and how both were increasingly shaped or misshapen by technology: Silent Running (1972) Westworld (1973), Soylent Green (1973), The Omega Man (1971) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). In low budget exploitation cinema, a number of notable creature features deliberately played on the public’s fears of ecological imbalance and pollution: Willard (1971), Frogs (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972), Killer Bees (1974) and Squirm

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