5 - The Science Fiction Film as Marvelous Text: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Summary

Help! I'm lost.

– Close Encounters

As Rosemary Jackson emphasizes, the fantastic text seems to have, as its underlying purpose, a desire to put “the real under scrutiny.” In offering its alternative version of everyday experience or calling into question the rules that would seem to govern that everyday world, it transports us to a new territory – at least “no longer in Kansas,” as Dorothy tells Toto – or perhaps more precisely into a kind of liminal position wherein we must start figuring out the rules anew. Essentially, it fantasizes us. That effect, I would suggest, becomes especially evident in and significant for the marvelous dimension of fantasy, which focuses on forces from outside the human realm, forces that, in other contexts, we have traditionally associated with the supernatural, that unexpectedly come into play and compel us to reconceptualize our world by seeing it as part of some larger and more complex realm. As conventional explanations prove unavailing, the effect of that otherness or outside intervention typically proves disorienting – both to characters and to the audience – as we see in the above comment by a character in Steven Spielberg's first science fiction effort, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Faced with a power outage, power company employee Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) has set about his assigned task of finding the problem, fixing it, and restoring power and thus light to his world – of bringing it back to normalcy.