June 3, 2026

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) — The Arrival

Show Notes
Transcript

Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind changed the modern science fiction film forever. In this episode of Spielberg Reloaded, we explore how Spielberg turned UFO obsession, government secrecy, suburban paranoia, and spiritual wonder into one of the defining movies of the 1970s. Richard Dreyfuss stars as Roy Neary, an ordinary man whose encounter with an unidentified flying object destroys his normal life and pulls him toward Devils Tower. We examine the film’s groundbreaking visual effects, John Williams’ iconic score, François Truffaut’s performance, the influence of real UFO culture in America, and why Close Encounters remains one of Spielberg’s most personal films.

A.I. was used to help with narration and creative elements of our scripts.

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Calarogu Shark Media. You don't start with Jaws. You don't

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start with the shark, or the beach, or the summer

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blockbuster that supposedly invented the summer blockbuster. You start here, Indiana,

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nineteen seventy seven. A power company lineman named Roy Neary

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is sitting in his truck in the middle of the night,

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lost following reports of a blackout that has no explanation.

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His compass is spinning, his radio is dead. Then the

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sky lights up, and just like that, Steven Spielberg shows

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you what he's really interested in. Not the monster, not

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the threat, the light. This is Spielberg reloaded episode one,

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind nineteen seventy seven. Steven

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Spielberg wasn't a newcomer when Close Encounters hit theaters. He

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had already made Duel, the TV movie that announced a

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filmmaker with something to prove. He'd made The Sugarland Express,

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and two years earlier, Jaws had made him the hottest

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young director in Hollywood, the man behind the highest grossing

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film anyone had ever seen. He had every studio in

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town ready to give him money. He could have made anything.

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What he chose to make was a film about a

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man who sees something in the sky and can't let

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it go that tells you everything about Steven Spielberg. Close

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Encounters of the Third Kind was released in November nineteen

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seventy seven. Written and directed by Spielberg and produced by

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Columbia Pictures, the film follows Roy Neary played by Richard Dreyfuss,

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an ordinary man from Indiana whose encounter with an unidentified

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flying object sends him into an obsession he can't explain

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and can't control. He starts building strange shapes out of

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mashed potatoes. He tears up his backyard. His wife takes

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the kids and leaves. He drives across the country, chasing

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a vision he saw once for thirty seconds in the dark.

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The film also follows a parallel track government scientists and

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researchers who have been quietly documenting UFO encounters around the world,

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converging on a remote location in Wyoming where something is

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about to happen. The two tracks meet at Devil's Tower,

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and what happens there is one of the most genuinely

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moving sequences in American cinema. But before we get there,

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let's talk about what Spielberg was actually making close. Encounter

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is not a monster movie. It's not a thriller. It's

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not even really a science fiction film in the traditional sense.

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It's a film about belief, about the compulsion to know

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about what happens to a person when they encounter something

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so far outside their understanding that their ordinary life simply

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stops making sense. Roy Neary isn't a scientist or a

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soldier or a government official. He's a husband and father

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who works for the power company and plays with model

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trains in the garage. He is deliberately nobody special. Spielberg

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made that choice with great care, because the point isn't

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that the aliens chose Roy. The point is that Roy

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can't let go of what he saw. That obsession, the

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thing you can't explain but can't stop thinking about, is

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the real subject of the film. Richard Dreyfuss plays Roy

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with a quality that was unusual for science fiction films

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of the era, genuine psychological unraveling. He's not cool, he's

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not competent, he's not in control. He's a man coming

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apart at the seams, driven by something he doesn't understand,

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doing damage to his family in pursuit of a vision

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he can barely articulate. Dreyfus makes Roy sympathetic even when

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he's behaving badly, which is most of the film. That's

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a hard thing to pull off. Terry Garr plays his wife, Ronnie,

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and she has given something even harder to do. She

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has to make the audience understand why she leaves while

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also making them wish she would stay. She's not the villain.

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She's a woman watching her husband disintegrate and making the

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rational choice. The film doesn't punish her for it, It

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just lets her go that moral complexity. The idea that

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Roy's obsession costs him something real, something he might not

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get back, keeps Close Encounters from being a simple wonder story.

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The awe comes at a price. Spielberg understood this. He

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said later that the film was partly about his own

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consuming passion for movie making, about the way creative obsession

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could isolate a person from the people who loved them.

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That self awareness gives the film a weight that pure

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spectacle never could. The production was enormous by the standards

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of the time. The interior of the Mothership Hangar sequence

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was built inside a former dirigible hangar in Mobile, Alabama.

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One of the largest indoor sets ever constructed. The visual effects,

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supervised by Douglas Trumbull were groundbreaking. The ships don't move

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the way movie UFOs had moved before. They don't glide

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or streak. They drift, they hover. They behave like nothing

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from Earth because they aren't. But the most important creative

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decision Spielberg made wasn't visual. It was musical. He brought

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in John Williams, who had just won an oscar for Jaws,

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and Williams gave him something no special effect could have provided.

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A language. The five note motif that the scientists use

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to communicate with the aliens is the film's emotional spine.

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It's not a theme, it's a conversation. It's the idea

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that music is the first thing we'd reach for if

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we needed to talk to something we'd never met before,

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something that didn't share our words or our history. There's

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something quietly profound about that that the universal language isn't

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mathematics or light signals. It's a melody. Williams understood exactly

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what Spielberg needed. The score builds from strangeness to something

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close to rapture by the time the mothership appears in

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full the music isn't accompanying the images, it's completing them.

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The film was received as a companion piece to Star Wars,

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which had come out six months earlier in the summer

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of nineteen seventy seven. Both films were about space, about wonder,

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about something beyond the ordinary, but they were almost opposite

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in temperament. Star Wars was about action heroism the pleasures

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of myth. Close Encounters was about passivity, surrender, the terrifying

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pleasure of being chosen by something incomprehensible. Luke Skywalker goes

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looking for adventure. Roy Neary has adventure thrust upon him,

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and spends the whole film wishing he could understand why.

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What's remarkable about Close Encounters seen from a distance is

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how little it explains. We never learn where the aliens

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come from. We never understand their purpose. We don't know

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why they return the people in planes they took, or

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why they took them in the first place. We don't

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know what Roy will find when he goes with them

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at the end. That ambiguity was a deliberate choice, and

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it was a brave one. Studio films in nineteen seventy

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seven were not supposed to end with the hero walking

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into the unknown and the audience not knowing if he's

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coming back. Columbia was nervous about it. The ending evolved

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during development. Spielberg pushed for it anyway. He was right

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to fight for it. The ambiguity is the point. The

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film is about the experience of encountering something beyond your comprehension,

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and the honest response to that experience isn't explanation. It's awe.

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Explanation would diminish it. The not knowing is the entire

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feeling the film is trying to create. There's a sequence

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near the end, before the aliens arrive, where the scientists

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play the five Notes signal into the night sky from

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a bank of speakers arrayed across the desert, and then

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from somewhere in the dark, something plays it back. That

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exchange call and response, human and un known is one

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of the purest expressions of what Spielberg was reaching for,

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not confrontation, not invasion, contact. He would return to that

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idea again and again throughout his career, but he never

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made it quite this nakedly, this undefended. In later films,

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the wonder would always be complicated by danger or loss

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or moral weight here for a few extraordinary minutes. At

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the end of Close Encounters, it's just wonder uncut, unqualified.

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The film became one of the biggest hits of nineteen

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seventy seven, earning hundreds of millions across its original release

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and later reissues on a budget of around twenty million dollars.

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It earned eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Director for Spielberg,

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though it didn't win Best Picture, losing to Annie Hall,

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which is one of those Oscar outcomes that look stranger

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with every passing year. Close In gave people a framework

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for thinking about the unknown that wasn't rooted in fear.

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Before nineteen seventy seven, the dominant image of alien contact

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in American popular culture was invasion, the War of the Worlds,

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the day the Earth stood still in its more ambiguous way,

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The alien was a threat,

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The unknown was dangerous. Spielberg said, what if it isn't

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What if the unknown is just unknown? What if the

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right response to something beyond your understanding isn't a weapon,

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but a willingness to stay in the room. What if contact,

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real contact with something genuinely other, required you to let

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go of everything you thought you knew. You can trace

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a line from Close Encounters to Contact to Arrival to

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every film that has since tried to imagine First Contact

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as something other than war. Spielberg built the template. He

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gave this genre It's better Angels. He also gave us

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Roy Neary, who is still one of the most honest

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portraits of a person in the grip of obsession that

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American cinema has ever produced. Not glamorous, not heroic, just

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a man who saw something and couldn't pretend he hadn't.

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Next time we flip the coin, same question, what is

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out there, but a completely different answer e t. The extraterrestrial,

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the alien who isn't a mystery to be solved, but

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a friend to be lost. But for now, remember this

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind isn't a film about aliens.

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It's a film about what it costs to believe in

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something you can't prove, and what it feels like when

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the universe finally proves it for you.