ABSTRACT
In a scene from Steven Spielberg’s 1982 family-friendly fantasy E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the eponymous alien is happily participating in what is undoubtedly a typical engagement with the culture of film. Home alone while new friend Elliott (Henry Thomas) is at school, he has accidentally come across an ‘oldie’ while flicking channels on TV, namely the classic 1952 John Ford film, The Quiet Man. The preceding scene has made it abundantly clear that Elliott and E.T. are linked empathetically and kinaesthetically; that their experiences are shared, such that E.T.’s beer drinking results in a drunk Elliott sliding of his chair at school. But upon seeing John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara’s clinch in a storm-swept scene, the relationship between E.T. and Elliott allegorizes something I would characterise as inherently cinematic. Elliott, sharing the viewing and participative experience of E.T. enacts in the ‘real’ world that which is occurring in the ‘reel’ world: in the same way as Wayne kisses O’Hara, he kisses a pretty girl amid the chaos of a disrupted dissection class in a neat joining of two fictional realms (see Figures 7.1 and 7.2). The scene is, I believe, not only a celebration of cinema’s power to shape our encounters with the real world, but in stressing the shared experiences that Elliott has with both John Wayne and the watching E.T. it also highlights the way in which cinematic experience is itself an inherently shared one—something that involves both audiences as well as characters, and blurs the distinction between participants and observers.
