100 Movies Every Catholic Should See #56: Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Written and directed by Steven Spielberg

Take a listen to these five notes:

These are the five notes that were developed by Steven Spielberg and his longtime collaborator John Williams to represent how aliens might communicate to us if we ever made contact with them. To quote the director years later in an interview for The Making of Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

On Close Encounters it was very important that John [Williams] become a major character because music was the actual avenue of communication. [The aliens] communicated through lights, colors, and music. That’s what I had written in the script…I don’t know where it came from but I just thought it’d be really cool to have aliens and humans communicating by what reaches us quicker than anything which is the passion of music.

Lights, colors, and music

These three ways that the aliens communicate to the characters of Close Encounters are also the three main ways that cinema primarily affects a viewer. One of the rules over at Pixar is that if you want to emotionally affect the audience you can’t do that without the proper lighting and without emotionally compelling music. There is something about this combination of elements that together imbue a sense of awe into the subject experiencing them. The beautiful churches of the Gothic period still amaze both believers and non-believers in this way: through the way the light comes pouring through the dazzling colors of stained glass, and the way that liturgical music travels through the building to immerse the listener.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a film about many disparate people coming together to believe in something beyond themselves, moved by experiences that they themselves can’t explain. The film primarily follows Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) as he begins encountering strange phenomena in his hometown, and his subsequent struggle when those closest to him begin to alienate him for his growing belief that he’s seen something from another world. Meanwhile, a group of scientists (led by two in particular played by Bob Balaban and Francois Truffaut) is also on the trail of these mysteries on a global level, as a bulk carrier ship that disappeared in 1925 appears in the desert, mysterious blips appear on radar, and massive groups of people start chanting the five notes of music heard above.

Like a film I wrote on earlier this year, The Truman Show, Close Encounters is about the relentless pursuit of truth despite everyone around you telling you that you’re the crazy one. This pursuit for Drefuss’ Roy Neary drives him almost mad, and leads him to risk his life to reach the final destination where the main UFO is eventually supposed to land (if you haven’t seen it I won’t spoil where it lands, it’s a great reveal) where he finally meets up with the scientists. This culminates in a line dropped by Truffaut’s scientist, who upon walking up to Neary, simply says: “Mr. Neary, I envy you”. Neary, unlike the scientists, has come all the way to see the UFO driven almost primarily on blind, inexplicable faith, versus the calculated rationale and hard evidence required for the scientists to get to this point.

So it is also that the viewer of cinema who is best able to approach a film is the one who has still not lost his sense of awe and wonder, who still can be moved by a beautiful John Williams score or the tricks of the light utilized by an expert cinematographer. The movie theater is the closest place outside of church where- if the movie is true, good, and beautiful- a group of strangers can find themselves sharing a common sublime experience through the manipulation of lights, colors, and music.

Does it logically follow then that good cinema can actually lead someone to find their faith in God in this way, if it provides such sublimity? It all depends on the viewer, and how open their hearts are to understanding how the truth, goodness, and beauty they have experienced in a particular work of art correlate to the Truth, Goodness, and Beauty of their Divine Creator. It can require becoming almost like the childlike Neary with his single-minded pursuit of a higher power, for as Christ said:

“Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it”