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I went to see an IMAX 40th anniversary screening of
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial last night with Tracy, and I thought a lot about the peculiar history I have with this particular movie.
It was the first movie I can remember having seen in a movie theater. It came out in 1982, and I was six years old. I
wrote about this once on LiveJournal, a post in 2004 that I titled "most memorable moviegoing experiences." I had no idea it was that long ago that I posted about it, by the way; I really thought it was later in the aughts. Eighteen fucking years ago! Jesus Christ. Anyway,
E.T. was the first movie I mentioned in that post, because I wrote about them in chronological order of film release, and I need to reshare what I wrote about it, in its entirety, now:
1. E.T., 1982.
I was six years old. Given how long ago it was (22 years), it's amazing I can remember any of it. But I have a distinct memory of sitting in the theatre and seeing the scene set in the woods, and when the headlight shines on E.T.'s face and he screams. It kind of scared me.
Most memorable, though, was the context. I was still two years away from breaking away from the church that was the only Christian influence I had ever known as well as the only school I had ever known. This was the same year we moved in with the Duffys, two years in which I was not allowed to watch television but for two instances -- one to watch a kids' special and another to watch the Reagan/Mondale debates. I remember coming home from the movie and Janet saying something like, "You went to that movie, didn't you?" -- in a tone that suggested that the very act of going to the movies was depraved.
The reason I share that now is because something occurred to me last night about that memory, of Janet Duffy being so judgmental about my having gone to a movie. Now, I still remember that during that period of my life, we were conditioned to believe that just about everything on television or in cinemas was of the devil and meant to be avoided, so it's understandable that I would remember Janet's comment this way—not to mention the long-known fact that she was a clear accomplice in luring in children (including myself) for her husband to molest. She once slapped me hard across the face without provocation, so of course all of my memories of her would be colored by my bias of her as a villain.
That doesn't change how I could have been wrong all these years about this particular memory. It occurred to me last night, for the first time ever, that she might have been talking to me the way any normal person would talk to any kid who just went to the movies: "I heard you saw a movie!" or something like that. It's entirely possible she wasn't suggesting depravity in that moment at all, but I just heard it that way as a seven-year-old because I had been otherwise led to believe watching movies was a bad thing.
You know what? It's also occurring to me just now that she may not have even slapped me across the face that hard. I would have been anywhere between seven and nine years old when that happened (
E.T. came out when I was six, but we didn't movie in with the Duffys until I was seven, so it must have been about a year after its release, but still playing in theaters, which would be unsurprising for what was then the most successful movie of all time). I remember crying really hard and being hurled onto a nearby bed by the slap, but for all I know, she lightly slapped me to make a point (she was still a bitch) and the shock of it just elicited a wildly dramatic response from me.
I really hate how unreliable memory is. And not just mine, either: everybody's. There have been multiple studies to support this. It's why I love how much I document all the events in my life, because it's a reliable record of when the events were still fresh. And even that's not 100% reliable, but it’s a hell of a lot more reliable than accurate recall of something that happened forty years ago.
Anyway. I have seen
E.T. several times, like virtually anyone born before the mid-eighties, but it had been a long time since the last time I watched it. There was a 20th anniversary edition released in 2002 with extra footage and "enhanced digital effects" that were incongruous and really didn't add anything to it, but I do remember going to see it then. Shobhit and I got together in 2004 and during our first years together I had him watch a
lot of movies he'd never heard of that had been part of the American zeitgeist, and
E.T. was one of them. I cannot for the life of me find any blog record of when this happened, but I do remember him complaining about the effects on the film, especially the early shot of the collected plants inside the alien spaceship: "It looks so artificial," he said. He ultimately wasn't that into this movie.
It may very well have been somewhere between 2004 and 2007 or so that Shobhit and I watched it, though, which would mean it had been ages even since the last time I watched it—fifteen years at least, another thing I did not realize, until I was watching the opening credits on the huge movie screen last night and thinking about how I had no recollection of how the movie starts: which is just opening credits over a black background, before the opening scene in the woods begins.
I can't actually remember seeing the 20th anniversary release in theaters either, but I absolutely must have. I remember seeing the added scenes, and I had seen those before sharing the movie with Shobhit a few years later. I can't remember if I watched the "special edition" version with him or not. I was actually kind of relieved to find the movie last night in its wholly original, 1982 form.
Tracy herself just turned 40 on Wednesday last week. Although I had been legitimately shocked when she told me a month or two ago that she'd never seen
E.T., it only hit me last night that the movie came out the year she was born. Even though I am only six years older than her, even that many years can be a key difference. Becoming a teenager, for example—I turned 13 in 1989, but she wouldn't have until 1995, when the pop culture landscape was markedly different. I'm old enough to actually remember this movie's release, but Tracy isn't. She did say she's familiar with some of the iconic moments, which she must have seen here and there on cable over the years: the flying bikes, for instance.
After the movie, we had a lot of observations about the movie, particularly from a 2022 perspective. I just
posted them to Facebook so I'll just past what I shared there into this post:
*The effects don’t hold up as well as we’d like, but are still serviceable. The narrative, though, holds up incredibly well, and kept us in rapt attention from start to finish. John Williams’s score is a little bombastic and intrusive, though.
*The creature design of E.T. must be one of the weirdest in the history of cinema. That little guy looks like the love child of a giant potato and a turd. (Side note: I only recently learned E.T.’s face was modeled after the poet Carl Sandburg, but composited with Ernest Hemingway and Albert Einstein. Some sources also add a pug dog to the list.)
*Watching E.T. in a post-covid world is kind of wild: authorities seal up Elliott’s house and everyone is in scrubs and face masks—until (spoiler alert!) E.T. dies, and then everyone’s acting like, Okay we’re out of the woods! and pulling their masks off seconds later. The fuck? How are they so confident no plumes of something horrible won’t burst from the bodily orifices of an *alien creature*? Get your shit together, people!
*Speaking of alien orifices, I found myself wondering when and where E.T. shits. He’s hiding in Elliott’s closet for much of the movie. Is the floor in there covered in squishy wrinkled turds? How would a creature like that even use a human toilet? Granted, it’s well established that E.T. is telekinetic so maybe he just floats all his turds out the window.
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Anyway. I had ridden my bike home from work, and Shobhit decided to spend some time at the casino so he was gone for the roughly one hour I was home. I'm looking after Cassie the cat next door while Alexia is in Portland for a couple of days, so I fed her first, and then fed Shanti and Guru before making myself some fried frozen parathas with reheated leftover eggplant. I need to make some rice so that I can mix some in with the leftover eggplant and shahi paneer we still have from dinner last Friday. Not tonight, though: there will be lots of food, probably, at our Braeburn Condos "Summer Social," the first even of it's kind we'll have had in ages.
I left a little bit early and took Light Rail from Capitol Hill to Northgate, thinking about how seeing a movie at Thornton Place after work was never a viable option on weeknights after work, but now it is, because Light Rail gets me there in a matter of minutes. Granted, now Tracy always gives me a ride home afterward. I sat at a table in the courtyard of Thornton Place for about fifteen minutes, only to find Tracy getting up from a bench when I got up to walk closer to the theater entrance when it got closer to 7:00—and she said she'd been waiting there about twenty minutes! Jesus Christ. Neither of us thought to text each other for some reason. Well, I didn't because I expected she would not get there until closer to showtime. Oh well.
We spent a lot of time chatting in her car, parked across the street from my building after she drove me home, as always happens. We were there so long that a guy had to come by and ask us to move the car so he could put the recycle bin from his nearby business in the spot where the car was. Oops. He was moderately scraggly with a beard and shorts on so I stupidly thought he might be a homeless person asking for money when he was first getting my attention, and I really hesitated to roll down my window. I felt a little bad about that. At least he was a white guy, so I didn't feel
as bad about judging him. No white guilt about that one!
Shobhit texted me while I was in Tracy's car across the street, telling me how much he'd lost at the casino and clearly feeling bad about it. He even acknowledged how he can get disproportionately angry at me for small expenses, which was nice to see, I suppose. Honestly to me the key difference is right there: he gambles with large amounts of money, so he lost a lot. He blew a gasket when he learned how much I had borrowed from my own savings account to cover Australia flights we booked, and yet last night he lost a full third
more than that gambling. The difference is, I can be empathetic to his situation, poor choice as it may have been. We all make poor choices occasionally, and we move on. I refuse to consider the choice I had made to cover flights a poor choice, but whatever.
When I walked in the front door at about 10:30, Shobhit was standing right there at the entrance to the kitchen, which is also just a few feet from the front door, and I startled him. He had assumed I was in bed. I guess he didn't pay attention to the fact that my keys were not hanging from the key rack by the front door, which would always be a good indicator. Ditto the fact that my shoes were not on the floor inside the front door.
I did get right to getting ready for bed, though. Then I spent too much time watching TikTok videos after getting in bed, keeping me awake until about 11:40. I only got five and a half hours of sleep. I know it's unhealthy to spend time looking at screens while in bed. I need to impose a rule about it. Maybe I should program one of those rules into my phone that turns off the social media apps after a certain time.
Actually, I just did. I set my phone for "down time" between 10:30 pm and 5:30 pm. I should do the same with my iPad. I think I've done this in the past and wound up just reactivating everything. But, it's become too much of a problem and I need to do something about it again. I've got to stop getting too little sleep nearly every night.
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[posted 12:23 pm]
