Spielberg between kitsch and great comedy: America celebrated and criticized

Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is a stranger film that its many celebrants realize. They don’t realize they are being mocked (particularly in the film’s almost ecclesiastic ending, with playful visionary manchild Richard Dreyfus ascending the light-filled whale-mouth of the ship that will take him to, if not heaven itself, the heavens. For Spielberg’s trademark middlebrow sentimentality, which basically makes me want to wretch, is here mixed with a lot of terrific American Jewish comedy (think Neil Simon perhaps more than Jerry Lewis, let alone Chaplin) making terrific fun of normal middle-class American life in small-town middle America, with a household whose gadgets, toys, and appliances go haywire thanks to the alien interference from some outside, including in a scene that comically mocks the horror film genre as the hapless housewife (whom crazy man Dreyfus will basically abandon, though it is she who drives off in disgust. That’s just after this husband and father to a little boy (a bit more suited, clearly, for the latter) manically pulls up plants and stuff from the yard and throwing it throw the window to build a replica of the holy mountain that is the mysterious object of desire, glimpses along with other members of the obscure cult of the annointed seers, that turns out to be the landing airstrip for the flying saucer (and this and its fellow objects really are that, right out of 50’s sci-fi films) that is the talisman of the apocalyptic deliverance, to which an army church service (ecumenical, with a similarly formed, perhaps a bit Christianized, Star of David erected near a cross on the shelf behind the preacher) is inserted in a moment of montage. Is Spielberg inviting us all to get some New Age salvation? This is the filmmaker who later would give us Saving Private Ryan, ET, and Schindler’s List. Without irony? No, but he does believe in the American myths he also laughs at; he’s a well-adjusted middlebrow, middle-class American who helps laugh at ourselves and what we also believe in. The comedy and redemptive kitsch ode to joy that he sings are to me uneasy bedfellows, but not to Spielberg and many of his fans. The bathos is almost bottomless. For instance, the key song is a simple organ melody that sounds like something a child learning to play piano would manage on the second day of his life’s lessons. Of course, it’s also true that America in 1977 was, even just four years after the end of the American war in Vietnam (and two years after its actual end, and the onset of the Cambodian holocaust), a far more innocent place than it is today. Or else a country that very much wanted to reclaim its innocence. The older country folk we see looking up at the sky, Richard Dreyfus walking out of the house and calling to it, as if to God, these and so many other touches evidence that. I saw this on a bill with Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppolla’s appropriately very bitter film about America’s most decisively unpopular war, whose closing scene brings the rain of critical fire down on much of American romanticist culture, perfectly personified by Marlon Brando, the icon of American theatrical authenticity and its cult. Spielberg’s much gentler film (and he is nothing but a gentle man with a gentle view of his society) could not feel more different, its aesthetic close to standard television sitcom fair of the era, though a bit more unsettling if you care to notice or notice enough to care. A nightmare followed by a lullabye. In dark times, for better and worse, we remember the trauma.