Close Encounters of the Third Kind

For our first, extraordinary setting, I bring you to this 1977 American science fiction film, written and directed by Steven Spielberg. 40

What is a close encounter of the THIRD KIND? The film’s categorisation of Close Encounters in fact references J. Allen Hynek’s book: The UFO Experience: A Scientific Enquiry. 41 The Hynek Scale is a classification of six levels for UFO sightings arranged according to increasing proximity. It is worth pointing out at this stage, that while Hynek’s definition of a Close encounter serves our purposes, the Hynek scale does not. This can be illustrated through the official trailer for the 40th Anniversary re-release of the film where the encounters are classified hierarchically placing sight first, then evidence, then contact:

THE FIRST KIND: SIGHTING THE SECOND KIND: EVIDENCE THE THRID KIND: CONTACT42

Figure. 3 Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Official Trailer

If we define contact as the state of physical touching, this hierarchical ordering of encounters, easily fits in line with traditional ideas where the higher, rational self seeks control over the lower bodily self. It concurs with the classical hierarchy of the five senses where Plato

40 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, dir. By Steven Spielberg (Columbia Pictures, 1977).

41 Allen J. Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry. (Boston: Da Capo Press,1998, 1972). 42 Close Encounters of the Third Kind – Official Trailer, online video, YouTube, 25 July 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSpQ3G08k48 [accessed 29 March 2019].

champions sight as ‘the noblest of the senses’43. Whereas touch and tactility are always last: dirty, carnal and immediate. The Hynek Scale does not serve our purpose because rather than a hierarchical scale of compartmentalised sensory perception, our sensual-encounter requires full and immediate ‘carnal attention’ .

44

Hynek defines a ‘Close Encounter’ as an event in which a person witnesses an unidentified flying object.45 I’d like to propose to you a comparative definition for a sensual-encounter in the context of this discussion.

Sensual-encounter: An event in which a person approaches an identified object, as if it were unidentified, with full carnal attention.

I give you this pop culture reference because it rolls off my tongue, similarly to our title: Sensual-encounters with ordinary things. I also give it to you because the story invites us to enter into the unknown. I want to use this narrative of alien encounter to approach our everyday encounters. Remember we are looking for the unexpected and unattested.

If you (re)visit the film, I’d also like to draw your attention to the wonderful moments that the main protagonist (Roy Neary) shares with shaving foam and mashed potato (Figure. 4). He also builds a monumental sculpture of a mountain in his living room out of dirt from his garden. His alien encounter was so compelling it appears he has a bodily need to create these physical forms.

Figure. 4 Roy Neary and Mashed Potato

43 Richard Kearney, ‘What is Carnal Hermeneutics?’ p.103. 44 Kearney, What is Carnal Hermeneutics?, p.117.

45 Allen J. Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry.

Engel theorizes Roy’s role in the film as translator of visions into physical form:

The film suggests that the ability to have visions and translate them into physical form through physical action – the factors which make a person a visual or dramatic artist, or a filmmaker, are among the factors which distinguish Neary and Guiler and fit them for the new world humankind is entering with the arrival of the Mother Ship. They are the ones who were invited.46

Engel takes the view that it is Roy’s artistic need to manifest his visionary experience into external physical form that qualifies him and his friend Jillian for invitations to Spielberg’s new world of humankind. Despite its great appeal, I think this is a simplistic idea of what qualifies an artist and a romantic view of the future of mankind. Importantly, in their summation, the materials Roy chooses are not taken into account. Roy experiences intense moments of being enchanted by the shaving foam, the mashed potato, and the dirt. Rather than asserting his visions on inert material, it could be construed that he is discovering something life changing through communing with ‘ordinary things’ . He is engaging with each material encounter in a physical and bodily way. He loses himself in the mashed potato. Like a maker in the zone. Like a shaman in a trance. Like someone in love. Perhaps like you having a sensual-encounter with an ordinary thing? He is not simply a translator of visions into physical form. This is a reciprocal and bodily encounter with matter. Roy and the mashed potato form a momentary attachment through action and experience. The mashed potato is affected, Roy is affected. Roy understands the world very differently now and behaves differently as a result.

I think there are things we can learn from Roy.

We are looking to the ordinary for the extraordinary; the unfamiliar; the strange; the wonderful; the enchanting. To look at something familiar as if it is unfamiliar can be unsettling. Freud discussed this in his essays on the uncanny. He observed that the switch of the homely (Heimliche) into the ‘unhomely’ (Unheimliche) is often unnerving for us. He cited examples of the uncanny such as objects coming alive, the doppelganger effect and instances when childhood beliefs that we have grown out of suddenly appear real. 47

Not only am I asking you to look for the unhomely (unfamiliar) in the homely (familiar), I am also asking you to embrace the ability of inanimate objects to exhibit “independence or aliveness constituting the outside of our own experience”.48

This encounter is not about exploring the Uncanny. However, I can’t promise that these sensual-encounters will never be uncanny. I don’t want you to be put off by the potential

46 Charlene Engel, Language and the Music of the spheres: Stephen Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in The Films of Stephen Spielberg: Critical Essays, edited by Charles LP Silet (Oxford: Scarecrow Press Inc, 2002) p.53. 47 Jamie Ruers, The Uncanny < https://www.freud.org.uk/2019/09/18/the-uncanny/> [accessed May 2020]. 48 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p.4.

strangeness in this task or even the predictability of salacious tropes and fetishes known to fit into the genre of The Uncanny.