Close Encounters of the Third Kind
By Jon Towlson
()
About this ebook
Related to Close Encounters of the Third Kind
Related ebooks
Prison Movies: Cinema Behind Bars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of Light Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Gangster Film: Fatal Success in American Cinema Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Curse of Frankenstein Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Coen Brothers (Text-only Edition): This Book Really Ties the Films Together Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cinema of the Coen Brothers: Hard-Boiled Entertainments Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Philosophy of the Coen Brothers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blade Runner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Deathwatch: American Film, Technology, and the End of Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAtomic Age Cinema: The Offbeat, the Classic and the Obscure Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cinema of James Cameron: Bodies in Heroic Motion Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Philosophy of Film Noir Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Heist Film: Stealing With Style Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAmerican Films of the 70s: Conflicting Visions Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Twilight Zone Encyclopedia Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Teen Movies: American Youth on Screen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Philosophy of Science Fiction Film Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe New Hollywood: From Bonnie and Clyde to Star Wars Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMatinee Melodrama: Playing with Formula in the Sound Serial Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsContinental Strangers: German Exile Cinema, 1933-1951 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America, Second Edition Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRe-Animator Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsRoger Corman’s New World Pictures, 1970-1983: An Oral History, Vol. 2 Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDead of Night Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFrankenstein and Philosophy: The Shocking Truth Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Performing Arts For You
As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Yes Please Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Midsummer Night's Dream, with line numbers Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Unsheltered: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Robin Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Diamond Eye: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5For colored girls who have considered suicide/When the rainbow is enuf Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Macbeth (new classics) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Importance of Being Earnest: A Play Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Our Town: A Play in Three Acts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lucky Dog Lessons: From Renowned Expert Dog Trainer and Host of Lucky Dog: Reunions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hollywood's Dark History: Silver Screen Scandals Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coreyography: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hamlet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Woman Is No Man: A Read with Jenna Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Storyworthy: Engage, Teach, Persuade, and Change Your Life through the Power of Storytelling Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Quite Nice and Fairly Accurate Good Omens Script Book: The Script Book Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Trial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Romeo and Juliet Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wuthering Heights Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Dolls House Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Agatha Christie Collection Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsStories I Only Tell My Friends: An Autobiography Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Best Women's Monologues from New Plays, 2020 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Whale / A Bright New Boise Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Count Of Monte Cristo (Unabridged) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Close Encounters of the Third Kind
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Jon Towlson
1. Close Encounters: Genre and Context
Early Sci-Fi
In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds the industrial revolution saw a response in literature to the way science and technology was reshaping the world. Jules Verne’s stories of fantastic adventure, From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870), Around the World in 80 Days (1873) explored technological devices and transportation. H.G. Wells wrote cautionary tales of scientific inventors – The Island of Dr. Moreau (1895), The Invisible Man (1897) The Time Machine (1895) – and imagined Martian invasion in The War of the Worlds (1897). In America, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote of extraordinary realms in his Martian Adventures Series (1912-1964), and of prehistoric reawakening in The Land That Time Forgot (1918).
Science fiction exploded in the 1920s and 1930s, partly because of the popularity of cinema, itself a wondrous time machine and magic show, but also thanks to pulp magazines. The monthly Amazing Stories (1926) introduced writers like E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith, and later Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin, whilst Astounding Science Fiction (1930), which would be later renamed Analog (and is still published today) debuted Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. Van Vogt and Robert Heinlein. Its most famous editor was John W. Campbell Jr., author of Who Goes There? (1948) – later adapted for the cinema as The Thing From Another World (1951) (Telotte, 2001: 63-122; Sobchack, 2001: 17-25).
After World War Two, pulp writers began publishing novels, helping to move science fiction further into the mainstream. Key writers of this era include Ray Bradbury (Martian Chronicles 1946-); Asimov (I, Robot, 1950, The Foundation Trilogy, 1951-); Heinlein (The Puppet Masters, 1951) and Arthur C. Clark (Childhood’s End, 1953). The emergence of speculative fiction within ‘serious’ contemporary literature took place at the same time, with the works of Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1931), George Orwell 1984 (1948), and later J.G. Ballard (The Drowned World, 1962) and Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, (1963). These novels sought to combine fantasy with philosophy and politics, drawing on allegory to comment on (often disturbing) trends within modern society. Closely aligned are the traditions of utopian and dystopian literature. Utopian novels date back to Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Erehwon, written in 1872 by Samuel Butler, which contrast idealised worlds with the failings of the present reality; dystopian works such as Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), on the other hand, depict a future characterised by oppressive social control and human misery (Sanders, 2009: 150-151; King and Krzywinska, 2000: esp. 13-22).
In cinema, Georges Méliès became the first sci-fi filmmaker of sorts. His A Trip to the Moon (1902) featured rocketships, interstellar travel and aliens. The age of modernity after World War One led to optimism about science and technology creating a better world, but also to fears about the inequalities of a technological society. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) depicted a divided city where workers would become virtually enslaved by machines while the idle rich enjoyed the fruit of their labour. Class struggle in a futuristic (dystopic) environment has become a recurrent theme of science fiction cinema due to the lasting influence of Metropolis (The Hunger Games, 2012, Snowpiercer, 2013, Mad Max: Fury Road, 2015). By contrast, Things to Come (1936), adapted by H.G. Wells from his novel The Shape of Things to Come (1933) predicted a utopian future after war causes society to collapse and be replaced by a new improved one (Sanders, 2009: 140-154).
The film serials, Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck Rogers (1939) popularised pulp science fiction cinema in the form of rocketships, ray guns, alien invaders, evil intergalactic emperors and damsels in distress; and employed a machine-like narrative strategy of incessant cliff-hanger situations to hook the viewer into returning to the theatre each week. We can see them as the inspiration for the likes of Star Wars and the myriad superhero blockbuster movies that continue to dominate Hollywood today.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in an atomic age which could be seen reflected in the radiation/alien-invasion fears of 1950s Cold War science fiction. The Thing from Another World, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The War of the Worlds (1953), It Came from Outer Space, Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), clearly play on Cold War paranoia and the attendant national obsession in the late 1940s/ early 1950s with UFOs. Fears of radiation from atomic testing, radioactive fall-out or nuclear war found expression in films about atomic mutation and monster bugs: Them! (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), Tarantula (1955) – the last two films directed by Jack Arnold, arguably sci-fi’s first ‘auteur’ director. At the same time, space exploration films showed a more optimistic side of technology in the 1950s, as America and the-then U.S.S.R. competed in the ‘space race’: Destination Moon (1950), Rocketship X-M (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956) (Warren, 2010).
Aliens attack in Earth vs. The Flying Saucers [1956].
More saucer shenanigans in This Island Earth [1955]. This one’s beaming up a plane.
Modern Sci-fi Cinema, 1968 onwards
In 1968, 2001: A Space Odyssey returned science fiction to its origins in Greek mythology. Kubrick’s landmark film can be seen as a culmination of the space exploration themes of the previous decade and one of the first to broach the need to evolve beyond imminent destruction at our own hands. As such it is perhaps the first example of ‘transcendent’ science fiction cinema, exploring the human need to place trust in a force larger than ourselves; given its lofty philosophical ambitions, however, its influence unsurprisingly took time to catch on in Hollywood mainstream terms (Cowan, 2010: esp. 3-71).
Science fiction films of the early seventies were instead more overtly concerned with identity and environment, and how both were increasingly shaped or misshapen by technology: Silent Running (1972) Westworld (1973), Soylent Green (1973), The Omega Man (1971) and The Andromeda Strain (1971). In low budget exploitation cinema, a number of notable creature features deliberately played on the public’s fears of ecological imbalance and pollution: Willard (1971), Frogs (1972), Night of the Lepus (1972), Killer Bees (1974) and Squirm