The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [328]
E.T.: The `Self' from outer space
Even in the Hollywood dream factory, there are of course times when a story makes rather deeper contact with the underlying archetypes. And it may be illuminating to end this section by looking at one such example, by way of contrast, even though this was still a story primarily conceived on no more than a sentimental level. Certainly it was a remarkable achievement to turn a hideous little monster with a wide, bulbous head, huge eyes, a long neck and leathery skin into one of the most lovable characters in modern popular storytelling. But when we consider what the central figure of Steven Spielberg's ET. (1982) really represents, his appeal becomes wholly comprehensible.
The film opens at night with an extra-terrestrial spaceship landing in a Californian forest to study earthly plant-life. Its crew's researches are interrupted by a pack of government scientists and officials, seen menacingly in black silhouette, and the aliens rush back to their spacecraft to escape. But one of them is left behind.
We then meet the hero of the story, 10-year old Elliott, at his home in a nearby town, being excluded from a game played by his older brother and three friends. When they trick him into going outside, he throws a ball into the garage and is startled when it is thrown back at him. Back inside, the sense of Elliott's isolation from his family only deepens when, unwittingly, he lets on to his mother that their father, who has recently left home, has gone to Mexico with his new girlfriend. This makes his mother cry, and his elder brother furious at him for being so tactless. Elliott is a boy seemingly without a friend in the world, but he is about to find one.
That night, sleeping outside, Elliott is disturbed by scuffling noises, turns on his torch and for the first time sees the extraordinary little extra-terrestrial visitor. At first he is terrified, but the creature moves gently forward to touch him with its elongated fingers. Far from being threatening it is offering friendship, rather like Frankenstein's monster when it wakes him from sleep. But, unlike Frankenstein, Elliott reciprocates, protectively leading the `alien' into the house to hide him in his bedroom. The two begin trying to communicate, with the alien quick to copy everything Elliott does. Next day, Elliott lets his brother and younger sister into the secret, swearing them to secrecy, so they are now a conspiracy of three, led by the formerly excluded Elliott. And they soon discover between them that his new alien friend commands miraculous and life-giving powers.
The biggest surprise is that the alien seems to have established an extraordinary telepathic sympathy with Elliott, so that when the boy is at school, and the alien gets drunk on beer from the fridge back home, Elliott feels drunk at his desk. While this and further telepathically-induced actions are landing Elliott in trouble with the school authorities and his mother, his young sister is teaching the alien to speak. Having returned home in disgrace, Elliott is soon teaching his alterego to repeat his new name, `E.T.', an echo of Elliott's own name. They then learn that E.T. above all wants to contact his far-off planetary home, as he repeats his plaintive new phrase `E.T., phone home'.
One reason for this is that E.T. is beginning to sicken, from his exposure to life on Earth. He uses his super-intelligence to build a radio-telephone, and after a Hallowe'en party he and Elliott take it into the forest to use it, with E.T. demonstrating his power to make Elliott's bicycle rise magically into the night sky. But when the boy fails to return home, his mother calls the authorities, and we now move into the `nightmare stage' of the story. First, E.T. seems to be dying. Then menacingly impersonal, space-suited officials and scientists move in to capture him. Finally, he and Elliott are laid out