From its multilingual opening to its multilingual finale, Close Encounters of the Third Kind is about language: verbal, visual, electronic, and musical—communication and its limitations, language and its possibilities; and it is about the ineffable things which are beyond speech or imaging—things having to do with emotion and yearning, things touching upon the spiritual and the supernatural.
In his article “Politics and Parousia in Close Encounters of the Third Kind” Robert Torry called Steven Spielberg’s classic science fiction film of 1977 “the most rhetorically compelling film of the American bicentennial era” (188-96).
America’s post-World War II attainment of superpower status encouraged a sense of what Torry called “a divinely willed national purpose” (189), a sense of fitness for great things which had its origins in America’s Calvinist past and was not extinguished by the traumas of the Vietnam era. However, Close Encounters’s themes are not narrowly national. The arrival of the Mother Ship occurs in America, but though the story is told from an American perspective, Close Encounters is actively, thematically supranational. Indeed, rather than being a glorification of the nation at the second century mark, the film might be seen now, at the distance of twenty years, as an early view of a world in which in some respects, communication being one of them, national boundaries are all but transparent.
Indeed, the film is about breaking down barriers—national, linguistic, physical, and bureaucratic—in pursuit of knowledge. When the barriers are broken, it culminates in an event which is world changing. It suggests that humankind has reached the point where it is ready to enter the community of the cosmos, and it provides an American, Roy Neary, to demonstrate some of the characteristics which perhaps make humans worthy to do so. It should be noted that while it is a computer interface which makes the final musical conversation with the alien guests possible, the characteristics which allow Neary to make his way to the final meeting at Devil’s Tower have little to do with technical expertise or computer literacy--the virtues which we are being told in the nineties are basic for evolving twenty-first century humans. Rather, Neary demonstrates tenacity, creativity, curiosity, excitement, courage, and, finally and perhaps most importantly, the conviction that, as he says repeatedly in the film, all this “means something. This is important.”
Almost every critic who has written about Close Encounters discusses its religious dimensions, what B. H. Fairchild, in his excellent 1978 article on the film, identified as “the simple recognition that there is More, that the natural and mundane are not closed but open-ended and extend ultimately perhaps into the supernatural” (342-49). The spiritual is linked to no particular religion in the film. The volunteers selected by officialdom to interact with the alien visitors attend a chapel service before they troop out to the Mother Ship. Amid a variety of symbols drawn from many religions, the chaplain prays that the Lord may “send his angels” to guide the travelers on their journey. A higher reality is invoked, but this reality is not the tiny figures that emerge from the ship; rather it is inclusive of them as well as of humankind.
Another, nearly contemporary, filmic example of the sense of spiritual yearning seen in Close Encounters, outside a specific religious context, can be found in a scene in Federico Fellini’s 1974 film Amarcord in which boatloads of villagers go out to wait in the cold of the night for the passing of a brightly lighted ocean liner not unlike the Mother Ship in its mysterious enormity. Their anticipation and yearning for the mysterious transit of the huge ship filled with its unseen passengers and traveling into the night while they watch and marvel in their tiny stationary boats may serve to illuminate comments made by Fellini and quoted by Fairchild:
Like many people, I have no religion and I am just sitting in a small boat drifting with tide. Today we stand naked, defenseless, and more alone than at any time in history, waiting for something, perhaps a miracle, perhaps Martians, Who knows? (342)
In 1973, before Amarcord appeared, El Espiritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive), by Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice, had expressed some of these same feelings of spiritual yearning, placing them in the character of Ana, the mystically inclined child. The spirituality expressed in Erice’s lyrical and melancholic film is transmuted into secular terms although grounded in the long history of intense and mystical Spanish Catholicism. The film draws much of its filmic style from seventeenth-century Spanish paintings such as the religious pictures of Ribera and Murillo, but in The Spirit of the Beehive it is a science fiction film, Frankenstein, which imaginatively captivates the mind of Ana and sets off the action. Erice’s film demonstrates that the secular and the spiritual dimensions not only coexist but may complement and even illuminate each other. The same sort of imaginative mixing of the spiritual and the secular permeates Close Encounters. The imagination is the realm out of which the spiritual evolves, and the figure of Barry Guiler, the innocent and unfearing child who refers to the UFOs and their paraphernalia as “Toys,” serves to remind the viewer of Close Encounters of childlike innocence and openness in the face of the unknown.
Critics of Close Encounters have suggested a variety of religious analogs for events portrayed in the film, suggesting that it refers to Pentecost or to apocalyptic events. But in fact many of the biblical references in Close Encounters are from the Pentateuch and more specifically the Book of Genesis. We are being told that this film is about the beginning of something, not the end. The most obvious biblical reference is the broadcast of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, which is on the television screen in the Neary household the night Neary has his close encounter. But the reference to Moses and his mountain serves only as a general analog and not as an equivalent to what happens at the Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters. The Devil’s Tower is not Mt. Sinai, Roy Neary is not Moses, and the alien visitors are not God.
On the other hand, Robert Torry compares the Mother Ship’s arrival to Parousia, the moment described in 1 Thessalonians 4:17 and 5:6, when the chosen are “caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (qtd. in Torry 190). In this passage the faithful are exhorted to remain awake and ready for the arrival of the Lord. In Close Encounters sleep is the final obstacle to be overcome in the ascent of the Devil’s Tower. Neary, Jillian Guiler, and a third invitee climb the mountain pursued by government helicopters spraying sleeping gas. The third person stops to rest, is gassed, and falls into a deep sleep. Climbing the mountain behind Jillian and faltering, Neary exhorts Jillian to keep moving and not to look back, an exhortation in itself biblical, as it calls to mind the exhortation to Lot’s wife who looks back toward Sodom and is as a consequence turned into a pillar of salt. But in Close Encounters, when Neary slips and begins to slide back down, Jillian does look back and reaches her hand down to his. He perseveres and grasps her offered hand, scrambles to the top, and remains awake to reach the other side. The motif of salvation by grasping an offered hand, or damnation by failing to do so, is played out in several other Spielberg films. To give just one example, in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Dr. Schneider dangles over a murky pit, much like the soul in a Jonathan Edwards sermon, and is given the choice of reaching for the grail on a ledge below her or grasping Indiana Jones’s extended hand to be pulled to safety. Blinded by desire for the object which is the symbol of salvation, she rejects the offered hand and falls into the pit. Then the situation is reversed, and Jones dangles over the pit. He is given the same choice—grasp after the grail or accept the extended hand of his father who finally calls him by his chosen name; he accepts the offered hand and is saved.
In “Close Encounters of the Authoritarian Kind,” a highly polemical 1983 article on the political implications of Close Encounters, Tony Williams presented the view that the spiritual impulse in Close Encounters indicates a childish yearning for authoritarian control (23-29). But this view seems narrow and shortsighted. The search for the spiritual has been the source of too many attainments in art, thought, and culture and is too central to human desires to be dismissed as a sign of arrested development.
More to the point is Williams’s allusion to the story of the Tower of Babel in which God stopped humankind from building a giant tower to reach the heavens by confusing human speech (27), as in Genesis 11:6-7:
The Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will be impossible for them. Come let us go down, and there confuse their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
The idea that a single language and the ability to communicate which it provides will make it possible for humans to do anything “which they have imagined to do” is a potent one (Williams 27). In a sense the Babel passage in Genesis is undone in the final sequence in Close Encounters. Humankind proves it has come of age by reachieving its lost unity of language.
The concept of overreaching, central in the Babel myth, to the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, and to myths such as that of Pandora’s Box, is important to science fiction writers who can be divided roughly into two groups: optimists who have a general faith in human possibilities and the human capacity to imagine things worthwhile doing, and the pessimists who weave plots which depend on one or another of the seven deadly sins, expressions of humankind’s frailties, or on overweening human pride.
Spielberg is occasionally found among the pessimists. Many of his films depend on someone’s doing the forbidden thing, whether it be feeding a certain creature after midnight, building on sacred land, or opening the Ark of the Covenant. The forbidden thing being done, Pandora’s box being opened, evil escapes. In Spielberg’s 1993 blockbuster Jurassic Park, avarice leads the theme park developers to clone dinosaurs for profit, as, in Jaws, avarice led the Amity town fathers to ignore the obvious possibility of shark attack in the hope of salvaging their town’s summer tourist season. On the one hand Spielberg understands the impulse of the park’s director (played by Richard Attenborough) to make as much money as possible on the park, its trappings, and souvenirs—the same ones Spielberg audaciously uses and promotes in Jurassic Park’s ice cream eating scene. On the other hand, the film posits that profit, the very motive for which the film was created, is blinding, and coupled with technology can lead to destruction and death.
Unlike Jurassic Park, Close Encounters belongs solidly in the optimistic science fiction camp. It portrays new technologies as a natural and expected outcome of human development, an indication of health and growth, and posits the encouraging view of creativity and capability and aspiration that the universe is more than a collection of rules waiting to be broken, and that ordinary people can do extraordinary things.
One of Spielberg’s great strengths as a filmmaker is his loving but ambivalent portrayal of the details of everyday life at the same time he is tearing that life apart. The toys in Barry Guiler’s room which are animated by the aliens’ visit are examined by the camera in affectionate detail, as are the items in Jillian’s bedroom and kitchen, as is Neary’s house and his model train setup.
The details of Neary’s family life must look and feel familiar if the audience is to identify with the Nearys. Roy Neary’s wife attempts to hide the sunburn caused by Neary’s exposure to the UFOs and wants him to forget his encounter with them. She is embarrassed and bewildered by what has happened to him and desperately wants her ordinary life back again, but there is no going back for Neary. The attractions of his lost life are expressed poetically in the scene in which he is sculpting a huge model of the Devil’s Tower in his living room. His family has deserted him. Unshaven and exhausted, he stops to rest, pulls back the window curtains and looks longingly out the window at the gloriously green and placid lawns of his neighborhood. He watches his neighbors at work with their garden hoses and lawnmowers. Then he closes the curtain and returns to the obsessive creation within his house. Critics have often commented on the childlike innocence of the UFO seekers in Close Encounters, but this scene shows Neary as a man who has lost his innocence. He no longer belongs in the green paradise of suburbia. There is something beyond that world which he cannot ignore. No one asks Neary if he wants to be implanted with a vision. The vision is simply given to him, and once it is there he has no choice but to respond to it. It means something. It is important.1
To underscore the contrast between the continuous and unchanging round of suburban life and the sense of urgency Neary feels, Spielberg uses a classic symbol in a modern way. The hourglass is used in Renaissance art—for example in Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil, and Melancholia—to symbolize time and mortality. On the television screen as Neary is working on his mountain an hourglass with its sands running out appears as the logo for the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.” Next on the screen comes a commercial. The Budweiser Clydesdales are seen pulling a huge beer wagon. And we hear a song in the background—the king is coming, the king of beers. What comes next is the image of the Devil’s Tower which sends Neary on his quest across country. This reference to the coming of the king suggests the apocalyptic second coming of Christ, but as we have seen, Spielberg also refers to Moses’s mountain experience, and to Babel. It is as if he is very consciously providing references and analogs—as if to say: these things are like this, but they are not this.
The assertion that puzzling things have meaning beyond the cluttered round of everyday life is central to Close Encounters. Throughout, the struggle to understand, to decipher, to connect is the goal and source of excitement and wonder and fear. Much of the film’s delight has to do with the thrill of translating and decoding. From the old Mexican in the Sonoran Desert at the film’s beginning who tells the investigators that the “sun came out last night and sang” to him, to the chanting pilgrims on the Indian hillside who thrust their fingers skyward when asked where the tones they are chanting came from, to the line of UN-flagged jeeps racing across the desert to find an abandoned ship, the mood is one of feverish pleasure at receiving and deciphering alien signals.
Both Jillian Guiler and Roy Neary respond to their close encounters by making works of art. Neary sculpts his three dimensional versions of the mountain he has never seen out of mashed potatoes, shaving cream, and finally out of the clay he uses to build model railroad displays and dirt taken from his yard. Jillian Guiler draws multiple versions of the mountain. Their visionary experience is so compelling that they must try to translate what they have seen internally into an external physical form—to make it real, to let everyone else see, to see it again themselves. Not surprisingly, when artists are asked why they make art, these are among the answers they give. Artists will often say that they make art because they have to, that there is a compulsion to give a physical form to things seen internally—to make them real and visible. The film suggests that the ability to have visions and translate them into physical form through physical action—the factors which make a person a visual or dramatic artist, or a filmmaker, are among the factors which distinguish Neary and Guiler and fit them for the new world humankind is entering with the arrival of the Mother Ship. They are the ones who were invited.
Linguistic and musical translations are even more obvious than visual motifs in Close Encounters, which begins with a translation from English to Spanish, and then to French. The first words we hear are in English, as one of the investigators asks a Mexican counterpart, “Are we the first?” These words establish the framework for what happens in the film. The aliens’ arrival is a first, and that question sets the tone of the film as being about the experience of beginning something new.
A visual metaphor for the communication barriers to be circumvented in the film is provided in this first sequence as car lights appear out of a sandstorm (a mysterious image which presages the later appearance of car lights and then of the UFO’s lights behind Neary’s truck on a darkened road). Figures walk through the dust toward a break in a low iron fence. The broken physical barrier serves as a good metaphor for the linguistic barriers to be broken. In this scene we are introduced to Lacombe, the French UFO investigator, played by François Truffaut, and to his translator, Laughlin, played by Bob Balaban. The effect of the presence of Truffaut on the overall production of Close Encounters is hard to evaluate. Clearly, however, he plays a wonderfully sensitive and intelligent Lacombe. The introduction of a major character in an American film who does not speak English was somewhat novel in 1977, and it remains far from common today. Laughlin’s translations for the international team of which Lacombe is the head serve for the audience as well, and additional subtitles are provided.
From the outset the structure of Close Encounters readies the audience for translation as an essential and natural part of communication and understanding. Spielberg assumed the audience is much like his main characters. Jillian Guiler and Roy Neary are not especially well degreed or pedigreed. They have not been specially prepared for what happens to them. They are, as Lacombe says in the film’s most oft-quoted line, “ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances,” but part of the message the film carries is an implicit faith in ordinary people to rise to the occasion when necessary. Further, the faith that whatever translation is needed will be provided comes across in the action of the film.
For example, Lacombe’s translator, Laughlin, provides the key to the UFO’s landing site not because he knows French but because, by chance, he is an ex-cartographer and so recognizes as map coordinates the numbers the aliens are repeatedly transmitting. This realization sets off one of the film’s most delightful sequences as an excited group of bureaucrats races for a huge office globe, looses it from its stand, bouncing it onto the floor, and roll it down a hall and into the narrow corridor of their command center which it nearly fills. Ironically, without the cartographer, who is only present because he knows French, not maps, the aliens’ destination would likely not be translated. Likewise, without Neary, one invited guest to make it all the way to the Mother Ship, the final meeting might not take place.
Like Laughlin, Lacombe is fluent in more than one semantic framework. Music provides the frame of reference which proves more universal, in the end, than words. Lacombe has devised a sign language keyed to the musical tones the aliens and investigators have broadcasting back and forth. Based on the system devised by Zoltán Kodály for teaching deaf children music, it links the tones to hand movements. Essentially the film uses communication with the profoundly deaf as an analog for reaching the visitors from the timeless and soundless vacuum of space.
There is a resonance in the choice of François Truffaut to play the French UFO investigator. Lacombe understands and sympathizes with the invited guests at the UFO landing. He promotes Neary’s final ascent into the Mother Ship with the grave, sad comment to Neary that he envies him his invitation. In 1973 the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film had been awarded to Truffaut’s film about filmmaking, La Nuit americaine, titled in English Day for Night. In it Truffaut portrays Ferrand, a director who is deaf and wears a hearing aid. That persona resonates into Close Encounters as Lacombe uses Kodály’s language of the deaf to communicate with the aliens.2
Actually, Lacombe speaks and understands some English. We see him lecture, asking wryly if his audience knows French before explaining the Kodály system to them in halting English. The viewer of Close Encounters cannot but wonder how alien visitors who have obviously come to Terra many times and understand Terran communications can fail to know Terran languages. But the purpose of the meeting at Devil’s Tower is not for the aliens to communicate in Terran languages. It seems from the aliens’ point of view to be an experiment to see if humans are capable of rapidly learning to communicate in an abstract language of light and sound. Their demonstration of that capacity makes them worth communicating with.
The computer interchange which occurs at the film’s finale goes well beyond Kodály’s simple five tones. The visitors send additional tonal patterns for their hosts to learn, and when these have been learned they send more until the computer interface automatically picks up their song and responds in a sort of musical and visual conversation Fairchild described as akin to the mystical music of the spheres.
There was a time when these two areas—science knowledge and God-knowledge—were connected, and the connection was the myth of the music of the spheres; the belief that astronomical and heavenly perfection was manifested in musical harmony inaudible to man in his fallen state. . . . It is music as language, and what could be more appropriate for man at moment of transcendence, making the Promethean leap upward? (342)
One jarring feature of the Spielberg revised edition of Close Encounters is the added scene in which Neary is actually shown walking into the Mother Ship and emotionally looking up at a wall full of cubicles in which a myriad of tiny aliens are apparently at work. The wall resembles a giant beehive, each busy member of the hive at work at his own station, and each separate from the others. It is an image which may or may not evoke a “Promethean leap upward” depending on the viewer’s own ideas about perfection, or about the direction in which humankind’s evolution may be taking it. In certain respects the less specific original version of the film was more satisfying, because it left the interior of the ship to the viewer’s imagination, so that one could provide Neary’s vision of celestial perfection by using one’s own.
Close Encounters continues to move viewers so many years after its first appearance because it is a hopeful film. What is being celebrated in it, as in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—though it must be said that 2001 posits a far, far chillier version of human evolution—is humankind’s hoped-for arrival at a new stage in its history. Close Encounters provides an extraordinarily optimistic and affirmative view of human progress—that life has meaning, that relationships matter, that positive growth and change are possible, and that the desire to “know what’s going on,” as Neary says he wants to do, is among the features that distinguish humans and fit them to be accepted by the other inhabitants of the universe.
Early in Close Encounters there is a sequence in which an assortment of people await the appearance of the UFOs by a roadside, their eyes filled with anticipation and conviction. Lights they identify as the UFO’s come into view, and one grizzled man holds up a crudely written sign, a sort of invitation, which says “Stop and be friendly.” In the final sequence of the film a small figure emerges from the Mother Ship and walks to Lacombe. With a nod and a sweet, gentle smile Lacombe offers the Kodály sequence of hand gestures. The alien does likewise, blinking its sad, serious eyes and finally smiling. There may be, somewhere out there, other civilizations which will someday “stop and be friendly” Close Encounters suggests that we should be looking forward to that day. It suggests that openness and wonder in the face of the unknown are to be honored where found and encouraged where lacking, and last, in its final moments, Close Encounters suggests that a smile may be the finest, the most complete, and the most satisfying form of communication in the universe.
Spielberg’s portrayal of the obsessed artist probably owes something to other Hollywood treatments of the theme, to such films as the 1956 Lust for Life with Kirk Douglas or to Charles Laughton’s 1936 Rembrandt.
See Wayne J. Douglass, “Hommage to Howard Hawks . . . François Truffaut’s Day for Night,” Literature/Film Quarterly 8:2 (1980), 71–77.
Fairchild, B. H., Jr. “An Event Sociologique: Close Encounters.” Journal of Popular Film 6:4 (1978), 342-49.
Torry, Robert. “Politics and Parousia in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Literature/Film Quarterly 19:3 (1991), 188–96.
Williams, Tony. “Close Encounters of the Authoritarian Kind.” Wide Angle 4:5 (1983), 23-29.