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E.T.’s Magical Children: An Inner Reach from Outer Space
- Devon Deimler, PhD
- 17 hours ago
- 8 min read
As the aperture of winter solstice closes upon us in the Northern Hemisphere, the psyche too coils, nestles into darkness and focus, before the gradual expansion of sunlit hours begins again and psyche stretches long towards spring. This pronounced moment of daylight turnover is sometimes, mythologically, figured as the divine child. Dionysos, child of a chthonic spring, who the ecstatic Thyiades cyclically reawaken on frozen Parnassos. Or the Christ child, who follows his vine brother’s footsteps in miraculous birth, rebirth, and embrace of the margins. But here I wish to spend time with another sort of alien visitor and magic child—two magical children, actually. And though my tale takes place at Halloweentime, I write this at the advent of Christmas, the season in which many return to the place my characters give everything to reach: Home.
When presented with the list of cinematic archetypes for JCF writers to choose from this year, the Magical Child immediately chose itself for me, as it had already done so over 20 years ago, when I made my initial return to E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982). What I share here is brief and selective, beamed through the opportunity to focus on said archetype and relevant passages thereto from Campbell. E.T. remains a sacred companion for the long journey.
Campbell speaks of “the child of destiny,” in the context of the hero’s childhood. This phase of a heroic life is already marked by encounters with “unsuspected presences,” including angelic or other-specied helpers who teach of what resides “just beyond the sphere of the measured and the named.” To survive these uncertain conditions, “the myths agree that an extraordinary capacity is required” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 301-302). A magic, let’s say. Spoilers follow.
To the moon and back
The magical child heroes of E.T. are E.T., an alien from an unnamed planet, and Elliott (played with otherworldly soul by Henry Thomas), an earthborn boy feeling alienated from his family after his father’s departure. The film begins in nighttime, in a redwood forest, where a spaceship of gentle alien botanists has landed. They are soon frightened away by the arrival of government agents, and E.T. is thus stranded by his mothership. Via a trail of Reese’s Pieces, alien and boy eventually encounter one another (viewers don’t get a clear view of E.T. until Elliott does), and a deep, psychosomatic bond is established. Elliott introduces E.T., under a most excellent promise of secrecy, to his siblings, Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and Gertie (Drew Barrymore), who join Elliott in hiding E.T. from their mother, Mary (Dee Wallace).
E.T. exhibits special powers of empathy and vitalization; he can levitate objects, resurrect wilting flowers, and heal wounds with his glowing finger. Elliott is deeply protective of E.T. and the connection they share (they “feel each other’s feelings”). Seeking to contact E.T.’s home planet, the two build a communicator out of household items, sneak E.T. outside through a Halloween ghost costume, and take off for the forest (the iconic magic flight across the full moon) to install their device. As the communicator shows signs of working, Elliott’s heart aches over the impending loss of his magical double. He wishes for E.T. to stay in Elliott’s home; they could grow up together.
By morning, E.T. has become very ill and government agents descend upon them (they are the true alien invaders of the film, wrapping Elliott’s home in plastic). E.T. and Elliott are hooked up to machines and monitors. Their synchronized heart rhythms separate and E.T. fades away. An agent credited as “Keys” (Peter Coyote) allows Elliott time alone to say goodbye to E.T.. After expressing his love, E.T. suddenly returns to life, and a plan is hatched. Michael and his formerly too-cool-for-Elliott friends assist in escaping E.T. back to the forest by outwitting the agents (bicycles can go where cops can’t). In the forest clearing, the mothership returns. The time for a real goodbye has come, but E.T. points from his heart to Elliott’s head, reassuring him he will always be right here. The ship door closes like a camera iris over E.T.’s glowing heart, and the ship takes off. Elliott watches with wizened eyes and blowing hair. The magic child has become a hero, one who will remain so for not relinquishing the magic child that remains inside him, animating his imagination and ethos forever after.
“I’ve been to the forest”
E.T. pulls on distinct mythic lineages for its symbolic effects and aesthetic enchantment. From Christian iconography: E.T.’s sacred heart, his radiant emergence and ascension, the divine spark of his finger. The bookend site of the film, the forest, is a premiere fairy tale landscape, a genre ruled by magical children. When Keys says to Elliott, “I’ve been to the forest,” we can read him as saying, I was a child of imagination, once, too. Andrew Gordon describes the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, as transforming “tract homes into fairytale cottages,” and cites the eternal child motif, noting how such children are often born from a shiny egg (or spaceship) and exposed to “extraordinary dangers while also possessing extraordinary hidden powers” (288).
While these mythic kin—touchpoints of varying intentionality for Spielberg—add constellatory sparkle to E.T.’s universe, its magic is already given with the film itself. As Glen Slater claims, what we’re after in a meaningful cinematic experience is “archetypal resonance,” which manifests not by excavating “recognizable substructures” but by experiencing the “phenomenal foreground”—how a film’s audio-visual metaphors evoke emotional responses carrying “timeless and universal undertones,” regardless of whether one is knowledgeable of cultural motif patterns (8, 12). This resonance evokes James Hillman’s definition of “archetypal” as indicating a sense of importance, a knowledge of the heart.
Close-up encounters
For me, the most powerful scene of E.T. is when the camera zooms into Elliott’s face, just as his escape mission seems about to fail. In that moment, E.T.’s telekinetic magic (and the equal powers of John Williams’s score) lift the children into the air and away from the guns below. This sequence, each and every time I see it, reignites the aesthetic arrest that hit me twenty years ago. My pounding heart soars with the music and tears fall. It’s an aesthetic arrest like that which Campbell (following James Joyce) articulates: a “healing force” of compassion, a mirror “reawakening the eye and heart to wonder” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 100): “There is a telling moment of impact when this recognition strikes, and one is held as by the mystery of one's own face in a glass. Therewith, the radiance” (102).
What my heart recognizes in E.T., and particularly in that scene above, is an archetypal resonance, an emotional correlate of my own life experience, though my experience does not literally resemble the film. What E.T. granted me unexpectedly years ago, and still, is catharsis. It is an indirect image by which I can directly look at and move through the emotions tethered to a great loss in my own world, and an unrelenting wish that I, too, could have saved somebody. In no small terms, by the light of its moon, this 1982 movie about a ridiculous-looking alien and a boy with a bike has saved me many times. The child who is gone is always right here. Movie magic.
Stay young at heart
One need not have such a high Richter-scale, personal association for the archetypal resonance of this film to be felt. When Roger Ebert reviewed E.T., he said it’s “a reminder of what movies are for. Most movies are not for any one thing, of course. Some are to make us think, some to make us feel, some to take us away from our problems, some to help us examine them. What is enchanting about E.T. is that, in some measure, it does all of those things.” And it is what it pluralistically does: John Williams’s score affects a technical-metaphorical mimesis; it is polytonal, utilizing two different keys at the same time, a musical mirroring of E.T. and Elliott’s dynamic. Spielberg loved Williams’s music for the final chase scene so much that he even edited the sequence to fit the music—they are that music.
For Spielberg, E.T. was a cinematic materialization of the emotions he felt as a lonely child of divorced parents, which made him long for an imaginary friend. He positioned his camera at a child’s eye view for significant portions of the film so that viewers took on a child’s perspective. What is magical about our child hero and his childlike alien friend is their ability to feel each other’s feelings, and to act on those feelings. What is magical about E.T., for those moved by it, is the same: we feel their feelings. And the experience acts, perhaps, as Campbell says of the type of love associated with a Christmas Crib, to cultivate “in one’s heart the inner divine child of one’s own awakened spiritual life” (Myths to Live By, 151).
by the light of its moon, this 1982 movie about a ridiculous-looking alien and a boy with a bike has saved me many times. The child who is gone is always right here.
MythBlast authored by:
Devon Deimler, PhD is a writer, artist, and teacher. She is an Associate Professor in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Mythological Studies program, Curator of exhibits and events at OPUS Archives and Research Center (home to the collections of James Hillman, Marija Gimbutas, and Joseph Campbell), and a lecturer and special editions editor for The Philosophical Research Society, where she has served as Contributing Artist/Scholar. Devon earned her PhD in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology from Pacifica. Her dissertation, Ultraviolet Concrete: Dionysos and the Ecstatic Play of Aesthetic Experience, won the Institute’s Dissertation of Excellence award. She holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her experience in the arts includes founding an independent record label, Wildfire Wildfire Productions, and working as Assistant to the Director at the Dennis Hopper Art Trust. She was recently published in Truth and Soul: A Robert Downey, Sr. Reader.
This MythBlast was inspired by Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Magical Child.
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