When faced with something out of this world, people react in very different ways. Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind examines these reactions, as the movie revolves around mankind’s first contacts with an extraterrestrial race. Disbelief, wonder, fear and joy are all emotions that the film’s characters feel when encountering the flying saucers that visit earth throughout the movie, and Spielberg uses a system of images to truly capture this reactions and help us compare them to each other. Mercado defines image systems as “the use of recurrent images and compositions in a film to add layers of meaning to a narrative”; in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, no image is more recurrent than a shot (sometimes a close up, sometimes a long shot due to the number of people in the frame) of the character(s) looking slightly up and to the right or left corner of the screen, either in fear or amazement.
These shots are crucial to the film, and repeat themselves constantly as different characters are faced with the extraterrestrials. It works wonderfully, because the film plays with our expectation of the aliens and their ships, but seldom lets us see them. By focusing on the characters face, which is always colored by bright lights in white, blue, and/or red, Spielberg lets us know that the character is being exposed to the aliens without having to show them. This builds suspense and anticipation for the audience, while simultaneously allowing us to intimately examine the characters’ reactions and emotions. This shot becomes a signifier to the characters’ relationships to the aliens, which foreshadow the end of the movie. Larry and Barry look up to the sky in amazement and childlike naivety. Barry is in fact a child, and his reactions are used in parallel to Larry’s to help us understand our protagonist. Larry’s life pre-alien contact is not great, as a short scene of his shouting children and angry, child-like wife lets us know. He looks at the sky and aliens in amazement because it adds adventure and purpose to his life. Like a child, he fails to see any danger in the alien visitors, instead standing in awe whenever he faces them. In the end, it is Larry and Barry who get to meet the aliens and ride on their ship.
The long shots of crowds staring at the sky in amazement are also parallel to a very crucial shot in the film which captures Larry’s descent into obsession. When Larry begins gathering materials to create his largest representation of Devil’s Tower, he starts throwing plants and dirt inside the house. Larry’s wife can no longer stand this, and goes outside to actively try to stop Larry’s collection. He is obviously making a scene, causing all of the neighbors to star staring at him. When he finally falls down, right before Larry’s wife takes the kids and leaves, a crucial scene of Larry’s oldest child and some neighbors staring down at him occurs. The staring is very much a parallel to other scenes of characters staring at the sky; but in this scene, the characters are looking down on Larry, as if he were an alien himself. In contrast to how Larry looks at the UFOs, his family and neighbors look at him with fear and anger. Larry, in his obsession, has become an alien to a family that has no love for or interest in extraterrestrials. This scene is once again paralleled at the end of the movie, when Larry is taken by the aliens and walks hand in hand with them as they board the ship, while the scientists stare in amazement and wonder––at him, this time. As he leaves earth in the alien ship, we can easily imagine everyone at the Devil’s Tower looking to the sky in wonderment. 
Media Design and Criticism 