The Great Unknown: Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind

“We do not fear the unknown. We fear what we think about the unknown.” Is a quote from Teal Swan. This idea is incorporated into a lot of director’s movies, however, Tim Burton, a creator of many famous movies, would probably have one of the best understandings of this idea. This is through Burton’s constant use of ideas about the unknown in many of his films. Yet, these ideas of fearing the unknown and curiosity of the unknown are especially prominent in Burton’s films such as The Corpse Bride and Edward Scissorhands. There are a great amount of techniques Burton uses to convey these ideas of the unknown, but Burton typically uses techniques such as some sort of misfit protagonist that is different than most people and a judgmental

The science fiction film genre has been around almost as long as movies have, but like the cinema it is still a fairly young art form. This genre came into existence shortly after the invention of the movie camera in 1888 and has endured for over one-hundred years. Science fiction is adaptive; it changes with the times and this trend can be seen in its incorporation of other genres, cultural history and technology. This essay will attempt to define the genre, chronicle the history and evolution, and explore its relation to technology. This is in general and in the cinema.

A lot can happen in sixty years, and America is no exception to that statement. It is arguable that one of the biggest differences regarding America in the 1950s to modern America is culture. The movie “Pleasantville” reflects much of these cultural differences from 1950s to today in a creative and thoughtful way. It also provides much useful insight into the cultural conflicts America faced throughout the 1950s. The many differences between 1950s culture and modern day culture, my own opinion which time period I would personally choose to live in and cultural conflicts of the 1950s will be discussed throughout this essay.

Salt of the Earth has a good claim to being one of the most controversial and notorious American movies of all time. Normally a film with such an infamous public reputation would be expected to have transgressed societal proprieties with regard to the use of sex and violence. However, that is not the case with this New Mexico set movie about a miners strike. Salt of the Earth was the film that suffered most at the hands of the McCarthyist witch hunts that were doing the rounds in early fifties America. Without wishing to condone the political attitudes of the time, it is to a degree understandable why this was the case as the film is one of the most impressive pieces of agit-prop drama imaginable.

Both The Brother from Another Planet (John Sayles, 1984) and Juice (Ernest Dickerson, 1992) share the similar purpose of Blaxploitation which redefine the critical perspective about the stereotypical good and evil ideologies of the African Americans and reveal the blacks’ position in American society. However, by mobilizing close textual analysis on both films Brother and Juice, as well as the articles from Janani Subramanian and Kenneth Chan, I want to argue that the diversities of the films genres endow distinctive approaches to address the issue. In the Brother, the science fiction genre serves as a mask which provides the chance to dodge the seriousness of facing the racial issue directly by disguising the black identity under an alienated character, yet endows the possibilities to embrace the topic underneath it. Whereas the action genre in Juice can presents more radically about the conflicts between the African American youths with the society and themselves on the daily life base because the violence element is granted and expected in an action movie. By comparing and analyzing the social and political position of blacks in American society in two films, we can come to a better understand how the allowance towards alienation and violence elements reflects distinctively on science fiction and action movie genres.

When I saw images of aliens and spaceships in the title sequence of The Day the Earth Stood Still, I wondered what this movie could have to do with American history. But upon viewing, it became very apparent that this film had as much to say about the 1950s as any documentary. This movie demonstrates how early Cold War tensions and anxieties could affected relations between nations and people (or in this case, planets and aliens), and portrays women in their ideal socially-constructed roles.

Spielberg's work exhibits more technical virtuosity than the others. Also, he is a great admirer of the old Hollywood masters, such as John Ford and Frank Capra; his film often contains embedded visual or aural references to them. In addition, a majorly praised television film, Duel (1972), brought him the opportunity to direct for the cinema, and a string of hits has made him the most commercially successful director of all time.

Success doesn’t come out of extreme devotion towards something, its comes out of drive. Steven Spielberg never characterized himself a victim despite the fact that he struggled with  dyslexia. He was labeled as lazy growing up because of his inability to read. His struggle has instituted another reason why he should live up to his dream of becoming a filmmaker; To prove to those who labeled him, and to save his shame and guilt that others put on him. Spielberg stated that directing films was his form of therapy for many years.

The following essay serves at part 3 of my series on the history of science fiction films. Please take a moment to check out part 1 and part 2 if you haven't done so already.

Steven Spielberg is one of the most influential film personalities in the history of film, and as of the pioneers of the Hollywood era. He is the Hollywood's best known and influential directors and producers in film history. Spielberg has numerous big-grossing, critically acclaimed credits to his name, as producer, director and writer.

Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) mirrors the ideology of a sci-fi film outlined by Susan Sontag in the Imagination of Disaster so closely that it borders on a lack of creativity. That is what qualifies this film as a ‘revival’ of the sci-fi genre following revisionist works like Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). This film, among other things, believes that femininity in leadership will lead to disaster on the political stage and that personal relationships should mirror the ideals of this government balance. This scene uses framing and set design re-erect themes of the traditional sci-fi ideology such as the military embodiment of masculinity and the weak femininity of a ‘scientist’. This scene also sets the stage for what Sontag calls the balance of a ‘good war’ and the ‘yearning for peace’ which unfolds throughout the film. The ideology of Independence Day is despairingly unoriginal, touching on almost all themes outlined by Sontag as what makes the science fiction genre.

During the time of 1930-1950 there had been a lot of change with the Hollywood movies that had been made. As the U.S slowly shifted into the great depression as the 30s’ came around, it had affected the Hollywood film industry through economic crisis putting the movies into low budgeting films. But as the great depression seemed to be a major crisis for those living in the U.S another crisis soon followed as the great depression had ended, and that so happened World War II. When the U.S officially entered the war the whole Hollywood film industry changed drastically. Some of the usage from the film industry had been the type of propaganda used from it whether it had been formal or informal as well as official or unofficial. Many of the movies

In writing definitively about American films of the nineteen fifties, Douglas Brode refers to the societal hysteria resulting from fear of both the communist threat and the possibility of nuclear war. Accompanying this general state of mind was the emergence of the science fiction film as a major genre. Titles in the genre dealt with fantasy topics ranging from alien invasion (The Thing, 1951, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956), to biologial "missing links" (The Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954), to the bizarre side-effects of nuclear contamination (The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957), or to actual nuclear war (The World, the Flesh and The Devil, 1959).

In English: reprinted in Jim Hillier (ed.), ‘Cahier du cinema, vol.1:1950s’, London, BFI/Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985.

Next, I will reiterate the “Social Problem” film and the scare of juvenile delinquency during the 1950s. I will introduce the bad girl film genre in more detail, expanding the tropes/motifs of this cycle, and demonstrates how this genre can be subcategorized as a social problem film.