More lost boys

Rating: Null/10 (15 September 2008)

"You know what I saw recently? Munich. I hate it, all this false complexity. But I'm not always dismissing Spielberg. A much better film cinematographically is his previous one, War of the Worlds. I like its dark, grainy atmosphere. His films are all variations on the story of paternity rediscovered, his big obsession. The tragedy of Spielberg is that he's much closer to what we call "art" when he's doing what he probably thinks are commercial projects." – Slavoj Zizek
"Film is my drug and every few months I need a new fix." - Steven Spielberg
Directed by Steven Spielberg, "ET: the Extraterrestrial" stars Henry Thomas as Elliot, a kid living in suburban California. As his parents have separated, Elliot's a bit depressed. Thankfully Elliot befriends a small alien creature, whom he dubs 'ET'. Like Elliot, ET's name starts with an E and ends with a T. More importantly, ET's also been abandoned by his parents. This separation leads to ET's body becoming pale and sickly. ET eventually dies, but is magically resurrected when his parents return. "ET phone home!" ET triumphantly says. The message is clear. For Spielberg, himself the son of divorced parents, the family unit has the power to heal and nourish.
The motif running through all of Spielberg's key films is that of the recovery of the father figure. In "ET", both Elliot and the alien are abandoned by their fathers. "Empire of the Sun", "Hook", "AI", "Minority Report", "Catch Me If You Can", "Indiana Jones" and "War of The Worlds" likewise all focus on parental abandonment. "Jurassic Park" itself begins with child hating archaeologist, Dr Alan Grant, threatening kids with a raptor bone (a symbol of the paternal superego). Only later, in a very brief scene, does Grant throw away this bone. At this point he suddenly becomes a father and reconciles with the children. As he nestles in a tree, cradling the sleeping kids in his arms, the predatory dinosaurs of the night slowly morph into benevolent herbivores the following morning.
Philosopher Slavoj Zizek would himself call "Schindler's List" an "ugly remake of Jurassic Park", with the Nazis as the dinosaur monsters, Schindler as the cynical-profiteering and opportunistic parental figure and the infantilized ghetto Jews as threatened children. The story the film tells is not about the Holocaust, but about Schindler's gradual rediscovery of his paternal duty towards the Jews. His transformation into a caring and responsible father, echoes Sam Neil's character arc in "Jurassic Park".
The same story is repeated in "Duel", in which a weak and effeminate father must battle demon trucks in order to assert his masculinity and reclaim his marriage, and again in "The War of the Worlds", in which Tom Cruise plays a divorced working class father who neglects his two children. The invasion of the aliens reawakens in him the "proper paternal instincts", resulting in him rediscovering himself as a caring father. In the final scene he finally gets recognition from his son who, throughout the film, despised him.
So at their core, Spielberg's films are all "the story of a divorced or working class father who strives to regain the respect of his children". Sometimes this tale is told from the perspective of the child, sometimes it is told from the perspective of the adult. In each case it's the same story.
Mostly, though, Spielberg's cinema is a cinema of "trauma avoidance". The reason's for Daddy (or state/nation/leader) being a jerk are suppressed and the crisis of masculinity is repaired or avoided via Daddy's battles with fantasy monsters (nazis, sharks, dinosaurs, trucks etc). In short, power and patriarchy are rehabilitated via fantasy.
One can see similar "trauma avoidance" in "ET", a film which posits fantasy as an imagined escape from pain. In the film, Elliott's broken family is not in any real sense repaired, or its brokenness even explored as a truly solvable emotional problem. Instead, the film uses aliens to provide a false emotional closure.
In "ET", the little alien becomes a mediator who provides a substitute father, only to disappear and "go home" once Elliot's mother embraces the good scientist (and new father?) in the final shot. As Spielberg's art is always about avoidance and not confrontation, daddy's absence is never resolved or investigated, and so his creepy rehabilitation must be repeated, over and over again, from one film to the next. Whether it be young Elliot in "ET" or Chris Bale in "Empire of the Sun", Spielberg's fantasies palliate traumatic human experiences (divorce, war, slavery, terrorism, Holocaust etc) by offering viewers the film's imaginative plenitude as a compensation for its characters' emotional losses.
But despite all this, almost everything in "ET" works. The film oozes raw, naked emotions and never pretends to offer anything other than a child's knee-high perspective, which Spielberg's shooting strategy reinforces. Autobiographical to the core, the film perfectly reflects its author, a man who has made a career of avoiding painful truths by indulging in fantasy. It's once these personality traits are married to external issues (Munich, Amistad, Ryan etc), that you get profoundly untruthful junk.
8/10 - Would spawn a whole genre of "suburban kids' adventures".