I disagree with most people - including Steven Spielberg - about the ending of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind

[Warning: Pretentiousness incoming]

I just know that the boys are going to discuss Close Encounters through the prism of what is now widely known about Spielberg’s childhood and family, so I wanted to get this off my chest. CEOT3K is my favourite Spielberg movie, and I think it’s his definitive movie - precisely because he made it before he started second-guessing himself.

Spielberg has gone on record that he dislikes how he wrote the family drama in CEOT3K. He stated that if he made that film now, he wouldn’t have Richard Dreyfus’ character Roy Neary leave his family behind to go with the aliens at the end.

From a 2005 Cinema Confidential interview: “I know that 'Close Encounters,' because I wrote the script, was about a man whose insatiable curiosity and a developing obsession and a kind of psychic implantation drew him away from his family and with only looking back once, walked onto the mother ship. Now, that was before I had kids. That was 1977. So I wrote that blithely. Today, I would never have the guy leaving his family and going on the mothership.”

And it’s not like the boy dying in Jaws, where Spielberg is more like “I wouldn’t have the guts to do that nowadays.” It’s more like he thinks it was fundamentally wrong for Neary to leave. And I’ve seen this sentiment expressed in online discussions about the film. And to me, that rings false. Neary leaving his family is one of the things that makes the film work for me. It’s bittersweet to think about, but it fits the theme of the film.

Before CEOT3K, most aliens were written as a generic invading force (ala War Of The Worlds) or as super-advanced human-like species with similar moral codes (ala The Day The Earth Stood Still). And after CEOT3K, there are innumerable stories where aliens are basically just an excuse for an adventure story (ala ET and Independence Day). CEOT3K is one of the few films to highlight the unknowable ‘alienness’ of the aliens and still show how communication can be possible. It’s one the few films to really sell a an alien encounter as a ‘numinous’ experience - something beyond our regular understanding (Under The Skin is another than does this well IMO).

The aliens are capricious and scary, but not malicious - as far as we can tell. They are like Old Testament angels: even when they’re benevolent, their arrival is so spectacular that all notions of regular reaction are insufficient. They operate by their own unknowable moral code. And that’s significant. Sure, Neary leaving his family for the aliens makes him seem like an asshole to us - but we can only imagine being in that situation.

So to me, Neary is caught up in something far beyond his usual realm of experience, and idea that he should experience something monumental like this but still revert to comfortable human morals feels like a betrayal of the film’s main theme. I dislike the idea that that someone could experience this paradigm-shifting even but the ultimate moral is still “Yes, but what’s really important is family”. That would be lame IMO.

Now, you could argue that the Spielberg did a bad job writing the family drama, so this theme falls flat for you. I could agree. To me, the film does a good job of conveying a dysfunctional family where no one person is to blame for it falling apart. But depending on which of the three versions of the film you watch, you get different scenes that either make the wife and kids seem more annoying, or Neary seem more insane. The 1998 edit is the best IMO for really hammering how Neary’s obsession was traumatising the family, and it was best for them to leave.

To me, that’s the point - this thing is bigger than family, bigger than familial bonds. And that’s not a theme that I think pop culture usually deals with. ‘Family first’ is one of the core comforting themes in media, and CEOT3K is one of the few to challenge it, and that’s one reason I love it.