The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Steven Spielberg · a film · 1977 · about 135 minutes · written and directed by Steven Spielberg
Mode
A film of first contact made as a studio spectacle, turning from scattered signs and a household’s breakdown to a pilgrimage and a liturgy
Mythos
Annunciation and election: signs fall on the many, a vision on a few, and one is taken up; the mountain of revelation; the lost returned unaged; the child who goes to the light and the father who must become a child to follow
Phase
Four movements in about 135 minutes: scattered signs in Mexico, India and Indiana; obsession in one house; the pilgrimage to Devils Tower past the army; the landing and its exchange of tones
Presentation
Feature film in colour, in English with some French, about 135 minutes, judged in the theatrical cut of 1977; the Special Edition of 1980 and the edition of 1998 are its director’s later versions
Register
Terror and wonder at a railroad crossing; crowded domestic noise, talk over talk and the television on; comedy turning to breakdown; near silence and music at the close
Scale
Three continents and one town, a family broken and a child taken, an army and its scientists, one mountain
Governing Proposition
Lights cross the sky over an Indiana town, and a power lineman who meets them on a dark road cannot stop making the shape of a mountain he has never seen: in shaving cream, in mashed potato, in earth carried into his house, until his wife takes the children and leaves. Elsewhere scientists follow signs across three continents, decode a signal into a place in Wyoming, and an army clears a county around it with a false disaster. The wager of the film is that a calling may look like madness and be true; that the visitors’ language is music and light; and that the man who is chosen must leave everything ordinary behind, a choice the film celebrates more than it weighs.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film opens in the Sonora desert, where the planes of Flight 19, lost in 1945, are found standing in the sand intact. Then air traffic control at Indianapolis. Then a night in Muncie, Indiana, the night of the first sightings. In his mother’s house a small boy, Barry Guiler, played by Cary Guffey, finds his toys waking, and goes out into the dark without fear. Each sign arrives as a fragment, unexplained, and the film does not join them: it leaves the viewer where its witnesses are, in front of something that has no name yet.
Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, is a power lineman, out in his truck that night. At a railroad crossing, in the dark, the mailboxes begin to rattle, the instruments on the dashboard go mad, and a light comes down from above, so close that it burns one side of his face. Terror and wonder come at once, and Michael Kahn’s cutting holds them together. Roy drives on after the lights, and the film’s argument has its man.
Steven Spielberg wrote and directed it, with the sole screen credit, for Columbia Pictures, which released it in November 1977. Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips produced it; Vilmos Zsigmond photographed it; Michael Kahn edited it; Douglas Trumbull made its special photographic effects; Joe Alves designed it; John Williams wrote the score. It runs about 135 minutes. Spielberg later made two other versions, the Special Edition of 1980 and an edition of 1998; the theatrical cut of 1977 is the work judged here, and the later versions bear only on its survival.
Movement II
On a hill outside the town, Crescendo Summit, cars wait in the dark. A single light hangs over the road; small craft race past the waiting cars, low and bright, and are gone. Roy has chased the lights here, and Kahn’s cutting of the chase carries the night on its speed. Barry’s mother, Jillian Guiler, played by Melinda Dillon, has seen them too. Neither of them can say what it was.
Elsewhere, the scientists. Claude Lacombe, played by François Truffaut, a Frenchman speaking French through an interpreter, and David Laughlin, played by Bob Balaban, follow the signs across the world. In India a crowd sings five tones and points upward, all together, arms raised. The five notes become the film’s motif and its plot at once: a theme in Williams’s score, a phrase carried in Lacombe’s Kodály hand signs, and in the end a language.
The visitors come back for Barry. At Jillian’s house the boy stands at the open door in a rectangle of orange light, open to whatever is coming, while his mother fights to hold the house shut. He goes to the light, and he is taken. The scene is the film’s dread at its height; from here the fear will be given up for wonder.
Movement III
In the Neary house the noise never stops: talk over talk, the television on, three children shouting. Ronnie Neary, played by Teri Garr, watches her husband change. He shapes his shaving cream into a mountain, and then, at the dinner table, his mashed potato, while his family watches him. He says, “This means something.” He cannot say what. The film shoots the household crowded and overlapping, and its comedy is the comedy of a man becoming ridiculous to the people who love him.
The beat repeats, more often than the film needs: Roy cannot explain, and Ronnie cannot bear it. Then the obsession goes past comedy. Roy carries earth, shrubs and chicken wire into the den, shovelling them through the kitchen window, and builds the mountain the size of the room. His children cry at the window. Ronnie puts them in the car and drives away. On a second viewing it is these scenes, the ferocity of the breakdown and the fear on the children’s faces, that come forward, and the wonder recedes.
In the den, Roy sees on the television news a place in Wyoming, Devils Tower, from which the army is evacuating the county. It is the shape he has been making. Private madness becomes public truth in a single cut: the mountain he could not stop building is a real place, where something is about to touch down.
Movement IV
The scientists have decoded a signal into a place: the coordinates of Devils Tower. The army clears the country round it with a staged spill of nerve gas, and to make the lie believable it kills or sedates the livestock in the fields. The film shows this plainly, an institution that fakes a catastrophe to keep a secret, and then lets it go. The government’s strand is told in briefings and explanation, flatly staged, in a form the rest of the film has outgrown.
Roy and Jillian, each drawn by the same shape, make their way toward the Tower and climb past the army. The mountain of revelation is no longer a sculpture: it rises in front of them, and the clay, the potato, the earth and the paint were all its image.
The pilgrimage is short and hard, and it is the hinge between the two halves of the film. Behind it is the world, its noise and its families; in front of it is the far side of the Tower, where the landing will come. A cloud boils up over the summit.
Movement V
The landing. The mothership comes rising from behind the mountain like a city lit for a festival. On the ground a synthesiser plays the five tones; the ship answers; tone answers tone, faster and fuller, until the music becomes a conversation. Lacombe makes the hand signs. The climax of a large studio film is a piece of music, understood by the audience exactly as by the scientists, by hearing. The summit is held for many minutes rather than struck once.
Out of the ship come the taken, among them the airmen of 1945, unaged. The return of the lost is a resurrection, and the film lingers on it past its need. Then the visitors choose. Roy, who made the mountain before he knew what it was, is chosen, and goes into the ship. The child who went to the light without fear is answered by the father who must become a child to follow.
The film asks its audience to rejoice: the man was right, and he is chosen. But the family he has lost is not in the frame. It was played partly as comedy and then left, and the film’s two judgments, of a home destroyed and of an election, do not meet. What it knows is in the crossing, the den and the exchange of tones: that a calling may look like madness and be true, and that ordinary life cannot hold it.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test and it holds at the ends and bites in the middle. The scattered signs, in the Sonora desert, over Indianapolis, in India and in Indiana, are each required: they make the visitation global and the convergence on Wyoming earned. Roy’s obsession is the spine, and the mountain he shapes in potato and then in earth is the hinge by which private madness becomes public truth. But the household sequences repeat one beat, Roy cannot explain and Ronnie cannot bear it, several times over; the scientists’ strand runs beside Roy’s more than through it, and its decoding and briefings could lose a third; the return of the taken runs past need. The director’s own recuts, which moved material in and out of the middle, confirm from outside that its necessities were not fixed. Required parts, repeated beyond their need: the axis stands at 7.3, below the Necessity Cap.
Score: 7.3 / 10
What the film brings into the open is the shape of a calling as it is lived in an ordinary American house: a vision that cannot be put into words takes over a man, makes him ridiculous to his family, and is shown to have been true. It shows faith from outside, a father shovelling earth through a kitchen window while his children weep, and from inside, in a line spoken over a mound of potato: “This means something.” An army that fakes a spill of nerve gas and kills or sedates livestock to clear a county is shown plainly. What holds the figure at 7.3: much of the disclosure is of a mood, wonder itself, rendered overwhelmingly rather than understood; and the price the film reveals, a man proved right and a family lost, is seen and then left, never thought through, while the film chooses the rapture.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Elevation is frequent and of several kinds. Terror and wonder at once in the truck at the crossing: the mailboxes rattling, the light from above, the instruments gone mad, the burn on one side of Roy’s face. The single light over Crescendo Summit and the small craft racing past the waiting cars. Barry in a doorway of orange light, open to whatever is coming. The crowd in India singing with arms raised; the cloud boiling up over the Tower; and the landing, the mothership rising from behind the mountain like a city lit for a festival, tone answering tone until the music becomes a conversation. Held at 8.2 because the elevation is nearly all in one key, rapture and awe: the dread of the opening is given up, and the summit, held for many minutes, runs on past its need at the close.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The archetypes are built, not only evoked. The plot is an annunciation followed by an election: signs fall on the many, the vision is given to a few, and of those one is taken up. The mountain of revelation bears weight: Roy and Jillian are compelled to make it, in clay, in potato, in a model the size of a room, in paint, before they know what it is, and the image turns out to be a real place where heaven touches down. The airmen of 1945 return unaged, a resurrection. The child who goes to the light without fear and the father who must become a child to follow him are paired, and the Pinocchio thread, the wish upon a star, is the hidden fable. What holds the axis at 7.8: the divine is generic, light and music, a heaven without a theology, and the film evokes Sinai more than it builds it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The inheritance is the science fiction film of the 1950s, in which the visitor from the sky is invasion, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and The War of the Worlds, with The Day the Earth Stood Still the rare benign exception; and 2001: A Space Odyssey, the precedent for effects in the service of awe. The departure is real: a large studio picture that makes contact a communion, refuses combat, makes its climax a piece of music, and gives the central role in the science to a French film director speaking French through an interpreter. What holds it at 7.6 is how much of the turn rests on proven paths: Trumbull’s grammar of effects came from 2001, the benign visitor had precedent, and Spielberg, coming off the largest success of his time, placed the wager on his own strength.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The form is a convergence: separate witnesses on three continents and in one Indiana town are drawn, without knowing why, toward one place, and the structure is the drawing. Change the form and the knowledge changes. In a novel the five tones would be a description; the film’s discovery is that the visitors’ language is music and light, and its climax is understood by the audience exactly as by the scientists, by hearing. The montage of signs, each a fragment left unexplained, makes Roy’s ignorance formal. The household is shot crowded and loud, talk over talk, the television on, children shouting, and the last act is nearly wordless: the passage between them is the passage from the world to the sacred. What holds it at 7.8: the scientists’ half of the film is told in briefings and explanation, a conventional form the rest has outgrown.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Return yields, and nearly fifty years of it are evidence: the film is rewatched, taught in courses on Spielberg and on the New Hollywood, and argued over in three cuts, which is itself a re-examination of what the work is. On return the household scenes yield more than they do at first: the ferocity of Roy’s breakdown, the fear on his children’s faces and Ronnie’s humiliation are sharper than the wonder that sells the film, and its stance toward a father’s desertion becomes the open question. The patterning of light, headlamps, the refrigerator, the door, the ship, repays study, as does the placing of the motif. What holds it at 7.4: much of what the film has is given fully at first viewing, and the critical return turns largely on one question, the family.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1970s, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is real: the film made the visitation a religious experience on the scale of the studio spectacle, and showed that effects could carry awe rather than combat. With Star Wars, released the same year, it turned Hollywood toward the large science fiction film of wonder and toward the director as the author of the blockbuster. What holds it at 7.8: that turn shares its credit with Star Wars and with the logic of Jaws, the New Hollywood it helped to end was replaced by nothing this film specifically founded, and its own line, contact as communion, is narrower than the field it helped to move. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the benign-contact film became a line, Spielberg’s own E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial first, with Contact and Arrival among the films commonly read as answering it; the five tones and the potato mountain entered common reference; and Trumbull’s craft of light set the look of the friendly visitor for a generation.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-nine years. The form survives: the theatrical cut of 1977 is complete. Its maker’s own altered versions charge it a little: the Special Edition of 1980 replaced it in circulation for some years, and the edition of 1998 was for a time the standard version at home, so the original was partly displaced by its director’s revisions; since later editions carry all three cuts, the charge is small. Presence has been continuous and wide: repertory, television, every home format, teaching, and the five tones quoted far beyond the cinema. The fabric ages as period, the photochemical effects and the Indiana households with their televisions, but the effects, made of light rather than models, have aged better than most. At its span and presence, the small charge for displacement holds it at 8.6.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Read to the same anchors as every desk. The command is broad and visible in every department: Vilmos Zsigmond’s light, which makes illumination itself the subject, through keyholes and under doors, backlit in fog; Douglas Trumbull’s effects, built from light and haze rather than hardware; Michael Kahn’s cutting of the crossing and of the chase to Crescendo Summit; the sound design; John Williams’s score, whose five-note motif is both a theme and a device of the plot. The household scenes, overlapping and chaotic, are directed as surely as the spectacle. What holds the figure at 8.2 is unevenness at the joins: the scientists’ scenes are flatly staged, the middle sags in pace, as the later recuts confirm, and the finale’s length shows craft serving effect at the expense of shape.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the Neary kitchen, shouting, the noise of the television, a father losing his mind in front of his children; and the liturgy at Devils Tower, near silence and music. One law covers both: the visitation is real, and ordinary life cannot hold it. The household’s noise is the world the music overrides, and light runs through both, the refrigerator door, the headlamps, the ship. But the seam is wide. The film plays the destruction of a family partly as comedy and then asks its audience to rejoice when the father leaves for good, and the two judgments do not meet; the government plot, with its false catastrophe and its dead cattle, belongs to a paranoid thriller the ending forgets. One physics, with a seam that holds the axis at 7.5.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 135 minutes holds. Consciousness: one man’s obsession from inside, and a mother’s terror for her son. The family: a marriage and three children broken by a vision, a single mother and her child. The state: the army, the air traffic controllers, a government that stages a disaster to keep a secret. Science and language: the decoding, the hand signs, music as speech. The globe: Mexico, India, the United States. Labour in Roy’s work as a power lineman; history in the lost of 1945 returning. The sacred frames the whole. What holds the figure at 7.4: the orders are present more than integrated. The state and the family meet only in Roy, the scientists have no inner life, and the cosmic is held as spectacle rather than as a world.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Sublime and The Made at 8.2. A theatrical cut that survives complete across forty-nine years, with a presence as wide as a film’s can be; heights of several kinds, from the truck at the crossing to the exchange of tones at the Tower; and a making in which light is the subject, from Zsigmond’s camera to Trumbull’s effects and Williams’s five notes.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 7.3: a middle that repeats one necessary beat, with the scientists’ strand running beside the spine rather than through it; and a disclosure that is largely of a mood, wonder rendered rather than understood, with the cost to an abandoned family seen and then left. Next above them, The Bottomless Well and The Encompassed at 7.4: a yield largely given at first viewing, and orders present more than joined. These hold the film below Tier IV, with the seam in The Inner Law at 7.5.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.3 falls two tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.2, The Living Form at 7.8, The Inner Law at 7.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 7.8, The Archetypal Deep at 7.8, The Swerve at 7.6 and The Unconcealment at 7.3 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.3, The Unconcealment, 7.3, and The Bottomless Well, 7.4, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Two of the five summit conditions are met, the Coherence Floor and the Megethos Floor. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, from a sum of 92.9, in the band of Tier III, three tenths short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires, and the Necessity Cap would close the summit to it at any aggregate.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Close Encounters of the Third Kind as released by Columbia Pictures in November 1977, the theatrical cut of about 135 minutes, from the prologue in the Sonora desert to the departure of the mothership: written and directed by Steven Spielberg, who holds the sole screen credit (other writers worked on drafts, uncredited), produced by Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips, photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond, edited by Michael Kahn, with special photographic effects by Douglas Trumbull, production design by Joe Alves and music by John Williams. The Special Edition of 1980, shorter, which added a ship found in the Gobi and the interior of the mothership and cut some of Roy’s breakdown, and the Collector’s Edition of 1998, which restored most of the domestic material of 1977 and dropped the interior, are not the object; they are weighed only under The Imperishable, as alterations of what survives. The differences among the three cuts are known in outline, not shot by shot. No print, script or recording was consulted. Dialogue is described rather than quoted, except one line whose wording is certain. Details that could not be verified, among them the exact date of the opening, the other hands who shot additional photography, the pitches of the five tones, the running times of the later editions, the film’s budget, its awards and its other honours, are not given.