Steven Spielberg’s film, A Close Encounter of a Third Kind, is loaded with image systems that serve to make themes of motifs more prominent for the audience. Mercado states that “the use of recurrent images and compositions in a film add layers of meaning to a narrative” (21). Spielberg uses lighting to convey the sense of curiosity and uneasiness that come with encountering the unknown.
There’s three separate stories surrounding the encounter with extraterrestrial beings. The first story is the government trying to gain contact with the aliens. The more important story is that which follow Roy (our protagonist) and the story of Barry and his mother Jillian. In the opening scene with the government we see someone running the control room for planes. This gives us a sense of control and order because everything is monitored very closely so that planes don’t collide. Suddenly something appears in the radar and almost crashes into the planes. This is the government’s first contact with the aliens. The scene of the man in the flight control room is suspenseful in that he is trying to direct the planes to keep them from colliding with the unknown that suddenly appeared somehow. The juxtaposition of control and then chaos/lack of control is important for lighting for the rest of the film.
Roy is sent out of the house because of a power outage that randomly occurs in the town (the aliens probably did it). His job requires him to go out and try to fix/figure out what’s happening when he stops his truck to look at a map to figure out where he’s going. We suddenly see bright headlights in behind Roy’s truck. He motions for them to go past him and the car creates a bunch of dust that then creates a feeling of confusion. Then we see what looks like headlights behind Roy’s truck again. Instead a car go around we suddenly see the lights float up. When Roy first encounters the aliens a bright white light appears over his truck. This bright white light should give off a calm and friendly feeling, but once we see what’s happening in the car it feels disorientating. When the objects in the car start moving and floating around it we feel the confusion and fear that Roy is feeling. This is representative of how when we don’t understand something we tend to fear the unknown. In supernatural encounters things floating around are usually seen as a sign of malicious intent. Roy doesn’t know what the intent of the aliens are, he simply knows he doesn’t understand. The audience can infer that even though it seems like chaos the light let’s the watcher realize that maybe the aliens aren’t here to harm, they’re simply making contact.
In Barry’s case all of toy’s come alive while he’s sleeping. This again is a way of making the audience understand that contact with something we don’t understand tends to frighten us. However, after the aliens came in contact with both of these characters, the characters became fascinated and wanted to know more about them. We know this because we saw Barry try to chase the space ship when he runs into the field and later in the road, and Roy tried to follow them in his truck. Barry’s later encounters the aliens and the lighting suddenly makes the audience feel uncertain in their intentions. We saw them bring a white calming, comforting light over Roy but they used a harsh red light when Barry opened the door for them. This red light thus adds to the violence of the scene when Barry is abducted and pulled out of the arms of his mother.
In the final scene the lighting returns back to the bright white color we originally saw in the beginning of the film. The mother-ship comes over Devil’s Tower and creates a massive beam of light onto the people. The ship then lands and the bright light is used to obscure the image of the aliens who were coming out of the ship. So even though the audience finally gets to see them come out of the ship and make contact with the people directly, the lighting still makes people feel a sense of mystery surrounding the aliens and their intentions.
Throughout the whole film the audience is in caught in the feeling of anticipation, curiosity and confusion with the characters of trying to understand what’s going on. The lighting often served as a mirror of the feeling to help establish a better relationship with the audience and the characters within the story. Thus, the lighting enhances the image systems and successfully heightens the mixed feelings of being fascinated and afraid of trying to understand something that is unknown to us.
Media Design and Criticism 