Close Encounters and Disclosure Day

Sure, yeah.

The only reason I was having a different feeling about this is because I watched Close Encounters the other week.

I actually watched it twice, basically.

I watched the director's cut and then the special edition.

And I was really kind of disturbed by Close Encounters.

I

felt like there was

a lot of weird questions and there's a lot of things in it that feel very...

Not like sinister, but definitely cryptic or something.

I don't know.

There's something weird about it.

And I can't tell if that's just like because I kind of have this new way of looking at Spielberg movies and I have a hard time just like taking it at face value.

Because when you take Close Encounters at face value, it's a relatively simple movie.

It's a very simple story, and it's very clear what the motivations are, and it culminates in this big epic thing.

And it really does feel like an attempt to create wonder and awe and spectacle, which at the time was not nearly as common as it is today in cinema.

You know, obviously Spielberg kind of is one of the biggest auteurs to create this type of movie.

And, you know, like taking it at face value, you can very much just imagine that Steven Spielberg is into aliens.

And he's just like a wondrous creative person who really wants to play around with the ideas that there's life on other worlds and wants to try and create like this cinematic reality for that.

And just something Spielberg's always been into is kind of like getting us closer and closer to these fantasies.

We can experience all these things vicariously through his movies, all these wondrous, magical, fantastical events like aliens showing up and dinosaurs being back and stuff.

And obviously, this is kind of just like the reputation that solidified for Spielberg, which we've discussed in previous episodes.

I don't know if you want to retread that at all, but we've already kind of set the stage for how we feel like Steven Spielberg is not merely a slick commercial director, that he's not just a propagandic filmmaker putting out the... sort of approved colloquialisms of the day or whatever and we've kind of had a change of heart about him and how he's actually a very intelligent thoughtful filmmaker who makes films with lots of layers and he thinks about the choices he makes or at the very least he feels the choices he makes in a way that is very intuitive and um leads to a work that really lends to conspiracy theory thought, you know, in a way that Kubrick does or something.

I mean,

specifically Close Encounters, right? Which is, I mean, behind the scenes on the 4K disc.

He's pretty straightforward about like, at the time I believed in aliens and then also Watergate happened.