“What the hell?” movies, part 1: Close Encounters

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Close Encounters, plot holes, Steven Spielberg, story logic

People will ignore howling plot problems if they like a story enough. Some of the most popular stories make no sense.

I’m not talking about the kind of mystery that can make a work of art intriguing. I enjoy some ambiguity in art. Why does the Mona Lisa smile? What’s Dali evoking by making a clock face hang like a soggy T-shirt? What’s wrong with Citizen Kane’s Charles Foster Kane? People have spent rich careers happily digging into these questions.

No, I’m talking about stuff that just plain unravels — yet people don’t seem to care.

Take Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spoiler ahead.

Mysterious aliens controlling high technology are visiting Earth. They send to the minds of receptive people a compulsion to draw a distinctive mountain and travel to it.

In addition to telepathy, the aliens communicate via patterns of light and sound, transmissions spelling out longitude and latitude coordinates, and hand gestures. What’s more, they kidnap people who speak a variety of languages.

As these developments pile up, the movie’s human characters — and its audience — wonder: What do the aliens want?

Here’s the spoiler: The aliens want the people most receptive to the telepathically implanted compulsion to show up at the mountain so they can take the most receptive person or persons away.

But why do aliens with advanced science and multiple ways to communicate use indirect, confusing ways?

And whether they use telepathy or kidnapping, why do the aliens take people away?

The movie reveals none of the above. It doesn’t even leave intriguing hints.

You’d think that audiences would find such unanswered questions frustrating, but they don’t. They usually love the movie.

Hell, I love it. The movie’s story is so compelling, its characters so sympathetic, and its visuals so stunning that I didn’t even wonder about these questions until after I’d seen the movie at least twice. I still enjoy it.

But it makes no sense at all.

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Why the UFOs haven’t landed yet

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Alien life, extraterrestrials, science fiction, SETI

It’s a science-fiction cliché: The alien hive mind. From the slugs in Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters to the Borg in Star Trek, the creatures who think as one — and who mean to wipe out our messy, savage individuality and absorb humanity into their collective — horrify us with the threat of losing our souls.

But what about an independent, self-sufficient alien that values freedom and autonomy even more than we do? Would this creature view us with horror?

It would notice that individual humans are rarely, well, individual. It would see that we’re almost always with families or co-workers or friends. It would see us gathering in marketplaces and nightclubs and theaters and sports stadiums.

It would see how we go out of our way to be together, via political rallies and Facebook groups and weddings (these humans not only bond together for the rest of their lives, they even gather together to celebrate it!).

It would look at our armies, and It would gape in confusion: “Humans are so devoted to each other that they herd together even to kill each other.”

It would look at our sex lives, and It would think, “They can’t perform even the basic function of reproducing without each other’s help. Their tiniest amoebas can do it, but they evolved away from it.”

And It would wonder, “Don’t the humans have any sense of self-reliance or individuality?”

Our desire to join together in pairs, families, teams, businesses, armies and other teams would intrigue the alien — but Its curiosity would grow into terror on discovering how often we try to pull each other into joining us and being like us.

The door-to-door missionaries and television preachers who seek converts. The activists demanding that others support their causes. The businesses advertising for new customers, the military services seeking recruits, the gods of fashion telling us how to dress, the frat boys talking sorority girls into debauched parties — “These humans never stop,” the alien would think. “It’s not enough that they don’t want to be alone — they never leave others alone, either.”

The alien would seek out the few of us who cut ourselves off from the rest of society: the paranoid survivalist who hides out in a mountain shack, the ascetic monk who prays alone in his cell, the bitter misanthrope who hates modern civilization and lives far off the grid. The alien is ready to admire them —

— until It sees that each of these humans believes that his way of life is the right one and that others should be like him.

The alien would think, with rising horror, “What if the humans discover me? What if they follow their pattern of needing others to behave like them and think like them?” The alien would fear our demands: embrace our political philosophy, fight alongside us in our army, and join our religion.

Even worse, we’d insist that we really like living the way we do. We’d say that the alien might be as happy as us . . . if It would just give our way a chance.

No wonder the UFOs haven’t landed yet.