B B BE Featuring Yakitori, Sushi and Sashimi DINNER FROM 6 PM ' / I f f 4001 S.E. MILWAUKIE AVE, PORTLAND 232-2824 □BE □BE □BE □BE □BE □ B B B B E.T. anti Beyond By Penny Allen hammered flutes ♦ gui piccolos ♦ books and Drawing by David Kline Steven Spielberg, as do many of us in 1982, likes video games. When we play them, we’re being trained in a new language whose patterns have implicit values. Successful play reinforces certain values ... values which are first pressed upon a video player through the choices of action, whether to eat or be eaten, or in the more complex games to sidestep, finesse, segue out of or otherwise transcend confrontation, thereby prolonging and enlarging upon the game. More important, though, are the rewards for the player’s ability to physically and mentally synch up with electronic circuitry. The strongest value implicit in the latter is the love of electronic communication (even or especially the foreignness of it) which helps to eliminate fear of the future. The more unimaginative video games simply forgo their multi-dimensional possibilities in favor of the two-dimensional conflict forms of the past (like kill or be killed) in pretty much the same way George Lucas' Star Wars saga shortsells the excitement of both the future and of special effects for sure genre forms of the past (cowboy adventure). This is very much like not wanting to grow up, where one denies available emotional breadth or ambiguity, choosing instead to stick with a psychological structure of an earlier developmental age. The greatest video games teach you to love change, or process, or synthesis, or transcendence of universe. It may well have been some of these games which opened up Steven Spielberg's view of the possible ways in which events unfold. Whatever, with the movie E.T., Spielberg certainly unfolds a vision of the future, new values in tow, that plays differently from the old win/lose, hold-onto-your- territory-or-die games. And with countless millions seeing the movie worldwide, many of them more than once, Spielberg’s actually helping to shape a future of new values. Millions of people will be able to imagine a future of communication with those of ‘higher intelligence’ because E.T. has placed value in communicating with outside forces rather than repelling them. Like Laurie Anderson, who is also interested in building new images for the future, Steven Spielberg seems to believe that electronic circuitry assures evolved communication. In E.T., once we know the basic fact that there’s some kind of rather small outer space creature wandering around the little boy Eliot’s house, and Eliot knows this too, the movie’s and Eliot's first impulse is for communication with the creature. Eliot has no fearful thoughts of escape, nor has he a defensive/aggressive impulse to overpower or destroy the little Extra Terrestrial. Make friends with it! Of course! Learn from it! And right below the surface of Eliot’s experiences — leaving a trail of m&m’s in the forest to get the E. T.’s attention, then straining to find a level on which to talk with the E.T., and then finding himself synched up to E.T.’s actual make-up, his ‘electronic’ circuitry — just below the surface of all that lies the hope that E.T., and all the other E.T.s, are going to come to our rescue and get us out of this century alive. They obviously know so very much more than we know. E.T. could never be called a new-fangled boy-and-his-dog movie, dolled up with futuristic special effects. Dogs never advance beyond a certain point; movies about them have to be about loyalty, obedience, or primitive heroism, where we marvel at the animal’s performance of tasks supportive to the humans in control. With the creature E. T. comes knowledge that we need in order to survive, and thus there is hope, because access to it has been depicted as a possibility. If it were the Extra Terrestrial’s land we needed rather than his knowledge, we’d have to call E.T. a strange twist on Turner's frontier theory (Turner maintained that the existence of the western frontier literally and psychologically made it possible for people to escape the past, or even a rotten present). But the idea that ‘out there’ holds solutions other than the ones we’re mucking around with on Earth in 1982 is not romantic escapism. It has more to do with the language of video games than with Turner, more to do with the adding of a dimension to reality than with the conquering of unknown territories. Speaking of sidestepping the conquering of territory, the most extraordinary structural element in E.T. and Spielberg’s system of new values is the axing of dad. Dad is gone In E.T.; the character has been assassinated to open up the possibilities for the son, to use Freudian thinking. Eliot’s father abandoned mom and the kids somewhat before the movie takes up the story; in one fell swoop Spielberg’s choice erases, within Eliot's immediate family, the archetypal male responses of fearful or defensive or protective aggression towards the Extra Terrestrial as well as the likelihood of an adult male (the father) taking control of the ‘threatening invasion’ (which is exactly how all adult males behave in the movie). Is Spielberg trying to say that certain behavior patterns have to be altered, eliminated, or transcended? Probably he wouldn’t cop to that, but with E.T. his work sure has gotten interesting. ♦ recorders >♦ whistles ny varieties folk musics. ARTICHOKE MUSIC 11-6 • monday-saturday • 722 northwest 21st • 248-0356 Kafoury & Hagen Lawyers General Civil and Criminal Practice including: Personal Injury Workers’ Compensation Drug Cases Gregory Kafoury • Douglas Hagen • Cathryn Hagen 320 SW Stark 224-2647 Bottle the sunshine up my dears, and lay it safe away, Hammer the cork in good and tight keep for a rainy day. For clouds will come, showers fall, and earth and sky look sad, 42 Clinton St. Quarterly
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