E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

directed by Steven Spielberg

Mike Duquette

It is the afternoon of Labor Day, September 2024, and I am 37 years old. I exit Film Forum in Manhattan after a viewing of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. It’s a 35 millimeter print that looks great and sounds okay; some of the sonic alterations made for an infamous 20th anniversary re-release have not been changed back. Most people don’t notice. I am not most people.

The last strains of John Williams’s end credits suite echo through the theater. I pull on my blue satin E.T. jacket—the silhouette of E.T. and his human friend Elliott (Henry Thomas) flying on a bike on the front and “E.T. Phone Home” on the back—and consider apologizing to the staff. I have seen E.T. an innumerable amount of times, and since my teens I reliably cry at all the same emotional beats. This time was different: a funereal sob left my body, ringing over the heads of Gen X nostalgists and a surprising amount of children, shepherded into an air-conditioned theater on this last unofficial day of summer to experience one of the great blockbusters of a golden age of mass-marketed Hollywood fantasia. Ultimately, I say nothing. I’m sure they’d understand either way.

I think about all the ways this film has been between my ears, tattooed onto my brain, in my back pocket, at my fingertips and pumping in all the chambers of my heart. As long as I knew what movies were, I could say with certainty that E.T. is the one I treasure most. And so, at this moment, I have no trouble deeming E.T. a September movie. Just as seasons change and the phases of life melt into another—just as 10-year-old Elliott grows and changes in unimaginable ways across 115 minutes on screen—September brings the end of one time of year and the start of a new phase in the cycle of life. It only seems right.

*

It is October of 1981, and I am not yet born. Kids dress in costumes for Halloween and travel door to door in search of tricks and treats. From a ranch house at the end of a cul-de-sac, a 10-year-old boy named Elliott, dressed as a hunchback, and his teenage brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton), in the guise of what he calls a “terrorist,” leave their home with their younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore), a waddling tot dressed as a ghost. Their mother Mary (Dee Wallace)—a woman doing her best in the wake of a painful separation from her husband—is dressed in a domino mask and a leopard-print dress.

Unbeknownst to Mary, her daughter is actually miles away, guarding her brother’s bicycle. “Gertie” is actually a space creature, marooned on Earth during a routine botany mission. In the boy’s “hunch” is a backpack carrying an interplanetary communicator made from household objects. Under cover of Halloween, the boy and the space creature—who has formed a psychic bond with the child—steal away to the forest where the alien’s spaceship once landed and set up that communicator so our cosmic wanderer (dubbed “E.T.” by the children) can, in his own halting English, “phone home.”

Passing children and adults in costume, E.T. is briefly distracted by a child dressed as Yoda, the wise Jedi master from The Empire Strikes Back. As he shares a moment of recognition of the rubber mask, and score composer Williams slyly quotes a theme he wrote for the Star Wars sequel, the audience inevitably laughs. Years later, people on Facebook with too much time on their hands will build memes suggesting that E.T. is, himself, a Jedi. Star Wars is made up.

As E.T. and Elliott make their way through the forest on slim rubber tires, the alien surprises us all by using his magic powers to nearly fling the bike and its passengers off a cliff, only to instead float effortlessly into the night sky. An orchestral theme, used tentatively throughout the early reels of the picture, suddenly unfurls at full volume. The bike sails across a full moon, a magical image burned into the imaginations of millions of filmgoers.

E.T. is, without question, an October movie. It only seems right.

*

It is Thanksgiving of 1991, and I am four years old. CBS has secured the rights to air E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on television for the first time. It is an event: children can get their picture taken at Sears on a bike with E.T. in the basket, just like in the film, with sales of the Polaroids benefitting the Special Olympics and the Children’s Action Network. My parents allow me to take at least three pictures on separate trips to the mall. I stay up after turkey and potatoes to watch the film, which I know by heart.

By this point, I own two copies of E.T. on videocassette. The second was to have the proper box art; my brother, a curious toddler at the time, had torn up the first. Either copy is rarely far from the VCR, and I play it incessantly. A poster from Universal Studios’ Orlando theme park, advertising the E.T. Adventure ride, adorns the wall of my bedroom. I am drawn to E.T. for reasons I cannot possibly articulate as a preschooler. No one suggests I am on the autism spectrum until I am in my early thirties, and no one will officially declare me as such until a few years later.

E.T. is, undeniably, a November movie. It only seems right.

*

It is Christmas Eve of 1990. I am three years old. We gather in my mother’s parents’ house, a few towns over from us in suburban New Jersey, as we will every Christmas Eve until my teens. I am the youngest at the holiday party, other than my brother, who is an infant. Adults are not easy to talk to when you’re that young, and I find myself exploring some of the rooms in my grandparents’ house that I don’t normally venture into.

In one of those unused rooms, I find a drawer full of videotapes. One catches my eye for its relative lack of color: a deep, dark blue, like the night sky. On its side, in white, weathered letters: E.T.; below it, in a serif font, The Extra-Terrestrial. I pull the box from the drawer and am transfixed by what I see: a blue-white full moon, rising over pine trees; just off-center, a small silhouette of a boy on a bicycle. In a front basket sits a creature with a hunched body and a long face. I am just starting to read, and at the top of the box, I see: “The Story That Touched the World.” Dazed, I bring the tape to my family. My grandmother, who never missed an opportunity to indulge my youthful whims, takes the cassette from its box and slots it into the VCR.

The film starts. I am transfixed. In a forest, creatures emerge from a luminescent spaceship and gather plant life. One is drawn to the scene of suburban lights from a forest overlook. His reverie is stopped by roaring cars, from which shadowy men emerge with flashlights. The little being’s chest glows a deep orange, attracting the attention of the adults. He runs away with a shriek that scares me enough to stop the tape. What was I seeing?

I know now that I was seeing something that was due to change my life—and I was definitely seeing a December movie. It only seems right.

*

It is March of 2002. I am 14 years old, and the world will finally see what I’ve been celebrating for months. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial gets a lavish 20th anniversary reissue. Five minutes of deleted scenes will be added back into the film, and—just as George Lucas did with Star Wars—Steven Spielberg oversees the enhancement of a few dozen special effects shots with digital technology.

For months I had absorbed all the pre-release hype like a sponge. My favorite movie was back! Toys “R” Us sold exclusive merchandise. New making-of books were printed and TV specials aired. Magazine cover stories and newspaper ads were added to my growing collection of E.T. ephemera.

The moment was not without controversy. Digitally enhancing E.T. seemed as misguided as the Special Edition-izing of the Star Wars trilogy—although, as I insisted on message boards and in emails I sent to film critics, Spielberg was adamant that this reissue would not replace the original version. I was baffled by one change, where Mary admonishes Michael for dressing like “a hippie” for Halloween. It replaced the line “You are not going as a terrorist,” which many at the time saw as unnecessary revisionism in the very recent wake of the September 11 attacks. Plus, if you did the math, Mary probably was a hippie; why was she so upset? For my part, I was mostly confused, as the offending line was simply deleted when it was released on video and didn’t need to draw so much attention to itself. But no one asked me.

When I finally got the chance to see E.T. in a theater, I was thrilled. I was less thrilled when the weekend box-office returns showed E.T. in third place, behind not only the newly-released vampire flick Blade II but the second weekend of the animated film Ice Age. E.T. fell to sixth place the following week; by the next month, most of Toys “R” Us’ E.T. merchandise bore clearance tags, and my plan to see it in theaters a second time was scuttled when Universal took it out of my local multiplex in favor of The Scorpion King, a prequel to The Mummy Returns. Were people not understanding what I knew—that this was the ideal cinematic experience for young and old alike? Was the world too cynical to appreciate the gentility and joy of E.T.?

Ultimately, I couldn’t get too worked up over it. For this, time has proven to me: E.T. is a March movie. It only seems right.

*

It is April of 2024. I am 36 years old. Life has hit me in every direction. For four months, I have been unemployed; for just over one month, I have been a father to twin daughters. They are, without question, the most beautiful people I have laid eyes upon. Within a day, we discovered my youngest was born with a cleft palate, and struggles with eating and breathing simultaneously. She is sent to the NICU and placed on a feeding tube.

For five weeks, my wife and I take care of one child in our home and one in the hospital. I somehow power through freelance writing assignments to keep the bills paid as best I can. I don’t know if I’m coming or going most of the time. One day, I visit my small daughter as she lies in a tiny little bed, with various cables snaking through her bundled blanket. 

I think of the saddest moments in E.T., when the government agents finally discover the creature in Elliott’s house, turning a home into a plasticine science experiment. Earth’s atmosphere has made E.T. sick—ashen and flaky, clinging to life in a hospital bed while Elliott is telepathically ill himself. E.T. will figure out a way to sever his link to Elliott, dying as his 10-year-old friend heals and screams in anguish as doctors—real ones, not actors, hired by Spielberg to heighten the realism of the scene—try frantically to revive him. When one technician takes a defibrillator to shock E.T.’s heart to rhythm, Barrymore as Gertie leaps in terror, and shuts her eyes tight, as if to will away the horror befalling her friend. (In behind-the-scenes footage, the young actress found herself unable to stop crying; Spielberg, who eventually became her godfather, can be seen consoling her. It is the memory of this moment that launches my sob into Film Forum months later.)

In the film, E.T. will heal, and so too will my daughter. But not knowing when your children will be reunited at home is a feeling I wish unto nobody. Drained and sleep-deprived, I pull out my phone and play her my favorite piece of music: 15 minutes of Williams’s Oscar-winning score from the end of the film, when Elliott, Michael and their friends sneak a revived E.T. out of the house, first by van and then in a rousing bike chase that, for better or worse, birthed the entire Stranger Things aesthetic. Before the government agents can close in on the five bicycles, E.T. again rouses them into flight across a setting sun. They land in the forest and our main characters witness the spaceship landing once more. E.T. says his heartfelt goodbyes to his friends, and we walk away imbued with the power of cinema, hoping against all reason that if an Earth boy and a space creature can form such a deep bond, then no two people on this planet are unable to come to a mutual understanding.

My daughter comes home that month—proving my point that E.T. is an April movie. It only seems right.

*

It is June of 1982. I am still not yet born. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg’s sixth feature film, is released in more than a thousand theaters in America. It will not leave the top 10 of the weekend box-office reports until February of the following year. It is hailed by critics as, perhaps, Spielberg’s best film and one of the most enduring by any filmmaker. Audiences are rapt by its charms. Sales of Reese’s Pieces—a peanut-butter candy no one particularly thought of until it appears in the movie—skyrocket after a month. A video game for the Atari 2600 is rush-released, and is so bad that the market for video games goes into free fall for the next few years. E.T. is nominated for nine Academy Awards and wins four, losing Best Picture to a solemn biopic about Mahatma Gandhi. Neil Diamond co-writes a song inspired by the movie that reaches the Top 5 of the pop charts. Michael Jackson releases a storybook album inspired by the film that, in 1984, helps him win the most Grammy Awards ever earned in one night. George F. Will, a conservative columnist and ally of Ronald Reagan, finds the film’s apparent disdain for adult perspectives so odious that he writes a column in Newsweek headlined, “Well, I Don’t Love You, E.T.”

Having already streamlined this approach to high-concept cinematic blockbusters twice, with 1975’s JAWS and 1981’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg is now the architect of Hollywood’s future. For better and for worse, release schedules are plotted around the biggest noises a studio can make at the multiplex during the summer months, with eye-popping visual effects and exhausting marketing campaigns. E.T. will become the highest-grossing film of all time, until it is supplanted by Jurassic Park, then Titanic, then Avatar, then Avengers: Endgame, then Avatar again. In some ways, E.T. is the forefather of those films: at times grandiose and theatrical, utilizing eye-catching special effects to depict exotic creatures and occurrences. But E.T. is also hushed and intimate, made on a budget less than the ad spends for those pictures, with a deep interest in the hearts of its characters and a strong sense of place and space—as if these fantastic moments could happen with the right amount of belief. Others will keep trying, but time, place and the balance sheets of Hollywood studios almost guarantee that a Marvel film will never feel quite the same.

It all goes back to that summer. E.T. is a June movie. It just feels right.

*

It is August of 2022. I am 35 years old. I sit drying on the shores of Rockaway Beach, readying myself to visit the waterfront Thai restaurant where my wife and I will finally have a wedding party, nearly two years after we married on the small balcony of our Queens apartment, making the best of a precarious global health situation.

I check my email and receive a redlined document: changes have been made to an essay I have written about John Williams’s score to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, which will be included in a 40th anniversary vinyl reissue of the soundtrack. Thanks in large part to E.T.—which had an album of re-recorded soundtrack highlights upon its original release and several reissues featuring more and more original score cues over the next 35 years—I have devoted much of my creative and professional pursuits to the sale and storytelling of “catalog music.” I have worked for record labels and creative agencies as a copywriter, researcher and even producer—but I have always wanted to write liner notes. Convivial, informative essays on the stories behind a body of music and how it fits into the context of culture—just like the one I am reviewing edits on now. Those edits all look good—and why wouldn’t they? They’re coming from the offices of Spielberg and Williams, who are responsible for the work.

The hazy air is thick with promise for the future. Perhaps, in fact, E.T. is an August movie. Yes. It just feels right.

*

It is a month and year to be determined. I am probably 40 years old. Many things have likely happened, none of which I can predict. The world may well be scarier than it already feels now. I pray that it is kind to the innocent, and will do my best to ensure that fragile peace holds wherever possible. My daughters, their blue eyes peering upward, will finally watch with me the movie that has powered my dreams and ambitions; the film I can see and hear whenever I close my eyes; the one that served as my Rosetta stone for artistic value and emotional fulfillment. This time, I will watch them watch E.T. for the first time. I will watch over their impressions and curiosities, the way all fathers should. And in doing so, I will unlock new feelings in my own heart, blooming like a geranium in the hands of a wayward space botanist, traveling three million light years to the world he calls home.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial will be a movie for that moment. It will just feel right.

Mike Duquette is the founder/editor of catalogue music website The Second Disc and keeper of the off-kilter pop culture newsletter Duque’s Delight. His work has appeared in Allmusic, Observer, Ultimate Classic Rock, and in essays for music reissues by Cherry Red Records and Mondo.