But there was a palpable difference between then and now, and you need only rewatch a film like E.T. or the original Star Wars to see it. For all Spielberg’s talk about private horrors, both films are fundamentally, unselfconsciously optimistic. People are decent, Han Solo has a heart of gold, and tomorrow really will be brighter than today. In E.T., for example, much of the tension surrounds a shadowy group of government agents who are determined to capture the alien for themselves. At first glance it seems all very Watergate, echoing Seventies conspiracy thrillers like The Conversation or The Parallax View. But it turns out that their leader, “Keys”, is actually a thoroughly decent fellow, a grown-up version of young Elliott himself. Official America, in other words, isn’t so bad after all. “I’ve been wishing for this,” Keys says at one point, “since I was 10 years old.” It’s hard to imagine a US government agent in 2022 being given a line like that.
Both films also share a fundamental faith in modernity itself: in science, technology and the idea of the future. In Star Wars, it’s true that the ships and uniforms are battered and grubby, reflecting a sense of decline since the Empire replaced the Republic — a very Roman theme. But none of the characters ever doubts that technology is good for them. There are no environmental costs; you can fire up your speeder as often as you like without worrying about climate change. Nor does anybody really question their society’s reliance on walking artificial intelligence, except for the barman at the Mos Eisley cantina (“We don’t serve their kind here”). Like E.T.’s alien plant-enthusiast, droids are useful, good-natured, even kind-hearted. They’re not trying to take over the world. They’re just trying to help.
If you want an insight into the mentality behind films like E.T., perhaps the best place to go is the Nasa visitor centre at Cape Canaveral, a vast monument to the optimism of a vanished age. The entire experience is infused with a sense of faith: in America, in technology, in progress, in humanity itself. On the screens above you, a succession of elderly men and women with reassuring Midwestern accents talk of comradeship and teamwork, duty and commitment. None of them questions whether it was worth it, or doubts that they were doing the right thing. And the entire experience is underpinned by a sense of narrative, a story driving towards a moment of apotheosis. That moment, of course, is 20 July 1969, when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. “The first thing I think about when I think about the Sixties,’” Spielberg told Rolling Stone, “is when we landed on the moon.”
But my overwhelming impression after visiting Nasa a few months ago, rather like my feeling after rewatching E.T., was simply one of nostalgia. Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind was more than a half a century ago; for children today, it is as remote as the Battle of the Somme was to children in 1969. To put it bluntly, the moment has passed. The Space Race is over. Nasa’s government funding has dried up; it relies heavily on private sponsorship now. When we think of technology today, we often think of the costs, not the benefits. Despite the miracle of the Covid vaccines, a believer in scientific progress today runs a gauntlet of cynicism and disillusionment. And who now believes in the future?
So if there was a film in the summer of 1982 that foreshadowed our present, it wasn’t E.T.. It was a competitor released just two weeks later, which performed very poorly at the box-office but became one of the most aesthetically influential science-fiction visions ever made. With its neon cities shrouded in smog and pollution, its streets crowded with rogues, immigrants, whores and replicants, its nightmarish future of driving rain and endless night, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner could hardly feel more different from the moral universe of Spielberg’s fairy-tale. But today our world seems closer to Scott’s vision than to Spielberg’s. And perhaps that’s why E.T. still commands such power, as a reminder of what we’ve lost.
All of which, of course, brings us back to that marzipan. As Jim Robson’s daughter Mary told the BBC, they would get it out now and again in the intervening years, to remind them of days gone by. “It was nice to see it again, it’s like a familiar face, so finding it wasn’t sad because it just always made us laugh,” she said wistfully. “I took it home to look after and I haven’t put it away. I like to see it every day.”
A bittersweet story, then. But perhaps the last word should go to St Albans’s equivalent of the engineers behind the Apollo missions, the director of Simmons Bakers. He was pleased to hear that their creation had lasted forty years, he said. “But I still wouldn’t recommend eating it.”
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