Close Encounters & Spielberg Themes

This was only the second time that I had seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind (and the first was many years ago), so I went into the film nearly with a fresh slate. However, as I watched the film, scenes kept coming back to me and I repeatedly got that "Oh yeah!" feeling right before something was about to happen, which was a very fun experience. A few key moments that I had remembered, which still stick out in my mind after seeing the film again, are the scenes where Richard Dreyfuss's character, Roy, attempts to recreate Devil's Tower using objects around the house -- first with the mashed potatoes at the dinner table and then later with all of the plants, dirt, etc. from outside the house.

It is this second scene that I really wanted to talk about first, because it highlights a common Steven Spielberg theme that we have discussed quite a bit already and continues to reappear in many other future Spielberg films -- the deterioration of the family. As Roy rips plants out his garden and his neighbor's chicken wire out of the ground, proceeding to throw all of these things into the window of his home (along with some dirt that he has shoveled in), the audience begins to see that he is clearly starting to "lose it" because of his obsession with his alien encounter. While we can sympathize with Roy here because we, the audience, know that he really has seen extraterrestrials (since we too saw the UFOs at the beginning of the film), Roy's family does not share this knowledge or this sympathy. As a result, they think that Roy has simply gone totally insane, and his family totally falls apart. It is an interesting question here as to whether Spielberg wants the audience to sympathize with or be angry at Roy's family for not trusting him and supporting him in this obsession, but either way, I think it is pretty clear that we are not supposed to think that it is necessarily Roy's "fault" for what is happening. His wife and kids, though, do see it that way, as shown by another scene where Roy is crying in the bathroom because he can't explain to his wife what's going on. Here, Roy's son Brad yells at him and calls him a "baby" for the way that he behaves. This brings up another common motif that Spielberg usees -- the question of manliness or masculinity. It is interesting to see such themes that we found in Jaws show up again in Close Encounters.

On the other hand, one recurring Spielberg trademark that seems to actually begin with this film is the tremendous use of bright or colored light and how that light interacts with the characters. This is something that shows up again in later Spielberg films, namely his science fiction films (such as E.T.), but Spielberg really seems to be experimenting with it here and playing around with light in a big way, essentially for the first time. A few memorable (and even now iconic) scenes from Close Encounters that demonstrate this are Roy's first encounter with the aliens where the UFOs light up and actually even burn his face, the scene where they young boy opens the door to let in the red light from the spacecraft, and of course the spectacular "light show" at the end when the aliens actually land at Devil's Tower. One thing I wanted to add about this concluding scene at Devil's Tower is that Warren Buckland, in his writing about this film, claims that one trait that dominates Close Encounters more than others is Spielberg's use of off-screen space (as he mastered with the shark in Jaws). However, it is interesting to note that Buckland praises Spielberg for his use of the "hidden" and the "unknown" numerous times in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, yet Buckland does not really criticize Spielberg for then violating that trend and breaking the mystery by then showing us the aliens at the end of the film. (However, at least in the Ultimate Version of the film he refrains from showing the inside of the spaceship.) In any case, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is another one of Steven Spielberg's classic entries, and it continues as well as establishes many of the themes, techniques, and trademarks that we will see over and over again in Spielberg's later films.