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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. Also from Wes: Curtain Times, a calendar of Boston theatre, classical, talks and readings. 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 Keys 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 unform…
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