Stephen Spielberg once said that he was “still waiting to get out of [his] Peter Pan shoes and into [his] loafers.” Being a filmmaker, he said, was his way of remaining a child. Sort of. While his film “E.T.” is told from a child’s vantage point, it does not completely honor the wish to remain there. Like the alien he befriends, Eliot has been abandoned. And to this, many of us can relate. But in the end, the point of phoning home isn’t to get rescued by adults, but to avoid—even as we succumb to the responsibilities of adulthood—alienating our childhood talents for imagination and play.
Thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Buck Mason. To get a free t-shirt with your first order, head over to buckmason.com/subtext.
Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail
For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes.
This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science.
Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast.
Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website
Transcript
0:11 Wes: Steven Spielberg once said that he was still waiting to get out of his Peter Pan shoes and into his loafers. Being a filmmaker, he said, was his way of remaining a child, sort of. While his film ET Is told from a child's vantage point, it does not completely honor the wish to remain there. Like the alien he befriends, Elliot has been abandoned. And to this, many of us can relate. But in the end, the point of phoning home isn't to get rescued by adults, but to avoid, even as we succumb to the responsibilities of adulthood, alienating our childhood talents for imagination and play. This is Wes Alwan. This is Erin O'Luanaigh, and you're listening to Subtext. Okay, so, Erin, it's been a long time since I've seen ET and this experience was quite different than the last time. For instance, I remembered the adult scientists in the film in a much more sinister way. I didn't remember that they were actually trying to save E.T. s life. I thought they just wanted to dissect him or maybe even vivisect him. But also I was thinking about whether or not I thought that ET Was cute or whether he was grotesque. And I know he's cute, you know, he's got a cute face, but I also found myself. Or maybe it's only components of the face are cute, but I found myself sympathizing with Gertie. When she said I don't like his feet and in general, his shape and the way he hobbles around, I thought, huh, that's really interesting because he's sort of iconically cute, but I hadn't really noticed the grotesque aspect.
2:03 Erin: Yeah, I didn't remember the lower half of his body at all. When he's lying in that ditch after Halloween, and then when we see him kind of fully laid out, he definitely's definitely bottom heavy, shall we say
2:19 Wes: he's got a pear shaped body, unfortunately.
2:23 Erin: Yeah, his legs are a little on the short side, but I find him adorable. I mean, how would you describe his head? It's sort of binocular or, you know, I mean, the eyes make it.
2:35 Wes: Yeah, it's got a periscope plus binoculars quality, I guess. You know, the neck. Periscopes a bit.
2:41 Erin: Yeah, the neck, yeah, yeah, the neck extends, but just the head shape itself is.
2:46 Wes: Yeah, very oblong. Obviously he's probably used to a different gravity, although, you know, he seems somewhat adapted to Earth's atmosphere, although not enough to not get sick, you know, eventually.
3:01 Erin: But I didn't realize that was the problem.
3:04 Wes: Well, I don't know if that's the problem, actually. It could be the. Because, of course, he rejuvenates when the spaceship, his comrades, or not comrades, fellow aliens, come back and get near. So it seems like the sickness might also have something to do with empathetic connection.
3:24 Erin: Yeah. I hadn't seen this film since I was maybe 9 or 10, so it has been a very long time for me, too. And I also remembered the adults being bad guys, and they're not, and I was surprised by that. I also remembered the mother being kind of a bad guy, or that was my impression. Like, you know, not an actual bad guy, but, like, I remembered her being somehow different. Like not sympathetic or something like that. But not the case.
3:50 Wes: I think there's an ambivalent relationship to the adults in the film. You know, it starts out very sinister with the scientists doing their searching and the Keyes guy. Right. And we only get to see the waist. We don't get to see the faces until the end in which we. We find out that Keys doesn't want to hurt ET but he wants to save him, and that he's been dreaming about this since childhood. And so that, in a way, his childhood wishes have carried over into adulthood so that it no longer looks just like adult cynicism. I'm going to find this creature and dissect him. And I represent the powers that be. You know, the governmental powers are representative, as oppressive. But I like the complexity of this position, and it's not uncommon in Spielberg. It's a complex representation of adults and the relationship of children to adulthood. And one of the things about adulthood, and this is well represented in the mother, is just the intrusion of adult concerns. Right. So the mother is very harried. She has to work. She's been abandoned by her husband and now has to take care of all these kids. So there's something about adult concerns that are very alien to children or make them feel alien, I think Spielberg famously said. Right. His focus on aliens had something to do with the fact that he felt. And I think his father abandoned him as a kid as well, but that his feeling of being like a little alien as a kid, which I thought was very interesting, because, of course, there are ways in which ET Seems to represent, you know, children and childhood innocence. That didn't tee you up very well, I guess.
5:45 Erin: No, no, no, no. We're talking about this in relation to the mother.
5:50 Wes: Yeah. This is a variation on adulthood. It's not the same. She doesn't Work the same way as the scientists. But, you know, she just kind of similar to the way I remembered her, which is being very frazzled and standing, in a way. She's an object of sympathy for the kids because she has been abandoned as well. But she's also largely irrelevant. She's kind of in a flurry at the perimeter of what's going on. And we get to be in the childhood world and it's the children who have all the agency for most of the film.
6:29 Erin: Yeah. I'm thinking about how late she actually finds out that ET Is there. I didn't really even remember her finding it out. And there's that great sequence, of course, where she doesn't see him.
6:40 Wes: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Which is a good metaphor, Right, for the way being adult closes us off to, let's say, the world of the imaginary. I don't know.
6:50 Erin: Right. Well, thinking about the mother and the sort of, like, fact of having this single mother who's gone for a lot of the day, he stays home from school or the sort of, like, inherent lack of supervision that comes from that got me thinking about the neighborhood itself. And I was really intrigued by this suburban backdrop, which seems. I looked it up, and it seems that critical opinion is split on this as well. But I seem to get, on the one hand, a kind of benevolence from the neighborhood and a kind of safety which is borne out as much in the mom as it is in the friends of the kids. I'm surprised that the mother, you know, of course, she has this initial reaction to trying to protect the children from this creature. But then she has a surprisingly rational, or whatever the rational version of a good reaction would be to this plot scenario. And she's sympathetic to Elliot and, you know, likes this little alien, as far as we can tell. And the children in the neighborhood too. You would expect them to foil the escape plan at the end. Instead, they help. So there's this kind of surprising benevolence and community in the neighborhood at the same time. It allows for this tremendous freedom. It's also rather alienating not to keep returning to that word. And it's a little bit cookie cutter, of course. Like, you could see the shots of it on the hillside are, on the one hand, kind of beautiful. On the other hand, they have that manufactured or prefab kind of look to them, the houses. And I was reminded of the neighborhood in the dissection scene which seemed to me to be just as the frogs were kind of identified with ET For Elliot, the individual little glasses that they were in with the chloroform I thought was kind of reminiscent of those houses on the hillside.
8:45 Wes: Exactly, yeah. That's great. I didn't think about that connection to the glasses, but I thought, you know, in thinking about this I thought again, I agree with you. And this is one of the, the things that's important about the film that it's not. This is suburbia, but it's not just, hey, suburbia bad, hey, adulthood bad, hey, science and technology and authority bad. Again, it's a much more ambivalent, complicated relationship. And I at one point, just thinking about some of these shots of the valley, right, we get to see this suburban, you know, I guess it's a suburb of la, maybe, I don't know, but mm, it's not suburbia. Filmed entirely from within. And as something completely bland. We get kind of a grand scene of it looking down into the valley. And I had an association which is it's kind of a loose one. But I was thinking about the sort of crater like aspect of the way the city is laid out in the valley. And I thought of War of the Worlds in which the spaceships kind of get buried into the ground a bit. So I thought, you know, it almost has that glittery aspect, right, which is something that Spielberg does with his alien spaceships, all the lights and it's. I thought, you know, in a way it's like a crash landed spaceship. I think the alien and the spaceship, they have something to do with our capacity to maintain a relationship to what is creative and imaginative and childlike in adulthood. And so here you see, it's not just where dreams have gone to die, but there's still a hint of some capacity for that. So yes, it's broken in a way. And adulthood tends to. The tendency is to break childhood capacities for being imaginative and for play and for creativity because adult concerns intrude. But there's still always that potential. And the wish here, I think is to be able to maintain some of that imaginative capacity into adulthood. So it's there in a kind of broken form, which means that to some extent it's potentially fixable. So the movement into adulthood doesn't have to be all that sinister in the way it seems at the very beginning of the film with the shots of the searchers, the scientists, in a very sinister way overlooking the suburban valley. It doesn't end up being necessarily that sinister.
11:16 Erin: Yeah, I like the brokenness, but also the idea of the landscape is holding those two things in tandem. Kind of like the keys guy, right? As adults, of course, we like. We maintain memories of childhood experiences and therefore, sort of holding together our childhood selves and our adult selves at the same time. And in that same way, I think you're right that the shots above that little town are pretty grand. And it's that integration with the landscape, I think, expresses like a very California kind of tension between living in this beautiful place and settling it, but it never really being settled. There's always the earthquake threat or the threat of natural disaster kind of looming over what's otherwise a kind of very hospitable place. And so you have that too, I think, in the house where it's like, it's safe and suburban and sequestered on the one hand, but on the other hand, because of the flexibility of the parent child relationship, it's unsafe. You know, your dad might leave you, your mom might be away from the house when you need her. And so there's both a tremendous freedom and safety and danger kind of all existing at once. And I think this is related, you know, the California idea, too, is really interesting when it comes to, you know, the movie associations and, like, being in the land of. Of movies. I think that membrane is pretty permeable in the movie as well, you know,
12:41 Wes: in thinking more about the appearance of ET and sort of. I don't know if my experience is generalizable, if others get that element of grotesqueness as well, but I thought, you know, it's interesting to represent childhood innocence in et, which I think is represented as something grotesque. And that led me to think of the ways in which those two things are related. So I thought of the way the fetuses at a certain, you know, certain points in development look, and the fact that there's an incompleteness. And that incompleteness, you know, it's not just physiological. So there's. There's a lot of that. Right. And ET's difficulty with mobility and. Which is a factor of childhood and not being an adult yet. And so. So being alien to an environment which. Right. We are adapted to that environment as adults, but not fully adapted to it as children. And incompleteness also extends to unformed character and lack of education. So children are more material and potential, or they're more a matter of potentiality than actuality. Right. There's. They're waiting to be actualized, but going along with that, there's a lot of vulnerabilities, which, you know, again, I'm connecting this to grotesqueness, but there's dependence and the prospect of abandonment, as you mentioned, there's a difficulty defending oneself. There are sinister adults who might abuse or molest, and so those capacities not fully developed. And then even the ability to flee danger is impaired, going back to mobility. And then there's the. Ultimately there's the danger of poor formative influences that lead to a kind of adulthood that is damaged to some degree or another. And there's dramatic forms of damage, but then there's just ordinary damage again, being caught up in the world of adult concerns and losing a connection to one's imagination and creativity. So I thought that's a really interesting bunch of things that you can pack into the appearance of ET and it doesn't have to be that way. Right. Because you. I love the Yoda crossover in the movie. Right. The gnarledness of the appearance can also represent old age and wisdom. And it also can represent, you know, as we saw in our analysis of Alien, it can represent sexuality. So I'm thinking of the frog scene there with a little girl standing, screaming as the frogs are on the floor, which, you know, if you're a Freudian, you're tempted to see that as a. Feelings about sexuality and ultimately. Right. That culminates in, in him kissing her. So he takes her down off the, off the chair and kisses her. So I think all those elements are there in the, you know, maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but you can read into, into the appearance that, you know, all of these different elements.
15:37 Erin: No, I think that's right. And I think, you know, in your description of childhood and of the fetus, you know, I was thinking too, of old age that all of those things could apply in like, the final years of one's life. I think there's the dependence, the senility, and also the kind of. It's not unformed like in childhood, but it's like a. Is that at the risk of sounding too, I don't know, sort of like an Eastern philosopher? It's almost like the return to the generalized or the, you know what I'm talking about. Like, you become wise and things bother you less and the rough edges of your personality are kind of smoothed away and you become more, I don't know, clean in your, in your perspective on things. You see things more vividly and more clearly, perhaps in a certain regard. And so there's a kind of full circle quality that I think ET Unites. And, you know, in as much as he has to sort of learn the human ways and as a child with this, the speak and spell and learning how to talk, he also has that kind of eternal wisdom quality. And that's what I love about the Halloween scene. I was thinking. I've been thinking about that Halloween scene so much. The idea of the children being dressed as people who are dead or recently dead, you know, and ET is the ghost. Or also that ET is, you know, a ghost interchangeable with the little girl
16:57 Wes: and is scared of their outfits.
16:59 Erin: Right, right.
17:01 Erin: And that, that kind of flexibility, I think too extends to ET's gender. You know, like Elliot insists that it's a boy. Of course, Gertie dresses, dresses ET up as a. As a little girl. Right. So there's a kind of fungibility and flexibility to his, his appearance that we can take to, you know, in, in any direction.
17:21 Wes: ET is gender fluid.
17:22 Erin: Yeah, right. Or genderless or whatever. And I was thinking too about that frog dissection scene and about how it does seem like through linking his consciousness with et, Eliot. So I had. I had forgotten about that ESP connection that they had.
17:41 Wes: I had forgotten about the extent of it. That scene which we're about to talk about that culminates in the kissing. The empathetic connection to the ET and through that in the movie is one of my favorite. To me, it's the best. So I did remember that. But yeah, I had forgotten all about the extent of their identification and even the fact that Elliot Wright, the E and T. It's pretty heavy handed in telling us that those two are strongly
18:08 Erin: identified, but for about half a second I thought I had really discovered something unique and then I realized that that was probably obvious to everyone and sure enough, it's in all the reviews.
18:19 Wes: Only in thinking about this carefully did I. That's the first time I noticed it and I'm sure it's mentioned a lot by critics, but.
18:25 Erin: But yeah, he contains Elliot's name, I guess. Right. And so that's, that's an interesting idea is the containment factor, like ET contains Elliot and the sort of the dreams of the children and everything, not the other way around. But that association where he's in school is a really interesting one because of course you get ET as a potentially very, very old little person, very close to death on one side of it, and also as a child, sort of close to non existence. Right. On the other extreme. But then that middle sequence, am I wrong for thinking of it as being like the surrogate father who stays home jobless in the middle of the day and drinks beer in front of the tv? Is that.
19:06 Wes: You know, I hadn't thought of that. But that's great. Yeah.
19:09 Erin: Because the experiences that he's picking up through the television and the sort of, you know, John Wayne movie watching, you know, Coors Light drinking experience. It's like Elliot is, you know, speeding through the maturation process by.
19:23 Wes: Exactly. Yeah.
19:24 Erin: Experiencing that with E.T.
19:26 Wes: yeah. That's the part of it I did think about. You could read Eliot's relationship in a Peter Pan way. Right. As a desire to stay a child. But again, and I think this goes along with the ambivalence towards adults in this movie. It's actually more about the desire to become an adult in a certain kind of way again and maintaining some connection to childhood or integrating childhood into adulthood. And maybe it's about imagination, but it's also about empathy. And so that empathetic or sympathetic relationship to ET Is not just about, hey, I'm going to stay a child. And this is all very touchy feely and aren't we? It's also about becoming an adult so that ET Becomes a conduit. Right. A communication device, like the device that he later on builds to connect to his home. He becomes a communication device, device to adulthood for Elliot by way of a John Wayne movie. So Elliot gets to do these very adult things that normally a father might help him do. So I think that's brilliant, the idea that ET Is in that position of a deadbeat dad in this scene, but the deadbeat dad is somehow transformed into a real father.
20:49 Wes: You know, we get that scene later on where they're smelling his. The father's shirt and talking about the things that he used to. Used to do with him. So that's really interesting. And so, you know, as I said, the thing I love most about the film is just the fact that that telepathic connection puts Elliot in the position of behaving a lot like an adult and in the classroom, you know, taking it on himself to release the frogs and then ultimately kissing the girl in a scene where you get this cut back and forth between the John Wayne movie and what Elliot is doing. And I just. I think that's very touching.
21:27 Erin: I think so, too.
21:29 Wes: So we're talking about home a little bit here and the idea of a father being at home. And so I guess it's. We should talk about what it means to want to go home and so own home and what Homecoming represents in the context of the movie, because I think that's complicated as well, you know, like E.T. eliot's been abandoned and what does it mean for E.T. to go home? What does it mean for Elliot to go home? And how are those two things related?
21:56 Erin: Yeah, speaking of streams being crossed and things like that, you know, it seems important that ET Return to his proper place and that, you know, there's the suggestion that he's dying without being in close contact with his family. So that familial unit seems to be very important. On the other hand, it's undermined by the fact that, you know, he maintains this. This really strong connection with Eliot. You know, there's that moment where he asks Elliot to come, potentially come with him. And so there's this. This moment of crossing. But the message of the film at the end seems to be that these worlds are sacrosanct and that there's a very clear place of belonging for each of these two figures. And I guess I don't know how to reconcile that in terms of the larger themes of the movie, which are obviously about the ability for these species to sort of integrate and about understanding and tolerance and all those good things.
22:54 Wes: You know, there's an ambiguity here in Homecoming as well, and one of the meanings is quite dangerous. It's regressive. Right. As we saw in our Oedipus episode, we don't really want to go home in the sense of ending back at home with the parents, sometimes in an inappropriate way, as it was for Oedipus, but sometimes just being dependent on them. Right. Economically. And the concepts of, like, going away from home, which I think is associated with growing up and going home, can get very confused. And as we talked about in the Oedipus episode, you know, nominally. Right, becoming ambitious and competitive and developing a career in adult relationships, that's supposed to take you away from the fold, the parental fold and the original family. But it can, on another level, be a way of maintaining an unhealthy connection to it, you know, which is what we see. And someone becomes grandiose or narcissistic or very focused on, you know, admiration at the expense of everything else in their work. And again, they. So they lose a connection to the playful and the creative and the imaginative. But we can't simply be childlike. We are focused on recognition. And there's. We. I don't think as adults, we can simply abandon that. So those things become very confusing. And I think it's a really interesting fact of human development that regression and maturation look a lot like each other. They're structurally very similar, and they interpenetrate and they create these enormous dangers, because what can seem like a maturational process can actually take on the significance of regression. So I think for Elliot, at the end of the movie, he knows that staying on Earth, if He's going with E.T. to his home, I think that that would represent a regression, a return to some place where, you know, be very Peter Pan of him, where he can be a child forever with these childlike creatures. Although that's kind of a simplification, again, of what ET Represents. But so he has to stay in order to finish the process of becoming an adult. So, again, the wish is not simply to remain a child, but to carry something of childhood into adulthood. And I think, you know, it begins with his abandonment, his wish that his father hadn't abandoned him and that the family were still intact. And so we get this unfolding of a kind of fantasy in which he. There's another abandoned creature with which he's strongly identified, and that creature is going to help him get home. But that doesn't mean him going home in the sense of remaining a child or regressing. These two things are paradoxically related. Maintaining something of childhood, the childhood capacity for sublimation and becoming an adult are importantly related. And so then the question is, how do you accomplish that very complicated task of staying a child in one sense, in the service of being the kind of adult you ideally want to be? That's the problem. Right.
26:08 Erin: That's really interesting. I'm thinking, too, of, like, you know, if he left with ET he would become his father in a way. Right. His father who's depatriated himself.
26:17 Erin: And gone to another. To another place. Mexico. Right.
26:21 Wes: It's interesting because in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the father ends up abandoning the family and going with the aliens.
26:29 Erin: Yeah. Well, I hate that movie. I can't stand that movie.
26:34 Wes: I love that movie. And I wrote a long piece about it, and I think I'm going to put that on my substack.
26:40 Erin: Oh, fun. Maybe you'll get me to like it.
26:43 Wes: Yeah, no, I really. I saw it on its 40th anniversary in the theater.
26:48 Wes: Oh, okay. And I was. Yeah, I was really blown away by it. But Spielberg actually said, you know, if he had been a father at that point, he would not have had the father get on the spaceship. But I think part of what the father getting on the spaceship can mean is our relationship to our parents changes and no longer becomes dependence. And childhood attachment, there's much greater dose of identification. And so absence is also implicated. You know, parental absence is, in a way, is implicated in becoming an adult. So that, again, it's a very paradoxical thing. You need the childhood attachments to parents and then the correct sort of attachments in the service of getting away from them, in service of detaching from them. Like in the very beginning of the movie, Elliot, very casually. Right. Says. And very insensitively because he gets chastised by his brother for it, but insensitively says, oh, he's in Mexico with so and so the name of the girlfriend. Hmm.
27:51 Erin: That desire for escape, I think, is pretty well represented in the Star wars product placements throughout the film.
28:01 Wes: I just love the way Spielberg has fun with his friend George Lucas, you know?
28:04 Erin: It's so good. Yeah, I read, too, that Harrison Ford was in it and then got cut out. He was gonna be the principal of the school.
28:11 Wes: Yes, I read that as well.
28:13 Erin: Yeah, I'd love to go to that school. No, but I had forgotten, so. I love Stranger Things. I don't know if you like that show.
28:23 Erin: I mean, I think it's declined in quality a little bit. But that. But those opening sequences, you know, because I grew up seeing the Goonies a lot more, actually, than ET or anything like that. I had forgotten that the kids in ET Are also nerds. You know, Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, you know, those types of kids.
28:42 Erin: And so I really liked. And I was one of those, too, not Dungeons and Dragons, but I did have. My brother and I had Star wars action figures, and we had a. We made the Millennium Falcon out of legos. It was a whole thing. And the TIE Fighters and stuff like that. So I really liked that stuff.
28:58 Wes: Yeah. Well, I can say, you know, in the 80s, growing up in Ireland, we were very, very into that as well. And there's a kid in our neighborhood who. He was like, the rich kid, and he had all the Star wars stuff, which. Which was hard to get, like you. You know, some of the things were practically collector's items and. But.
29:15 Erin: Yeah, right. I remember my most prized possession was I had Princess Leia in her Endor outfit with that speed bike thing where she would go through the woods in Endor with. Luke was on the speed bike, too. And then they had that whole chase quest.
29:32 Wes: Which movie was this room?
29:33 Erin: This is Return of the Jedi.
29:35 Erin: Do you remember that? Where they're going through the redwoods, but it's on Endor. And Connor and I rewatched that over and over and over again, so everybody wanted her in the way. And I was so happy that I had her in that, like, weird little camo outfit where you could barely even tell that it was her you know, it was a little teenage, teeny, tiny thing. It could have been anybody. And her on her speed bike and we would, you know, through the backyard. Anyway, so these are kids who are. And they're red. Peter Pan is a bedtime story. And so these are kids who are thematically primed for an alien to come down. I just kind of wonder what that brand of childhood, what function that is serving. It seems to me Elliot is like the ideal child to meet. They're in an age of sci fi, like partially created by the maker of this film, which is really interesting. And I love the. Is it Buck Rogers? Is that the name of the cartoon that they.
30:31 Wes: I think so, yeah.
30:34 Wes: Yeah. That ET Gets the idea for the radar from. Yeah.
30:38 Erin: And I know Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers had a big impact on Star wars, the concept of Star wars and that development. And so it's like a fantasy for children. You know, the Peter Pan escapist going to another world, living in childhood kind of fantasy. But it's also, I think, of a very particular brand. You know, I think sci fi in general obviously has these associations with times of uncertainty and discomfort in the real world, which makes the sci fi element sort of so attractive, but also gives them a kind of a threat. Yeah, so I don't, you know, I don't know about, about that connection. I'm, I'm just kind of thinking about that.
31:17 Wes: Yeah, I think this is another ambivalent relationship, you know, because technology can also represent adulthood in the sense of, you know, like in Close Encounters more than in this movie. Spielberg makes a lot of electronic toys, but also appliances and, and the way technology can kind of just serve mundanity. And we see a lot, a lot of that with smartphones now. Right. The way technology can just come in and fracture life and fracture relationships and it breaks us apart. And the wish is that technology could actually serve the purpose of human connection and creativity and intimacy. And of course, you know, film is a very technology heavy medium. And so, you know, you can see Spielberg, Spielberg's preoccupation with this idea that technology and art can kind of play well together. So when you were talking about Star Wars, I was thinking about the way in which the childhood imagination is kind of ascendant because you have all these impractical devices. Like why would you create these, you know, if you can fly around in spaceships, why would you create these big lumbering, you know, whatever it is in Empire Strikes Back, those big like horse
32:35 Erin: like machines walking the at ats.
32:40 Wes: Is that what they're called walking through the snow and being susceptible to being tripped up and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, and why would you fight with a lightsaber if you could just use a blaster? But anyway, you integrate all of that kind of retro stuff and anachronisms and nostalgia, but you also, you privilege childhood imagination in those circumstances. So, of course, you know, children are fascinated with science fiction and the future and technology as promising something fantastic and imaginative. But there's also the other sides of this, you know, one is technology, again, serving the purpose of the. The mundane appliances in the kitchen and just getting kind of stuck in the routine of everyday life. It can help make a routine more of a routine of all that stuff. But then there's also the sinister aspect of surveillance. The surveillance that is performed on the family by the searchers and the scientists. This happens in Close Encounters as well. The use of technology about the powers that be to kind of exploit or control. So control the populace. So, yeah, technology can mean a lot of different things, but the hope is that in a way it served the purpose of play rather than becoming the thing that kills it. So I'd like to pause here for a moment and talk about our sponsor for this episode, Buck Mason. So I was really excited when I found out that Buck Mason was going to be sponsoring this episode, in part because I knew that meant that they were going to send me free clothes. But also, I had always wanted to try Buck Mason and I had never gotten around to it. I really liked the look. I'm a fan of the tailored look, but it has to be for me, it has to be cut right or else it's going to be too small on me. So I was very happy to find that everything fit me really well. They sent me a hoodie which is absolutely fantastic. It fits great, it looks great. And overall, Buck Mason is a really good place to go for the essentials. Jeans, shirts, jackets and all really well made. It's the type of clothing that can easily become your go to favorites. The kind of stuff that in the morning you just instinctively reach for. Once you try Buck Mason, they'll become your go to's too. Head over to Buckmason.com subtext and and get a free t shirt with your first order. That's B U C K M-S-O-N.com subtext to get a free t shirt with your 1st order. Buckmason.com subtext okay, back to the show.
35:27 Erin: I like that a lot. You're reminding me of the Roger Ebert quote I love, which is that movies are like a machine that generates empathy. I'm thinking about the boys.
35:37 Erin: Becoming. You know, so much of growing up in the age of cinema is kind of like discovering one's own identity through identification with people on screen or with fictional characters, but in this far more visceral way than the generations past who had to sort of like, you know, experience these stories mediated through a page, you know, thinking about these movies reflecting back to you or sort of like teaching you modes of behavior, like literally carried out. When ET watches John Wayne and Maureen o' Hara kissing, and then Elliot is like, compelled to carry. To carry it out with that kind of identification. But also the idea that the figures prior to ET's arrival, the figures that the boys are shown identifying with, are aliens. Yeah, these non human figures. I don't think he. I think he has maybe Orlando figurine, but he has, like, mostly the figurines that he's showing to E.T. are all aliens. And, you know, the fact that they go as ghouls and ghosts for Halloween and the fact that in Dungeons and Dragons they're playing as goblin characters or something like that is really interesting because it's like their identification is expressing a kind of brokenness, you know, and there's
36:51 Wes: also the childhood preoccupation with cuddly toys, which psychoanalysts would think of as these transitional objects between attachment to parents and moving on to more mature stages of psychological development. But. Yeah, what are these attachments to the alien or to the technology in some very imaginative sense? And to stuffed animals and animals in general, what does that all represent?
37:19 Erin: It makes the little Gertie. I think it makes her accept ET right away. I love when ET is among the stuffed animals so the mother doesn't see him because he looks like he blends in with the rest of her choice.
37:31 Wes: Yes. Yeah, exactly.
37:32 Erin: Yeah. So they're all a little ghoulish. It kind of highlights how heightened and actually odd looking so many dolls are, you know, and so I don't remember exactly what her dolls look like, but they all have those big eyes and they're, you know, I think that she immediately accepts ET on those terms because he. He doesn't look right. He doesn't look human or anything, but he looks. He looks like a toy. And therefore she accepts him on those terms.
37:59 Wes: Yeah, I mean, I think part of it goes back to Spielberg's complaint that he felt like an alien when he was a kid. And again, it's, you know, like E.T. these children are. Have much different forms physiologically than adults. You know, part of it was just being small, but in infancy, right. Large head and then the fetal stages and then. But you know, more to the point is the psychological, because they're inchoate psychologically, children are much different. They're aliens. So, you know, you could think of as the adults are the aliens or the children are. Feel like aliens. But I think, you know, this identification with aliens and ghosts and stuffed animals and part of it is about, you know, it might be about the way you handle the imagined viewpoint of adults. How do adults look at us as these strange little incomplete beings? And how does one cope with that fact? Well, you surround yourself with these alien like figures with which you can identify. And then for Elliot, right, he gets to go beyond the figurines to the actual. Gets the actual thing right and get something out of that. So these identifications can actually facilitate the entry into adulthood, this transition, you know that again is foreshadowed, right, because children are aware that they're becoming adults. And it's a strange feeling. I mean, I remember, I remember my big worry when I was a kid was like, because my sisters always had homework. And I just remember being terrified of the day that I would have to do homework.
39:50 Erin: Oh, I remember being excited for homework.
39:54 Wes: You were excited for homework?
39:55 Erin: Oh, yeah. I couldn't wait to be, to be a.
39:59 Wes: What kind of monster?
40:01 Erin: Let me tell you,
40:05 Wes: adult relationships and all the disappointments, everything that's coming, it's kind of a terrifying thing. Which explains some of the. What are Grimm's fairy tales preparing children for? You see some of the ways in which, right. Adults that the witch that eats the child and which adults can abuse or they can prevent children from growing up. The mother who wants to stay merged. But also, I think it's just adulthood looks like a, a scary place in part and again in part because it kills the. It can kill what's really important about childhood and what we don't want to lose, which again, I think has something to do with play.
40:41 Erin: And to return briefly to the, to the flip side of that equation, I was just thinking about, you know, one of the things that makes children so alien to adults besides their cute little big headed appearance, is the fact that we can't read their thoughts, right. Like we don't know what's going on inside their heads and they can't express themselves. Which is, I think, one of the things that makes that ESP connection with ET so interesting too. Yes, that's, you know, someone who can read your mind and who shares your consciousness in this really intimate way. And therefore, that must be some facilitation of the maturation process, too, though I. I don't know under what terms that would be, but the ability to finally, I guess, express your thoughts properly or get people to understand you, even though that's always an imperfect enterprise. But to be able to express that in adult terms, or so that adults can understand you well.
41:29 Wes: And even to come to the point, you know, as part of what you're doing in childhood is learning how to mentalize and put thoughts to feelings and to. And a baby can't do any of that for themselves, and the mother does that for the child. And ultimately the child develops the capacity to do that for themselves in that capacity has something to do with the symbolic order. Right. And the use of signifiers, the use of language, because. Right. Language can help us cope with absence. So if the mother walks out of the room, it's not just that Mommy is gone forever. It's, you know, I can imaginatively put this symbol in her place and soothe myself with the thought that she's still there in some sense and that she will return. I'm reminded of ET Saying, I'll be here. Right. He's leaving. But then he points to Elliot's head, although I think, there, I'll be here. The significance of that is more about the imagination will remain with Eliot, the imaginative, playful component.
42:37 Erin: Right. But I think also that it's like he's going through a whole life cycle with his father and that E.T. s loss maybe is helping him to mourn the loss of the father figure and realize that that can be. It's super sad because it's an abandonment. It's not a death. I mean, not that one is. I guess, one is sadder than the other, but, you know, I think it's like a way to cope with that loss.
42:59 Wes: You know, I love this idea, too, speaking of technology serving more humane, empathetic, and connecting purposes, this idea that ET Gets that he can phone home and that he can do that by cobbling together speak and spell and some other stuff.
43:15 Wes: Absurd. And again, going back to the kind of fantastic technology where childhood imagination is ascendant, this kind of absurd contraption that we're supposed to believe allows him to communicate with a spaceship in another solar system, or at least on its way back to another solar system.
43:34 Erin: I was reminded of when I finally got a flip phone late in high school, because early on I was always doing musicals after school and staying for rehearsal, and I would always have to, like, find someone who. And it was hard to do. Find someone who had a cell phone so that I could call my mom to come and pick me up. And anyway, I realized that really, it's. It's like ET Is on a playdate, and he has to let his parents know where he is so that he can get a ride back home anyway.
44:03 Wes: That's great. That's great. You know, that feeling of abandonment, I'm familiar with that in the sense of I grew up in a single parent household and didn't have a father, just with my mom. And I just, you know, she was working and trying to make ends meet, and it was a very tough circumstance financially, but also because she was often not home. And I remember that feeling of waiting for her to get home and just that sense of abandonment in that. Whether it was, you know, whether it was fair or not, but. And then just going back to more ordinary childhood stuff, like, you know, you get lost in the mall or something or.
44:40 Wes: And that horrible feeling as a child that if you're. If you've lost your connection to the adult, that you're in big, big trouble. Then you have to go to the kiosk and have them announce, you know, which is embarrassing.
44:55 Erin: Oh, yeah. Oh, God. Did this movie come out at a time that you were. Did this align with you being the perfect age to see it in theaters or.
45:04 Wes: Oh, yeah, Yeah. I was 10 years old when this film. Wow.
45:08 Erin: Okay. Yeah, so it's perfect. Perfect movie for you.
45:13 Wes: Yeah. And it was not long after I got to the. To the United States, too.
45:19 Erin: Did you like Reese's Pieces?
45:21 Wes: I don't remember liking Reese's Pieces, although I was very. I was very excited about American candy. Like, the first thing I did was I went and got Doritos. Like, I had. Only I heard about them, and I couldn't believe that, you know, they're these triangular chips. Like, I just thought that was crazy. Not that we didn't have, like, exotic stuff in England and Ireland, but. And not that you couldn't get Doritos if you tried, like, go to Harrods or something, but. But yeah, I had never had them, and that's the. That's the first thing I did. So I know that. And by the way, back then, you could get a Candy Bar for 36 cents and a pack of chips for 30 cents. Does that make me sound old? Start talking about prices.
46:00 Erin: Uh, oh, tell me that you're gonna get a roast beef D for 5 cents and then. Then we'll talk. Yeah, And a Sunday and a shoe shine.
46:11 Wes: You know, originally they asked, I think it was Mars if they could do M M's and.
46:17 Erin: Yeah, that's right. I read that.
46:18 Wes: Yeah. Yeah. And the Mars said no. For whatever reason, I guess they thought that E.T.
46:23 Erin: was too scary. Right.
46:25 Erin: Pretty high and mighty for a company named Mars.
46:29 Wes: So Hershey's, you know, they got the. They accepted. And of course, it just drove, like, tremendous sales of Reece's PCs. And I remember them being a big thing, so I remember them being, like a symbol, right? So they became more than a candy. They became a symbol of something. And in this case, you know, I wonder how they got the idea for this, because it is, you know, the use of the Reese's PCs to lure E.T. i'm like, is that really necessary? Does, you know, how does that forge the relationship? In the beginning, ET Seems more like a child and more primitive in a way than he ends up being. So it's more like trying to lure a dog or a cat to where you want it to go.
47:12 Erin: I was thinking about that and the relationship of ET to appetite. He eats so much. There's a lot of junk food in that movie.
47:21 Erin: And a lot of spills unashamedly.
47:24 Wes: Right. With the Cokes. And it's just ordinary, and yet everyone is thin.
47:28 Erin: I don't know about that. I mean, I think that there's an important fairy tale quality to it. And the idea that Eliot somehow knows that winning something over involves satisfying its sweet tooth or, you know, something like that. I mean, there's the breadcrumb idea. There's the idea of, you know, winning over, like, the Ewok. Winning over the Ewok with a little treat so that it won't eat you. Not that Ewoks are a great example of actually. And this predates that movie, I think, by year. But anyway, I don't know what that's about.
48:01 Wes: Well, with the breadcrumbs, you made me think about reversing the whole Hansel and Gretel thing, right? So instead of getting lured into the forest to be eaten by the witch, you lure something out of it.
48:13 Wes: And the other thing that occurs to me by you talking about junk food is that, you know, that's another component of modern life and what technology does for us, you know, in the. In the realm of convenience, right? So you get all these convenient but not so healthy snack foods, and you have a busy mother. And so, of course, that just becomes a kind of go to that kids have access to. But. But in this case. Right. It's put in the service of something more sublime in a way. Right.
48:44 Erin: I mean, the cleverness of that is that what represents ease and convenience and the mundane for us represents exoticism for E.T. you know?
48:53 Erin: It's kind of like. Like renewed or rejuvenated through his. His perspective and. And things that are bad for you. I mean, includes, you know, includes beer and. And it's like a really mundane. Isn't it a Coors Light? Isn't that like a bad.
49:07 Wes: I don't know anything about beer, so.
49:09 Erin: Yeah, but isn't that, like, the junkiest beer as far as beer goes?
49:12 Wes: It's one of them.
49:15 Wes: Or PBR or. We drank even, like when I was in college, we drank even more. You know, the, like, cheapest thing you could find. I forget. Even forget the name. It's like, not even like a national brand, but. But yeah. Corsa Coors Light.
49:29 Erin: Yeah. So there's, you know, not that it's saying something positive about beer or. Or intoxication or something, but there is a kind of like, re. Enchantment of convenience and junk food and.
49:40 Erin: It's like animating the little figurines, you know, having them come to life or something. It's. It's that. That kind of reinvigoration of the symbol.
49:47 Wes: Yeah. And again, you know, there are lots of these reversals or putting one thing in the service of other. So it's putting junk food or beer in the service of something else. Like, it goes along again with the whole. Your idea of the deadbeat dad becoming the conduit to something more adult.
50:03 Erin: Yeah. And the intoxication maybe is just symbolic for this, like, imaginative flight, you know?
50:09 Erin: The dad, maybe, who's sitting at home and who's trying to forget his troubles and the fact that he's out of work by sort of drowning his sorrows in beer becomes like the conduit for this, like, imaginative escape in childhood, which is like, a positive thing and which is not associated with behavioral issues and addiction and stuff like that. Right.
50:31 Wes: And this is what adults use alcohol and drugs to try to recreate. Right. To recreate ecstatic feelings associated with being creative, but also to recreate connection to human. Human beings. And it's a kind of substitute for feelings of intimacy and self connectedness and connectedness to. To others. So it's a poor substitute, but, you know, it's spot on for. In its. In its parallel to the healthier version of that.
51:01 Erin: I wonder if junk food too is kind of a benign version of that. I mean, when I think of like certain junk foods, you know, I really don't eat a lot of. A lot of junk food. So when I, when I do think of Reese's Pieces or Doritos or whatever, I think of childhood parties or like watching the super bowl as a kid, you know, usually birthday parties, having that kind of unfettered accent. Not that actually I was allowed to have junk food and stuff like that growing up. My mom wasn't strict about that. But just the quantities that you would eat and that kind of communal experience associated with those types of junk food. You know, the idea is that it's available in the house and the kids are probably having it on their own, but it becomes this, like, shared experience by having it with ET in the way that I would associate it with, you know, hanging out with friends or having a sleepover, eating a lot of junk food and staying up late and being on a crazy sugar high or whatever.
51:52 Wes: Right. I love the way it starts out with the kids illicitly ordering pizza. Right. And like get lots of sausage, which becomes a kind of counterpoint to the pacifist. I don't know, I was going to call them herbivores, but really the ETs love plants and have a special connection to plants and are there to, I guess, harvest or to take botanical samples. But I can't imagine them as meat eaters, you know. So what do they eat?
52:19 Erin: No, maybe they eat gardeners, raising plants and boys.
52:25 Wes: Yeah, right. But part of that meat eating, pizza eating thing goes along with. Right. We start with these. Elliot in this relationship to these older boys, including his brother, but his brother's rowdy friends and razzing each other. This is another thing I like about some of these 80s films and Spielberg in particular, and these representations of childhood as the rough edges of that, especially as you get into adolescence, and then the relationships between children of different ages. So, and Elliot wants to play a game with them and he's being excluded from that game, which is again, one of the. Goes to one of the vulnerabilities I mentioned earlier, which is the deficits or weak vulnerabilities when it comes to actually competing. And that's something that you will eventually have to do as an adult. So this is another. This is something that Elliot is trying to make the transition into the ability to compete and kind of roughhouse with these. With these older boys or with boys his age as he gets older. And there's this element of cynicism as well. There's a line that I like. I couldn't fully understand it in the movie and I had to look it up in the script, but something about 40 year olds and then someone says, how do you win this game? Another kid says, it's like life. You don't win at life. Then someone says, money helps. So talking in very adult ways, when of course, they've just used their mom's money to order pizza. But for someone who grew up in the 80s, like me, it's very nostalgic. I have the feeling that even your generation probably feels some kind of nostalgic connection to the 80s, and that's part of what makes a show like Stranger Things work.
54:12 Erin: I don't know, I was a 90s kid, but yeah, yeah, for sure. I think that kind of grittiness in childhood TV shows was still very much that. Maybe it had softened a little bit, but I think it was still very much present. I'm thinking too about with these adult concerns and money and stuff like that. You know, you mentioned that people are eating all this junk food and not getting fat. The mother doesn't seem to be indulging that much, or at least she's always gone and she's always kind of harried, as you say. And of course, kids can eat, eat all that stuff with impunity, relatively speaking. And then I'm thinking about the intrusion of the government people who are all. Weren't they all like ER staff, like real EMTs or real ER doctors or something?
54:55 Wes: Oh, were they real?
54:57 Erin: Yeah, he hired people who really would know what they were talking about in an emergency room situation like this.
55:02 Wes: Okay, interesting.
55:04 Erin: And so I'm thinking about that in terms of health and trying to keep ET alive and the concerns of the adult figures with checking your vital signs and, you know, is there a connection to be made there? It's like things kind of get real for the adults in a way that doesn't for the kids.
55:23 Wes: Yeah, I mean, adults have to keep us alive as children so that, you know, you get a. You get a gradually more sympathetic view of adult worries and concerns. You know, the things that, again, the compromise our ability to be creative and playful. So it's not just sinister, but it's forced on us to some extent. So our first encounters with the Searchers and all the rest of it, it's very sinister and it remains that way to some extent. You know, you have adults with guns, right, Trying to stop the kids from escaping. Although Spielberg, in a later edition, digitally took the guns out and replaced them with walkie talkies. But I think he should have left in the guns.
56:05 Erin: So dumb. Yeah.
56:06 Wes: Yeah, but it's, you know, so the
56:08 Erin: threat is so important.
56:09 Wes: Yeah. The sinister stuff doesn't entirely go away, but again, we get a complex depiction of that and it's softened. It's softened for the keys guy. The keys guy turns out not to be such a bad guy, the way he's standing next to the mother in the final scenes and interacting with her. Hints of a surrogate father figure. And then the. The concerned medical staff. And what I took away from this as a kid is just a bunch of bad people trying to dissect E.T. i forgot about the fact that they actually care. They're trying to save them. They're concerned. So adulthood has real concerns. It's not just a matter of negligence and malevolence and all the things that you might think it is in childhood. Right. So you learned to, you know, as you grew up, you learned to empathize with adults in a different way and the kind of things that led to them neglecting and, as a child, damaging you in certain ways.
57:10 Erin: Right. But it's funny, you know, those kind of practical concerns are, of course, like, superseded by this resurrection that happens. Right. So they, you know, they could monitor. They could monitor them with all those little. The stickers that. All their vitals and everything and try to sustain life as much as possible. And then, of course, it's all undermined. Like, first, you know, Elliott feels as though he can heal ET by being with him, or he's, I think, reading the adults around him as having sinister intentions in a way that a child would in that scenario. And therefore, we're. We're reading those intentions that way, too. And he's. He's wrong, we think. Right. Even though he's close to E.T. in those scenes, just a few beats before E.T. is still dying or he's still suffering. So even though we get this sense that if Elliot was free to go to him that things would be better, it really wouldn't matter. But these practical considerations and the beepy machines and everything that's going on, ultimately it's something else that revitalizes ET and that supersedes all that stuff.
58:14 Wes: So he comes from a place that is more technologically advanced, obviously, put a spaceship on Earth. But in a way, for his species, it seems the social is more basic than the biological. Right. Which is not normally the way, at least if we're naturalists, that we think about it. Although, of course, it's very, in some circles, philosophically, it's very common now to think of the social ontology of things as fundamental as over and against materialists and scientifically oriented for whom atoms and biology and all that stuff, those are ontologically fundamental. So in this case, it's his social connection and telepathic social connection to his shipmates, his, his spaceship friends. It's his telepathic connection to his people, to his peers that is more important than, than all the biological stuff when it comes to his actual survival. So whatever the machines say about his respiration and his heartbeat, cardiac arrest. There's something that is more important than that, that is ascendant over that, and that is the love and social connection. All right, so we'll leave it there. What are we going to discuss in postscript? Other Alien movies?
59:38 Erin: Yeah, other Alien movies. What else can we do? Oh, like a Spielberg talk about other Spielberg movies that we like?
59:45 Wes: Yeah, yeah, let's think. Yeah, let's do that. All right, so thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is of part, part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.
