Almost everyone both in and out of [Close Encounters of the Third Kind] seems … to be waiting for some kind of miraculous salvation, an escape, an awakening, from the bad dream of social stagnation and middle-class malaise which the first half of Spielberg's movie so emphatically reminds us of. And we would probably all arise and go now … were it not for the film's sustained promise that soon, suspensefully soon, our questions will be answered, our emptiness will be filled, that Something Out There will take us away from all this. And what will it be? UFO's? No, Close Encounters seems to me to be about UFO's only in the way that King Kong is about apes. Religion, then? Ideology? Science? No, it isn't science, says the movie's Major Walton. It is, replies Lacombe …, "an event sociologique." (p. 342)
Close Encounters is about a sociological rather than a scientific event, but the film is also a sociological event in itself. We, the audience, become the sociological content of the film. We swarm to the theater to witness a close encounter for the same reasons that Spielberg's characters rush to Devil's Tower. (p. 343)
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