Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
1982 · Steven Spielberg · E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how often adults are cropped at the waist, headless. (camera)
Daviau and Spielberg pin the camera at a ten-year-old's height. For most of the first act the hunting men are trouser legs, a flashlight beam, a ring of keys on a belt.
Payoff: You are put inside a child's body before you are told anything, so the adult world stays unreadable and large. In the reading: perception-image. The reading calls this the perception-image: the film picks an eye and a height, and never hides that choice.
Notice the amber light in the kitchen, closet, and hallway doorways. (light)
Daviau builds the house from warm practical sources, backlight and haze. Keep the temperature in mind. When official vehicles and equipment arrive, the light turns cold and blue.
Payoff: You feel the intrusion as a drop in temperature before you understand it as plot. In the reading: affective color. This is affective color: warmth that soaks the room and is the feeling, not a decoration on top of it.
Look at how long Spielberg holds E.T.'s face without dialogue. (performance)
Rambaldi's animatronic head works by tilt, blink and the widening of the eyes. The film keeps cutting back to it and waiting, letting one plain feeling sit there.
Payoff: A face built from motors and latex carries the story because the film gives it time to register. In the reading: icon of quality (qualisign). The reading calls this a qualisign: a still face radiating one quality, wonder or fear, held for you to absorb.
Listen for E.T.'s rasping voice against ordinary suburban room noise. (sound)
Ben Burtt assembled that voice from human and animal sources. It sits inside a soundtrack of refrigerators, televisions and traffic, so the impossible creature shares the same acoustic room as the kids.
Payoff: The strangeness lands because everything around it sounds like your own house.
Count the household objects E.T. handles: candy, Speak and Spell, beer. (setting)
The clutter of a boy's bedroom becomes the alien's language. He learns Earth through toys and groceries, and hides among stuffed animals in the closet.
Payoff: The fantastical stays believable because it is built entirely from things already lying around the house.
Once you have seen it
Watch the school lab cut against E.T. raiding the refrigerator. (cutting)
Littleton cross-cuts the two rooms so one feeling runs through both bodies. Once you see it, track the same editorial logic through the sickness later.
Payoff: The bond is not stated in dialogue. It is made by the cut, which puts two rooms on one nervous system.
Watch plastic tunnels and hazmat suits fill the family kitchen. (staging)
The same warm rooms you spent an hour in are re-dressed as a sterile laboratory. Doorways you knew as amber thresholds become sealed plastic.
Payoff: The violation is spatial. A home you learned by heart is stripped of its function in front of you.
Wait for the moment Peter Coyote's scientist finally gets a face. (performance)
For most of the film he is a belt of keys and a pair of legs. The film grants him eyes only once the children have taken the initiative.
Payoff: Spielberg rations adult faces like a reward, so the shift from threat to fellow dreamer is something you see rather than hear.
Listen for Williams's main melody carrying the bicycle flight. (sound)
Spielberg re-cut the climactic sequence to the music instead of scoring the finished edit. Follow how every lift and turn lands on the orchestra.
Payoff: The pictures are obeying the music here, which is why the flight feels inevitable rather than staged.
Carry this in: Watch the withheld faces. The camera sits at Elliott's height, so adults stay cropped until the children earn them.