[30 years ago this week, the pseudo-documentary film Alien Autopsy aired. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that moment and others that reflect our enduring fascination with the possibility of alien life, leading up to a post on recent revelations!]
On two
superficially similar films that feature very distinct portrayals of both
America and aliens.
Two of the
most prominent cinematic representations of alien encounters feature similar
title images of those encounters: Steven Spielberg’s Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and
Robert Zemeckis’ Contact
(1997).
Spielberg was a kind of mentor to Zemeckis,
executive producing the younger director’s first two films (both released in
the three years after Close Encounters),
and so it’s quite possible that Contact
(released almost exactly 20 years after Close
Encounters) was partially intended as a tribute to the earlier film
(although its title is drawn from Carl Sagan’s
1985 novel on which it’s based). And the two films do follow a fundamentally
similar structure when it comes to those alien encounters [SPOILERS for the two
films here and in the rest of this post]: opening with a partial and uncertain
such encounter and then following a group of characters attempting to connect
more definitively with these aliens and, in the film’s culminating scenes, able
to do so more definitively.
Yet when
it comes to both those main characters and the aliens they encounter, Close Encounters and Contact differ in striking and
significant ways. Spielberg’s film focuses on ordinary Americans, working-class
protagonists (Richard
Dreyfuss’s Roy Neary is an electrical lineman and Melinda Dillon’s Jillian Guiler a
working single mother) who are unexpectedly drawn into and fundamentally
changed by the alien encounters and the broader universe they open up.
Zemeckis’ film, on the other hand, focuses on scientists and parallel figures (Jodie Foster’s Dr. Ellie Arroway works for
the SETI observatory and Matthew McConaughey’s Palmer Joss is a
spiritual leader with a lifelong obsession with theories of alien life) who
have long been concerned with the question of aliens and alien encounters by
the time the film opens. That difference doesn’t simply mean that the two films
portray quite distinct strata of American society (although they certainly do).
It also means that they depict the question of alien encounters through very
different perspectives and tones—for Spielberg’s characters, these are
shockingly strange questions that reveal a universe they had never known and entirely
shift their identities as a result; while for Zemeckis’, these are questions
toward which their whole lives have been trending and the answers to which will
determine whether their identities have been meaningful or ultimately
misguided.
Perhaps
relatedly, the two films also portray the aliens themselves in very distinct
ways. Close Encounter’s aliens
look
very much like our most common images of extraterrestrials—oddly shaped heads
atop thin necks, very long fingers, and so on—and communicate in a language of
their own, one featuring hand gestures as well as the film’s famous musical notes (courtesy
of Spielberg’s favorite composer John Williams, natch). In
Contact, on the other hand, we never
really see the aliens, which is precisely the point: when Foster finally makes
contact, the alien she meets chooses to take the form of her late father in order
to connect with her more individually and intimately. Although we are meant to
understand that he is indeed an alien (rather than simply a hallucination of
Foster’s, as many of her peers believe), this choice nonetheless makes Contact’s alien encounter far more
thematically focused on Foster’s character and identity than on the aliens
themselves; while Dreyfuss in particular does become similarly obsessed with
aliens in Close Encounters
(eventually leaving with them at the film’s conclusion), their depiction
nonetheless draws our attention to their striking form rather than simply his
character. One more significant difference between these two cinematic
representations of alien America.
Next aliens
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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