It wasn't even a case of me wondering if something from my childhood would hold up or not, I just had to watch it to figure out why I hadn't endlessly rewatched it since the '80s!
Having now rewatched it, I think I have a theory: those other films I mentioned are about adults. They may certainly be child-like visions about how awesome adulthood must be like, but that still means that those films can still age with the audience.
E.T., however, is about children--and not just about children, but childhood as it is perceived by children. In fact, E.T. is perhaps the most singularly accurate representation of the disorienting experience of childhood that has ever been committed to film. It is an experience that most adults not only do not recall, but most don't wish to recall.
I'm thinking of scenes such as when we first meet Elliott, hanging around his teenage older brothers' friends, who are eating pizza and playing cards, play-acting their juvenile vision of adulthood--one imagines that if Mom wasn't there, they'd be chomping cigars in a smoke-filled room. The camera continually sweeps slowly around the table, never pausing, ever restless and unresolved, as Michael and his buddies are undeniable jerks to Elliott, even as Elliott is undeniably annoying.
I'm also thinking of when the kids are all crowding, pushing, and shoving onto the school bus, throwing paper-balls at each other, Elliott shrieking that the goblin was actually a space-man, Michael both teasing yet also sticking up for his younger brother, while another kid keeps repeating "Uranus! Get it?" over and over and over. There's just this casual chaos about these scenes, which nails the feeling of childhood perfectly.
Also noteworthy is that, with the significant exception of the Mom, almost all of the adults in the film are portrayed from low camera angles, making them appear all the larger and more menacing. Their faces are almost always hidden, either from the camera cutting off at their chests, or obscured by shadows, or faced away from the camera, or hidden behind medical masks and space-helmets. Adults in E.T. are the actual aliens, dark invaders from another world. E.T. does not need to feature malevolent space invaders like most sci-fi, because the human adults already fulfill that role. The seemingly-omnipotent terror of adults is a very real part of the childhood experience.
This is no rose-colored nostalgia for childhood, but a dead-on depiction of how we all more or less behaved as children and perceived the world, one way or another, however embarrassing it may be to recall now.
Yet Spielberg has real affection for all these children, too; he does not render them more precocious than they should be--they are not mini-adults, in other words--but nor does he make caricatures out of them. Michael's jerk-friends become the heroes and helpers in the climax; Elliott learns to love others rather than just act out. Spielberg's children are real human children, in all their messiness but also in all their fundamental decency. You can't have one without the other, is the implicit thesis of E.T., which is a balance no other film starring kids I can think of has been able to hit since; most directors usually just opt for either straight brats or lil' angels (that may be perhaps why Jake Lloyd was so terrible as Anakin in The Phantom Menace...well, one of many, many reasons).
That balance between messiness and decency is ever harder to maintain as adults, as we quickly try to forget all about our ridiculous childhood selves. I remember liking the film just fine as a child myself, but I don't remember falling in love with it--perhaps because, as a child myself, its world view was so identical to my own that it didn't occur to me to recognize how singular, how rare, for children to be so perfectly represented on the screen. But now I am a jaded adult, and I get it now, what an achievement E.T. was and is; this is why it raked in a billion dollars; it reminded adults exactly what it was like to be a child in the best way possible, warts and all.
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