Close Encounters of the Third Kind · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Close Encounters of the Third Kind enacts what Deleuze called the crisis of the action-image at the level of Roy Neary's psychology: where a genre hero converts perception into decisive action, Roy—an Indiana power-company linesman—cannot process what he has seen in the night sky. His roadside encounter doesn't generate a plot; it generates an obsession that destroys his marriage and strands him between domesticity and transcendence, a man for whom the image has become an ungovernable compulsion. Spielberg's third act makes this explicit: the climax at Devils Tower is, by the film's own structural logic, essentially plotless—it replaces narrative causality with pure sensory ceremony, which is precisely what Deleuze means by opsigns & sonsigns: situations that no longer extend into action but exist as pure optical-and-sound events, meaning suspended in a moment of seeing. Vilmos Zsigmond's mise-en-scène enacts the concept in every frame of the alien encounters. His atmospheric diffusion, practical light sources burning from within the shot, and deliberate lens flare render the spacecraft as light phenomena rather than legible objects—a camera straining to contain what refuses containment. The debt to 2001: A Space Odyssey is exact: Douglas Trumbull supervised optical effects on both films, carrying forward the photochemical pipeline that backlit spacecraft through atmospheric diffusion to produce luminosity rather than solidity. Spielberg inherits Kubrick's lesson—that the sublime arrives not as information but as light—and builds his entire theology of contact around it.