An Evening of Magical (Over)Thinking

It's been 25 years since I last saw "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" or thought about it. Or cared about it. So now my daughter is watching it, completely riveted, while I sit there completely confused. I remember following along with the movie's emotional logic when I saw it as a 12-year-old, but that was before I had a grasp of character, plot, story structure, internal consistency and, well, reality.

I can recall movie reviews comparing "E.T." to "Bambi" and thus Spielberg to Disney. But "Bambi" actually made sense. It more or less followed the cycles of life and the seasons, presenting animal life within a natural world full of elegant pleasures (ice skating on a pond, birth, mating) and real terrors (hunters, forest fires, rivals interfering with the mating.) "E.T." has, let's see, vaguely scary government agents, scientists paving the road to hell with good intentions, and renegade kids on bicycles who defy authority with pluck and determination. Fair enough. We can work with that.

But where does E.T. get his magical alien powers from? Why are they so arbitrary (heal a wound, make bikes fly)? And how does his magic square with his technological skills as demonstrated through his rigging a Speak-N-Spell with the telephone to contact a ship light years out into space? When he drinks, why does Eliot get drunk? Why do they take him trick-or-treating? What evolutionary processes formed E.T.'s bizarre physiogonomy? What were the aliens doing in our neck of the universe anyway?

There is suspension of disbelief and then there is completely shutting down all brain functions. Yet I say all this as an adult. The movie made complete sense to Katie. "I wish it could happen in real life," she said. "Except for the end when he leaves. That's sad."