Nostalgia is a funny thing, and it gives our memories vivid colors that reality never had. I think Paul Simon, who has said many things well, may have said it best:

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

A few lines later the narrator lets this fact seep through:

I know they’d never match my sweet imagination
And everything looks worse in black and white

During the final days of Lauren’s pregnancy, we were watching some “comfort movies,” and we decided to watch 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. While I’d seen it three or four times before, it was only in this viewing that a profound truth became glaringly obvious: Richard Dreyfus’ iconic everyman encountering the ineffable, Roy Neary, is terrible.

In my Kodachrome® recollection, Neary has a Jamesian mystical experience that he can only render in sculpture (potato medium and purloined property), hunted by shadowy government officials and scientists he reaches Devil’s Tower, Wyoming, and is chosen by the extraterrestrials before he joins them to jaunt happily beyond Earth to frolic among the stars. It has the glitter and sheen of Spielberg of the early 80s: childlike wonder, lens flare, and the messy reality of family.

In black and white consideration though, the modern audience (myself included) asks: “Yeah, but what about his wife, his kids, the house he totaled?” The last they saw Dad he was in the midst of his Jamesian crisis and then he’s…gone.

As I asked myself this question, I had to ask, “why had I never thought to ask that before?” Only with some huge planetoids of socially-indoctrinated privilege could it be swallowed that Neary was a “hero” entitled to be a Terran ambassador of humankind’s best. But in the Kodachrome® memories of this film — he was. Privilege is a hell of a drug.

With the aid of critical theory (of the gender and economic kind), I’d like to unpack this movie a bit more.

Oh, and let’s just say what doesn’t need much saying: Teri Garr was criminally underused in this role.