“I guess you’ve noticed something a little strange with Dad. It’s okay, though. I’m still Dad.”
Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, is the lead character in Steven Spielberg’s 1977 blockbuster Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The story begins one night when Roy crosses paths with several alien spacecraft. Subsequently, he has visions of a mountain and devotes himself so fully to interpreting the meaning of his alien encounter that he gets fired from his job and generally acts like a crazy person at home—he falls to pieces in the middle of a meal and finally tears up his yard to produce a living-room-sized sculptural replica of the mountain he can’t get out of his mind. Meanwhile, his wife packs up the kids and leaves him.
Once Roy realizes his sculpture is a facsimile for Devils Tower, he heads to Wyoming where the aliens descend from the heavens and select him as the lone representative of humankind to travel the stars. It’s a really satisfying encounter with tens of minutes devoted to a nearly non-dialogue climax of immense light and sound. The SFX are solid. The music tugs at the heart strings. It is an emotionally-rich mass entertainment concerned with open-minded expansion of the human condition.
But Roy is a failure. He’s lost his job, a devastating blow to any family, but particularly to a Boomer family of the middle 1970s where Dad earns the money and Mom turns out the kids. He’s also fixated on a fellow contactee whose son has disappeared into a UFO, but most of all he’s totally uninterested in the consequences of leaving Earth, maybe, forever.
Roy’s selfish interests overwhelm everything else in his life, which is forgivable (sort of) because these interests are, literally, alien and something you or I will never experience first-hand (I think). The end result is sour, however, since another patriarch has decided that what he wants is most important, and that his pure motivation is all that matters.
Despite being a husband, the father of three, and a former-breadwinner living in suburban squalor, Roy’s wife, Ronnie, is the real hero of the story who must struggle to manage three crying, confused children while her husband happily escapes his responsibilities to meet ET’s first cousin, three-thousand light years removed.
–September 30, 2018
