Next the bright headlights of several vehicles come
racing up to the forest edge. Feet pound the dirt and we see only legs running.
Then the camera comes to rest on a set of keys dangling from the belt of one of
these strangers. Instinctively we know we are seeing things from the point of
view of someone small. It’s a frightened child’s perspective, which is pretty
much what E.T. is when he is accidentally left behind by his people. And
Spielberg knew better than anyone that his manipulation of point of view so
early in the film would force his audience to identify more easily with the
small people – and alien – in the film. For after all, this is a story about
children coming to terms with themselves as creatures both in need of and
giving emotions.
When a suburban boy, Elliott (Henry Thomas), comes across
the creature in his backyard, it’s the plaything and companion he’s been
looking for. His older brother, Michael (Robert MacNaughton), excludes him from
activities with his friends (one of whom is played by a very young C. Thomas
Howell) and sends him out for the pizza. Family life is made more complicated
by the fact that Elliott’s father has abandoned the family, creating a rupture
that leaves his mother, Mary (Dee Wallace), as the sole provider and caregiver
for three young children. Gertie (Drew Barrymore) is the youngest, about aged
five.
The story was initially developed by Spielberg based on
his own childhood experiences, but Melissa Mathison wrote the script. It
focuses almost exclusively on the children in the story. In fact, Mary is the
only adult whose face we see until the final act of the film when the
government types and scientists take over the family home in order to capture
and study E.T. With the exception of a chase sequence near the end, I can’t
recall any significant use of high-angle shots. Almost the entire film is shot
from a child’s perspective, forcing us to identify with both Elliott and E.T.
Mathison doesn’t bother with a lot of exposition. There
are no scenes involving the bureaucrats discussing the presence of aliens on
earth. We know nothing of their knowledge of the event. We don’t know why E.T.
begins getting sick, although we can presume it has something to do with his
being away from his home environment. All this adds to the illusion of its
being entirely child-centric. The kids wouldn’t know any of this information,
so if the audience did, the illusion would be spoiled.
The story arc takes Elliott and E.T. through a suburban
adventure meant to conceal the alien from the adult world and rig up a
communication device to contact his people to come retrieve him. Communication
is the key theme that runs throughout the film. When they first meet, Elliott,
rattles off explanations t E.T. of various toys in his bedroom. Later Gertie
teaches him to talk a little with the aid of “Sesame Street” on TV, the 20th
century’s greatest communication device. Elliott doesn’t communicate well with
his family: he can’t make himself a part of his older brother’s life; Mary is
too busy and pulled in multiple directions to really pay attention; and Elliott
makes a major communication gaffe when he bluntly announces that their dad is
with another woman in Mexico, a point that sends Mary into tears. But Elliott an
E.T. develop an inexplicable psychic bond (even their names are lexically
linked) that allows them to feel what the other feels. Their connection is so
deep that they have achieved the ultimate level of communication: that which
doesn’t require words and symbols anymore, but is simply understood in the mind.
Spielberg drives that point home in one of the film’s best and funniest
sequences as E.T. drinks beer at home while Elliott gets drunk at school.
And all the while, we continue to see this man from the
waist down with a set of keys on his hip. He’s there in the forest looking for
signs of the alien, and then he turns up at the house. Played by Peter Coyote,
he is never named, but listed in the credits as “Keys.” He is the representation
of the dangerous world of adults, but when we finally meet him as Elliott and
E.T. are growing more ill together, we find he has benign motives toward E.T.
He, too, has an element of childlike innocence that allows him to more easily
make a connection with Elliott that will ultimately benefit E.T.
I remember watching the movie as a child and feeling that
Keys was like a father figure by the end of the film. I even had this
instinctive understanding that somehow Mary would get together with him.
Watching all these years later with a better understanding of how filmmakers
manipulate these emotions, I realized it’s the greatest error Spielberg makes.
He deliberately positions Keys as the only adult in the film who ‘gets’ what Elliott
feels for E.T. He functions almost as an adult version of Elliott, one who
never fulfilled his childhood dream of an alien encounter. Then at the end as Elliott
and E.T. are saying goodbye in the film’s most heart-wrenching and emotionally
difficult scene, Spielberg frames Mary and Keys together as if they were
husband and wife. At that moment, I knew exactly why I had that feeling as a
kid. Spielberg wants us to think of them as a family unit. The arrival of E.T.
helped Elliott – and, by extension, Gertie and Michael – feel more like an
intact family in spite of the absence of their father, who has run off to
Mexico with his new girlfriend. Spielberg could have achieved similar results
without such a blatantly manipulative move. It makes no sense to suggest Keys
as Elliott’s new father figure. A much stronger scene would have made it clear
that Elliott will be well-adjusted even without the presence of a father
because the experiences with E.T. have helped him grow up just enough to put
away some, if not all, of his childish things.
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