My wife hates the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind. To her it’s the story of Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) an absent husband who allows his obsession with UFOs to lose his job, ignore his children, take his wife Ronnie (the stellar Teri Garr) for granted, and stand idly back when Ronnie has had enough and takes their children to her sister’s house. Turning his head toward his obsession, the rest of the movie glamorizes Roy’s pilgrimage to Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, linking with another woman, Jillian Guiler (Melinda Dillon), who seems to understand the pull of the alien obsession. We never see Ronnie or the children again. Instead, when Roy finally walks on to the alien ship to leave planet Earth, he says his goodbyes to Jillian, the new woman in his life, who watches Roy with unbridled admiration as she clutches her own little boy, just returned to her by the aliens. Her little boy is fatherless, just like Roy’s own son Brad. Both sons in this story have been abandoned by their dads.
I feel a little differently about this film than my wife Vicki. It’s young Brad that I think about the most when I watch this story, one of my all-time favorite movies and, in my view, Spielberg’s masterpiece.
The first hour of the film is a cacophony of information. Huge tribes around the world are obsessed with the same strange song. The great French filmmaker François Truffaut, Spielberg’s idol, plays Dr. Lacombe, the sensitive and smart UFO researcher who eventually puts the pieces together of what these aliens are doing and how the human race might connect with them. We watch Roy spiral between his family and his irresistible obsession. The clearest exchange we see between Roy and his son Brad are over an argument whether to see Pinocchio; a small marionette of Pinocchio can also be seen among Roy’s stuff, a glimpse into Roy’s sense that with everything he has, he’s still dissatisfied, not yet the real boy he once dreamed of becoming. The domestic fights between Roy and Ronnie are raw and real. Ronnie watches her man lose his focus, not caring about his job, which means to her not caring about the family or their life. She finds Roy soaking himself in the shower, fully clothed, trying to get his head straight, and implores him to come to family counseling. Through tears and rage, they battle like only a married couple can, trapped in the small bathroom that feels as confined as their inability to see each other.
But someone else is there, on the edge of that bathroom fight. Young Brad Neary has also had it - with his dad, his parents, the fighting, the instability. Exploding with little-boy rage, his face streams tears as he slams the bathroom door, screaming at his father “You’re a crybaby! You’re a crybaby!” - the ultimate insult from a son who expects his dad to be strong, dependable, present. Our last image of Brad is a full-screen shot of his tear-stained face, shoulders seething, his face tormented with hurt and fear as he pulls the bathroom door closed on his parents.
I’ve been that little boy. My guess is all of us have. As a father, many times I would find my little girls quivering with tears after they heard Vicki and me fighting in the other room, telling themselves that mommy and daddy are not getting along and will probably divorce. That language came from their world experience, picked up from school and friends, projected onto us. Vicki and I tried to be open with our girls when we disagreed or fought about something, not wanting to hide that sometimes mommy and daddy argue and need to talk things out. But the doozies were undoubtedly scary, seen and heard through their young eyes.
The first time I saw Close Encounters, I was in my 20s, catching up on films I had missed in childhood. I focused on the aliens and the sci-fi elements. But something tugged at me to keep digging, to try and understand what would make a dad willingly walk from his own family, his own children, seemingly without any hesitation.
One truism about film stories like this: it’s almost always the dad who makes the idiot move. Disney movies kill off the mom character so that the audience will willingly go along with the brainless choices our heroes make. We’d never buy it if the mom were around; moms are too smart and too blunt to let their kids get into stupid trouble. It’s mom who slaps us upside the head, grabs our belt to yank us back from the cliff, or makes us sit and resolve something before anyone leaves the table. Ronnie has no time for Roy’s mindless obsession with aliens when her own children have to eat. She is the mama bear, fiercely defending her family, removing her children to safety when her husband has lost it.
But young Brad has a story too. We leave him slamming the bathroom door, his last words condemning his father with the strongest accusation he can think of - a crybaby. When my own dad left us, I was about the same age as Brad, in the same 1970s era. After one of those rage-filled little-boy outbursts, I would retreat to my bedroom, slam my door, and drop face-down on my bed. Soon I would turn to my Matchbox cars on the floor, flip through my football trading cards, or pickup a book and begin to read - self-soothing experiences of play and story. I’ve spent my entire career in kids and family entertainment, starting in the toy industry, moving to the studio side in the first year of DreamWorks, brought in by one of my earliest bosses and mentors in the business. My first several years at DreamWorks were full of meetings at Spielberg’s Amblin compound, nestled in the heart of Universal Studios. I haven’t been there in years, but in those days Amblin’s main conference room was lined with movie posters and memorabilia. The model used for E.T.’s space ship sat on the side credenza under a plexiglass cover. I would stare at it, totally distracted with childhood memories of seeing that ship bigger than life on the big screen. Sitting in those meetings, Spielberg himself occasionally attending, was surreal.
They say that if you want to tell stories, you should start with what you know. When I watch early Spielberg movies, I see stories from a grown man working out vestiges of that little-boy confusion, even though his parents didn’t divorce until Steven was 19 years old. Jaws is about random attacks from a giant monster coming out of nowhere. E.T. is about another fatherless boy, but this time it’s the boy himself who gets an alien encounter. E.T. assures Elliot that although he has to leave, his departure isn’t abandonment, promising the boy “I’ll be right here” - a vow Roy never makes to his son Brad. I fell in love with the toy industry when I started to understand the power of play in the life of a young child: play is the work of a child figuring out how life works. Mr. Rogers takes children seriously, understanding that their stress in processing trauma can look childish to adults, but that seen through the eyes of a young boy who calls his dad a crybaby, the stakes couldn’t be higher.
My view of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is that the entire story is a grand yarn young Brad tells himself after his dad has left the family. Face down on his bed, wiping away his tears, what could a young boy tell himself about why his dad would leave him? It must be for something so powerful, that in some twisted way it becomes glorified. Kids do this all the time when they brag to friends about whose dad has the better job. I can picture Brad curled up on his bed, knees to his chin, imagining his dad has been taken by aliens, elevating him from a boring dad with a boring county job to astronaut status, not just exploring space during the age of the Apollo heroes, but actually being taken away by real aliens; aliens so real that their base sits as the foot of Devil’s Tower, a real place, possibly a picture Brad saw in National Geographic, or in a book on national parks when doing a school report.
My brain worked that way as a kid. When my dad walked out on us, my mom burst into my room, full of tears, and blurted out “your father just left and said he’s never coming back.” Like Roy, he too hadn’t taken the time to assure me he would always be right there. I’ve written extensively about this in my small book on family recovery, One Small Step. In our family, that’s not the end of the story. After finding sobriety from his alcoholism, then finding faith, he and my mom reconnected. Eventually dad moved back in. A few years ago, my sister and I sent my folks on a cruise for their 50th anniversary. Today they still thrive as missionaries in southeast Asia, even as they are soon turning 80 years old.
But most little boys whose dads walk out don’t get that story. I wrote One Small Step to honor my dad’s small but important step of courage, hoping things weren’t too far gone, when he sat in a church basement in the safety of an AA circle and raised his hand, asking for help. If you’re a parent wondering if things are too late, the answer is, it’s never too late. No one is late on their own life’s timeline. But Roy never seems to look back. We get no memory flashbacks of Ronnie and the children, they don’t seem to come to his mind, when he is about to walk up the ramp and into the alien ship for good. Many little boys like Brad Neary have abandonment experiences where their dad never does come back.
Here’s what I think. Young Brad has grown up into a filmmaker, flush with early success. He’s been given the entire budget he’s asked for to make his next story, a story about a dad who loses his focus, gets pulled away from his family by a power he can’t ignore, and launches into the glorified status of a space explorer on an alien spaceship. What else could explain why a dad would otherwise leave his family? Not for a midlife frustration that his job wasn’t panning out, passed over for promotions, meeting another blonde single mom with a younger boy, finding in her someone who understands his obsessions and doesn’t ask him about bills, groceries or a messy living room, someone he can drive away with, off into the great beyond.
Close Encounters is aptly named. Young Brad has to tell himself something about why his dad left. We have an underlying need to tell ourselves the “why” of our traumas. But the reality is we usually don’t get the answer to that question. There was no “why” my dad fell into alcoholism. There were a string of related traumas, including the recent suicide of his younger brother, the pressures of a young couple marrying suddenly because of a baby (me), but the cause of addiction is difficult to pin down. It’s baffling and cunning. So we tell ourselves stories - we play - to figure out how life works. Russell Brand’s excellent book Recovery has a powerful line about not trying to solve everything all at once. He says, “For my recovery path, taking things one day at a time has never been less of a cliche. Today is all I have.”
After the initial shock of a close encounter with trauma, we need a story to tell ourselves. I totally understand (as much as my idiot husband-brain can grasp) Vicki’s take on this story. She feels for Ronnie, a fellow wife & mother with a husband who gets caught up in far-off dreams; she has no patience for glorifying Roy’s departure. When I re-watch Close Encounters, I can’t help but see the entire story through young Brad’s eyes. When Brad closes the door on his dad, the rest of the story takes on a grand adventure, an epic road trip beyond the mess of their 1970s suburban home. What else would a little boy tell himself about why his dad really left. Only something that incredible could be more powerful than staying right here.
For more like this or to connect with Rick, visit www.thestorycrate.com
