When it came out E.T. was a follow up on Steven Spielberg's earlier works about extraterrestrials, such as Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It showed a fascination with aliens, science fiction, NASA, the Area 51 programme and of course, a deep understanding of a child's need to connect to something greater when he has lost a father. However, it goes deeper than the usual children of a divorce plot that had been extensively explored in the 70's.
E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind are films that deal with issues pertinent to today: how the machinery of government tends to dehumanise everything - to the point of making a man forget what it was like to be child himself and to have connected to something greater and unimaginable. If you look at E.T. in the light of the era it was created in, Steven Spielberg was commenting on society, on the Cold War, on what it means to be a "grown up" and on how the only people an extraterrestrial can trust are all under 18 because they are yet to fall prey to greed or bureaucracy.
This is not the reason why E.T. transported me back to a different age. It's not the reason why I relived my tweens all over again while watching it on the big screen. It's not the reason why it touched every single child in my generation and the one that followed it closely. No, the reason why it touched us, is because it presented a world in which all you had to do was to believe in the nameless, unknown, magical creature that could you "unlimited power". This creature, E.T., could levitate objects, use toys to re-create technology from other galaxies and it could give you the ability to feel its emotions, to connect without using words or language.
E.T. made every 10-12 year old in the world who watched it believe they too could do anything. They too would be delivered from a reality in which they didn't belong. They too could escape an almost unbearable reality that disturbed and scared them.
This 12 year old believed as firmly in E.T. as she did in the Force, that nameless power from Star Wars. She wasn't the only one. Steven Spielberg referenced Star Wars in so many ways during the film that it goes beyond product placement of merchandise for a fellow filmmaker: George Lucas. It is also a revealing statement about the power of imagination in Spielberg's life.
Which is why you found me on Boxing Day 2010 at GOMA watching a film that is not yet 20 years old on its purported 2oth Anniversary. Because this alien had phone home and been transported from an unbearable reality to a place it could understand.
