End of Innocence: Why E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Will Never Have A Sequel
If you’ve ever fallen victim to the cultural maelstrom that is E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, then you may have noticed something missing. For all its popularity and excessive use of obscure merchandising (and trust me, my Kraft Macaroni and Cheese E.T. bendable toy is just the surface of it), the only product movie-wise that we ever got was the original film. In our modern day of ever-growing Transformers sequels and Marvel cinematic universes, it’s a wonder how E.T. never got caught up in its own fame; so much so that it would have spurred multiple sequels of its own. Was it just respecting the trends of its time? Would it have its own cinematic universe if it was made today? Upon further examination, I truly don’t see Steven Spielberg ever returning to this project; not because he didn’t like it or because it’s outdated. If anything, E.T.’s themes of alienation and friendship could speak more to the isolated generation of today than any other. The reason E.T. doesn’t, and never will, have a sequel lies outside the realm of marketing and instead in the domain of its creator’s personal idealisms. But for that, we’ll need to delve into Spielberg’s own personal history to understand his life’s work.
When Steven Spielberg was nineteen years old, his parents were in the midst of settling their divorce, caused by what was a lengthy and appropriately complex extramarital affair. As an electrical engineer at the onset of the computer era, Spielberg's father, Arnold Spielberg, had taken a position with the RCA corporation, which took the Spielberg family from Cincinnati, Ohio to New Jersey, then to Arizona, and finally to Saratoga, California. As an Orthodox Jew, much of Steven's childhood was met with bullying and discrimination, to the extent that Spielberg was made to feel ashamed of his ethnicity. The isolation of anti-Semitic sentiment experienced throughout Spielberg's younger years would lead to his familiarity with being alone, and would be a driving force for his interest in making 8 mm films by himself.
Spielberg would go on to win contests and prizes for his independent films throughout high school, where his interest in escapist adventure films and science fiction would become a staple of his cinematic style. But even so, the confusion of his parents' divorce would continue to perpetuate the theme of isolation in Steven's life, where he blamed his father and found solace in his mother. Steven would go on to resent his father for the divorce, leaving to go to college at California State University and working as an intern at Universal Studios. The persistent resentment and intentional absence of father figures would become a recurring motif throughout many of Spielberg's films moving forward, with Spielberg remaining seemingly fixated in his past before that very moment of separation, the likes of which would ultimately define his life and his career.
It would take years before Spielberg would finally accept what was really the truth, and that it was actually his mother who had the affair all along. Arnold Spielberg had only hid his wife's affair, and therefore the brunt of their divorce, in order to protect his son's image of his mother. Unintentionally, this would unjustly create an unrealistic idealism of Steven's mother, one that would become a drip in the well by which Steven sourced his movies' characters from. One could analyze this as Steven's attempt to make sense of it all, to just have something or someone that he could blame in order to be able to move on. But the world isn't always that convenient and relationships are not always that certain. For Steven, the only things in life that were certain were the worlds he imagined as a child, when things were much more simple. And the only way to experience those worlds was through film-making.
From its movie poster and promotional advertising alone, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial doesn't appear to be a film tackling the earnest depths of divorce, and consequently the rebounding effects that divorce may have on a child. If anything, it appears to be a movie exactly of its time: a heartfelt retrospection on the surreal and dreamlike qualities implicit of childhood, where nothing feels quite as real in hindsight as it did in the moment. Like a smear of oil to a lens, blurring the crisp starkness of reality, and in that, the blurring of the hardest edges of the truth. I find childhood to be most like the time shortly after a nap; waking up to a limbo between the fabricated and the textured, to when one's senses experience a jet-lag between cerebral spheres. The worlds and places risen out of this imagination may inevitably succumb to the dull limitation of reality, but something in that short drink of dreamland wanderlust makes the adventure that much more enticing. And in that cusp between worlds is where I find the domain of cinema, where we can try to document our dreams as though they had really happened, with E.T. being one of their most demonstrative.
Steven Spielberg would eventually produce E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial with the help of Kathleen Kennedy, who you may know now as an absolute martyr within the Disney Era Star Wars fandom. Nevertheless, E.T. would then be distributed by Universal Pictures, allotting it a ride titled "E.T. Adventure" at Universal Studios theme parks (which is a clear favorite of mine).
In the movie, a creature (later nicknamed E.T.) is left behind by his alien race. He meets a young boy named Elliot, ensuing the collision of two totally different world-views as E.T. tries to understand life on Earth. Throughout the story, E.T. and Elliot bond both telepathically and emotionally, forming a friendship that supersedes both space and time. This bond even becomes biological as both E.T. and Elliot become ill, leading to the U.S. government surrounding Elliot’s house in quarantine hamster tubes in an attempt to study them. At this point, you are more than welcome to interject your own “Quarantine 2020” joke here. They both eventually recover, and after transmitting a message to E.T.’s alien race using a makeshift Speak & Spell device, E.T. goes back to his spaceship and flies back home. And nobody ever saw from E.T. again... until 1990 when “E.T. Adventure” opened at Universal Studios Florida.
The movie itself is ripe with nostalgic childhood throwbacks intrinsic of Spielberg's life and childhood, be it with Elliot wanting to play Dungeons & Dragons with his brother, a cameo Halloween costume appearance by Yoda from Star Wars, or the recurring mention of Reese’s Pieces candy. As a side-note, originally M&Ms were going to be used instead of Reese's Pieces, but Mars Incorporated (the inventors of M&Ms) turned down the offer because they thought that the movie E.T. would end up scaring children. Which is ironic, because aliens come from Mars, not Hershey, Pennsylvania.
The movie also examines the condition of childhood at the time, such as the exploitation of children as naive and newfound consumers during the Reagan Era's relaxation of marketing laws. This would become an undertone of not only E.T. but many of Spielberg's films moving forward, hinting at Spielberg's own latent reflection on corporate marketing in the 1980s.
In juxtaposition to the joys of childhood, E.T. also touches on the theme of divorce, most prevalently shown by Elliot’s mother and her inability to emotionally overcome her separation from Elliot’s father. This is partly out of jealousy and partly out of remorse; which is an understandable reaction to divorce because oftentimes there is no proper reaction to it. A divorce doesn't have to make sense; it's an element of law, not an element of etiquette. Oddly enough, you may also notice that Spielberg never allows the viewer to hear the father's side of the divorce, or what really happened other than that he's clearly moved on somewhere else. Hmm... sounds strangely familiar... kind of like... Steven Spielberg was using this movie as a means to vent his own personal emotions or something… Nostalgia is not just an emotion in the tide, but something that resonates with us throughout our entire life, even when we aren’t aware of it. We are products of our past, even when we think we aren’t.
But with all speculation aside, this entire analysis has been leading up to one important notion: Spielberg and his team had crafted a potential storytelling universe bred from his own nostalgia, and yet there has still never been an E.T. sequel. As I’ve previously mentioned, the climate of movies today seems to guarantee a sequel from something as successful and culturally impactful as E.T., even at the sake of being just another cash-grab. And while the ride “E.T. Adventure” does try to propose an idea of what happened to E.T. after the movie, it still doesn't hold the same merit in the cultural zeitgeist as, say, a substantial sequel might. And to make matters even more complex, Spielberg had actually written a treatment for a potential sequel back in 1982 with the original film’s screenwriter Melissa Mathison, tentatively titled E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. This movie would have canonically addressed Elliot’s life after meeting E.T., in which a group of evil alien mutants kidnaps Elliot and his friends. But this treatment was never put into production, as Spielberg thought that it took away from the themes of the original movie. But with that being the case, why didn't Spielberg just write a different sequel? Is there a deeper reason why we fundamentally will never get another movie?
For that I'd like to bring up a notable scene, whereby E.T. and Elliot first transmit their message. There's a turning point in this scene when Elliot begins to realize that his bond with E.T. has grown stronger than he had initially anticipated, and that E.T. going back to his spaceship would ultimately mean the end of their friendship altogether. Elliot begins to beg E.T. to stay with him, solely so that they can grow up together. But this scene in the context of the movie doesn't make much sense, because E.T. is fully-grown and doesn't serve a true purpose on Earth. His existence doesn't affect the fact that Elliot will become an adult one day, and that he'll too probably marry and experience the complexity of a relationship just as his parents had.
But thematically, this scene makes perfect sense, as this not only represents Elliot's desperation for friendship, but his inability to mature beyond his childhood. Spielberg's inspiration behind E.T. was said to be from his idea of an imaginary companion; one that filled the void of Spielberg’s loneliness as a child and of the absence of his father. Elliot functions as a motif of Spielberg's inner child, with a desperation to likewise remain in his childhood. Just as Elliot's father left Elliot's family, Steven Spielberg believed that his own father had left his family. E.T. functions as a replacement for Elliot's father, something foreign that can understand Elliot's internal sense of alienation in the world. Elliot has no friends, can barely get along with his siblings, and like other kids, finds recluse in playing make-believe with his action figures. Elliot doesn't feel confident enough to mature without the support and presence that his father would have provided. Instead, Elliot finds solace in the idyllic, in a scenario where his father's absence does not hinder his character. Likewise, Spielberg finds a similar solace in the nostalgia of his past, when his father's presence did exist and he could play make-believe with his 8 mm film.
One could analyze the story of E.T. as the adversity of a child's imagination in juxtaposition to the reality of adulthood, with Elliot's house at the crest of the suburban hilltop as a nostalgic Mount Olympus or Stairway to Heaven. It resembles the paradise of childhood overlooking the reality of life, with E.T.'s magical abilities embodying the insurmountable scope of child-like imagination. E.T. can never have a sequel because that magic ended as the movie’s credits began to roll. E.T. going back home insinuates the end of life's magic and therefore a transition into reality for Elliot as he comes to face his truths. That magic is gone, but remains forever encapsulated in those two hours of film.
For Spielberg, it seems that the world he crafted through filmmaking was his way of retaining that magic, that fantasy that he could no longer grasp onto as an adult. The separation of his parents was a separation of his past and his future, a line that defined him that he could never cross again. We stand at that line today. In these perilous times, the world before and the world after have become two completely separate places. And I think that line is the place that makes nostalgia so inherently tempting, because we want what we can't have anymore. Over time, I've come to realize that nostalgia is not just a marketing scheme (although it can definitely be used for that) but in the end is ultimately just our minds’ attempt to find stability in uncertain circumstances. As we look towards a precarious future moving forward, we find our footing in what we already think to be true, even if what we think is actually distorted by rose-tinted lenses. It's in moments like these where we're our most vulnerable, but become our most powerful. And who knows, maybe the loneliness of quarantine has inspired someone out there, some kid with some 8 mm film and a fondness for his imagination, who will one day give us a movie like E.T. that's worthy of being its spiritual successor. And maybe one day we'll look back at the world now and feel the same way as we do for the world back then. Maybe life just needs context, like a movie, and living is the adventure.
Want to learn more about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and its ride at Universal Studios? Watch Loafpile's video below!
