56. The Divorce, Part 2: E.T. Phone Home!

Author’s note: I didn’t intend to really write this much about my parents’ divorce, but once the words started flowing in a piece I did last month, they just kept coming. I guess I had (and maybe still have) more to say, so here we are. I thought it could be fun, though, if I ripped off my favorite filmmakers and turned this into a trilogy. So, to that end, the piece I did last month has been retitled and serves as the first part of the trilogy. This is the darker second chapter. Stay tuned for a disappointing let-down third part (maybe I’ll include Ewoks!!) at some point down the road.

You can read the first essay “The Divorce, Part 1: Dates, Data, and Doc Brown” here.

The Divorce, Part 2: Phone Home!

Happy Halloween, everyone! About a month ago, I wrote an essay about how the movies of 1985 and 1986 helped provide a much-needed distraction for me while I got through the early months of my parents’ divorce. In that essay, I spoke briefly about my all-time favorite movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and how I’d never really taken the time to write about it in any real meaningful way. Since it’s Halloween and since E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is a bit of a Halloween movie, I thought now’s as good a time as any to write something about my favorite movie.

In that post, I also said that it’d be “hard to write about E.T. because it’s hard to talk about things I unconditionally love” but I think that’s probably a false statement.

I sometimes see a question go around social media that says something like “what’s one thing you could give a 15-minute TED Talks lecture on with zero preparation?” Somewhere between “why the music of the Beatles freaking rules” and “ways to waste time at work without my supervisors noticing,” I’d put “why E.T. is an awesome movie.” I’m not sure which of those lectures would be easiest for me but I’m writing an essay about E.T. while listening to the music of the Beatles while at work. How are your deduction skills? Just kidding! … or am I? (big obvious wink to the camera). In all seriousness, I do 99.99% of my writing at home while listening to Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it, Copper. 

But yeah, talking about E.T. would be incredibly easy for me. It’s been my all-time favorite movie for the better part of 3 decades and I’ve seen it so many times I can practically recite its dialogue and hum its musical cues without having to really think about it too hard. With zero preparation and just going off the top of the dome like Eminem at the end of Eight Mile, I could give you 5,000 words on phoning home, the virtues of having a gang of friends who own BMX bikes, the best ways to camouflage yourself in a pile of stuffed animals, and the adorableness of Drew Barrymore. That’d be easy. Especially the last one. I don’t think there’s ever been a cuter child actor.  

What might be hard, though, is talking about E.T. in such a way where it doesn’t sound like the “Chris Farley Show” sketch from Saturday Night Live. “Remember that time when Elliott flew his bike across the full moon? … that was awesome.”  This simple fairy tale of a movie was the number one movie of all time for 11 years (until Spielberg’s own Jurassic Park unseated it). We’ve all seen the dang movie. We all know how awesome it is. It’d be hard to offer anything to the discussion that hasn’t been said many times over by people way smarter and way better at writing than me. (meta grammar joke)

So, I go back to my initial statement;“It’s hard to write about E.T. because it’s hard to talk about things I unconditionally love.” Okay, I think that’s only a partially true statement.  

If I’m going to write about something like E.T. and have it not sound like pure fanboy glazing, I’d need a “take” of some kind. Doesn’t matter if that take is lukewarm, warm, or scalding hot, I’d definitely need an angle.   

I could go historical and try to put myself in a 1982 frame of mind. I could talk about how swept up we all were by E.T. in 1982. How we all purchased the E.T. plushies and how we all owned a toy finger that’d light up red when you pressed it from the inside. I could talk about how E.T. and Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out in the same year and how we’d be moonwalking around our living rooms while shoving Reese’s Pieces into our mouths.

Or I could talk about how the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Atari game came out in December 1982 and how it was such a colossally awful game that they literally buried thousands of unsold games in a New Mexico desert as if it owed gambling debts to the Genovese crime family.  That actually happened. You can look it up.

I could talk about June 1982 and how the Steven Spielberg produced Poltergeist, the Ridley Scott directed Blade Runner, the John Carpenter directed The Thing remake, and the Steven Spielberg directed E.T. all came out within something like 3 or 4 weeks of one another. I can’t stress enough how insane the 1980s pop-cultural landscape was.  

Or if I wanted to go more in on the movie, I could talk about the miraculous whiplash that happens while watching E.T. where the beginning of the movie is lowkey a little frightening (especially for a 5-year-old me) but how we’d all be rifling through boxes of Kleenex as we sobbed our way through the last 20 minutes of the movie. Steven Spielberg is a master at many things but perhaps his most underrated skill is making you terrified of things you’d later be weeping over.

It’d be easy to talk about the George Lucas-John Williams-Steven Spielberg run we were all living through and how the movies those three men worked on (sometimes together) would permanently change movies and the moviegoing experience in ways we couldn’t even begin to fully comprehend. And if I took that angle, I’d have to talk about how in an era that included Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Star Wars trilogy, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Temple of Doom, a movie about an alien with big lifelike eyes (modeled after Albert Einstein’s) and an elongated neck was perhaps the best one of them all.  

I could then talk about how of the Spielberg-Lucas-Williams trio, John Williams was (and remains) the best of the three. John Williams never misses, and he was on the heater of all heaters in 1982. His brilliance has only become more evident and undeniable in the decades that followed to the point that it’s almost easy to take him for granted now. But how does the guy who wrote the music for the Star Wars movies also end up writing the equally iconic music for the (first few) Harry Potter movies, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Jaws, Close Encounters, Superman, and Home Alone (among so many countless more)? John Williams’ output has always been laugh out loud absurd. It would be a contrarian hot take to say anything other than his original Star Wars score (or perhaps its sequel The Empire Strikes Back) was his masterpiece work, but if you were to ask me what his most beautiful or most inspired work is, I’d probably say it’s his score for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. The highs he reaches in his E.T. film score stand side-by-side with the best works of Tchaikovsky or Mozart or any great composer you could mention. Seriously. If you doubt that take, find the soundtrack on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube and listen to either “The Magic of Halloween” or “Escape/Chase/Saying Goodbye.” The music speaks for itself and is undeniable.

Those would all be really fun essays and maybe I’ll do some someday. I keep going back to my original hypothesis, though: I once said “It’s hard to write about E.T. because it’s hard to talk about things I unconditionally love.” I don’t think that’s true.

I could easily talk about how you don’t know eras are over until they’re over. At some point, Spielberg would (temporarily) power down the alien ships that used to fly across our screens, would park the Orca at Universal Studios, and hang his archeologist’s fedora on the wall (again… temporarily) so he could attempt more adult and mature work by way of the novels of J. G. Ballard and Alice Walker. And I could talk about how George Lucas would spend the better part of the 1980s building several entertainment business empires while attempting to avoid becoming the kind of money-first studio head he used to rebel against as an up-and-coming young filmmaker.

But after all of that, I’d have to talk about how I didn’t think about E.T. much at all as I began navigating adolescence. There isn’t much room for “kid stuff” when you’re a pimply faced teenager obsessed with girls, the music of Metallica, and Houston sports teams.

I could talk about how E.T. became just a poster on a Blockbuster Video wall and how, yes, seeing that poster would bring warm feelings to my heart, but it would remain something I thought little about until one fateful day in late 1998 when I purchased the THX certified DVD re-release because some money was burning a hole in a young Marine’s pocket. So maybe I should talk about how rewatching that movie as an adult changed my life forever. That I can do.

But if I’m going to talk about how that movie changed my life, I need to start at the beginning and that’s going to be a little hard for me.   

Yes, I once said “It’s hard to write about E.T. because it’s hard to talk about things you unconditionally love.” That is, sadly, sometimes, a 100% true statement.

My parents got divorced in 1985. I was 7 years old at the time and the divorce was incredibly hard on me. I’ve always contended that although there is no good age to go through your parents’ divorce, 7 years old might be the absolute worst age to do so. If I had been a few years younger, maybe I would have been so unaware of what was really happening that the dark cloud of divorce would have been something that was always there instead of something that came in over otherwise blue skies. People in London perceive a rainy day differently than someone in Arizona, you know? If I had been a few years older, I could have killed two birds with one stone and wrapped my bitter feelings about the divorce into a burgeoning teenage angst. I definitely would have understood it more thoroughly. Or if I had been even older than that, maybe I would have been privy to more of the dysfunction taking place and the divorce would have been something I actually welcomed.  

For the 7-year-old me, though, the divorce had a severe unmooring effect, and I had a hard time navigating any space I’d find myself in. What do you mean this house I grew up in is no longer my house? What do you mean my dad now has an apartment where we sleep in his bed while he sleeps on the couch? We’re moving to Dallas now? Why? “So, we could be close to both my mom’s and dad’s extended families,” I was told. I guess that’s happening now. But what do you mean we’re now moving back to Houston? We literally just got here. Was it because my brother and I were becoming little hoodlums and breaking taillights with crowbars and I could see the look of exasperation on my mom’s face as she spoke to the police about it and came to the realization that maybe she was in over her head with two lost little boys? So, what do you mean we’re back with my dad in a little two-bedroom house 30 feet from railroad tracks in a rough part of town. Maybe getting a dog would help. And it does. …for a month or two until my dad decides to get rid of the dog while I’m at school.

I can’t tell you how many times I contemplated walking those train tracks and never coming back again. Every time I tried, I’d make it about 50 meters before turning back. 50 meters must be a perfect “cool down” length, but 50 meters to a kid that age might as well be 50 miles.

That’s just the physical space, though. The inner space was so much more of a maelstrom. It was hard to spend a good chunk of your childhood as a tug of war rope. And when you weren’t a tug of war rope, you were a timebomb, being loaded up with explosives from one side to let loose on the other. The explosive radius on these bombs would be dependent on the munitions being stuffed into it and the length of the fuse, but the trigger was too finely tuned to not go off. It always did. That’s what it was built to do.

It was hard to have a childhood home you grew up in and developed memories in and then one day not. Repeat. It was hard to have a childhood home you grew up in and developed memories in and then one day… not.  It was hard to not see your sisters. It was hard to not see your dad. It was hard to not see your mom. It was hard to get used to stepparents. Your parents chose these people to be in their lives. You didn’t. But they did. So, they’re now in yours, too. They all did as good a job as they could. Or they tried. Sometimes they didn’t. Most of the time they did though. Should I describe a shrug? Also, stepparents are held to unfair expectations.

It was hard to change schools every couple of years. It was hard that right as I’d be getting close to a friend or a friend group, poof, I’d be moving to a new school again. It was hard to have all these complex emotions and nowhere to put them, so I made a subconscious decision to put them down deep because you know that’s the only space you think you can fully control.

In related news, when some stars die, they collapse upon themselves and become blackholes.

Steven Spielberg makes movies about divorce in the same way that the Walt Disney Corporation makes movies with dead parents in them. His movies may be about aliens or archeologists or conmen, but those are just a means to an end for what he really wanted to talk about. Thankfully for all of us divorced people making our way through the 1980s, Spielberg, our most empathetic and heart-first artist, had some divorce things of his own he needed to work through, too. I maybe knew that Spielberg did this in his movies, but I didn’t know it know it until I watched E.T. all alone in my Marines barracks room in 1998. But saying E.T. is a “divorce movie” almost feels like a misrepresentation of how important that movie was and is to me.

E.T. is a masterpiece movie. Again, I could give you 5,000 words as to why that is. There are no wasted shots in it and even the most cynical of hearts would have a hard time not melting at everything happening on screen. The bike flying across the moon image would be my selection for “most iconic shot in film history” and how anything you’d submit as a counterexample would come in a distant second.

Again… this isn’t about any of that. E.T. isn’t my favorite movie of all time because of its iconic imagery, its script, or its acting. Those are all important, obviously. If the movie were a piece shit, I wouldn’t care what it has to say about divorce and broken families. Nailing those aspects of the movie are what makes the movie hit me right in the solar plexus the way that it does.

No, E.T. is my favorite movie because it’s not really just a movie to me. E.T. is my childhood. And I don’t mean that in the way most people say that sentence. It wasn’t my childhood because I watched it a lot. When I say “E.T. was my childhood,” I mean just that; E.T. gives me a sense memory of what my childhood once was.

In a very one-to-one comparison, the house the family lived in in E.T. felt very much like the Houston home I grew up in. In that era, Spielberg was an absolute master at making the houses and the families who lived in them feel very true to the lives we were all living in the early 1980s. Both the house and the people who lived in them were messy. There was always a hefty dose of stuff lying around. The dishes weren’t always done. There were Star Wars toys left on bookshelves and unmade beds, just like my room. Modern movies always portray immaculate houses, inhabited by similarly immaculate people. The sterility drives me nuts and feels more artificial than any CGI creation someone could create. They’re spotless and perfectly designed. The kids have these rooms where everything is put away. Does that ring true to your experience? It doesn’t to mine. And the people who live in modern houses in modern movies always work crazy ass modern jobs that no one really works in real life. Know any playwrights? Know any ad executives? People in classic era Spielberg movies worked blue collar jobs or (at best) white collar jobs that barely paid enough for the family to get by. It felt relatable to a guy who had parents who sweated over bills.

One of the things I really appreciate about the family dynamic on display in E.T. is that you get the impression that this is the same house that they lived in before their dad left. That was my family’s post-divorce dynamic for a while, too. We still lived in my childhood home for a brief time post-divorce, but since a major piece of the family was just gone, everything felt off. Everything was off. But the house was still the house, even if it didn’t feel like a home anymore.

But even going beyond how the family related to the house they were living in, it felt very real how the family related to one another. There have been several great divorce movies over the years, but I don’t think a better representation exists of what it’s like to just sit around the table as a divorced family than what we see in E.T. When you’re in a broken home, even the most mundane family dinner conversation happens over a tenuous peace. That kind of peace can be brittle, though. All that it takes to knock it off its axis is a glance or a misspoken utterance referencing whichever parent wasn’t in the room at the moment. There was a lot of eggshell walking in my dad’s house.

In one early scene, young Elliott is trying to convince his siblings and his mom that he indeed did see an alien (or something!) out in the cornfield the night before. Even though no one really believes him (IT WAS NOTHING LIKE THAT, PENIS BREATH – chef’s kiss for how kids of that era actually talked), they’re at least entertaining the idea. As an act of extending an olive branch to her obviously distressed son, she recommends Elliott call his father and tell him about it. He tells his mom that he can’t on account of his dad being in Mexico with Sally, presumably the woman his dad left his mom for. The older brother clocks what happens instantly, but you see the blood drain from his mom’s face as she struggles to maintain her emotional equilibrium. She leaves the kitchen for her room so she can let it all out, but in doing so leaves the kids to fend for themselves. “Why don’t you grow up, think how other people feel for a change?”

That whole family dynamic in that scene felt very real and relatable. There’s Gertie, too young to really understand what’s going so she just asks, “what’s Mexico?” There’s the older brother Michael, quick to come to the emotional defense of the distressed mom, which is kind of an unfair thing to ask of a 15-year-old boy. There’s the mom, obviously in a ton of pain, but doing as good of a job as she can. And then there’s Elliott… The thing about this scene that really gets to me is that the older brother is ultimately right. It is important to think about what other people feel before saying something. But empathy comes with age and with time and through experience. The older son already began that learning process. Elliott still needs to. It’s a scene like this where I wonder if the “E” and “T” in E.T. might actually stand for “empathy training.”

Empathy Training is what you see a few scenes later when Elliott feels sorry for a classroom’s worth of soon-to-be-dissected frogs about to meet their demise at the end of a scalpel, so he decides to hilariously (and romantically??? – it makes sense in the movie) set them free.  

Empathy Training is what you see when after spending an entire movie dreading the scary men chasing E.T. through Southern California, we learn that the lead scientist is just a kindhearted man (almost imagining what Elliott himself would be like as an adult) who is glad E.T. and Elliott found each other first.  

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is loaded with this idea of shared emotions and shared connections. But what makes this movie so special to me is not just in how these people in the movie communicate with the people they’re connected to, but in expressing the importance of communication itself.

E.T. and Elliott are developing a profoundly resonant friendship, and we get to see how that friendship blossoms over a fun and joyous first half of the movie. But E.T. needs to get home and him doing so stands in opposition to that friendship. We intuitively know as an audience that as fun as this all has been and as much as we may want them to physically remain in each other’s lives forever, this is all going to come to an end. We don’t want it to end because these friends are perfect for one another, but it absolutely must.

It’d take a minor miracle to land that plane in a way that felt both resonant and not overly maudlin or manipulative. Spielberg has that dynamic often in his movies and sometimes he calibrates incorrectly and the endings of his movies skew towards one of those sides, but in E.T. he absolutely nails it. It helps that the movie’s first half is entirely charming, but it was a stroke of genius to employ a technique where lines or words uttered at the beginning would come back later as resonant lines of dialogue.

One quick and easy example of this is how Drew Barrymore’s Gertie learns to spell using a Speak & Spell toy and via Sesame Street. When you’d get a letter or word correct on that toy, it’d encourage you and then later she’s watching an episode of Sesame Street where they’re learning the letter “B.” That device and television show are also how E.T. learns to communicate and it’s assumed Gertie and E.T. worked on communicating with one another while Elliott was at school. As they’re waiting for Elliott to come home they’re playing dress up. She’s ready to show Elliott their dress up but tells E.T. to “be good.” Later on, when E.T. is saying goodbye to Gertie, he says, “Be good” and it’s both a resonant call back to that earlier scene but also a bit of advice for the young Gertie character going forward.

There are a number of these examples throughout the movie, but the most obvious time this happens comes when they’re building the “phone home” device and Elliott cuts his finger on a sawblade. “Ouch,” Elliott says as he’s staring at the small cut on his hand. E.T. repeats the line, lights up his finger (we’ve all seen the iconography, folks), and fixes Elliott’s wound with his magic healing powers. Well, that scene gets mirrored and echoed later in two scenes. The first is when they’re in the forest clearing working on the phone home device and Elliott desperately pleads with E.T. to stay. E.T. points to his chest and says “ouch.” Then later when Elliott and E.T. are saying their goodbyes they both point first to their chest and then to their mouths, both saying “ouch” as they do so. The “ouch” this time is something that can’t be healed with a touch but is something unseen but still very, very real. Maybe even more real than the wound on the finger earlier. 

But here’s the kicker and here’s the whole point of both the movie and this essay. As E.T. lay dying a few scenes earlier, Elliott seeks to reassure E.T. by saying “I’ll be right here,” as he’s reaching out to him from across the respective hospital beds. That line and scene get echoed later when after pointing to their mouths and saying “Ouch,” E.T.’s finger lights up and points to Elliott’s head saying, “I’ll be right here.”

That’s it. That’s the whole dang point. Sometimes the feelings in our heart hurts. And sometimes the words we say to each other feels more like an “ouch” than a balm. But the way out of that is by engaging in both of those actions. You have to acknowledge the pain. You have to understand it for what it is. And then when you do that, you need to let the “ouch” out through the mouth by communicating that pain. But once it’s out, that’s when the healing process begins. And to never underestimate the power of a great hug!

And part of that healing process is knowing that those who love us are also going through this painful divorce process and are most definitely hurting, too. They’re probably doing the best they can, too. And they’re probably failing, too. And they’re all succeeding, too. Maturing is understanding that this may be our individual story, but we’re just a part of a much larger story with many different players going through many different reactions to the same experience. Just like the Peter Coyote scientist character, those who love us want what’s best for us, even if it runs counter to what they’re wanting or needing at the time. Like I said, empathy training.

Great movies have an immense gravity to them. Have you ever started a movie and realized 2 minutes in that you were watching something truly special? It doesn’t have to be immediate, but every great movie you’ve ever watched pulls you in. And for however long you’re in that gravity, that’s all that matters. The thing (whether that be a movie, a book, a conversation, magazine article, etc) has you and time loses all meaning. And every time you think about that great movie, you feel that same pull.

For me, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is an inversion of that dynamic. I’m the one with the immense, blackhole-like gravity and when I need it, I pull the movie to me. I don’t ever plan to watch E.T., I just let the universe decide that for me. So sometimes, I won’t watch it for a year or more. I hold it dearly. Maybe I’m too precious with it, I don’t know. But I don’t want to ever take this movie for granted. I don’t want it to be yet one more thing that is on while I’m doing other things. When I watch E.T., it brings me back to a pre-divorced world where everything in my family felt whole. It’s a world that doesn’t exist anymore so going back to that world carries a lot of emotion with it. But also, when I watch E.T., it brings me back to a post-divorced world, too. And the post-divorce world is one with immense pain but also immense beauty. The movie exists in both worlds. It’s why it’s such an emotional watch for me. When I watch E.T., for all the good and for all the bad that I’ve lived through, I’ve phoned home. And E.T. is always right here.