Close Encounters of the Turd Kind

This film was written by Spielberg so his treatment of a family in crisis (a common theme in his films) is perhaps all the more fascinating. Roy (as many of the men in Spielberg films) appears unsure how to fulfill his role as father. We are first introduced to him in his living room where his wife appears more of a mom scolding him on the mess his massive train set is causing to her home. He even attempts, reluctantly, to explain his son’s homework problem to him through the use of his toy trains. The early references to Pinocchio (who of course dreamed of becoming a boy) culminate with Roy proclaiming “I grew up on Pinocchio”. Later, after his close encounter with an alien ship, he begins being drawn to a shape (later revealed to be a mountain). It is interesting to note he first sees the shape in his shaving cream (a product exclusively for adults, facial hair denoting passage from childhood). He stops shaving and stares at the shape as if it is something he should remember (an uncanny object from his past?). His wife ends the scene by slapping the shaving cream onto his face, as if to remind him of its (and his) correct place. Later, a child’s recreation of the shape in dirt draws him even more intently. Here, he reaches out almost absent mindedly and touches the object, getting his hands dirty in the process. Unlike Kubrick’s monolith in 2001, A Space Odyssey (which has many obvious similarities to Spielberg’s space movie), the object produced by the child (and also touch by his mother) resembles a turd – fascinating to a child as it his first production that he willfully controls according to Freud; Kubrick’s characters sustain leaps in evolution due to his monolith, while Roy appears to be de-evolving into a fantasized childhood where his adult responsibilities no longer exist.

Roy’s wife, Ronnie, is later upset that he has lost his job and then in a fit of inspiration, she watches as Roy begins destroying her garden (and that of their neighbor) and throws dirty objects through her kitchen window. Ronnie leaves Roy, who proceeds to create what resembles a giant turd in the middle of the living room. Dirty and exhausted, Roy sees the same image on his TV and abandons his home (forever) in search of the object. When the aliens (or is it the Blue Fairy?) do land Roy deserts his family to ascend in the alien ship for some romanticized heaven. During his final ascent into the slip in the mountain, Roy literally struggles to crawl and stand up as he reaches to the outstretched hand of Gillian (a surrogate mother figure as he has left Ronnie and the kids for good earlier in the film) – Roy appears to have regressed back to a baby learning to crawl and stand on his own with his mother cheering him on. Gillian descends into the mountain with Roy, but she pulls back when Barry returns from the spaceship, accepting her role as an adult and parent. Roy then (fulfilling his oral fixation) kisses Gillian on the mouth and heads for the ship. Perhaps a little heavy handedly, Spielberg next has Roy and Barry mirror each other in a matched shot while a variation of “When You Wish Upon a Star” plays in the background – Roy has regressed back into the childhood he dreamed of. The first alien we see appears tall (perhaps the adult), but the aliens that pick Roy out of the crowd and surround him appear to be children (they have picked him as their playmate and let him join their circle). Roy has regressed back to a child with what appears to be no regret or sense of loss of the family and adult life he is deserting. Spielberg doesn’t even have Roy’s family there to look on and wish goodbye to their father (having long ago disappeared in the family station wagon half way through the film when Ronnie raced off in response to Roy’s messing up of her home); perhaps Spielberg sense that had they been there, Roy’s decision might have appeared too selfish for the film to offer what little bit of resolution it does at its conclusion.

Spielberg has created an anti-fairy tale, or a fairy tale in reverse. Whereas fairy tales are designed to help the child learn to cope with the challenges of becoming an adult and functioning in the world without being attached to mom and dad (such as Hansel & Gretel overcoming their oral fixation on the ginger bread and their too controlling parents to defeat the witch on their own), Spielberg has his main character regress from adulthood to infancy. There is no villain in the film, unless perhaps the human condition of having to grow up and become and adult. Many critics have a difficult time with this film, as they expect the narrative to fit into the normal paradigm of the main character progressing over the course of the film. Andrew Gordon skewered the film because the aliens act irrationally and he is unable to make sense of why Roy decides to flings the dirt and himself through the kitchen window when he could have use the sliding glass door. However, if we view the film as a fairy tale in reverse, these events make more sense. The aliens’ actions can be viewed as those of playful children more than having any rational explanation. Roy’s crawling through the kitchen window could be seen as his desire to crawl back into the womb.

In his films, Spielberg normally shows the aftermath of the missing father (Elliot in E.T., Jim in Empire of the Sun/son), but in this film he shows us a man abandoning his family for some higher ideal but without the consequences to those he leaves behind. The film reads to me as if he is exploring and almost justifying (though not quite) the father’s need to pursue his own desires over that of his family. As if the pain he felt from his father’s own abandonment still exists, but is perhaps tempered by an older Spielberg understanding that sometimes fathers make choices which abandons their role in the family not because they don't love their family or are bad people, but simply they sometimes have other callings which they are more drawn to.