“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”
You recognize that?
It’s from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of the biggest movies of all time. And an incredibly valuable resource — if you only know when to stop watching.
When I was a kid, around age five, my eyes bulged out each time my parents took me past the main movie theater in town.
For some reason, the theater still showed the marquee for E.T., even though the movie had stopped playing years earlier.
I was too young to see E.T. when it came out. And I suffered for years, seeing that marquee. I wanted to watch the movie so bad — a real life alien! On Earth! Makes friends with a little boy and turns the boy’s bike into a flying machine!
It’s everything my 5-year-old self wanted in life. But the movie was no longer in theaters, and there was no VHS either.
So a few years ago, fully grown and rather jaded, I downloaded E.T. to finally heal this childhood wound, and to see why this Spielberg fantasy is called the #24 greatest film of all time.
Unfortunately, the moment has passed.
I couldn’t really get into E.T. But I did get some use out of it.
That scene above. Let me repeat it in case you didn’t read:
“Look at what they’ve done to you. I’m so sorry. You must be dead… because I don’t know how to feel. I can’t feel anything any more. You’ve gone someplace else now.”
That’s when E.T. dies, about nine-tenths of the way through the movie. And the boy, Elliott, who had a psychic link with E.T. and who has felt everything E.T. has felt, suddenly cannot feel anything any more.
I can imagine that when E.T. played in movie theaters, both the kids and the parents choked up at this point.
The kids, because the cute little extraterrestrial is dead.
The parents, because they felt on some level this scene might be about their childhood dreams, hopes, and capacity for joy and wonder… which have been drained out of them as they grew up and became adults.
And then of course, in the movie, E.T. comes back to life and everything works out just fine. Which is the insight I want to leave you with today.
If a story reaches mass popularity — E.T., Fight Club, Bad Santa — it’s because it makes people vibrate.
The thing is, social order must be maintained. That’s why each mass-market story either has a happy ending (if the characters were deep-down deserving) or a moral to be learned (if they were not).
Don’t let that fool you.
Market-proven tear-jerkers like E.T. can really show you true human nature — if you don’t wait until the end. The end is just tacked on to muddy the waters. But the psychology lesson is all the emotional buildup that happens before the turnaround.
That buildup shows you how people really are. Those are the real problems and desires people respond to, and that’s what you should speak to. Everything else is just Hollywood.
Meanwhile, in an alternate cinematic universe:
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