Close Encounters of The Third Kind

Note: I wrote this while I was recuperating from an operation. It's six years old. I was forced to lay in bed for a couple of weeks, and I spent some of that time re-watching movies. Close Encounters was one of those movies.

"With Close Encounters this last time... while it wasn't as if I were seeing the movie fresh,  there was a more than expected intensity.

I remembered it as this child-like, wide eyed wonder. Roy Neary, third eye squeegee'd clean, meeting the interplanetary glow- bugs. He's happy, that French guy is happy, all the scientists seem happy- and the aliens are literally jumping up and down with joy. Basically, the aliens dropped by to give us the warm fuzzies.

No, no, no.

This is a harsh movie. Roy Neary is, when we meet him, a hopeless fuck up. His middle-class life is closing around him like a fist, and he's quietly desperate for escape. From his marriage, his family, his job. Neary is... Peter Pan, suddenly awakened in the real world, wondering what the hell happened- and looking for the first thing flying back to Neverland. To some place where he's not the focus of everyone's anger, the butt of their jokes. Where he's understood as he wants to be understood, and where he's the hero- at least every once in a while.

Enter the aliens, the encounters. And suddenly Roy has an invitation home. And even if it means ditching his family, avoiding the authorities, chasing those glowing fuckers straight to Mars- he's going.

Well, shit. A better balanced, better tuned man might easily go off on a tear after such an experience.

But Roy, he has this huge hole in his soul, and since nothing else has come along to fill it- a thing he's probably never even admitted to himself- the encounters seem like a gift from whatever god he worships."

I stopped there, for whatever reason. Never got back to it. My point, all in, would seem to have been- Close Encounters isn't the happy little movie I remembered it as being. It's actually a straight up horror movie.  A gentle, Disney themed horror movie, but a horror movie nonetheless.

But the aliens are friendly! And that whole government conspiracy thing- they just want to arrange the meeting without creating a mass panic! Everyone just wants to say "hi!"

Watch it again. The aliens are creepy. They seem to have invited people to meet them- but their method? Implant a compulsion. An impulse that the person cannot quite understand, that drives them half crazy, unless they figure it out and follow it. They have to paint, they have to build models, they have to put it all together themselves- and only a couple of them are successful enough to make it to Devil's Tower.

I wonder if there aren't many, many people left permanently crazed by not figuring it all out- by not making it to the Tower in time.

The aliens seem to have the ability to explain, they just... don't. Are they malevolent, are they up to no good? In the end, we are led to believe that they aren't. But the build up? It screams - don't get in the car with that man, Laurel! Don't take his candy!

Also- a plot point is that they have been here, on and off, for years. As the movie starts, they've returned a giant oceangoing ship and the aircraft flown by the famously vanished Flight 19- which went missing decades back. During the final scenes, they return the people associated with the hardware. Apparently not much older than they were.  Where have they been, why were they taken?

Never answered.

The government people are just as creepy. They hide behind commercial  entities, their equipment suggests years of preparation, and their only method of controlling people?  Fear. More...

That final scene- the aliens coming down, having a musical conversation, opening up their giant ship and coming out?

The logic of the movie suggests that none of that was intended. They showed up to drop off the previously taken people and vehicles- but while they are here, before that, they take more people, and they implant people with the urge to come to them in a remote location.

The government, this time, caught them at it, and arranged to show up and try and communicate. But had that not occurred? What was the original plan?

I think more of the same- get people to come to them, covertly, and take them along.

In the end, Roy Neary abandons his family- who his obsessive behavior, as he was figuring out the alien compulsion, scared the hell out of.  His wife doesn't seem to work, his kids are all young enough to need a lot of care, not nearly ready to leave home...

If Roy had simply wandered off with Jillian- to whom he clearly has an attraction- we'd consider him a criminal.

Abandons them to go off with a bunch of sneaky aliens, who swarm him and pat him and shove him up to the ship, with no idea what they intend.

Aliens who've shown, by the way, that they're not all these cute little grey guys. Recall that when the ship splits open, before we see the little guys, there is this one:





Spidery, creepy, and he shows up first, bends into view and then, after he opens his hands in permission, the other aliens appear.

What.
The.
Hell.

I'm curious. Who out there saw this as a kid and was scared to death by it?

In The Beginning- New Project

I think it might be of interest to develop a script here. To do it in public, to do it so that people can see and maybe comment on the progress.

Before I start, be aware that I reserve all rights to the material posted here.  It would be lovely if someone were inspired, but I think we all know the difference between inspiration and theft*

Okay.

The idea I have in mind is... simple, and the generation of it was fairly typical, for me.

I was participating in a live play reading. One of the scripts involved a character being killed by another character. Which started me off thinking about death. Specifically, about how we prepare for death. Which led to me thinking about graves, and then grave digging.

And then- the idea. An image in my mind. A man, digging a grave.

That was it.  Not a lot of detail- a tired man, in T-shirt and jeans, quietly digging.

Who, where, why?

Actually, my first serious thinking about this wasn't developmental. It was... protective:

 Where have I seen this before?

The image was so strong, I was nervous that my mind was regurgitating something I'd seen or read. In a movie, in a script or story.  That I was about to start working on something that someone else had already done. It happens. It's happened to me. My junk file has a lot of little scraps that turned out to be me telling a story I'd already seen or read elsewhere. Saved in case I can come up with a decent variation that might allow me to use the idea with a clean conscience.

See earlier comments about inspiration versus theft.

So. I thought about all the places, movies, etc, where I might have encountered a man, digging a grave, as a distinct scene or image.

Holy sweet baby Jesus. There are lots of sources, or potential sources. Westerns, comedies, Kill Bill- which is sort of both- Star Trek... a couple of books specifically about people digging holes for unknown reasons.

The thing is... those are all similar images, similar concepts.

But... while they may use the same idea, the same starting point... it wasn't what I had in mind.  As I considered this stuff, I had a realisation.

The digging was not the point. The digging was not some odd metaphor for paranoia, or art project or what have you. He wasn't digging his own grave.

He was digging a grave for someone he intended to kill.

All of this happened, by the way, in the space between having the idea and driving home, Sunday afternoon.

Sunday night,  I decided that this unnamed man had been plotting to kill whoever for a long while. That he was now at the end of a lengthy plan- thank you Alexandre Dumas (Pere)- and that he was intending to kill his neighbour.

He'd tracked that person down, bought the neighbouring house, moved in and got friendly- the neighbour having no idea who he was.

And, as part of an extensive landscaping plan, he was actually digging the person- man or woman?- a grave.

So.

This was the end of the story, or very nearly.  All that was left was the killing.

What?

I should let this person escape? After whatever the hell- still unsure- he or she- still unsure- has done to our digger?

Late Sunday night, after waking up due to an incipient cold clogging my nose, I decided that I would avoid the temptation of starting at the end and flashing back. I had the end, but I needed to have a beginning. But-again- I really liked that digging scene. And I really wanted to start there.

So.

Either flashback or?

Or, in this case- tell the story backward. Well, mostly. Start with the grave, then go progressively backward, and then flash forward to the death.

That struck me as cool. More, as interesting. As a pretty neat stylistic, er, thing.

And, after the cold medicine kicked in... I abandoned decided against going quite that far.

Instead, I would be pure. Start with the actual, final murder, and in the next scene, start with the digging, and then with the decision that today was the day to finish off the neighbour, and then with the decision to- you get the idea.

At this point, I would normally have started writing. But... what?

This could be a play, a movie, or a short story of some kind.

And I have yet to decide which way to take the idea.

Which will probably be the next post.

*"Star Wars" An Original Story by George Lucas versus "Flash Gordon" An Original Story By George Lucas. Taking the bones of the idea is fine. Taking the meat on those bones will get you in trouble.