The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Steven Spielberg · a film · 1982 · about 115 minutes · the theatrical cut
Mode
Science fiction made domestic; the family picture, the visitation story and the passion in one
Mythos
The visitor from the sky who heals with a touch, is taken, dies, rises and ascends; the foundling and the changeling; the imaginary friend made real; the child’s world that adults cannot enter
Phase
Some days of an autumn, from a landing in the forest by night to a departure from the same forest, with Halloween at the centre
Presentation
Feature film in colour, spherical widescreen at 1.85:1, in English, about 115 minutes in the theatrical cut; a mother, three children, a creature and the men who come for it
Register
From bathroom words at the dinner table to death and resurrection; warm wonder, with dread as its counterweight
Scale
One house, one boy, one visitor
Governing Proposition
A boy whose father has left finds a creature stranded by its people in the forest behind his house, hides it, and comes to feel what it feels, until the state comes for it and it nearly dies. The wager of the film is that a child’s grief can be shown from inside, by holding the camera where the child stands, and that the love a lost thing calls out is proved only by letting it go.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins in a forest at night. A ship has landed, lit from below in fog. Men come into the trees after it, and the film shows them only as torches, legs and a ring of keys at a belt. The ship leaves, and one of the visitors is left behind. The first ten minutes set the law of the whole: the stranded creature is the one the camera follows, and the adults are seen from below, without faces.
Beyond the forest is a suburb, and in one house a boy, Elliott. The house is a mother’s house: Mary, played by Dee Wallace, is raising three children alone, and the father is away in Mexico. Something is in the shed behind the house, and the boy goes out at night to find it. The wound is in place before the visitor is found.
Steven Spielberg directed the film from an original screenplay by Melissa Mathison, and produced it with Kathleen Kennedy for Amblin, for Universal. Allen Daviau photographed it, Carol Littleton edited it and John Williams wrote the score; the creature was designed and built under Carlo Rambaldi. Henry Thomas plays Elliott, Robert MacNaughton his brother Michael, Drew Barrymore their sister Gertie and Peter Coyote the man known as Keys. It closed the Cannes festival in May 1982 and opened in the United States in June. The film judged here is the theatrical cut, in colour, about 115 minutes; the edition of 2002, about 120 minutes, is not the object.
Movement II
Elliott meets the creature in the shed at night, and lays a trail of Reese’s Pieces to draw it into the house. A frightened boy coaxes a frightened thing indoors. E.T. is hidden from the mother, and the secret passes to Michael and to Gertie, so that the three children become a household within the household, the brothers rivals and then allies.
The camera stays at their height. Mary passes through her own house and never sees the creature, hidden among the stuffed toys in a closet. The comedy is a child’s comedy of concealment, and it carries the film’s first argument: the children’s world runs beside the adults’ and the adults cannot enter it. At dinner the brothers bicker about the father, and Elliott calls Michael “penis breath”. The line makes the brothers real, and behind the quarrel the mother’s own grief is glimpsed and not explored.
In the garage Elliott and Michael take down a shirt their father left behind and smell it. It is the one scene in which the absence is held up to the light, and the film moves on from it quickly. The creature arrives in the space the father has left, and the film is careful not to say so.
Movement III
A link forms between the boy and the creature, so that what E.T. feels, Elliott feels. Alone at home, E.T. drinks beer from the refrigerator, and at school Elliott grows drunk at his desk. In class he sets the frogs free, and while E.T. at home watches The Quiet Man on television, Elliott in the classroom kisses a girl. The intercut is a set piece, extravagant and comic, and it lays down what the last act will need: the boy’s body answers the creature’s.
Dressed in Gertie’s clothes, E.T. makes the comedy of a child’s dressing-up. He tends plants and revives them. He heals with a touch of his finger. The film gives each of these as a child’s marvel, and lets the mother pass through without seeing.
Then the creature asks to call his people. “E.T. phone home” is the line that has passed into common speech, and it is the plainest statement of what the film is about: someone lost wants to go home. Elliott, who wants to keep him, helps him build a communicator, a Speak and Spell among its parts.
Movement IV
Halloween gives the only disguise under which E.T. can leave the house: a sheet. Elliott takes him out among the children in costume, and on the way to the forest the bicycle lifts from the ground and crosses the full moon. The image is so complete that it became its maker’s emblem, and the film earns it: the flight comes from the one being who cannot get home, carried by the one boy who has been left.
The communicator is set up in the forest and left to send. After the night in the forest Elliott comes home ill, and E.T. is found in a creek bed, grey and drying. The two have been sickening together, and the link that made a drunk boy at a desk now makes a dying boy in a bed.
Then the state arrives. Men in spacesuits enter at the windows, the house is sealed in plastic and turned into a laboratory, and the boy and the creature are dying together under its lights. Here at last Keys is shown in full, kneeling beside Elliott, and speaks of his own childhood. The first adult face the form has granted outside the children’s house belongs to one of the men who came for the creature.
Movement V
E.T. dies. Then, under the white wrapping, the heart begins to glow, and the flower lifts. The creature is alive. Whatever its maker intended, the pattern of the passion is in the film: the healing touch, the taking, the death and the rising, and an ascent still to come.
The escape is a chase by bicycle through the suburb, past the police, and at its end the bicycles rise over the houses into the sunset. Williams’s score runs almost without pause through the last fifteen minutes, and it is reported that the ending was cut to the recorded performance rather than the music fitted to the cut. The chase is where the film loosens its grip: its comic police belong to a lighter film than the one that has just shown a death.
In the forest the ship comes down. E.T. touches the boy’s forehead with his finger and says “I’ll be right here”. The ship lifts and leaves a rainbow trail over the trees, and the boy stays. He has learned what the film set out to teach: the cure for loss is not keeping. The film won four Academy Awards, for score, sound, sound effects editing and visual effects, and was named to the National Film Registry in 1994.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere. The trail of Reese’s Pieces is how a frightened boy draws the creature into the house. The sympathetic link, set out at school and at home, is what later makes the creature’s dying Elliott’s dying. Halloween is required: a sheet is the only disguise under which E.T. can leave the house, and it carries the first flight. The scene in the garage, the brothers smelling their father’s shirt, is the one that names the wound the creature fills. What gives: the frog liberation intercut with the drunk creature at home makes one point with a set piece’s extravagance, and the Peter Pan reading to Gertie restates a figure the film already holds.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: a child abandoned by a father finds in a lost and helpless creature both something to love and a mirror of his own abandonment, and the love is proved only by letting it go. The last movement is a child learning that the cure for loss is not keeping. A second truth is the child’s view of authority: adults are waists, torches and keys until one of them kneels at the boy’s level and speaks of his own childhood. What holds the figure is how much of what the film carries is mood rather than meaning, wonder, a lit kitchen, the ache of farewell, and that the divorce, the root of the disclosure, is touched in a few scenes and then given over to the creature.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The elevation is frequent and of one kind, warm wonder, with dread as its counterweight. The rises: the ship in the forest at the opening, lit from below in fog; the bicycle crossing the full moon, an image so complete it became its maker’s emblem; the bicycles lifting over the suburb at sunset at the end of the chase; the glowing heart and the reviving flower; the departure, the rainbow trail over the forest under Williams’s finale. The dread is real: the house sealed in plastic, men in spacesuits at the windows, the creature grey and drying in the creek bed. Held from the top because the register is single and pressed: the score asks for feeling where the image has already given it, and the summits are sweetness more than grandeur.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The myth is partly built. The visitor from the sky heals with a touch of the finger, is taken by the authorities, dies, rises, the heart lighting under the white wrapping and the flower lifting, and ascends, leaving a finger at the boy’s forehead and the words “I’ll be right here”. The passion structure bears the weight of the last act; it is not allusion. Beside it stand the foundling and the changeling, the imaginary friend made real, and Peter Pan named outright in the bedtime reading. The particular stays particular: sweets, a Speak and Spell, a closet of stuffed toys. What holds the figure is that much of the deep pattern is drawn in strokes, through image and score, and the archetype, grace from above, is the familiar one, not made strange.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the invasion film of the 1950s, from which the film takes the landing, the agents and the quarantine and inverts them, the visitor innocent and the state the menace; the Disney family picture; and its maker’s own Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), which had already made the alien benevolent and the encounter a revelation, on the ground of suburban family life. The turns are real: the alien as a small, frail, comic body to be cared for rather than worshipped; science fiction shot from a child’s eye height; a personal film of modest budget after Raiders of the Lost Ark. What holds the axis lowest of the gated five is the stake. The wager was placed on its maker’s proven path, in the oldest story in children’s fiction, a boy and his creature.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows, which is the world as a child stands in it. The camera is held, for much of the film, at a child’s height: adults are torsos, legs, a ring of keys at a belt, and the only adult face shown in full for most of its length is the mother’s, who belongs to the children’s house. When Keys at last appears whole, kneeling beside Elliott, the form has made his face a disclosure. The sympathetic link makes inner states bodily, drunkenness, illness, a shared dying, so the film can show a boy’s grief without speeches. Daviau’s backlit haze makes the night suburb a place of possible visitation. Held from the top by the last act, where the chase and the set piece override the child’s-eye law.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Forty-four years of return have yielded several readings. The divorce is read as the film’s buried subject, with its maker’s own account of his parents’ separation as the source; the Christian figure is argued as intended or incidental; the film is set against Reagan-era suburbia and its fear of the state; Mathison’s script is weighed against Spielberg’s sentiment; and a long argument runs over whether the sweetness is earned or manipulative. Formally, the camera at eye height and the use of the score repay study. What holds the figure, level with The Swerve as the lowest of the eleven, is the shape of the yield: the readings converge on child, loss and wonder, the film is largely open on first viewing, and return goes more to feeling and memory than to new meaning.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Field: the cinema of the 1980s. The intrinsic force is real. The film made a child’s inner life the governing perspective of a mainstream spectacle, and fused science fiction with the suburban domestic drama, at a scale and with a seriousness about a child’s grief that the family picture had not attempted. It perfected and fixed a mode more than it reorganised what film could do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the suburban film of children and the uncanny descends from it openly, in The Goonies and the Amblin productions of the decade, and later in Super 8 (2011) and the television series Stranger Things; the bicycle across the moon became a studio’s emblem. The reach redirected the genre and the business more than the art.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across forty-four years. The theatrical cut survives whole. The edition of 2002 altered it, with digital shots of the creature and the agents’ guns replaced by walkie-talkies, and for about a decade was the version most readily found on home video; the original was issued beside it, has since been the standard release, and its maker has said he regretted the changes. The original was never lost, only for a time displaced, and that is charged by holding the figure at the usual mark for its span. Presence is as wide as a film’s can be, in reissues, television, every home format, teaching and quotation. The bicycles and the suburb date, but as period, and the film is about that suburb.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Allen Daviau’s photography, lit from behind and through haze, so that light itself is the sign of the visitor; Carol Littleton’s cutting of the intercut sympathy scenes and of the chase; John Williams’s score, which carries the last fifteen minutes; Melissa Mathison’s script, plain and economical in children’s speech, with “penis breath” at the dinner table making the brothers real; Henry Thomas’s performance, which holds grief and command without a child actor’s stagecraft, and Drew Barrymore’s. The creature is a mechanical figure lit to hide its limits. The costs: the score at times underlines what the image has done, the creature’s walk shows its means in wide shot, and the agents of the last act are staged as action rather than threat.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the squabble at the dinner table, the children bickering about the father and Elliott’s rude word, and E.T. dying in a house wrapped in plastic under men in spacesuits. One law governs both: the child’s world is the true one, and the adult order, a father gone, a mother overwhelmed, a state in masks, breaks it from outside. The comedy of E.T. in Gertie’s clothes, the frog liberation and the drunk creature obey it, each a child’s freedom from adult rule. The range is wide, from bathroom words to death and resurrection. What strains: the flying bicycles are prepared by the moon and keep the law, but the comic police of the chase belong to a lighter film than the one that has just shown a death.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 115 minutes holds. The family is held fully: a mother left alone with three children, the absent father present in a shirt and a trip to Mexico, the brothers’ rivalry and alliance, the youngest sister. Consciousness is the child’s, given from inside through the form and the sympathetic link. The state enters as a faceless apparatus of science and quarantine; the school as a classroom with a frog; the natural order in the forest and the plants E.T. tends and revives; the cosmos as the place the visitor comes from; the sacred as figure, in the death and ascent. The one house integrates them. What holds the axis lowest: labour, money and history are nearly absent, and the state is a menace without a mechanism.
Score: 7.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable and The Made at 8.6. A theatrical cut that survives whole after a decade of displacement, with a presence as wide as a film’s can be; and a making in which Daviau’s backlit haze, Littleton’s intercutting, Williams’s score and Henry Thomas’s performance carry the argument. Behind them, at 8.3, the warm heights of the moon and the departure, and one law, the child’s world against the adult order, that holds from the dinner table to the house in plastic.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.3: the family, the child’s consciousness, the forest and the sacred figure are held through one house, but labour, money and history are nearly absent and the state is a menace without a mechanism. Then The Swerve at 7.6, a turn placed on its maker’s proven path and the oldest story in children’s fiction; and The Bottomless Well at 7.6, readings that converge on child, loss and wonder, and a return that goes more to feeling than to meaning.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.3, The Living Form at 8.2, 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 8.2 falls three tenths short, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 five tenths short, The Unconcealment at 7.8 seven tenths short and The Swerve at 7.6 nine tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.6, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate on four of its five axes and by the aggregate, 8.0 from a sum of 96.5, far below 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial in its original theatrical cut of 1982, in colour, in English, about 115 minutes, from the landing in the forest to the rainbow trail of the departure: directed by Steven Spielberg from an original screenplay by Melissa Mathison, produced by Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy for Amblin and released by Universal, photographed by Allen Daviau, edited by Carol Littleton, with music by John Williams and the creature designed and built under Carlo Rambaldi. The 20th Anniversary Edition of 2002, about 120 minutes, which restored two deleted scenes, replaced some shots of the creature with digital images and replaced the agents’ guns with walkie-talkies, is not the object; it is weighed only under The Imperishable, as an alteration of what survives. No print, script or recording was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and other speech is described. Claims that could not be verified, among them an altered line of dialogue in the 2002 edition, the film’s standing as the highest-grossing film of its time and how long it held that place, and its part in making paid brand appearances in films a recognised practice, are not given.