How Close Encoun­ters chan­nels the wish­ful spir­it of Pinocchio

In his 1978 jour­nal, ​‘Close Encoun­ters of the Third Kind Diary’, actor Bob Bal­a­ban (who plays trans­la­tor David Laugh­lin in the film) wrote the fol­low­ing entry on 20 July, 1976: ​“Steven [Spiel­berg] tells me that he has got­ten the rights to the orig­i­nal record­ing of Ukelele Ike singing ​‘When You Wish upon a Star’ and is going to play the song in its entire­ty over the Mothership’s depar­ture… I think it’s a won­der­ful idea to end the movie with this sweet song… Steven asks if we would like to hear the song on his stereo and takes out the full orches­tra­tion and plays it for us.”

How could they have known the impor­tance that this bolt out of the blue would play across the span of Spielberg’s films? This sum­mer there’s a new print of Close Encoun­ters in town and its big screen return offers a reminder of a rel­a­tive­ly eso­teric fact: the film bears the rarely seen cred­it ​‘Writ­ten by Steven Spiel­berg’. As a direc­tor Spiel­berg inevitably involves him­self in the devel­op­ment of each screen­play that he devel­ops, but it’s inter­est­ing to note that over the course of his illus­tri­ous career only CE3K and AI: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence bear his name as both screen­writer and director.

Bind­ing CE3K and AI togeth­er is a 19^th cen­tu­ry Ital­ian sto­ry, Car­lo Collodi’s ​‘Pinoc­chio’ and, by exten­sion, its imprint on pop­u­lar cul­ture thanks in no small part to Walt Dis­ney, who over­saw pro­duc­tion of his studio’s ani­mat­ed adap­ta­tion in the 1940s. In the Dis­ney ver­sion, which sig­nif­i­cant­ly sweet­ens the tone of Collodi’s nov­el, Jiminy Crick­et embod­ies the idea of pur­su­ing a dream. In the book, the Talk­ing Crick­et appears just once, in chap­ter four.

CE3K fea­tures a scene in which belea­guered but eter­nal­ly starstruck sub­ur­ban­ite, Roy Neary (Richard Drey­fuss), tries to fire his sons’ enthu­si­asm to head out and see the Disney’s Pinoc­chio, extolling its virtues over a game of Goofy Golf. This ref­er­ence to Pinoc­chio encap­su­lates the film’s over­ar­ch­ing idea, and the notion of wish­es being grant­ed has been a core theme of Spielberg’s work ever since.

Per­haps Spielberg’s great­est accom­plish­ment in CE3K resides not in its inte­gra­tion of opti­cal effects with live action footage but in the human-scale dra­ma that plays out around Neary’s char­ac­ter. Roy’s break­down (post first-encounter) achieves tra­gi-com­ic pro­por­tions, as he strug­gles men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly to under­stand the new ver­sion of his life that’s com­ing into focus. His wish upon a star becomes an obses­sion that even­tu­al­ly tears his fam­i­ly life apart.

Spiel­berg revis­it­ed the Pinoc­chio motif in 2001 with a film about a boy robot who seeks to be human, extend­ing the som­bre strain that runs through CE3K. AI’s ori­gin lay in the short sto­ry ​‘Super­toys Last All Sum­mer Long’ by Bri­an Ald­iss. Stan­ley Kubrick was at one stage devel­op­ing the film but reached a cre­ative impasse of sorts and recog­nised that Spiel­berg might be more attuned to what he was try­ing to explore. When Kubrick was work­ing on AI, he made a hand­writ­ten note con­cern­ing ​“the Pinoc­chio syn­drome.” It was a note that led to var­i­ous cre­ative inves­ti­ga­tions as the film’s script mor­phed over the years. Then fate intervened.

Kubrick died in spring 1999 and Spiel­berg almost imme­di­ate­ly took up the project. Cru­cial­ly, he didn’t jet­ti­son the Pinoc­chio frame of ref­er­ence. The Blue Fairy from both the Col­lo­di nov­el and the Dis­ney film makes her way very pow­er­ful­ly into Spielberg’s AI and late in the even­tu­al film, the robot David dis­cov­ers a sunken theme park and there, amidst the gloom, he sees a Gepet­to sculpture.

The impor­tance of the Pinoc­chio sto­ry is stat­ed in the epi­logue of Bob Balaban’s Close Encoun­ters diary. In the entry dat­ed 20 Octo­ber, 1977 (just weeks before the film’s pre­mière) Bal­a­ban writes: ​“I’m see­ing a screen­ing of the movie for the first time… The open­ing kept get­ting post­poned because Spiel­berg was chang­ing things. Small things: an added close up of a Jiminy Crick­et figurine…”

Both CE3K and AI are sci-fi inflect­ed quests. Where, in a pow­er­ful sense, Roy Neary had Jiminy Crick­et as his con­science, David has Ted­dy. In both cas­es the search is for a way to feel alive and, there­fore, as human as pos­si­ble. Roy and David both reach these points through expe­ri­ences beyond what is ​‘ordi­nary’ for them. In both CE3K and AI, grace is grant­ed by the touch of an oth­er­world­ly pres­ence; the extrater­res­tri­als who sur­round Roy at Devil’s Tow­er and the Blue Fairy who appears to David. For these pro­tag­o­nists, dreams are realised at a cost. What could be more human than that?