Close Encounters of the Third Kind · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Roy Neary stops his truck at a level crossing in the Indiana dark, and the light comes from above. Not headlights. Something else, pouring down through the cab, lifting the loose junk off the seat, scorching one side of his face. He looks up. That is the whole of his response. He looks up. A linesman whose entire trade is keeping the current flowing has met a power he can neither name nor route, and all he can do is tilt his head back and stare.

Hold on that, because it is the hinge of the film. In most American movies a man who perceives a threat acts to resolve it. Perception flows into action, the situation gets changed, and the story is that change. Deleuze called this the movement-image, and it was the grammar of nearly everything Hollywood made for half a century: see the problem, act on the problem, restore the world. Close Encounters quietly cuts that circuit. Roy perceives something enormous and can do nothing with it. There is no enemy to fight, no lever to pull. He can only watch. Deleuze gave the figure who replaces the agent a name — the seer, the voyant, a character who no longer acts on the world but endures and beholds it. Spielberg builds a blockbuster around a seer, and that is stranger than it sounds. The crisis of the action-image, the moment when characters can no longer react adequately to what they see, was supposed to be the property of the European art film. Here it powers a Columbia tentpole.

What Roy is left holding is what Deleuze called a pure optical and sound situation: an opsign, a sonsign. The link that would normally turn a sight into a deed has snapped, and the image floats free to be looked at for its own sake. The lights over the truck are exactly this. Zsigmond shoots them as lens flare and atmospheric diffusion, as artifacts a camera can barely contain, so that we are dazzled before we are told anything. We do not decode the spectacle. We receive it. The film's deepest debt sits right here, and it is not to other space movies. It is to Antonioni's Blow-Up, where a photographer enlarges a print past the threshold of legibility and finds proof he can neither read nor pass on. Roy is that photographer's cousin: a man clutching evidence he has no words for.

The compulsion that follows reads almost clinically. Mashed potatoes pushed into a mountain at the dinner table while he mutters that this means something. Shaving cream. Pillow stuffing. Finally an avalanche of dirt and chicken wire hauled in through the living-room window. Deleuze, borrowing from literary naturalism, used the word symptom for acts that betray a drive the actor himself cannot translate. Roy's sculpting is a vision clawing for a shape. His suburban life rots around it. Job, marriage, the last shred of dignity his kids can still see in him, all of it slides, and that downward slope would be pure domestic tragedy if the film believed the drive were a sickness. It does not. It bends the slope back up toward the sky.

The counterweight to Roy's frantic hands is a child's motionless face. Barry Guiler, three years old, opens the kitchen door onto orange light and toddles toward it. Spielberg keeps planting the boy low in the frame, chin lifted, lit from the front, and lets the face hold a single feeling with no fear in it at all. Deleuze would call this a qualisign, the close-up as icon of pure quality, one affect expressed by a still, reflecting face. Most science fiction frames the human looking up at the unknown as terror. Spielberg frames it as recognition. Almost the entire argument of the movie is carried on faces tilted toward light.

And the light is the other lead. Douglas Trumbull, who had lit Kubrick's monolith and his own Silent Running, built the craft as practical models glowing from inside and photographed them through haze so they register as radiance rather than as solid hardware. This is what Deleuze named lyrical-abstraction, cinema reaching for luminous, near-white fields as a kind of spiritual alternative to the world of action. The mothership does not arrive like a machine. It floods the valley like a sunrise that has decided to mean something. Through all of it the film tilts toward what Deleuze called the Open, and toward an absolute out-of-field: the sense that the frame gives onto something vast and changing that can never be pinned to a location. The visitors are never an enemy with coordinates. They are closer to the sky becoming intelligent, answering Roy in five notes that are not score but event. When the mothership plays the theme back, swollen and harmonized across registers, communication has simply happened, and the sound is the thing itself.

So here is what Spielberg actually did. He took the broken sensory-motor circuit that Antonioni and the postwar Europeans had used to register alienation, the seer stranded inside a world he can only watch, and he rewired it for awe. The same stalled perception that elsewhere meant emptiness here means wonder. The Day the Earth Stood Still gave him the benevolent visitor and the catastrophic military misreading. Blow-Up gave him the man with unreadable proof. 2001 and Trumbull gave him alien presence as light rather than object. Out of those parts he made the rare thing that runs through Deleuze's whole second volume yet almost never reaches a mass audience: a film where the hero stops acting and starts seeing, and the camera, instead of punishing him for it, looks up alongside him. Watch it again for the faces. Every important one is pointed at the light.