For the record, I loved E.T.! I even enjoyed that little book they published with some of the letters the studio had received from children writing to E.T. 
Spielberg wasn’t being emotionally manipulative in E.T. If anything, E.T. is one of the movies that was most closely tied to his own emotional history. Spielberg himself said that he drew from his childhood to make this movie, and it may be a bit darker of a film than many take at face value.
I said:
I doubt any of the children watching these moves are, in real life, orphans in Dicksonian London or princesses of fantasy kingdoms
You have to slice it pretty fine to make it seem original. It was totally original because it was the first time anyone made a movie with a kid named “Eliot” who had a sister named “Gertie.” Revolutionary.
I mean, you seem almost to be suggesting that it would only evoke an empathetic response from kids living in an Arizona housing development. Kids aren’t that dense; *Oliver Twist *is still universal. The parallels are obvious even to a child.
I don’t know, I don’t watch that many kids movies, but it seems like it became a very common formula for kids movies (Holes, Matilda, Home Alone, The Boy Who Could Fly, Lilo and Stitch, Karate Kid, a million “made for Disney Channel” type movies), but I can’t think of many films before ET that used it, my impression is that perhaps showing a realistic and imperfect home life in a child’s film pre-ET was considered non-kosher.
Now my impression may be false, but in any case, ET is the earliest example of such a thing I was aware of.
No doubt, but I’d say that giving such a movie a modern setting evokes a different response then one removed by time or that takes place in a different world. It makes it more personal. Not only for kids, but for adults as well.
I disagree a billion per cent. Please see any randomly chosen Grimm’s Fairy Tale. You simply cannot get any more archetypal.
I think his point, made at least three times, was that the movie was different in that it set an imperfect home life in a setting that was comtemporary and immediately recognizable to most American children.
I don’t know if it was the first to do that, but it was definitely more recognizable to me, a ten-year-old, as a life I could identify with, than “Snow White.” YMMV, but bear in mind that our MMV as well.
I think the point is being missed somewhat. Elliott’s life wasn’t miserable because he was an urchin or the son of a poor German lumberjack, nor was he the neglected son of a high-powered career mom who just needed to realize what was Really Important in life, as per the usual formula. The drama of Elliott’s home is not formulaic and it’s not rammed down your throat. The kids never talk about how unhappy they are or how unfair their circumstances. The absent father is, IIRC, only even mentioned once. It’s actually a very precisely observed portrait of a truly contemporary middle-class household. Reducing it to simple “miserable child rescued by magic formula” is tone-deaf at best.
Great minds, RickJay.
There’s your archetype, and then over here you have your surface details. To suggest that an archetype is somehow irrelevant because one story takes place in England and one takes place in Arizona is just bizarre. Do you know what archetype means? And pointing out that Simplicio’s description of the movie’s homelife is archtypal is not reductive. Do you know what reductive means?
No one suggested that archetypes were irrelevant. You suggested that the “surface details” were.
*My *point, made just as many times, is that this story is so archetypal that to imagine it was absent from contemporary movies until 1982 is bizarre. Watch any Shirley Temple movie. Watch almost any movie with a child lead in the history of movies. [ETA: *ET *is basically *Lassie *set in 1982 Arizona.] Even if you limit yourself to “contemporary” movies–which strikes me as bizarrely arbitrary, considering the predominance of non-contemporary settings in most of the universally popular children’s stories through the ages.
E.T. was one of a long, long, long line of children’s movies where a young child, bereft of at least one parent, and undergoing the tribulations of an imperfect homelife, discovers something/one magical, through whose agency he is brought a step closer to, let’s say, selfhood, and through whose intervention (whether active or passive) he learns to transcend his–archetypal–surroundings.
The ONLY thing original about ET are the mundane, nearly irrelevant details of the specific, concrete setting.
I don’t think those concrete details are “mundane” or “irrelevant.” They’re what make the movie resonate with kids. Like the suburban setting of it. It seems realistic. It seems like real life.
Awesome. Let’s focus on that one word, a slight overstatement in order to make a point, rather than the actual substance of my post, the fact that ET was one in a long, long line movies with the same basic setup, many of them just as contemporary to their audiences as ET was to its.
But by all means, ignore that point, and let’s focus on the relative mundanity of the setting details that are, in fact, pretty much irrelevant to the story. If not basically irrelevant, you’re suggesting that ET would’ve been an entirely different film if it took place in a different state? A housing development in Florida, as opposed to Arizona, and suddenly it’s an entirely different experience for its audience?
You know, I have to apologize for being so irritated by this, or at least for expressing my irritation so strongly. I’m sorry for the sarcasm. But I truly feel like there’s some kind of bizarro-world argument going on here, where nothing anyone is saying makes any sense at all.
Again, think of almost every child-protagonist movie ever made. A huge percentage of them have to be of the same basic setup–archetype, if you will–of ET, and many of them have to be contemporary their respective audiences. I imagine there are points on which ET was arguably original, but THAT is simply not one of them.
I think there are two separate questions to ask. One is whether E.T. was original in its depiction of suburban family life, and the other is whether E.T. presented something that seemed original to its audience in that regard.
So regarding the first question, I wonder if you can tell me some films prior to E.T. (works from other media could be relevant as well, though films are obviously the most relevant) which did all of the following:
A. depicted “typical suburban life”*,
B. w/ kids as important characters,
C. where the depiction is aimed at being comprehensible to kids as well as to adults,
D. where “typical suburban life” is depicted in a way that does not give either the impression either that it (“typical suburban life”) tends to be just peachy or that it tends to be tragic.
Regarding the second question, I wonder if you can tell me some films that fit the four desiderata just listed, but which would have been part of the “film canon” (films “everybody’s seen,”) for either your typical 1982 (was it?) pre-high-school kid filmgoer, or that kid’s parents.
To be clear, I’m not claiming you can’t find such films. I honestly have no idea whether you can or not. I’m just trying to make the question clear.
-FrL-
By this I mean not just that it has scenes set in suburbia, but that in some way it is “self-consciously”* about “typical suburban life.”
**A movie can’t really be self-conscious, can it? Or can it?
Most of the archetypical stories have the children at some risk by the parents or others. Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods. Snow White is attacked by the stepmother. Even Dorothy has her dog threatened. No one is putting the kids in ET at risk. They’re just unhappy in a very 20th century way.
The second difference is that in most movies the fantasy is over the hill, requiring a journey. In ET the fantasy comes home. No magic chariots or flying carpets - just flying bicycles, which is a lot cooler.
I saw it as an adult, and I loved it, but my sense of wonder is well tuned. I liked it much better than Close Encounters, which looked good but makes no sense - and I’m up on UFOlogy.
BTW, though Spielberg is from Arizona, I’ve always thought ET was set in California - the forests are very Californian. The subdivision can be anywhere, though.
E.T. is the one at risk - not of simple death or malicious harm, but more significantly, of detached and cold scientific study by faceless government scientists in space suits (a jarring contrast to the alien’s emotional bond with the children.)
Only if you add the following criteria:
-The opening credits must be in pink
-The title has to have 4 words, at least one of which must start with a W
-The lead actor must have an aunt or uncle who was married to someone whose mother’s maiden name was “Jones”
Sorry to slip back into the sarcasm, but you can overdefine *any *argument into irrelevance. I’m not really interested in jumping through whatever prime-number-sided polygonal hoops you have to fashion in order to make the bizarre and unsupportable claim that ET represents some new archetype in children’s storytelling. It simply does not.
What the hell, dude? 
As far as I can tell, I’m just articulating exactly what it is others in this thread are saying is original (in one of the two senses I mentioned) in the film. If you’re sure they are wrong about this, I am sure you can name some films.
I didn’t mean this as a challenge per se. I figured you’d immediately rattle off a few and that would close the case.
Perhaps you don’t agree that what I asked about is indeed what people in this thread are talking about when they say there’s something original in E.T.? Or something?
I am honestly dumbfounded by your response. I was trying to be helpful.
BTW you can leave off item B from my list. I debated whether to include it, and on third thought, I think it is not necessary. It probably follows pretty naturally from C anyway, and if there is a film that does A C and D without doing B as well, I can’t see why your interlocutors wouldn’t accept it as a genuine precedent for what they are saying is “original” in E.T.
-FrL-