Most creators are lucky if they ever make one truly revolutionary thing in their lives. Steven Spielberg has made at least six.
He’s had his misfires and genuine failures along the way, but Spielberg has reshaped multiple genres and filmmaking as a whole in his wake. Many of his movies have become part of the bedrock of worldwide culture. There are multiple different trends and revivals that can be traced straight back to Spielberg, from Indiana Jones’ faux-serial period action to Saving Private Ryan redefining war films to virtually every monster movie made after 1975.
In retrospect, however, there’s one entertainment subgenre that we might not give Spielberg enough credit for, and that’s the alien conspiracy thriller. 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Spielberg’s second big hit after Jaws. While it hasn’t latched onto the popular imagination in quite the way that some of Spielberg’s later films did, it’s hard not to see Close Encounters’ influence on the subsequent alien-abduction films and TV of the 1980s and 1990s.
If you’re interested in seeing Close Encounters for yourself in advance of its 50th anniversary, YouTube is currently airing it for free, albeit with ads. Even better, YouTube’s version is the Spielberg-endorsed Director’s Cut from 1998, which reverses some changes that were made to the film in its 1980 Special Edition.
I guess you’ve noticed something a little strange with Dad
When I was a kid, I always thought Close Encounters was the third film in a series, based solely upon the title. In fact, the name comes from the 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, by J. Allen Hynek. Hynek was a scientific consultant on Close Encounters, and even makes a cameo at one point in the film. (Look for the guy at Devils Tower smoking the pipe.)
In his book, Hynek proposed a scale of classification for UFO sightings, which ranged from #1 (strange lights in the sky) to #6 (encountering a UFO that comes alongside an ‘animated entity,’ such as a human pilot or genuine alien). The latter three stages on Hynek’s scale are labeled as “close encounters,” the last and most significant of which, the “third kind,” provided the final name for the film. It’s another term for what’s now more commonly called “first contact.”
Close Encounters opens in 1977, as multiple lost aircraft have suddenly reappeared in the middle of the California desert. As a team of scientists tries to figure out what’s happened, multiple UFOs are sighted all over the world.
In Muncie, Indiana, Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is called out to address a local power outage. While working, a near-miss from a passing UFO burns half of Roy’s face.
After that encounter, Roy quickly becomes obsessed with the UFOs, which endangers his relationship with his wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) and their children. Without any idea why, Roy is increasingly compelled to make models and sculptures of a specific mountain with whatever’s handy, from dirt to clay to mashed potatoes. What Roy doesn’t know is that his new hobby is about to intersect with what’s become a genuine conspiracy.
There are parts of Close Encounters that can be a genuinely rough sit. While the audience knows that Roy is on to something, due to how his obsessions intersect with other characters and scenes, Roy himself doesn’t. The second act of the movie is a portrait of psychological disintegration, as Roy himself doesn’t know what’s happened to him. He ends up alone in his house at one point, surrounded by news clippings and handmade models, in a scene that presages all the great conspiracy-board scenes in later pop culture, from The X-Files to that famous meme of Charlie Day from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. In retrospect, Roy Neary is a prototype for what’s since become a famous stock character in Western fiction: the conspiracy-monger who’s just looking for that one last “I told you so!” that will prove them right.
That might be why Close Encounters has faded slightly in the popular imagination. It’s a science fiction movie, but it doesn’t have the spectacle or excitement of Spielberg’s later work in the genre. In fact, he revisited the topic of alien conspiracies himself five years later with E.T., which, in retrospect, might’ve overshadowed what hype Close Encounters may have had. Richard Dreyfuss going slowly insane at the family dinner table isn’t quite as iconic an image as E.T.‘s bicycle chase.
Just the same, Close Encounters is a classic for a reason, and almost 50 years later, you can make a real case that the real conspiracy is how a movie this good ever wound up becoming so overlooked. As long as you know going in that it’s closer to a strange family drama than any kind of thriller, it’s worth seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind at least once. It’s an underrated linchpin of the last 50 years in science fiction.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind’s Director’s Cut is currently streaming on YouTube.
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