He's just ET - no surname, no real history or explanation. And while he's evidently endowed with unearthly powers (you can call them supranatural or just supernatural), his theoretically massive intelligence never daunts the child Elliott who wants a friend.
Not that Elliott has a surname either, come to that. He is the ideal childish imagination, living with a sister and two brothers in the placid skin called suburbia stretched over southern California like plastic wrapping, with just a mother, the kind of vague, pretty, harassed yet un-adult figure that Steven Spielberg worships. The father has gone away. He's off in Mexico, with some girlfriend, and so ET arrives as a miracle of providence.
The creature doesn't stay to heal the whole world (we had evil empires then). But he does stay long enough to win Elliott's heart, and those of a generation of filmgoers. To this day, whether you like it or not, whether you let yourself weep or resent the manipulation sucking up your tears, ET is an emotional ride.
Yet it's a small film in most ways - the feeling of family intimacy and tenderness between Elliott and ET comes out of that modest scale. The movie cost only $10m. It needed no stars, no crowds. A few years before, Close Encounters of the Third Kind ran up a bill twice as big. But ET takes place in one small house, one patch of woods and one banal suburb lately carved and irrigated out of the semi-desert. It used the wizardry of George Lucas's special effects house Industrial Light and Magic (Spielberg was by then in harness with Lucas - they had just made Raiders of the Lost Ark). But there aren't a lot of special effects. Sure, you see bicycles fly, there's a perfunctory spaceship, and a few shivers of magic. But ET himself isn't a post-production trick, and the film relies on old-fashioned photography. The movie is actually uninterested in the technology that ET's culture possesses. It's a plain old love story, one with a twist: an inter-terrestrial love story.
And this little picture, turned down by Columbia because they weren't certain that it would work, grossed $399m in the US alone. Until the onslaught of Titanic (at higher ticket prices), it was the champion at the US box office. It's reckonedthat Spielberg made $250m in all from the picture, establishing his fortune and his power even if, as yet, he had no Oscars.
So an odd little love story changed Hollywood, made children of us all, and surely set up the coming of DreamWorks, the studio part-owned by Spielberg. After all, the image of Elliott on his bike sailing across the moon, with that hooded passenger in his basket, is like a prelude to the DreamWorks logo. They are both images of paradise. But 20 years later, as it comes back with all the anniversary trimmings, does ET still feel good?
First of all, where did ET come from? The most fruitful way to answer that sort of question with Spielberg is to see how he feeds off himself. I don't discount the purely autobiographical element: living in Arizona (close to the look and feel of the setting here), the Spielberg parents divorced after years of acrimony and arguing. The father went away, though Steven was several years older than Elliott when it happened. Then again, I'm not sure how far Steven Spielberg was personally wounded, or how far the loss merely stirred his sense of story. But by the time of ET, for sure, Spielberg had heard the criticisms that he was too clever or calculating to be moved by his own stories. And ET is a response to that, the director's most uncomplicated mining of feeling itself, a parable that rises to the real act of flight and soaring, the moment when Elliott gasps: "I love you, ET!"
That said, the movie is filled with references to Spielberg's early work. ET himself is the "fleshing-out" of a being glimpsed towards the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The sinister convoys of police and security forces are like the caravan that trails Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express. And ET is the flipside of all those inexplicable forces of menace that creep up on innocence in Spielberg films. By which I mean to say that this very benign alien is the result of a cunning flip-flop in Spielberg's plotting brain: suppose the truck in Duel or the shark in Jaws were not just nice guys, but a hope for the world - or at least balm for Elliott. And the trust that Elliott quickly feels for the alien (who could be filmed to look frightening) is foreshadowed in the rapture felt by the little boy in Close Encounters for the light show.
Don't misunderstand what I say next: but Spielberg is a phenomenon of plot. He thinks of plot in nearly mathematical terms, as a geometry of moral forces. It was in that spirit, I believe, that he decided that the concentration camps were doable as a major motion picture entertainment, if you could find an honourable flip-flop that made it a story of heroism. Thus Oskar Schindler makes that project, Schindler's List, work - so long as you aren't too troubled by the managerial efficiency of the ploy.
Of course, you could dig deeper with ET. You could say that it's a movie in which one lost soul from Oz comes to Kansas. You could even look back to 1951 and The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which a smart-looking alien (Michael Rennie) warns Earth about its dangerous way with nuclear weapons. But ET is just a guy who got left behind - maybe he's the accident-prone ugly duckling in his world. He has no message, just as, on screen, Steven Spielberg has seldom risked politics that exceed "love one another".
In fact, a rather similar shift in direction led to ET. In the wake of 1941 (the most striking failure in Spielberg's career), he was developing a project called Night Skies. He had hired John Sayles to write a script about hostile aliens menacing a rural community. There was just one friendly alien in the gang, but the tone of Night Skies was set for horror and violence. This was meant as a film to be directed by Ron Cobb, a cartoonist, with Spielberg serving as producer.
Night Skies was in pre-production, and Spielberg was about to do Raiders of the Lost Ark, when something happened. He began to feel afraid of Night Skies - and Close Encounters is plainly the work of a man ready to think that if there are forces "out there", they're just as likely to be friendly as hostile. Spielberg had also been affected by the advice of François Truffaut when they met on Close Encounters - make a film for and about children.
Then, as he began to work on Raiders and found its execution rather boring, he got talking with the writer Melissa Mathison (she was on set because she was Harrison Ford's girlfriend). Spielberg had this vague idea about a 10-year-old, rather lost in the world, who has an imaginary friend, or a talking toy, like Winnie the Pooh. Mathison - who had worked on the script for The Black Stallion, about the love between a boy and a horse - came up with a story. It was called ET and Me at first and, as Mathison admitted, it was less sci-fi than "the idea of the creature striking up a relationship with a child who came from a broken home".
When it comes to the movie itself, the textures of caring are everywhere. You feel that in the remarkably sylvan surrounds of the family home. This tale is set in the US south-west, where desert conditions have to be beaten back every year. But the woods where ET is lost are dense, coniferous, full of rich, loamy undergrowth. It is a forest more suited to Bambi or some Disney hymn to living animals. The forest is womb-like, soft-focus, a nurturing place where the snuffles of the lost alien, the beat of his heart and the caressing closeness of foliage all come together. The forest is an allegory of latent feeling.
Inside the house, there is a similar funky warmth. Yes, Daddy has gone - but maybe things are cosier that way. The kids squabble and insult each other in true- to-life ways - in 1982, the abuse "penis-breath!" was thought questionable in a film for children. But the line played off the look of awe in Drew Barrymore's Gertie at hearing such words, and somehow that was excusable. This family of children are cuddling close as they grow up. And even the mother is like an older sister, or a prediction that one day Spielberg might do Peter Pan and celebrate the Wendy figure.
Of course, a dramatic problem flows from this domestic climate. For if the story of ET is to show Elliott's awakened love for the lost alien, then he requires greater hardship or loss at the outset. He needs to be a Dickensian child, maybe, ignored, abused, left out of his family circle. Whereas no one could claim - and Elliott never does - that Henry Thomas looks anything but the object of affection.
It's important here to stress the abiding strength of Spielberg's cinematic style. No matter how intellectual, problem-solving or managerial his storytelling, he has always adored faces, and especially those in which wonder, surprise or discovery is dawning. Close Encounters refers to a kind of meeting with extraterrestrials, but truly, on screen, it means the way Spielberg tracks in on rapt faces in their moment of enlightenment. To that end, the camera in ET kisses and strokes the family faces - this is never more apparent than in the way Barrymore is filmed. She was six when she played Gertie, but Spielberg taught the world (and maybe the actress herself) to love the kid.
This may seem obvious in a film-maker, yet it is not. There are people who examine faces with detachment and coldness. Spielberg cannot help reveal his kindness in the way he photo-graphs faces. Moreover, one feels in this film just how great an influence Truffaut had had on him. In earlier Spielberg films, the kids are set-ups (like kids threatened in Jaws). They're not really noticed. But now it's as if Spielberg has looked at Les 400 Coups, The Wild Child and Small Change and found himself in the plain act of looking for a few seconds longer. Better things yet lay head - the children in Schindler's List, above all the boy in Empire of the Sun (maybe Spielberg's best film), and the intriguing fusion of Elliott and ET in AI.
Of course, the central face is that of ET - though the key shots, I think, are Elliott looking at ET. The alien was essentially the creation of Carlo Rambaldi (who had worked on the remake of King Kong, on Alien and on Close Encounters). It was Rambaldi who built the creature, or made the suit that was sometimes inhabited by small actors. He devised the range from deathly pallor to nutty health. And it was often Spielberg who worked the face and the eyes. As for the voice, it was a mixture of animal sounds and a few human voices, including that of Debra Winger (she and Spielberg had dated a little by then).
There are embraces between Elliott and this wise reptile (frogs are alluded to earlier in the film), as well as a kiss between Gertie and ET, that are seminal shots in the marriage of humans and artificials in the movies. They are still the core of ET's emotional thrust, the embodiment of the sentiment that has one of the grown-ups (the real aliens?) ask, "Elliott thinks his thoughts?", to which the older brother replies, "No, Elliott feels his feelings."
Feeling is directly related to life. When ET perishes, or lapses, Elliott says: "He must be dead, because I don't know how he feels." And when Elliott declares his love for the creature, why, the flatliner bounces back from the dead in a way that leaves you wondering whether ET was just acting and "dying" for pity's sake.
It's not just that the strings of manipulation show. Rather, it's the realisation that, for organisms as advanced as ET (call them extraterrestrials or Spielberg creations), death is a kind of game. It's that jarring calculation again, when feeling should be too shocked to be clever. It's that grisly decision to make the child's coat red in Schindler's List, as if that peril were not already painted on our soul. And here we come to something else central to Spielberg: that instinct for going one way while seeing the reverse potential: call it flip-flopitis. I suspect that Spielberg was always aware of the dangers of sentimentality in ET. He knew when his own stuff worked, and how it worked, and I'd guess he was afraid that his own mechanism might be derided.
That is the best explanation to be found for the uncanny way in which he made another film - the warped mirror image of ET - at the same time. For anyone deeply interested in this picture needs to see Poltergeist at the same time.
At the same time? Well, not quite, though clearly the two pictures were in Spielberg's head simultaneously, and they were eventually both released, a week apart, in June 1982. Ostensibly, Spielberg was the executive producer on Poltergeist, with Tobe Hooper (from Texas Chainsaw Massacre) directing. But the subjects of the two films do work in unison. For in Poltergeist, a regular family living in a suburb very like that in ET is threatened by another kind of alien invasion - utterly malevolent, and so ingenious that it speaks to the children through the television set, thus luring them into the netherland.
Poltergeist ends up with a cop-out, I think. The invaded house has been built on an Indian burial ground, and it is those disturbed spirits who have returned in vengeance. This is not just offensive to native US cultures, but a horrible waste of a brilliant insight: that TV is the real alien threat that we have created for ourselves. Here at last, Spielberg the producer had his hands on a suggestive and dangerous metaphor, and one that could be even more sinister if Poltergeist was less blatantly horrific. Suppose, say, the TV demons talked the kind of beguiling fluff that is so natural on TV.
That's not the point, though. What is crucial is that Spielberg's mixed instincts over the alien subject carried him into a rather inglorious scuffle with Hooper. No matter that Poltergeist's shooting coincided with pre-production on ET; Spielberg spent most of the shoot looking over Hooper's shoulder. Other people on the picture reached the conclusion that Spielberg was in charge, was directing it himself. On trailers, the line "A Steven Spielberg Production" was twice as large as "A Tobe Hooper Film". Hooper won damages for that as well as public apologies, but his career has never recovered and it is pretty well agreed now that the film deserves to be read as a Spielberg work.
How should we interpret that bout of unprofessionalism? It is certainly a sign of a kind of arrogance in the young Spielberg, something that helped keep Oscars out of his grasp for so long. But I think it's also a measure of his deeply divided reactions to the plot situation of ET. Indeed, it's almost as if, on the brink of making one of the great sentimental hits of all time, Spielberg sprang aside in horror or revulsion, and was compelled to show a darker side to the situation, and his own nature.
And not for the last time: 1993 would be the next "crowded year", when within the space of six months Spielberg opened Jurassic Park and Schindler's List. I have said before that there was something "inhuman" in that versatility, and I did not mean that word unkindly. Rather, I wrote it in the spirit of awe with which Elliott looks on ET. Not that in 1993 there was an embarrassed victim like Hooper. In this case, Spielberg directed both films.
But think of what they represent. Yes, there is a kinship. Both are about innocence hunted down by creatures of monstrous cruelty. Except that, even in those very simple terms, the comparison is tasteless. In other words, at essentially the same time, Spielberg directed a film that was a revolution in computer-generated imagery, and yet another landmark in box-office success, and a picture that treats the gravest subject of our time and - the red coat and a few other excesses aside - does so with immense care, respect and understanding. In other words, Jurassic Park was a peerless rollercoaster and Schindler's List was close to a great film. Doing them together is like writing Anna Karenina and Murder on the Orient Express at the same time. That task is not just very difficult. By so many standards of human nature and purpose, it ought to be impossible. For what do fun and grandeur mean if you can do them simultaneously? Hence the word "inhuman".
You might say that that "inhumanity" is only a hitherto unknown skill, a way of being deeply human and brilliantly artificial at the same time. That, I think, is the thing about Spielberg that interests him the most. In which case, ET is the film where, with one winning gesture, he turned the movie audience into children and at the same time posited the prospect that we might all of us one day be aliens. And, very simply, that is why AI is so provocative a concept and so wretched a film.
Meanwhile, whether he likes it or not, Spielberg is one of those figures who has helped build the sensibility of childhood into a kind of suffocating tyranny in American life. So, for myself, I would just say: "ET, stay home."
ET: The Extra-Terrestrial is re-released on March 29.