This book is about Steven Spielberg's 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of people assume this is special effects driven film and about “wow” and “wonder”—which it is—but it's also about alienated lost masculinity. Part of what I argue—and I think this is the new angle to the book—is that in the beginning of the 70s films by Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Kubrick and others tend to be by men directors who dealt with lost men, wandering, looking for meaning. A good example would be Bob Rafelson's film, Five Easy Pieces. As we get to 1976 with Jaws, and then 1977 with Star Wars, we start to see a shift. It's not a full shift—in those films, you now have men who become heroes and sort of help society—but interestingly, I think those two films, Star Wars and Jaws, also share with the earlier 70s an emphasis on a masculinity that hasn't yet found itself. For example, in Jaws—until Brody becomes a hero at the end of the film, he's pretty much a failed figure. He's been responsible for the death of a little boy. He's participated in the cover-up. And he's part of a series of films about fallen men, errant men, men who made mistakes. In the first part of the 70s, they are not excused. What does start to happen in the later part of the 70s is you get excused for your ills, if you can redeem yourself.

During the first part of the 70s, we see failed men who are failures from beginning to end. An example would be Roman Polanski's Chinatown. Jake has gotten a woman killed. There's no redemption, and the character simply remains in alienation. Five Easy Pieces would also be an example of that. Starting in the late 70s, we see some fully triumphant figures, like Rocky—they may start as falling—but they rise up. Rocky gets up from the floor. Luke Skywalker triumphs over the fact that he's been orphaned. Brody kills the shark by the end of the film.

For me, there's a pivot moment around 1976–77, and it's not absolutely a pure break. Given that Close Encounters is in 1977, I sort of see it as a transition film. On the one hand Roy Neary doesn't know the meaning of life. He's caught in a marriage that's clearly empty. At one point, the wife says something, “remember when we used to snuggle like this?” Clearly love is going out of the marriage. He's in a dead-end job. He doesn't have much to look forward to, and then he is given this second chance by the aliens. Except it's very much a second chance only for the man in the film. Not the women, you know. She takes the kids to her sister, and we never see her again. We do hear from her on the phone. Roy seems to start something with Jillian, but then she reasserts her sort of stereotypical femininity, and says, “I can't go with you, I have to wait for my son,” kisses him goodbye, and again, it's the man who goes off. It is still about a redeemed masculinity.

I showed the film a lot while I was working on it to focus groups, and women were bothered by the film in a way that I don't think they would have been bothered in 1977. I think we're supposed to be on Roy Neary's side. He now just looks like a bad parent. I quote this in the book, but one person said to me, “I'd like to see the sequel be about the kids and the therapy they're gonna need after their dad just disappeared from their life.” What I would like the reader to get out of it is a good introduction to the film that does recognize the ways in which it's part of a later tradition of special effects films that want us to be in marvel, want us to go, “wow.” I don't think anybody says, “wow” in Close Encounters, but in the 70s and 80s you start to get a lot of films where someone does something magical or superhero-ish, or there's a great special effect. A good example is The Matrix, when Morpheus jumps from building to building. Neo, who doesn't yet know he's a superhero, he goes, “wow.” Now, the equivalent of that in Close Encounters is people looking and being amazed. A good example would be the scene in the film when Roy and Jillian are driving in the car, and the barbed wire is over the car because they broke it through all these fences, and suddenly they screech to a halt, they look off-screen, we don't see what they're seeing. So we're also wondering, we're curious, and then we see them climb a rise, and as they climb, the camera moves up, and we finally see Devils Tower, and the music builds, and it's very triumphant. That, for me, is a kind of “wow” moment in that film.

One other thing I point out is that starting in the 70s, and it intensifies in the 80s, you start to get scenes where characters in the film applaud—not merely the audience. When Close Encounters opened, people were applauding certain scenes—but interestingly, characters in the film applaud. Jillian applauds towards the end. At the beginning, the scientists find the airplanes in the desert and the motor turns on, and they applaud. You sort of want to go, “yes, it's great, but these are scientists, they should be a little more level-headed.” They applaud when they hear the music played on a recorder. They applaud when the UFOs do a light show, and I think it’s that they’re proxies for the audience. We're supposed to be applauding with them. They're telling us, “this is amazing, this is great, you haven't seen anything like this.” There are two sides to the film. One, a very earthbound, ordinary world—Roy and his house. And then an extraordinary world of outer space, with the aliens then transitioning between those two worlds. For me, this means the transition between a pre-1977 New Hollywood and a post-1977 Newer Hollywood, which is more effects-driven, more buoyant, more optimistic. If we think of it just as a UFO film, you're missing a lot of what's going on in it.

When I started to do research on Close Encounters—and I often start a project not knowing what I will find, research-wise—I went to Spielberg biographies. And something mentioned, very much in passing, that Paul Schrader, who had written Taxi Driver, had also written scripts for Close Encounters. I started researching that, because he's clearly more the figure of the first part of the 70s. In Taxi Driver, even though there's this sort of upbeat ending where Travis Bickle is celebrated for killing people, it's an ironic upbeat ending. We get this letter from Iris' parents thanking him for rescuing her from the bordello. 'Iris is back with us, we're gonna make her happy now, she's not gonna run off.' But you don't really know if the film is celebrating Travis for having become a killer or condemning him. There's no condemnation possible for Luke Skywalker when he destroys the Death Star in Star Wars. There's no condemnation possible for Brody when he blows up the shark, although we share the condemnation of the mother who lost her child. There's no condemnation of Roy Neary for finding his dream. I think if there's condemnation, it's in later generations when they look back on the movie from our later perspective. Close Encounters looks different today in terms of its gender ideology even though feminism is ramping up through that period.

I started to do some work on Paul Schrader in relation to the film, and it turns out you can find screenplays of his online, so I found those. And they're actually closer to the film than everybody has said. Spielberg, in interviews, said, we tried Schrader, and his script was too dark. Yet, in fact, his script actually has spiritual transcendence at the end, sort of like the released film itself. Paul Schrader gave his papers to the library of University of Texas at Austin. So the library has the Paul Schrader papers, and there's a folder of material from his Close Encounters script which is very spiritual. I have a friend who runs a once-a-month webinar with people from Hollywood of the 60s, 70s, 80s, so he helped me get in touch with Michael Phillips, one of the producers of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and we had a Zoom conversation. Another friend of mine wrote a book on Paul Schrader that included an interview with him. So, I sent an email to Paul Schrader saying, “would you be willing to talk?” And, like, 5 minutes later, the phone rings, and it's Paul Schrader. So we talked about the film. He didn't remember a character who meets UFOs and has a spiritual transcendence. I said, “would you like to see it?” Texas had sent me the download of all the material. So I sent him the material. He wrote back saying, “I still don't remember it, but it's clearly me, because that's my typewriter. I recognize the typewriter I had in the 70s.” So, there are two different tones in Hollywood in the early 70s and the later 70s. Schrader's script is part of that, because on the one hand, it's clearly a Paul Schrader script. On the other hand, it has a clearly transcendental spiritual ending, which isn't the case for all Schrader films.

Martin Scorsese is similar that way. There are films like Last Temptation of Christ, where Christ avoids temptation, and his spirit is raised to the heavens. But there are also films like Goodfellas, where Henry is bad from beginning to end, and he's never repentant, he never transcends his world, and at the end, he's actually in a world that he hates, the world of being a stool pigeon suburbanite. So, these are directors who go back and forth between cynicism and uplift, between positive and negative. What I want to do in my books is be a little counterintuitive. Because Close Encounters is a special effects film, we’re going to think it's like Star Wars but I want to show that Spielberg’s film is also about cynicism and alienation. Before the BFI had sent their list of titles, I had proposed Saturday Night Fever—the disco movie with John Travolta. I actually write a little bit about Saturday Night Fever in the Close Encounters book, because I think there's a similar trajectory. Both movies have guys who are stuck in a working-class way of life—one is urban, one is less urban—who go to a special effects world—in one case, the UFOs, in the other case, a disco. They see bright lights, these give them new powers, and then they eventually leave their world behind. Roy literally leaves our world. Tony Manero goes from Brooklyn to Manhattan. And he's actually redeemed even more than Roy is. He actually tries to rape the main woman in the film. And at the end of the film, she's living in Manhattan, he goes to her door to ask forgiveness, and she sort of forgives him.

When I work on these books, I like to make sure my research is as complete as possible. I wanted to know how unique Close Encounters was in 1977, so I tried to watch as many films from that year as possible. There are 140 films. I got to about 102. And part of what I argue in the book is that most are man-centered, most are masculinist. Very few are about spiritual journeys. What is also interesting about Close Encounters, and why I think it straddles the 70s, is another genre, the road movie. A guy gets on the road. Sometimes it's two guys, buddy movies like Scarecrow. Or earlier in 1968 would be Easy Rider. And a number of these films are about men fleeing femininity. There's a very curious, little-known film called Adam at 6 AM, with Michael Douglas, where he's a college professor. He goes to the Midwest because his aunt has died, and he falls in love with a woman who is a high school graduate and for a while, he's trying to live her life. On the day of the wedding party, one of the relatives says, “we're running out of ice cream, can you go to the store?” And he drives to the store. He just stops the car, and looks around. Then he just drives on. Not going back. So it is this idea of the man in flight. It is interesting that all these road movies in 1977 are not about men leaving our world for a transcendent spiritual realm, other than Star Wars and Close Encounters. Very few science fiction films are about leaving our world.

The other thing that really struck me more about the film is repetition of dialogue. People in the film, in part because they're seeing something beyond human comprehension, can't find words. A good example is when Roy first comes back to the house after his first encounter, and he says, “Ronnie, wake up, wake up! There was this, there was a… there was a… it was a swoosh!” Like, he can't find the words. And when they find the boat in the desert, the cartographer keeps saying, “I can't believe it, I can't believe it, I can't believe it.” When Jillian and Roy first see the launch pad where the UFOs are gonna land, they say something like, “do you see what I'm seeing?” “Yes, I see what you're seeing.” It's a film about incredulity, and whether you could have credence in vision—what you're seeing and what's beyond what you're seeing.

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