Halloween for grownups

I owe Steven Spielberg an apology. Having now caught up with the 'Collector's edition' of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I realize that for twenty-five years I've been blaming him for something that wasn't his fault. I refer of course to the 'coda' that was added to CE3K in the 'Special edition' (1980), showing Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) inside the mother ship. At the time, I couldn't believe that someone capable of making such a good film, with such a brave ending, could then wilfully mutilate it in such a fashion. Now I learn that this coda was imposed on Spielberg by Columbia, as a trade-off for being allowed to re-cut the film. Now, finally, with the Collector's Edition (CECE3K?), Spielberg has rightly dispensed with this embarrassment, and once more Roy floats off, as he should, into a completely unknowable future.

(Anyone interested in a blow-by-blow account of the different cuts should read Jocelyn Briggs' essay on the Spielberg fansite.)

It's easy to forget how original it was, in 1977, to take a subject - flying saucers - that was the preserve of mostly-bad pulp science-fiction films, and give it the emotional dynamic of a major drama. Although, only two years before, there had appeared the telemovie The UFO Incident, dealing with the real-life case of Betty and Barney Hill, a couple who claimed to have had an alien encounter, and who supposedly gave completely consistent independent accounts of the incident under hypnosis. I can remember this story scaring the bejeezus out of me as a teenager. The UFO Incident, as I recall it, had a distinctly sociological approach, placing the incident within the social and personal context of the Hills. I can't help thinking of Lacombe/Truffaut's exclamation at one point in CE3K: "It is an event sociological!"

CE3K frames the story of one man's rendevous with the extraterrestrials against his own breakdown, and the collapse of his marriage; in any other film, even any other Spielberg film, Roy would end up back with his beloved family, hugging them as they all watch the UFO sail away. Instead, Ray never gets back to his family, but still ends in a state of ecstasy. (Spielberg cleverly uses the device of the abducted child Barry being returned to his mother to close this particular emotional loop in the audience; one returns home, one leaves home forever).

CE3K is also one of those key films in the debate that dogs Spielberg, namely his perceived inability to make a 'grownup' film. It's all about adults who won't grow up, kids who aren't interested in childish things (Pinocchio), aliens who are either ancient or childlike. One line I'd never noticed before comes in the scene where Roy is arguing with his estranged wife Ronnie on the phone: "I'm an adult...even though I don't believe there is any such thing!" (My paraphrase from memory - a correction will follow if necessary). Did Spielberg's choice of Truffaut as an actor have something to do with the latter's remarkable films about childhood (The 400 Blows, Pocket Money)? For the sake of a glib aphorism, one could observe that Truffaut's children are like adults, and Spielberg's adults are like children. Still, even if Spielberg's vision is limited in this particular way, this is the moment when that vision, and its subject, came perfectly together.