Right Here With E.T.

by Elaine Fowler Palencia


                                                                Collage by Anthony Afairo Nze

                                                                

In June 1982, the cinematic sky lit up with a science fiction film unlike any that had gone before it. Nowadays, the movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes calls E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial the greatest science fiction film ever made.
         My children were the perfect ages for the movie. Rachel was ten, the age of Elliott, the character played by Henry Thomas, who befriends the little space alien. She had seen the ads on television and begged to go. Andrew was nearly five, the age of Elliott’s feisty sister Gertie, played by Drew Barrymore.
        But we had a problem: Andrew had severe cognitive disabilities and unpredictable, aggressive behavior. Moreover, he had been diagnosed with a sensory integration disorder which meant he couldn’t process sensory input efficiently. He could become easily agitated by raw sensory data pouring into his brain too fast for him to organize and filter it for what was important. Taking him anywhere was difficult. Taking him to the movies had, so far, been a disaster. Because he had little capacity to sit quietly for any reason except to receive an immediate reward, I would buy him too much candy, popcorn, and soda at the concession stand. We got to stay for as long as Andrew was eating. I hoped that one day, by the time he finished the food, his interest would be caught by a film and we could remain.
        So far, that hadn’t happened. As soon as he swallowed the last of the popcorn, Andrew would pull at me and yell inarticulately until I took him home. But every so often, we would try again. If only he could somehow understand the representative nature of film, somehow clue in to the unfolding of a story, what an educational and recreational resource the movies would be for him. He would enjoy them so much, I reasoned circularly, if only he could enjoy them.
        Because of his short attention span and inability to think in the abstract, it was hard to entertain Andrew, or for Andrew to entertain himself. He was hyperactive and, because of cerebral palsy, uncoordinated. Getting through a day without destruction of property was a challenge. He seemed to respond to television, or at least be distracted by it; but he did not appear to register the presence of pictures on a cinema screen. Perhaps he could not generalize from the experience of television. Perhaps the scale of the big screen and its surroundings overloaded his senses. I wondered if a movie screen appeared to him as a wall of shifting colors, like flags blowing in the wind. Meaningless in his very concrete world.
        When E.T. came to town, I chickened out and we didn’t go. I couldn’t face Andrew’s behavior turning us into a spectacle and, moreover, disrupting other people’s enjoyment of the film. Rachel was disappointed. I could have taken her by herself, but there was a larger issue to consider. The era of keeping people with cognitive disabilities out of sight was passing, but it was not over, especially for the more “difficult” cases, individuals whose behavior and/or appearance were farthest from the “norm.”
        We were under pressure from various professionals in education and medicine, as well as from some family members, to institutionalize our son. But my husband and I believed that he, and other children like him, deserved to live in their own homes and communities. If this was hard for the community, and hard for Andrew, then our task was to socialize him so he would both learn to enjoy his hometown and to behave appropriately.
        But the community would have to be educated, too. If he could be his own best ambassador, I believed that, in time, the community would become accustomed to one more “different” person. A good outcome for everybody, except that I would have to put Andrew in unfamiliar situations populated by strangers who stared at him and often moved away as if frightened or disgusted. But how else could he learn to tolerate his own environment? How else could the environment learn to tolerate him? I sometimes felt that my efforts at inclusion had sentenced him to be reminded daily that he was a stranger in a strange land. But there is so much out there for him to enjoy, I would tell myself.
        A couple of months later, E.T. returned to town for a second run. One Saturday afternoon, Rachel, Andrew, and I set out to see it.
        Throughout the previews, Andrew busily devoured his snacks. By the time the main feature began, he had almost finished.
        The first scene of E.T. is calm. The camera pans over the starry night sky before dropping into a forest near a large tract of suburban homes. We hear strange, low sounds that are vaguely musical, vaguely animal. Small creatures who are built low to the ground and who do not move like human beings are puttering about in dense, foggy woods, gathering plants. The visibility is low, so that the audience does not get a clear view of them. A lighted spaceship a short distance away indicates they are extraterrestrials. The greenhouse in the ship signifies they are on a research mission. As a rabbit watches without fear, strange, long-fingered hands tenderly lift a tiny evergreen tree from the soil.
        Mesmerized by the strange scene, I forgot to monitor Andrew.
        The dreamlike mood is shattered by the roar of a pickup truck, followed by the chaos of probing flashlight beams, booted feet splashing in puddles, the noise of jangling keys: government agents, bent on the capture or destruction of the gentle visitors.
        Andrew grabbed my forearm. He sat forward, staring openmouthed. When he began to spit at the images, I knew he had grasped the essence of what was happening. Spitting was one of his defense mechanisms. He had immediately identified with the hunted.
        The peaceful aliens hurry back to their spaceship, but one of them is late to comprehend the danger. When he sees the commotion, he groans. When he is spotted by the humans, he screams and flees, grunting with fear—emitting the same kind of inchoate sounds that Andrew typically made when upset. A red light locates the creature in the darkness as he scurries and hides—it is his glowing heart. Under grave threat, the spaceship takes off without him, leaving him marooned on earth, lost, unable to move easily in unfamiliar terrain and gravity, unable to communicate with his pursuers or with anyone else.
        Without taking his eyes from the screen, Andrew moaned like E.T. and increased his grip on my arm. He knew what it was like to live on a planet your body isn’t quite adapted to and to be stranded at a distance from safety.
        As Tim Dirks notes in the www.filmsite.org review of E.T., “Much of the film was deliberately shot from a lower camera angle—from a child’s point-of-view—to manipulatively encourage younger viewers to identify with the characters, to simulate how overwhelming and threatening adults look to children (from the waist or knees down), and to force adult viewers to relive their own childhood.” Mary, the mother of the children who help E.T., is the only adult photographed from the waist up until late in the film.
Andrew knew how threatening adults could be.
        The door to Andrew’s classroom in the special ed wing of the grade school he attended had a one-way window. One could stand in the hall and look into the classroom without the children knowing they were being watched. This arrangement had been set up for visiting students from the University of Illinois who were studying special education. They could observe teaching methods without disrupting classes.
        Not long before our viewing of E.T., I happened to be in the neighborhood of the school and decided to visit Andrew’s preschool class. From the hall, I looked in before I opened the door. A birthday party was in progress. Andrew’s classmates were seated around a table, wearing party hats, and waiting for the cupcakes and servings of punch being placed on trays across the room. Andrew, however, was tied to a chair, arms at his sides, some distance away from the party. His face was wet with tears. As I watched, he strained against his bonds and rocked in his chair in an effort to join the party. His chair fell over, landing him on his side on the floor, still tied in it.
        An aide carrying a tray of refreshments stepped over him. The classroom teacher saw the accident but did not stop attending to the children at the table. She was, after all, encouraging them to have fun.
        When I opened the door, the teacher froze at the sight of me. “It’s not what it looks like!” she cried. “He didn’t pick up his toys! He couldn’t go to the party until he picked up his toys!”
        “He does not understand the concept of causality,” I snapped, as she hastened to untie him. “And, he can’t pick up toys with his arms tied.”
        The school psychological report filed in May 1982 noted that Andrew, four and a half years old, had the visual perception of a one-year-old and the auditory perception of a two-year-old. His receptive language was gauged to be that of a child twelve to eighteen months old, expressive language approximately eighteen to twenty months, and speech, twelve months. Yet, in a special education class, he was required to understand conditions comprehensible to a child with his chronological age.
        At home, however, I knew that he could understand more of Sesame Street than the psychological report indicated. He clapped his hands and bounced in his chair when the theme music came on. He pointed at Big Bird and Cookie Monster. That was why I wanted to give movies a chance.
        In E.T., the scene shifts to Elliott and his friends. The mood lightens with the horseplay of the boys. Andrew’s hold on my arm relaxed, but his attention stayed with the film. He was still getting it. After E.T. is discovered by the children, who decide to hide him in a closet and conceal his presence from adults, two difficulties arise: how to communicate with the little stranger and what to feed him.
        Andrew was eleven months old when I took him to our pediatrician with a question. At birth, he had appeared “normal,” and I had no idea there was anything wrong with him. But, although he seemed to be progressing adequately in weight, strength, and alertness, he would not imitate gestures or sounds.
        “How,” I asked, “is he going to learn if he can’t imitate?”
        “Boys are slow,” the doctor reassured me. “He’ll catch up.”
        When I returned with the same story at fifteen months, the doctor’s attitude changed abruptly. He wrote out a telephone number on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “Call this agency. Get him assessed.”
        So began my long journey to understand my son’s delays and the fact that he would not ever be “normal.”
        Once Elliott lures E.T. into his house and up to his room by means of a trail of Reese’s Pieces, he shows various objects to E.T. in an effort to establish communication, explaining each one with exaggerated enunciation. Later, Gertie also tries to teach E.T., using an alphabet book. When he is left alone in the house, he quickly begins to imitate gestures and sounds on the television.
        A report from Andrew’s school speech therapist noted: “We’ve tried signing this year but [Andrew] still only uses a few [signs] consistently and needs a verbal cue for these (eat, milk, all done). He does vocalize a little more this year but only imitates the “m” sound consistently. He does ask if he can use something by pointing to it.”
         “Are you hungry?” Elliott asks E.T.
         In the movie theater, Andrew stood up. Silhouetted against the screen, a tiny figure, small for his age, he knocked his right fist against the elbow of his upraised, bent, left arm: the sign for cracker.
         I had never known Andrew to help anyone before. Now I wondered if, with everyone concentrating on helping him, he had ever been given the chance.
         When E.T. sees a globe and pictures of the solar system, he says, “Home.”
         “O,” said Andrew, drawing out the long vowel.
         Eventually, E.T. and Elliott, who have formed a psychic connection, both fall ill; and it becomes clear that if E.T. remains on earth, he will die. To my relief, Andrew did not seem to understand this segment of the movie and continued to watch without anxiety, becoming only mildly restless when the government scientists took control of the dying alien. Only once more did he respond to the film. When E.T. raises his long index finger with its glowing tip to point at the sky, Andrew raised his arm and pointed skyward with his index finger. His face was solemn and intent. Home, I thought. He understands wanting to be home, in a safe place.
         Andrew watched E.T. to the end. From that day forward, he remained entranced with movies. In a 1985 letter to my parents, I reported taking him to see the film again and buying him a cassette copy, which he had taken to watching every day during breakfast. I also bought him an E.T. doll made of brown pleather, which he kept next to him on the couch for months. In adulthood, his favorite films were about witches, ghostbusters, natural disasters, superheroes, and outer space. He created a language for the DVDs given to him at Christmas and on birthdays. He requested Disney movies by quacking like Donald Duck and asked to see the tornado movie Twister by making a whistling sound like wind and a swirling motion (tornado!) with an index finger. For Ghostbusters, he bounced in his chair in rhythm to the Ghostbusters theme song. The witchy, Halloween movie Hocus Pocus he summoned with a long, drawn-out “OOOOOOOOO.” His sound for “movie,” which he made when he wanted us to take him to the cinema, was the sound of Star Wars villain, Darth Vader, breathing.
        When I ponder today why Andrew identified with E.T. so completely, I think of the film’s subtext of “otherness.” While he clearly sympathized with E.T., I believe he made connections that went beyond his bond with the odd-looking alien. Melissa Mathison’s screenplay for E.T. developed from a subplot in Spielberg’s unfinished sci-fi movie project, Night Skies, in which Buddy, a friendly alien, befriends a child with autism. Viewing the film through my Andrew lens, and imagining, as well, the way he saw it through the lens of his own experience, I wonder if a trace of autism doesn’t reveal itself in Elliot’s differentness from the other children in the film. Perhaps Andrew recognized it. In addition to all the other diagnoses he collected in his life, Andrew was labeled autistic and, indeed, often demonstrated autistic behavior.
        As for the way E.T. moves, the Wikipedia article on the movie notes, “Two dwarfs, Tamara de Treaux and Pat Bilon, as well as 12-year-old Matthew De Meritt, who was born without legs, took turns wearing the costume [of E.T.], depending on what scene was being filmed. De Meritt actually walked on his hands and played all scenes where E.T. walked awkwardly or fell over.” As a child, Andrew had a disconcerting habit of pointing out, and calling to, other people with disabilities when he spied them in town. In adult life, he became more subtle. He would catch my eye and nod in their direction, as if to let me know, there’s one of my people. I believe he intuitively grasped many aspects of differentness in the film, all of which contributed to his feeling of kinship with E.T.
        The story of E.T. can be seen as a story of acceptance and rejection of otherness. When my son was a child, many people were afraid of the way he looked and behaved; and they openly shunned him. As the years went by, and inclusion normalized his presence in public, the stigma faded. At twenty-eight, despite declining abilities that put him in a wheelchair, Andrew was able to move into a group home across town from us. He participated in many community outings with friends in a day program, while still enjoying weekends with us. Movies, live musicals, local street fairs, and restaurant outings highlighted our time together. The wait staff in several restaurants came to recognize us as a family, and to greet Andrew in particular.
         More and more people with disabilities are taking part in every facet of community life. Tolerance in many, but certainly not all, sectors of society is on the rise as the unfamiliar becomes familiar.
        When E.T. is dying, Elliott, also gravely ill, reaches out from his bed and whispers encouragement to the alien in the next bed: “I’ll be right here.” Meaning, You are not alone. In saying goodbye to the grieving Elliott before E.T. boards the spaceship that has returned to collect him, E.T. touches Elliott’s temple with his glowing pointer finger and also says, “I’ll be right here.” Today and forever, Andrew is still right here, with us.

 

In memoriam, Andrew Michael Palencia, October 18, 1977—March 31, 2022

Andrew Palencia, signing the word “love”