Title credits fade in and out on black, followed by thirty seconds of darkness. Musical tones emerge individually, building through a crescendo, like an orchestra tuning. At the climax, light floods the screen. It diminishes, revealing headlamps through a sandstorm. A car, then human figures, materialise on the blank screen: the diegesis gradually solidifies, anchored spatially and temporally by a caption, while the music modulates into sounds of wind and sand. The mysteriously shrouded figures, wearing dark glasses, are drawn to something off-screen, windward. One requests explanation. Their leader Lacombe (François Truffaut), appearing from the blankness, leads them towards a distant light. The solution – reappearance in a desert, after 32 years, of a missing fighter squadron in perfect condition – is startlingly impossible.
This deceptively complex opening on one level epitomises classical Hollywood narration: withholding information, gradual revelation, interest engaged through suspense. The title is enigmatic, while the final credit, ‘Directed by Steven Spielberg’, evokes a narrative image from Jaws (enhanced by pre-publicity stressing the secrecy of the production and majestic special effects), making this already a similarly significant event.
‘Event’ movies involve cross-media tie-ins and pre-publicity to prepare the audience for saturation release (Izod 1988: 184). Close Encounters of the Third Kind drew upon the successful merchandising of Jaws. Press releases prompting widespread speculation about UFOs, a novelisation (ostensibly by Spielberg), Bob Balaban’s production diary and comic-book versions stimulated interest. Consideration of the appeal of Spielberg’s blockbusters cannot ignore merchandising, as well as advertising and marketing. Nevertheless, as 1941 demonstrates, these alone do not assure success.
Darkness teases at the start of Close Encounters, heightening anticipation of spectacular pleasure. Tension, enhanced by the music, finally releases in a climax of light. Once begun, the scene exemplifies classical syuzhet construction. Restriction to less knowledge than the characters possess prolongs suspense; identification is encouraged because they remain one shot ahead in the relay of the look, awe-struck gazes off-screen cueing conventional expectations that we are about to share their vision. The final revelation satisfies curiosity but raises bigger questions. This pattern, consistent through subsequent scenes, repeats on a smaller scale within the scene. Balaban (Truffaut’s translator, off-screen as well as on) appears looking remarkably like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, fulfilling then confounding expectation, reinforced by the credits only moments before, of Dreyfuss as the star. Explanations open further mysteries, deferring promised mastery.
Commercial feature films inevitably begin self-consciously; style has to declare itself, cueing appropriate mental schemata, and information has to be narrated quickly (Bordwell et al. 1985: 25). Close Encounters accordingly begins with explanatory titles and identifies important characters through close-ups – particularly Truffaut, introduced individually and framed to solicit recognition – to prevent distraction from the central enigma.
Described thus, the film appears as manipulative as Spielberg’s critics contend. They assume his techniques ‘work over’ audiences, enslaving them to a reactionary worldview. In context, however, the scene is amenable to a complementary, although not necessarily ‘alternative’, reading.
Close encounters with realism
Whatever other discourses they embody, Spielberg’s films operate as commercial entertainments within classical realist parameters. A tenet of realism is that the diegesis springs fully formed upon the screen as though pre-existent; the narrative appears to develop independently of the camera or spectator’s look. The reading offered here runs counter to hostile criticism that ascribes ideological effects to deep structures yet ignores or accepts unquestioningly what is visibly evident – in other words, takes realism as given. Andrew Gordon, for example, deems Close Encounters ‘silly’, an example of ‘narcissistic euphoria’ by which Americans escape from ‘debasement of the environment, depletion of natural resources, and overpopulation’ (1980: 156), although why films should be judged against these issues remains unclear. He considers it inferior to 1950s predecessors that at least manifested healthy Cold War nuclear terror (1980: 157). Yet, the criticism runs,
Close Encounters of the Third Kind – the director in his element: Truffaut surrounded by cameras, lights and an inscribed screen
repeatedly, incidents in Close Encounters occur not with any dramatic logic, but simply because they give the director an excuse for striking visual or emotional effects empty of content. The opening in the desert (a quote from Them [1954] or It Came from Outer Space [1953]) provides a sense of ominous mystery, but there is no necessity for the aliens to dump the planes in a desert or for there to be a sandstorm when the UFO followers arrive. (1980: 159)
The sandstorm, which requires a desert setting, is unquestionably necessary to my reading. Close Encounters offers more than the single fixed subject position proposed by Colin MacCabe’s (1981) classic realist text thesis. It foregrounds and sustains a self-reflexive discourse utilising imagery and themes traceable throughout Spielberg’s career. Aspects of mise-en-scène and editing, exceeding their narrational function, link together to suggest significance beyond localised effects. Within familiar narrative conventions, style inaugurates strategies of associational form to create an internal logic that nevertheless reflects upon more obvious thematic concerns.
Self-reflexivity
Darkness at the start (and after the end credits), together with a display of pure light, inscribes onto the film its own materiality and the spectating situation. Gradual fading in on a blank screen dramatises mental projection that occurs in the darkness through spectatorial anticipation; facilitates narration by evoking mental schemata; enables films to be regarded as addressing deep-rooted needs and desires; and consequently initiates spectatorial (mis)recognition of the self as subject of the enunciation. In Metz’s words,
there are two cones in the auditorium: one ending on the screen and starting both in the projection box and in the spectator’s vision insofar as it is projective, and one starting from the screen and ‘deposited’ in the spectator’s perception insofar as it is introjective (on the retina, a second screen). When I say that ‘I see’ the film, I mean thereby a unique mixture of two contrary currents: the film is what I receive, and it is also what I release, since it does not pre-exist my entering the auditorium and I only need close my eyes to suppress it. Releasing it, I am the projector, receiving it, I am the screen; in both these figures together, I am the camera, pointed yet recording. (1975: 53)
The headlamps, penetrating the blankness, mirror (with all the Lacanian implications of that word) the spectator’s projective gaze and the projector beam, while Spielberg’s characteristic use of wind to signify heightened perception echoes Metz’s metaphorical ‘currents’ of vision. ‘Orchestral’ tones in the darkness – analogous to a stage overture before the curtain rises – underscore the film’s status as performance. The fading in of the fiction, moreover, enacts visual physiology, the spectator’s eyes adjusting to brightness at this moment.
Similarly self-reflexive openings include Ford’s The Searchers (1956), in which the screen blackens after the credits, placing the spectator (retrospectively) in the dark domestic space of the first shot from which a character, whose optical point-of-view initially matches the spectator’s, opens a doorway onto the western landscape. Brian Henderson notes that ‘Spielberg says he has seen it a dozen times, including twice on location with Close Encounters’ (1980–81: 9). Consider too the Hitchcock films beginning with actual or metaphorical stage curtains rising such as Stage Fright (1950) and Rear Window (1954). Lloyd Michaels, who relates Bergman’s Persona (1966) to ‘The Imaginary Signifier’, notes that its credits end ‘with a white screen of projected light – the absence of all images – which then becomes the hospital wall of the narrative’s first scene’ (1978: 74). Critics recognise self-reflexivity in anti-narrative films such as Bergman’s, or in Hitchcock and Ford films that cross the low culture/high culture threshold thanks to auteur theory. Yet the lure of narrative and spectacular pleasure, together with realist expectations and prejudices about populist cinema, distract from the significance (as opposed to mere recognition) of this facet of Spielberg’s work.
Close Encounters plays with disavowal, soliciting Imaginary identification while asserting its presence as Symbolic. Captions occur extensively, even when unnecessary. So what if young Barry inhabits ‘Muncie, Indiana’? How is understanding enhanced by knowing that a receiving dish is the ‘Goldstone Radio Telescope Station 14’? As Liz Brown notes of translation subtitles in documentaries, they ‘alter the image, rendering it an image with captions, which has consequences for the way it is read’ (1978: 91). Conferring authenticity on images, captions simultaneously compromise realism, distancing the spectator by drawing attention to narrative agency. Moreover, viewers aware that Muncie markets itself as the ‘average’ American town, ‘Middletown’ in a classic sociological study (Lynd & Lynd 1929, cited in Brian Winston 1995: 212), enter knowing complicity.
Perceived self-reflexivity sets in train shifting subject positions: the historical spectator defined by his or her discursive formation brought to the auditorium, the subject of discours when the film declares its materiality, and the identifying subject sutured into histoire. This shifting is pleasurably fascinating, requiring work by the spectator, as in figure/ground perception problems. To the extent the spectator suspends disbelief in the film’s impossibilities, it foregrounds mechanisms central to all mainstream cinema but particularly important in genres dependent on special effects.
Smoke and mirrors
Spielberg describes movies as ‘a technical illusion that people fall for. My job is to take that technique and hide it so well that never once are you reminded of where you are. If the audience stands up, points to the screen and says, “Wow! What a special effect!” – I’ve failed’ (quoted in Crawley 1983a: 31). This should be a salutary warning to distrust directors’ explanations of their craft. While Spielberg’s point remains valid for most realist practice employing effects routinely (matte shots or, more recently, computer generated imagery (CGI) to change backgrounds, or miniatures to avoid location shooting or expensive sets), fantasy movies depend heavily on admiration for special effects in their own right. Jaws, grounded in plausibility, would be diminished if we saw hydraulic pipes operating what we have to forget is a mechanical shark. But the rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) or the mothership landing in Close Encounters satisfy because admiration for audacity and skill counterpoise implausibility. Audiences often gasp and even cheer at special effects, and discuss them animatedly afterwards.
Insisting on the self-reflexivity of Spielberg’s practice in the face of his own comments, my claims might seem extravagant. Certainly my reading of the opening of Close Encounters would be untenable were it not supported by examples throughout. These, in light of Spielberg’s subsequent output, are evidently concerned less with UFOs or – as several critics contend – messianic saviours, than with cinema itself. Garrett Stewart (1978) suffered no embarrassment advancing such an argument before it became fashionable to denigrate Spielberg for his childish appeal and commercial success, while both Neil Sinyard and Richard Combs, neither of whom develop their comments, recognised cinematic imagery (as opposed to merely references) in the films. Sinyard explains that ‘Close Encounters celebrates cinema in the way it incorporates the film experience into the action proper’ (1987: 50), while Combs’ journalism frequently shows how ‘in Spielberg’s best films, all of cinema is somehow there (or at least a sizeable and satisfying portion of popular narrative cinema), an encapsulation of its history as well as a playful toying with its possibilities’ (1988a: 29).
Casting Truffaut – director, critic (intermediary to spectacle), creator of the auteur – makes sense given his role as director of a project coordinating technicians to master communication through light and sound. Indeed, he despatches a film crew after an encounter in the Gobi Desert; they accompany him to India; and he stands amongst a bank of movie cameras in the spectacular finale.
Spielberg’s ‘solar wind’ motif, rendering psychic projection palpable as light, creates a Hitchcockian false climax when gathered UFO followers mistake helicopter searchlights for their objects of desire. This demonstrates how quickly Spielberg’s lighting code becomes an intrinsic norm, and exemplifies how spectatorial and characters’ vision coincide as we share the error. A cheat as well as shot/reverse-shots encourage identification: the helicopters are unheard until overhead. This, although the first ‘dishonest’ manipulation, is at least the third time the spectator is tricked – car headlights behind the protagonist Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) set up the unexpected flying saucer ascension over his truck; resemblance between Balaban and Dreyfuss was earlier noted. Spectators are thus implicitly invited to modify perceptions (Brode 1995: 67).
Visible beams function consistently within the cinematic metaphor as ‘mysterious lighting’ (Sinyard 1987: 4) but more besides. During Neary’s first encounter, for example, the solar wind oscillates a crossing signal, making dazzle from the spaceship flicker like film projection. William A. Fraker, cinematographer on 1941, explains that smoke permeated every scene of that film, hiding wires for special effects models and creating distance perspective on miniature sets, but also to make lights flare and provide ‘texture’ (1979: 1211). Similar reasons probably caused many light shafts in Close Encounters; nevertheless, having evolved this visual style, called ‘God Lights’ after childhood experience of similar emanations in a synagogue (Baxter 1996: 20), Spielberg continues using it in conjunction with protagonists’ desire in scenes lacking any obvious dependence on effects, as in most of The Color Purple.
Characters repeatedly are attracted to light, awestruck, their faces illuminated by their projected vision: air traffic controllers gathered by their radar screen, UFO experts around their computer, followers assembled at the roadside, as well as the main characters, Neary, Jillian (Melinda Dillon), Barry (Cary Guffey) and Lacombe. Representing the audience, they ‘spend most of the film watching and listening to the lovely sights and sounds’ (Corliss, quoted in Crawley 1983a: 88). Scientists applaud the spacecraft’s aerial ballet towards the end. Combs likens Neary’s urge to encounter his vision to that ‘which draws audiences into the film, inviting them to become Everyman … So what the film is “about”, in a way, is its own illusionism’ (1978: 64). Spielberg has claimed elsewhere that ‘light is a magnet’ (quoted in Crawley 1983a: 123); while Pye and Myles record that in the production stills – important contributors to the narrative image –‘the only spectacle was blinding white light’ (1979: 241).
Those attracted to the landing, Lacombe says, are ‘compelled’ to find ‘an answer’. They parallel the spectator, carried forward in pursuit of narrative closure. In view of mainstream narrative’s conventionalism, it seems appropriate that Neary asks ‘If I’ve never been here before, how come I know so much?’. Devices such as subjective point-of-view and sound when Neary wears a gas mask invite identification with him (assumed anyhow by foregrounding his story), although shot/reverse-shots establish looser identification with others – with the entire ‘audience’ at the touchdown, so that spectacle explicitly becomes communal experience.
Neary and Jillian’s relationship somewhat perfunctorily provides heterosexual romance, characteristically intertwined with classical Hollywood cinema’s goal-oriented quest, confirming them as identification figures: separately, then together, they cue audience responses. Their spectatorship at the landing, hidden behind a boulder, is literally voyeuristic. Their dialogue contains cinemagoers’ remarks – ‘You wanna see better?’ ‘I can see fine’– while exclamations such as ‘We’re the only ones to know!’ liken such spectatorship, as psychoanalysis insists, to children excitedly fantasising the primal scene. Glance/object editing collapses the camera’s look into theirs, in turn becoming ours as we share their point-of-view. As in Hitchcock films discussed by Laura Mulvey, ‘the audience is absorbed into a voyeuristic situation within the screen scene and diegesis which parodies his [sic] own in the cinema’ (1981: 212), although scopophilia in Spielberg is often arguably de-sexualised. The scientists’ sunglasses also signify voyeurism by emphasising their looking yet masking their eyes: this confers disarming power on the wearers, analogous to illusory mastery experienced by film spectators.
‘Laying bare the device’ foregrounds self-reflexivity, an aspect of ‘artistic motivation’ (Bordwell et al. 1985: 21) that throughout Spielberg’s films is also realistically motivated. A tracking shot of chanting crowds in India fixes a boom microphone centre frame, ostentatiously transgressing a primary rule of ‘invisible’ narration. Searchlights mark the landing site, the big attraction, from afar, like a film premiere. (Or rock concert: the site is codenamed ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’. Among the first sounds at the landing site is an engineer testing the public address system, while communication with the aliens occurs through synthesised keyboards accompanied by a light show.) As David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger observe, ‘laying bare the device’ encourages connoisseurship: ‘only a discerning minority of viewers might take notice’ (1985: 22).
The entire cinematic apparatus is present. With its cameras, lights, sound engineers and tannoy voice (‘Gentlemen, ladies, take your positions please’; ‘Could we have the lights in the arena down fifty per cent please?’) the site resembles what it ultimately is: a studio set. Even the obsessive secrecy that surrounded Spielberg’s project is paralleled within the film. Screens within the diegesis foreground the screen we are watching. Barry, captivated by off-screen lights, is filmed through a fly-screen, making visible the plane of the ‘mirror’ constitutive of primary identification. Secondary identification also is strongly encouraged; his wondrous expression, combined with evidence from the light beams that something is there, fuels desire to share his view. Spectators ‘project’ both into his situation and, as that desire is immediately frustrated, into the narrative (classical realist expectations virtually guaranteeing eventual satisfaction).
Screens and blinds intersect intradiegetic ‘currents’ of vision. Barred shadows render light visible. At the finale, the blinding white rectangle opening into the mother-ship draws both Lacombe and Neary – ‘director’ and ‘spectator’ respectively, central identification figures in converging narratives. ‘Perception and consciousness are a light, as Freud put it, in the double sense of an illumination and an opening, as in the arrangement of the cinema, which contains both’ (Metz 1975: 52). (Paul Schrader, who wrote an early treatment for Close Encounters, is an astute and knowledgeable critic well-versed in theory. Although the Writers Guild of America arbitrated in favour of Spielberg’s sole screenplay credit when Schrader subsequently sought recognition, it would be interesting, in view of these emphases on vision, mirrors and identification, to know whether the homophony between ‘Lacombe’ and ‘Lacan’ is coincidental.)
Neary dissolves into the blank screen, preceding the spectator, as he drifts like Alice through the looking-glass from unsatisfactory suburban existence (collapsed marriage, unemployment) into fantasy, his sustaining object of desire. This is explicitly likened to cinema. Regression into noble savagery – marked by his smeared face and intense expression as he obsessively models the landing site from dirt and garbage inside his house – alternates with point-of-view shots, showing neighbours’ domestic activities; as they rake lawns and wash cars, camera placement and mise-en-scène underscore Neary’s alienation, likening them to ‘pod people’ in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The spaceship interior, conversely, recalls an enormous picture-palace foyer, a glistening chandelier at its centre. Rectangular screens both project and receive light, reminiscent of Metz’s mutual opposing currents. (Reciprocity of projection and introjection is indeed highlighted by Neary and Jillian’s creative compulsions.) The screens and their beams are photographed side-on in shots resembling the transition to the projection room scene in Citizen Kane, by which Spielberg’s lighting code is undoubtedly influenced. The ship’s hub is a gargantuan turning reel.
Disney’s ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ accompanies Neary’s transportation. Cinema is less sub-theme than substance in this film, with its allusions, ranging from obvious, well-documented examples – the crop-spraying and Mount Rushmore sequences of North by Northwest (1959) in the climb up Devil’s Tower – to arcane quotations and in-jokes. The bass from the mothership replicates tuba notes played by Capra’s Mr Deeds on inheriting $20 million – Close Encounters’ final agreed budget. Fences foregrounded in the opening sandstorm and later the incongruous ship in the desert are borrowings from Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Spielberg habitually makes explicit what Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva and others have argued, that all production and reading are intertextual: any text, insists Barthes (1975a), is a tissue of quotations interpreted by bringing to bear memories of other texts.
In view of charges of manipulation against Spielberg, it is worth insisting that spectatorial involvement in many cases depends less on conventional strategies of invisible narration (present, after all, in most commercial cinema) than this notion of productivity, which obliterates subject/object distinctions. The subject becomes a position where the spectator’s discourses interact with the text’s (Henderson 1980–81). Hence the spectator often has the sense of being the subject of enunciation. In Spielberg’s films, where the potential work on offer is considerable, the spectator may become pleasurably involved in the text beyond mere narrative comprehension.
Close Encounters and postmodernism
This makes Spielberg’s films ‘writable’ texts, as defined by Barthes. My intention is not to recuperate them into high culture, but to propose that their complexity is easily ignored by critics imposing inappropriate reading models. ‘Re-reading,’ argues Barthes, ‘is an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society which would have us “throw away” the story once it has been consumed (“devoured”), so that one can move on to another story, buy another book’ (1974: 15). If so with books, accessible wherever and whenever time allows, how much truer of films, which lack concrete existence for the spectator, for whom they are ‘imaginary signifiers’, and were – prior to video – generally perceived, unlike literature, as transitory. Indeed, Britton notes, ‘to present something as entertainment is to define it as a commodity to be consumed rather than as a text to be read’ (1986: 4).
Yet many people do return to films repeatedly. Hit-movie producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer observed: ‘American teenage boy audiences go back four, five, six times. You can meet people who’ve seen Beverly Hills Cop II fifteen times’ (Naked Hollywood, programme 3; see also Walkerdine (1990) for how some film viewers use video in ways that make redundant older assumptions about consumption). Close Encounters, appealing to such an audience, invites close reading. So dense is the aural and visual information that jokes and references are half-hidden: the anonymous tannoy voice, buried in ambient sound and marginalised in the spectator’s consciousness by pressure of narrative and enthralling spectacle, instructs the scientists to ‘Watch the skies!’ (reference: The Thing From Another World, 1951), reports that spacecraft are heading from ‘the north-north west’, and pages ‘George Kaplan’ – the non-existent personage in North by Northwest whose identity Cary Grant’s character unwittingly adopts by appearing to answer the call. Spielberg’s decision to modify Close Encounters for a ‘special edition’, whatever the commercial calculation, seems to confirm its amenability to repeated watching.
Particularly noteworthy – especially given promotional hype (endlessly recycled biographically) about Spielberg’s belief in UFOs – are the lengths the film goes to not to be taken seriously, certainly not to present itself as realist. After the alien crafts’ first display, the tannoy intones, ‘That’s all, folks!’ – the Looney Tunes slogan. If spectators, paradoxically, feel involved in a film that plays with its own conventions rather than addresses serious issues, this suggests play is central to cinematic pleasure. As Metz argues, ‘any spectator will tell you that he [sic] “doesn’t believe in it”, but everything happens as if there were nonetheless someone to be deceived, someone who really will “believe in it’’’(1975: 70). This ‘someone’ is associated with childhood: ‘Cinema, like dreaming, is regressive in that it calls up the unconscious processes of the mind and favours what Freud calls the pleasure principle over the reality principle’ (Turner 1993:). The children’s adventure tone of Close Encounters exemplifies this, with its obligatory wacky car chase and deceitful authorities trying to thwart our heroes’ desires.
The central characters who are transported, because of their wonder and trust, are the infant Barry and the explicitly childlike Neary. (Neary plays with model trains, becomes breathlessly excited when attempting to describe his UFO sighting, and is rejected as a ‘cry baby’ by his son when he cracks under the confusion induced by his vision.) Neary’s childlike nature is linked to cinema spectatorship: he wants to go and see Pinocchio (1940), an option his children reject, and his wife mocks him as ‘Jiminy Cricket’. Moreover, the extra-terrestrials announce themselves by animating Barry’s toys (delighting him and, thanks to childlike point-of-view shots, us) and his mother’s kitchen devices (which terrifies her and, by use of her adult optical point-of-view, discomforts us).
Imaginary or Symbolic?
Spectatorial regression is partly a function of the viewing situation (darkness, comfort and physical passivity satisfy archaic urges to lose a sense of self which Jean-Louis Baudry (1974–75) considers inherent in the psychical structure); partly also a closely related result of continuity editing, positioning the spectator so that he or she forgets physical presence and ‘identifies with himself [sic] … as a pure act of perception (as wakefulness, alertness)’ (Metz 1975: 51); and partly a result of narrative, typically involving pursuit of a lost object. Even complex narratives re-enact Freud’s fort-da game in which the infant masters its mother’s absence:
the pattern of classical narrative is that an original settlement is disrupted and ultimately restored … Narrative is a source of consolation: lost objects are a cause of anxiety … In Lacanian theory, it is an original lost object – the mother’s body – which drives forward the narrative of our lives, impelling us to pursue substitutes for this lost paradise in the endless metonymic movement of desire. (Eagleton 1983: 185)
The Imaginary is associated with pre-Symbolic infancy when Barry and his mother embrace in the ‘projector beam’ from the unseen spacecraft before he leaves, and finally when her quest results in reunion; simultaneously Neary, embraced by extra-terrestrials resembling human infants, is absorbed into the appropriately named ‘mothership’. The spectator too enacts the fort-da game, starting from pre-cinematic perception of the narrative image (associated here with blank light and reports of breathtaking spectacle) that establishes desire for the absent experience, and continuing through the UFOs’ tantalisingly repeated appearance/disappearance. Tricks played on spectatorial perception, described earlier, similarly lead – through a process of illusory mastery – to confusion, to mastery regained.
The mother’s body, however, ‘stands as a representation, no more than that, of what is ultimately unrepresentable, in that the object that could overcome the lack is non-existent’ (Lapsley & Westlake 1988: 68): it is the unsignifiable, consequently unremembered, antecedent to the Mirror Phase. Rosemary Jackson identifies the goal of artistic fantasy as ‘arrival at a point of absolute unity of self and other, subject and object, at a zero point of entropy’ (1981: 77) where, in Jacques Lacan’s words, ‘identity is meaningless’ (1968: 191). This precisely describes the absorption of Neary, representative of both spectator and filmmaker, into the blank screen. He remains where we have to return from: through the looking-glass. Jackson emphasises that Lewis Carroll’s Alice visits ‘a realm of non-signification, of non-sense’; that Through the Looking-Glass contains an epiphanal moment in ‘a place without words’; that The Hunting of the Snark has a topography which is ‘a perfect and absolute blank’; but that Carroll was always destined to return to ‘the empty pleasures of signs and language games’ (1981: 143–4) – just as Spielberg and the spectator are left with their ‘tissue of quotations’. Nevertheless, the film’s spectacular climax takes us part way, by means of escape from language into abstract sound and light, the ‘raw materials’ of cinematic signification.
Neary’s transportation, the projection of spectatorial desire, reverses the three determining moments in Lacan’s account of childhood development. He regresses through the Mirror Phase, subsuming his identity to transcendental unity; he fulfils desire symbolised by the fort-da game, escaping from positionality in language; and in breaking family ties and defying authority to get there, he overturns the Oedipus complex (submission to the Law).
Spectatorial regression to the Imaginary occurs through primary identification with the camera and, consequently, secondary identification with characters standing in as the spectator’s double, the Mirror Phase’s more complete specular counterpart. The double positions the perceiving subject, while satisfying need for mastery by providing an object for voyeurism. As Metz claims,
at the cinema … I am all-perceiving … absent from the screen, but certainly present in the auditorium, a great eye and ear without which the perceived would have no one to perceive it, the constitutive instance, in other words, of the cinema signifier (it is I who make the film). (1975: 51)
Typical of the fantastic, Close Encounters (like most Spielberg films) incorporates character doublings that similarly define roles mutually. Neary’s and Jillian’s odysseys begin with mirror shots, while the couple are filmed identically before they have met, moonlight casting leaf shadows across their faces: later, each sustains the other’s determination to pursue the quest. Cross-cutting connects Neary, struggling with a map, to Laughlan, the cartographer who dispatches him on his quest and whose name, in turn, echoes Lacombe’s. Lacombe is linked by a cut from a conference where he demonstrates sign language symbolising synthesised sounds, to Barry playing the same tune on his xylophone. At the finale, an extra-terrestrial mirrors Lacombe’s signing, while the musical duet and light show explicitly establish the visitors as projecting back the scientists’ desires. Moreover, the mothership’s underside – envisaged as a ‘city of lights’ (Spielberg, quoted in Sinyard 1987: 47) – reflects street patterns already seen in aerial shots.
Celebration
Implications of the films’ spectator/text relationships are considered in later chapters. By way of provisional conclusion, we can note that as public event Close Encounters shares elements of an ancient literary genre, the menippea. This ‘broke the demands of historical realism or probability’ (Jackson 1981: 14) and was linked with carnival – a ritualised festival where ‘everyone is an active participant, everyone communes … The carnival life is life drawn out of its usual rut, it is to a degree “life turned inside out”, “life the wrong way round”’ (Bakhtin 1973, quoted in Jackson 1981: 15–16).
The mirror metaphor is apparent. Communion is important too, not only because the film’s finale inscribes it, equating light with aspirations, a convention of religious iconography as well as a distinctive Spielberg characteristic; but also because cinema essentially entails social expression and containment of potentially subversive desires, a technologically sanitised version of menippea, in which legal and moral transgressions had free rein during periods of licensed misrule. Like carnival, cinema is potentially subversive in that it proceeds by deconstructing ‘the most cherished of all human unities: the unity of “character”’ (Jackson 1981: 82).
Truffaut admired Close Encounters for succeeding even with ‘no bad guys in it’ (Sinyard 1987: 47). Conflict is not so much resolved as dissolved: conflict implies difference, which the Imaginary abnegates. Just as Rocky II (1979), according to Walkerdine, fulfils vicariously ‘the terrifying desire to be somewhere else and someone else: the struggle to “make it”’ (1990: 341), Close Encounters offers relief from the self and life’s contradictions – while never pretending to be other than illusion.
Britton describes seeing a horror film with an audience for whom ‘predictability was clearly the main source of pleasure’, noting that ‘art had shrunk to its first cause, and I had the incongruous sense … of having been invited to participate in communion’ (1986: 3). Ironically, his auteurist preference for films that address universal moral dilemmas blinds him to a major component of cinematic pleasure that Close Encounters unashamedly, although less predictably, celebrates. Fantasy and science fiction have since Georges Méliès been spectacles of light, excesses of signification contained by generic conventions. Paul Virilio argues: ‘The matter provided and received in collective, simultaneous fashion by cinemagoers is light … In cinema, it would be even more appropriate to speak of public lighting rather than public image’ (1994: 21). Literary and dramatic models of criticism fail to recognise that the signifier is as important as narrative and diegesis. Pleasure involves the cinematic apparatus as much as its representations.