Obsessive Wonder — Close Encounters of the Third Kind programme notes
I wrote this for Glasgow Film in 2019 as part of a season about obsession in cinema. I’d interviewed Richard Dreyfuss a couple of years before and always loved the story he told me about why Steven Spielberg cast him.
It’s 1975 and Richard Dreyfuss is hanging around Steven Spielberg’s office wondering why he’s not been cast as the lead in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The unprecedented success of the just-released Jaws has made them the latest wunderkinds of New Hollywood, so it makes sense for them to re-team. Spielberg, though, wants to go in a different direction. He’s written the role of everyman hero Roy Neary as a 45-year-old family man and wants to cast Jack Nicholson.
Luckily for Dreyfuss, Nicholson is unavailable and since waiting for him will push production back another two years, Spielberg isn’t about to delay the movie he’s been dreaming about since he was a teenager, especially when the cash-strapped Columbia Pictures is willing to bet the farm on making his UFO-themed sci-fi opus.
Still, Dreyfuss isn’t leaving anything to chance. He’s been Spielberg’s sounding board for Close Encounters throughout the protracted 155-day shoot for the shark movie and has decided to badmouth other potential leading men every time he passes Spielberg’s office. “Al Pacino’s crazy,” he shouts through the door. “Gene Hackman’s too old,” he blurts out. “Hoffman’s not funny,” he quips.
Eventually he tells Spielberg, “Steven, you need a child, because only a child could leave his wife and children and not look back.”
Spielberg just looks at him. “You got the part,” he says.
Watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind with this in mind and it’s impossible not to see the subtle ways Dreyfuss infuses his performance as electrician-turned-alien-believer Roy Neary with the obsessive focus of a kid unencumbered by the responsibilities of adulthood. Even before he has his face-tanning first encounter with the extraterrestrials, we see him frequently zoning out amid the chaos of the Neary household, too focussed on his model train set or an advert in the local paper for a revival screening of Pinocchio (“I grew up on Pinocchio!”) to pay much attention to his wife Ronnie’s (Terri Garr) domestic frustrations or his boss’s panicked calls about the mysterious state-wide power surges that are plunging Indiana’s suburban landscape into darkness.
Post-encounter, Neary’s childlike obsessiveness only intensifies, reaching its apotheosis when the image of Wyoming’s Devil's Tower National Monument — which has been implanted in his mind as a sort of cosmic invite — starts exerting its grip on his psyche. In his efforts to figure out what it means, he starts playing with shaving foam and his food the way a child might. Indeed it’s no accident that all through the early parts of Close Encounters, Roy’s behaviour echoes that of Barry (Cary Guffey), the wide-eyed toddler whose abduction by the aliens brings the first act to a close in such spectacular style.
But it’s that alluded-to mashed potato scene — in which Roy sculpts a starchy version of Devil's Tower at the dinner table, oblivious at first to his distressed family’s tear-filled reactions — that’s the key to the film’s thoughtful depiction of Neary’s obsessive behaviour. Rooting Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the raw drama of an ordinary family coming apart at the seams (“ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances,” as a character puts it later on, articulating in the process what will become a fundamental theme in much of Spielberg’s work), the scene makes it possible to empathise both with Roy’s predicament and Ronnie’s fear that her husband is experiencing a full-blown mental breakdown.
A more simplistic film — the sort Spielberg’s critics often accuse him of making — would have loaded the dice in Roy’s favour by shying away from the emotional trauma he’s inflicting on his family and relegating Ronnie to the role of the shrew-like wife. But the pay-off of those wrenching scenes of domestic discord, the value of seeing Roy’s eight-year-old son lashing out at him for being a crybaby as Roy sits in the shower with his clothes on unable to cope, is why we remain on Roy’s side — even after Ronnie understandably takes the kids and leaves him to his mud sculptures and cartoons.
That Spielberg would have a sympathetic view of obsession is hardly surprising. His own precocious, tunnel-visioned childhood drive to become a filmmaker has become the stuff of legend. It’s especially pertinent to this film given that his first amateur feature, an effects-heavy sci-fi effort called Firelight (1964), made when he was still in high school, served as a crude test-run. (Both films were inspired by Spielberg’s memory of being dragged out of his own bed in the middle of the night by his father to watch a meteor shower.) He fed his own complex childhood home life into the domestic scenes too, revealing in Spielberg, Susan Lacy’s 2017 HBO documentary, that the aforementioned crybaby scene was a direct lift from the recriminations he directed towards his father as he witnessed him struggling to cope with the breakdown of his marriage to Spielberg’s mother.
But his more benevolent view of obsession also ensures Neary stands apart from the neurotic anti-heroes of the New Hollywood era. The legacy of political assassinations, the catastrophe of Vietnam, Nixon’s political malfeasance and the unfolding Watergate scandal had cultivated an air of despair and paranoia in the films coming out of Hollywood. All the President’s Men (1976) may have shown the positive outcome of obsessively investigating a criminal conspiracy, but fictional efforts to reflect the mood of the country veered towards hopelessness, with films such as The Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1975) and Taxi Driver (1976) zeroing in on alienated loners either destroyed by their relentless pursuit of the truth or pushed even further into the margins of society as they rail against the filth and corruption surrounding them. This became the dominant archetype of the 1970s, bleeding into the next decade via Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) and revisited by David Fincher in his 1970s-set true crime serial killer thriller Zodiac (2007). It’s an archetype that has its roots in Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab, whose influence was evident in Robert Shaw’s doomed shark-hunter in Jaws. In fact, prior to making Jaws, Spielberg pitched Close Encounters in 1973 as a story about Watergate and UFOs, hiring Paul Schrader to write a script revolving around a government cover-up.
But Spielberg has always been a better judge of the public mood than his contemporaries and by the time he got round to making Close Encounters of the Third Kind he sensed Watergate stories were becoming passé and toned down the conspiracy thriller element. It’s still there in the scenes depicting the military’s mass evacuation of Wyoming, but Neary’s obsessive pursuit of the truth finds a more sympathetic ear in the form of François Truffaut’s French ufologist, Lacombe, whose own ability to lead a United Nations-backed operation to make peaceful contact with the aliens on American soil reflects the brief window of optimism Jimmy Carter’s election to the presidency in 1976 seemed to open. That the aliens themselves turn out to be childlike creatures who embrace Neary, freeing him from the mundane shackles of his earthly life, is another sign of Spielberg’s lack of cynicism, transforming the film not into the regressive fantasy its tiresome Freudian-obsessed critics write it off as, but into a noble exploration of the value of confronting life with the obsessive wonder of a child.