Family Dramas: The Family in E.T. — the Extra-Terrestrial

Abstract

I had not seen E.T. when the first graffiti began appearing on railway bridges and hoardings but I knew what prompted them. As if to assert the film’s mythical, omnipresent status, the film’s catchphrase and central dilemma, ‘ET phone home’ was scrawled across urban spaces in the latter half of 1982.¹ Indeed, the graffiti appeared before the film did.² E.T. was the biggest grosser of the decade and therefore deserves a closer look. It is also a film primarily concerned with familial relationships, directly interrogating contemporary preoccupations with the power balances between father and son, but a film which cannot achieve resolution. It therefore rehearses the core contemporary familial paradigms which took a firm social and cultural hold on the decade.

Fine, we’ll just put a smile on our faces and try to get through the evening. That’s all I want to do.

Mother overheard by surveillance team in E.T.