E.T. and the Power of Making the Art You Need
I was shocked when I found out that the movie E.T. the Extra Terrestrial wasn’t actually about an extra-terrestiral.
Or at least, the original idea for the movie didn’t have an alien in it at all.
The movie has been one of my very favorite movies since I watched it as a kid. I might have been four or five the first time I saw it. I remember feeling deeply enthralled by it though I don’t remember why. And I remember my brother silhouetted by the black and white tv static after my dad took the vhs out, my brother’s small frame shuddering as he wept at the end, my parents cuddling him.
Since then I have loved E.T. at every age. As a kid, I loved the adventure, and I loved seeing a boy who had been made fun of by his peers become a hero they all admired. In high school I loved the idea that you could make a friend and together transcend the world around you. In college, watching the movie pushed me to look outside my own experience and learn from new friends who were nothing like me.
But it was some time into having my own kids that the biggest message of the movie came through, mostly because of what the Director, Steven Spielberg said about the movie himself.
In the 2017 documentery Spielberg, Steven Spielberg says,
“Originally, my idea for E.T. didn’t include an extra-terrestiral. It was going to be about how a divorce affects childhood, and how it really kind of traumatizes children. So the overriding theme was going to be about - How do you fill the heart of a lonely child. And what extraordinary event would it take to fill Elliot’s heart after losing his dad. It would take something as extraordinary as an extra-terrestrial coming into his life.”
E.T., I suddenly learned, isn’t about an alien. It’s about divorce. It’s about the hole in your heart when you lose someone you love and what it might take to transcend that pain and find hope and promise again.
I teared up just then, emotional, I think, for two reasons:
I remembered the pain of my own childhood, and feeling the promise of that movie when I watched it all these years – that the pain can be transcended, can be made small by simply overwhelming it with love.
I heard the artist himself, Steven Spielberg, say that he set out to make a film that transcended that pain. It gave me such hope for my own work.
This all came up this week while I was talking to my friend Lara over text. We were talking about tv and movies and how I never would have come out without them. Lara so very kindly said, “I’m so happy you found comfort from the tv of our youth. [I’m] also sad there weren’t more overtly queer stories for you to see yourself in. [I’m] watching Heartstopper now, and it’s so achingly sweet and lovely, and it gives me hope for the next generation. I wish we’d had shows like it when we were young.”
I told her I feel the same way sometimes. And also, sometimes I don’t. And then I said this:
“I felt the same way watching Love, Simon in the theaters [crying with a bunch of gay men at that sweet story]. But let it be true of every generation. Steven Spielberg made E.T. because it healed him. It gave him a movie he wished he’d had as a kid. What movies about kids of divorced parents ever made divorce seem like such a small thing [by comparison].
“We make the art we need and needed. And the next generation will make the things we never dreamed could be possible because they arrived to the world as it is now… not as it was.”
I grew up in a world where Steven Spielberg and hundreds of artists had already made E.T. And so I grew up in a world where I could believe that whatever haunted you or pained you as a child, that feeling of hurt could be overwhelmed by a feeling of love, wonder and belonging. I used that as fuel for the pursuit of love, wonder and belonging in my own life. Finding them overwhelmed the pain and fear I felt as a closeted kid in small town Texas.
And now, I am writing a book to add to this world of art. This book, I hope, gives a vision of hope to this generation and helps pave a way to a new generation of love and wonder and belonging, a new generation of humans who will make the art they needed for those who need it now.
