E.T – The Extra-Terrestrial

I am constantly amazed at the reaction people have towards this “fairy tale”. Some children are terrified by E.T., some adults hate the film for the regressive role it places the viewer in, while other think it is a story about hope for people from all different backgrounds (if an alien can bond with a human, why can’t we all just get along?). We begin with another Spielberg film with a family in crisis. Another father that has abandoned his duties (this time for another woman) and left the pieces to be sorted out by those he left behind. From the very beginning we are show teenagers sitting around a table (as if trying to be men playing poker, but it is steam not smoke that swills around them) trying to work out who has “absolute power” in a board game. Elliot tries to join in their "manly" pursuits and his mother appears unaware (or is she in need of?) the sexual attention she is receiving from the boys. The male figure that will replace the father at the end of the film is only known to us as “keys” (with a little too heavy handed use of an image to represented the missing phallus in the family). When “keys” finally puts his keys back into his pants and connects with Elliot, it is at that moment that Elliot breaks his connection with E.T. When E.T. finally ascends to the mother ship (or is he just returning back to the womb) he walks up the ramp like a tottering child just learning to walk. Some see this as a progression for Elliot, he has begun the transition to adulthood (no longer a boy wishing to stay connected more to the mother/child (E.T. even looks like an undeveloped fetus near the end film) but to the reunited family as “keys” and Mom look on with approval. Yet, Spielberg does a match shoot with Elliot and the Mom at the end of the film and the “dekeyed” Keys is off to the background, seemingly commenting that Elliot has become more aligned with the maternal, not the new father figure. This is not necessarily a regression; Elliot has grown in confidence over the course of the film and who is to say the maternal is any less powerful than the paternal? But having the film shot from the point of a child, having E.T. (which Elliot has some sort of connection with that involves his feelings, mind, and body) appear like a child retuning to the womb (and uncanny at times due to this regression), and resolving the missing father with an emasculated Keys (he appears himself more like a boy towards the end of the film when he describes his quest for E.T.), leaves many adults put off (and some children frightened) by the regressive nature of viewing E.T.

Spielberg seems to be still working out some of the scars left from his father's absence during his childhood, but the fetus like E.T. is uncanny and the resolution of the fairy tale a little too forced and a little too dominated by the mother-child relationship.