The Unidentified States of America

A story about growing up with UFOs, and finally telling aliens to kindly shit or get off the pot.

When I was a kid, UFOs were a constant hum in the background.

Star Wars came out five days after I was born, and hung around the second-run theaters for many years. My early imaginary life unfolded largely in that world of countless interstellar species getting over on one another, making fun of each other and sort-of, but not really getting along.

The cantina scene in the first movie was the first glimpse I got of the rough-and-tumble conviviality of adult life. In the cantina, there was the band - big headed guys, with giant black unblinking eyes - playing reed instruments and bopping back and forth in their black turtlenecks.

Clarinet extraterrestrials

When I was about six, I found one of those big-eyed, small-mouthed cantina musicians hovering over me, its elongated fingers trying to hold me down. It pressed down and then withdrew as I tried to thrash through a long moment of maddening paralysis, followed by a blackout. Then I could scream. My parents came in. And eventually I went back to sleep.

Peculiarity persisted through that age. I had a recurring nightmare. In it, I went out to the back yard of our house in Central Massachusetts. There was a package of marshmallow pinwheel cookies by the corner of the fence, by the woods, which I left the house, at night, to retrieve. Once there, a beam of blue light froze me in place. Paralyzed, I knew what was happening and knew it was happening again. I don’t think I woke up screaming. But I was glad to wake up.

It’s hard to say how many times I had the dream. But it was a lot. Then one night, I fought the paralytic effects of the beam of blue light and looked up. I saw a ring of lights with a circle of light in the middle, descending upon me. I didn’t look away. The flying saucer shattered on my head. I never had the dream again.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

This movie came out less than six months after Star Wars. And I first saw it on UHF channel 38 or 56 out of Boston. I’m not sure how old I was, but it was before we got cable in ‘84. And it acted as a bridge between my daily life and the story into which my dreams and imaginary life had enlisted me.

To this day, I love the film, most of it. It’s an incredible portrayal of obsession. I’ve since become acquainted with obsession’s uncanny invitation, the incredible thrills, deepening joy of persistence, the formless peril. I still follow along with the film eagerly. But the payoff, when the spaceship opens up and we see the aliens, hit me wrong even then then. And over time, I only like it less. It’s so on-the-nose that it almost obliterates the point of the film.

At the end, the the alien children emerge in the light. It’s pretty like Enya is pretty. The lady gets her kid back. Dreyfus abandons his family - practically an afterthought for Baby Boomers in the 1980s. The ending is mealy-mouthed, the equivalent of saying the mafia only kills other mafiosos. It elides the real human and social carnage that surround actual abduction stories, wherever they may fall on the scale of reality as we’re each left alone to determine it.

Close Encounters is a classic film nonetheless. Whatever it squanders in those last minutes, it still comes out way ahead. E.T. (1982 in the theaters, I’m 5), where the alien is in nearly every scene, was initially supposed to be its sequel. But instead, it feels like an expansion upon everything that went wrong - psychologically, morally and perhaps spiritually - with the last scene of Close Encounters. It’s like one of those doomed apologies where you start out sorry and end up doubling down on your original offense.

What really went wrong in that last scene of Close Encounters was, essentially, that anything at all had been portrayed within the space that the rest of the film had escalated toward the point of sacredness. Spielberg would go on to stress that the sanctity, innate decency and survival of his characters depended on resolutely not seeing the divine in Raiders of the Lost Ark (also ‘82). There was a lot going on with that guy in 1982.

It’s worth noting that E.T. was a huge box-office smash that sold a lot of merch. But no one ever wants to watch the thing again. Close Encounters is still worth your time right now.