Chaga (aka Evolution’s Shore) is a really good novel. But Ian MacDonald gets it so wrong about the Close Encounters Of The Third Kind aliens. They couldn’t have been any other way.
In Chaga, first published in 1995, McDonald merges aspects from two of my favorite novels, J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World and Greg Bear’s Blood Music, to posit an alien species based on buckyball DNA that begins to transform vast regions of Africa into a living fractal landscape.
It’s exactly the kind of book I’ve tried to write myself. My novels The Music Of The Rending Of The Night, Grand Funk Central, Hemisphere, and Harlequin Midnight all concern landscapes mutated into similar hallucinogenic tracts where mind and geography blur and the familiar becomes visionary or nightmarish.
I see no smart core prohibition on these realms. They are simply the rationalized unknown, a transfigured reality akin to the worlds of Angela Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines Of Dr. Hoffman. And note the word “reality” here. This is no Annihilation fantasy. This is something tangible and real but beyond our understanding: my abiding belief in what the alien will actually be like.
So I ought to be disgusted by Steven Spielberg’s fat-bellied little grays bopping around at the end of Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. The fact is, I think they’re absolutely right.
McDonald, through the mouthpiece of his lead character Gaby McAslan, makes his own antipathy all too clear, though he’s coy enough not to disparage the movie by name:
“She remembered an old sci-fi movie from her father’s video library. At the climax, the huge luminous starship of the aliens had floated in across the mountain to meet humanity’s representatives. It had touched the earth, and opened its doors. In a glow of light, the aliens had come out. And it had killed the movie. Run a spear into the side of the sense of wonder and let out gasoline and Diet Coke. There had been wee ones with oval eyes and no noses, like aliens in abduction magazines, that ran around twittering. Then there was a big long spindly one with arms and legs about eight feet long. He had to bend to get under the door. Gaby McAslan had thought that was most pathetic. They negate gravity, cross entire galaxies in city-sized star-ships filled with light, and they can’t design a door that opens wide enough.”
And yes, these are justifiable criticisms. Spielberg’s UFOs are extraordinary for their time, and his mothership is a marvel. But what comes out are the jiggy little humanoids of the pulp age. They should have been much, much weirder — as visionary a life form as their hardware. Shouldn’t they?
I’m going to argue that the answer is no. That McDonald was making a valid point but fingering the wrong culprit. He should be fingering those who claim to have had the close encounters and abductions. It is their imagination that has failed so badly. And since McDonald has written such a fine novel, and since his lead character is a spunky, quick-witted journalist (now, in the remembering, even if she saw the movie as a kid), they should both have understood why Spielberg did the things he did.
This is not, incidentally, the case in McDonald’s weak sequel Kirinya (1998), when she seems to have regressed into a hysterical fool. And let’s not get started on McDonald’s diatribe about 2001: A Space Odyssey in that novel, where he starts ranting that “monkeys could never do those things with bones and stones.” Hell, they ride horses in Planet Of The Apes.
The truth about Close Encounters is not that it’s a what-if on actual first contact but that it’s a what-if on the first contact as seen through the lens of UFO mythology.
By 1977, scientists and science fiction writers alike were already well aware that life out there was going to be more extraordinary than anything our anthropocentric brains could imagine. Even movies knew this. There are the pods of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and the invisible god-beings of 2001. In literature, there are everything from Campbell’s shape-shifter to Clarke’s Rama dwellers. All the accumulated speculation of the genre as far back as Wells was in Spielberg’s past and could have been used as a launch-pad for something truly new and remarkable.
But that wasn’t his point. There was no way his mothership hatch was going to open and weirdo giant octopuses were going to slither out. Or Mesklin centipedes. Or Triffids. Or globular swarms or frothy blobs or oozing slime. Not even mechanical devices. What was going to come out were things just like us because this is what the UFO mythology primed us for.
There are other layers of message, too. There’s the inclusive, all-the-same message. Aliens are our brothers and sisters in the stars. We’re like them too. We can have as positive a future as theirs.
There’s the question of communication, something with which Close Encounters is seamed from the very first scene. It’s not a random act that Spielberg chose as a major character, Lacombe, a man who doesn’t speak English and needs an interpreter. From this follows the universal language of music and hand gestures and the famous lightshow dialog. We can talk to these people, Spielberg is saying. It’s no more insurmountable an obstacle than talking to the French. Even a gesture as simple as a smile, we learn, is the buster of all the walls between us.
There’s the sense of wonder, of ourselves as small children gazing up into the night sky and wondering, without fear or prejudice, what might be out there. He’s not a major character, but the entire movie actually revolves around three year old Barry Guiler, the boy whose abduction (twice) and return (twice) form the heartbeats of the plot. Barry is ourselves in a state of grace, before we start finding fault with those who don’t look just the same as ourselves. The little grays who come pouring out of the mothership are Barry’s playmates. He doesn’t judge them on their big heads and spidery hands. He judges them on how much fun they are.
So the aliens had to be something that Barry would relate to — in other words, the plot itself demanded that they look like children. The exact same message was repeated five years later in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, which uses an ugly kid alien not that far from the ones in Close Encounters. Here are grays not as scary dead-of-night id beasts that gut cattle and perform invasive surgery on humans but as companions in our faltering first steps into the cosmos.
It is not the grays that would have killed Close Encounters. It is anything else.
There were also, of course, technological limitations. CGI was in its infancy, and Spielberg had to balance strangeness with believability given the restrictions of the craft. As he knew only too well from Jaws, ambition outreached ability in the cinema of the time.
Stop-motion wouldn’t have worked. Too much puppetry wouldn’t have worked. Take a look at the original theatrical release of Star Wars if you can still find a copy. The muppets are abominable. (George Lucas revisited the movie decades later and slapped CGI all over it. If you never saw the movie in the cinema or on VHS, this tampered version is likely the only one you know.) Now flick over to Alien, released two years later. It’s just a man in a rubber suit. He’s got a few more accoutrements glued on, but he’s fundamentally the same as the Close Encounters grays.
The first to emerge from the mothership is this spindly articulated puppet. McDonald is at least right that it seems to need to stoop to get out from under the door. The thing is, why do we believe this alien is native to the ship? In fact, why do we think any of the aliens we see are native to the ship, and not simply more travelers like Barry? Moreover, we assume it is stooping, but could it be that this alien actually walks bent over like that, a sort of living spider?
Emerging from the door, the thing has a somewhat repellant crinkly surface and skull-like face. My feeling is that Spielberg wanted us to think that something scary was coming out from the ship, so that he could then reassure us with what happens next.
In Spielberg’s novelization, there are three of the things, not one. He describes them like this: “They were immense, eight or nine feet tall, terribly thin. Too thin for the inner mechanics of the human body, except they resembled humans because they moved on things like legs and waved things like arms.”
Having reached the ground, the thing raises itself to its full height and slowly lifts its arms in what is most certainly meant to be a Christ-like gesture. Not monsters, it is telling us. Brethren from the stars. This, incidentally, is the last we ever see of the thing. It is not visible in any of the rest of the scene and presumably, having made its gesture, simply disappears back inside.
In the novelization, there’s a sequence not in the movie in which the three creatures shoot out rays of light. “They stood there, touching, swaying, glowing, and then one of them seemed to reach out an incredible long armlike thing and pointed it at Roy.” In the movie, as we’ll see below, the aliens have a different way of singling the hero Roy Neary out as special.
Next to emerge is this rabble of grays, actually small girls wearing costumes. You will note that the spindly puppet has entirely vanished.
Spielberg’s novelization describes them like this: “From within the great space vehicle a great twittering sound emerged. The space within seemed to convulse, writhing with energy. Small forms began to emerge and make their way through the fiery opening.
“They seemed about three feet high, humanoid in that they had arms and legs and a kind of bulbous head. […] Their arms and legs were incredibly flexible in a way no human could imitate. They were infinitely extensible, too, as Lacombe soon discovered. One of the tiny visitors wrapped an arm around him and the arm kept growing longer until it completely encircled the Frenchman’s waist.”
A shot from a little later in the movie of the same moment: the grays all lined up along the lip of the ramp at the very base of the mothership. Spielberg specifically designed his grays to be an amalgam of all the aliens in the UFO eyewitness reports in order that they might be “authentic,” regardless that if you’re skeptical of the reports (which Spielberg, and the movie, by their very nature are not) you’d characterize the eyewitnesses as a whole lot of copycats.
The grays don’t do much for a while. They simply stand there, back-lit. We never quite get to see their faces or to focus too much on those unpleasant-looking hands. In the novelization, they go around feeling up the humans’ genitals — I guess as close to an anal probe as Spielberg dared.
I just love this particular shot. You can’t see it clearly at this resolution, but one of the girls (seventh or eighth from the right) has decided to sit on the edge of the ramp rather than stand with all the others, meaning the light illuminates a bit more of her costume than Spielberg might have expected. Others of the girls seem to be showing signs of boredom, too.
This is basically as much of the grays as we’re going to see. Though Spielberg’s novelization has them bopping about and pouring Coke into their palms, here they just cluster and jostle. The girls are wearing tight padded leotards, big helmets which mean they can’t see much, and rubbery Thing hands. Some of the pot bellies may even be their own.
An unused scene has Lacombe interacting with one of the grays. This shot is from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: The Ultimate Visual History. Seen in the light here as they never are in the movie, the helmets have cute kiddie faces with dazzling blue eyes. The book explains that the original design for the helmets was so scary some of the girls were terrified of them. So they redesigned the aliens to be cuter — for the actors, not for us.
A group of grim-faced grunts are lined up ready to ride the ship. In the movie it’s not clear that any of them actually make it inside, but they all do in the novelization. In the movie, when the grays jiggle up and down the line, only Roy Neary actually smiles at them. He is immediately singled out for the trip, and led in this cluster up to the ramp, somehow clutching a bunch of those rubber fingers. But was it the smile, or was it because Neary was the only one who was actually invited to come to the landing site?
It’s a little confusing unless you’re paying attention and willing to read between the lines, but there seem to be three different species (ages? metamorphosic stages?) of alien we see: the spindly one, the grays, and this solitary animatronic puppet (which Spielberg nicknamed “Puck” during production) pausing when all the others have entered to make contact with the human team. “I wanted there to be diversity inside that particular civilization,” Spielberg explained.
Here’s Puck from another angle. A quite different shape to the others, you might mistake it for the spindly puppet. The face is completely humanoid, as would be necessary so as not to frighten Barry, with huge child-like eyes. In fact, it was designed so that it would look just like the actor playing Barry, giving audiences the chance to make a motherly, protective connection with it.
Not a Hitler salute. That would be a different movie altogether. This is communication through the Kodály hand signals used to teach music to deaf people, which of course assumes that aliens have hands just like ours. In this case, there are four fingers and an opposable thumb. This thing was once swinging in the trees.
The use of Kodály may seem odd for a species that first attempts to communicate with Earthlings through music. Composer John Williams noted: “We could never be sure that these extraterrestrials actually could hear anything.” Maybe not them. Their AI, for sure.
The crux of the whole movie. Even in the depths of the galaxy, a smile is a smile. Because, I dunno, maybe god made us all that way. The novelization extemporizes: “Lacombe looked down into its face. It was changing — from something embryonic, unformed, into a face of something a thousand years old. Suddenly, Lacombe knew that all the wisdom, all the super-intelligence, the experience that it had to take to build these vehicles, to travel these millions of light years was there in the aging countenance and the, yes, the smile of this fantastic little creature. Lacombe smiled back.”
And that’s not a connection you could have gotten from an octopus or centipede.
So Spielberg was constrained both by the techniques available to him and by what he understood his aliens to be in the minds of his audience. They must be familiar on a number of levels, and non-threatening, and relatable, and human-shaped even in the midst of incredible technological achievements. They must be something Americans could communicate with as equals, because then we’d communicate to each other as equals, too.
They must, in short, be everything the UFO mythology had primed them to be, and Ian McDonald was so foolish in his criticism that it is the paragraph I quoted above that threatens to run a spear not just through his character’s judgment as our window on the events of Chaga, but through our faith in McDonald himself. He could sit all the way through Close Encounters and not grasp its most basic lesson?
The dark of space is not just a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected. It’s a measure of our humanity. I give Spielberg a great deal of credit for his acuity on this matter. Undoubtedly he discussed and rejected the idea of truly alien aliens. He knew that this was not the tale he wanted to tell because it wouldn’t be acceptable to the popcorn-munching rednecks whose attitudes he needed to change. There they are, in the movie, jawing in derision, and proved to be wrong all along.
If only I believed you could see all that, Ian. Your character certainly would have, if you’d let her think for herself.
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