SOURCE: Rushing, Janice Hocker. “E.T. as Rhetorical Transcendence.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 71, no. 2 (May 1985): 188-203.

Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But the heart glows, and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.

—Carl Jung¹

Our time is marked by a yearning for wholeness. While continuing to benefit from the progress wrought by the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution, Western humanity is beginning to ask, “At what price?” For, along with its scientific dreams, the Enlightenment has delivered its share of technological nightmares. The twentieth century has enjoyed labor-saving devices, longer leisure hours, and increased lifespans. It has endured pollution, traffic fatalities, and Hiroshima. While few would actually return, given some fanciful time machine, to a pre-industrial age, many feel an undeniable, if unspoken, sense of fragmentation and separation—from their world, their fellow human beings, and themselves.

Although all cultures have sought transcendent wholeness to some extent, the contemporary desire is somewhat unique, tempered by historical precedents and made urgent by frightening future contingencies. A host of scholars have recognized the fundamental division of our age, referring to it in terms of fragmentation, secularization, and an absence of unity. Writers as diverse as Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade, Fritjof Capra, Carl Sagan, and Robert Pirsig have testified to the modern need for transcendence.² The problem arises, they would agree, because in our scientifically “enlightened” world, “all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.”³ Thus, as Stephen Toulmin notes in his recent The Return to Cosmology, the desire has been growing since the 1960s to recapture the classical Greek sense of “cosmos”—“the conviction that the entire system of the world forms a single, integrated system united by universal principles, that all things in the world consequently share in a common ‘good order,’ in short, that the universe or ouranos is ‘well turned out.’”⁴ Cartesian dualism, he claims, has exhausted its own limitations in the last century; the worldview of post-modern philosophy unites value and science, contemplation and action, returning us to a sense of unity, order, and proportion.⁵

While numerous scholar-writers have documented the plight of modern separation persuasively for learned audiences, it is film which has articulated the message for those Aristotle called “untrained thinkers.” In particular, space science fiction and fantasy make cosmic connections in mythic form. The more noteworthy representatives include 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, The Return of the Jedi, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek: The Search for Spock, Blade Runner, Outland, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.⁶ Possibly the most significant vision of wholeness, however, is 1982's figuratively and literally uplifting story of a boy and his extra-terrestrial. Viewers have thus far contributed enough money to watch E.T. phone home to make E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial one of the top ten grossing films ever made.⁷ Most critics exuberantly praised the film. Representative is James M. Wall, who proclaimed E.T. “destined to become one of the great fictional characters of all time.”⁸ Stephen Spielberg himself referred to the “spirituality” of E.T., explaining, “I was working with a very sensitive screenplay about the total human condition.”⁹

Whatever the communicative format, statements expressing the contemporary sense of fragmentation and the corresponding impulse toward unity are of considerable rhetorical significance. Together, they constitute an emergent genre of discourse which articulates these feelings as a special kind of rhetorical exigence that it simultaneously attempts to redress. In Lloyd F. Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation, “exigence” is an immediate pragmatic problem, a disturbance of equilibrium to be remedied by practical discourse.¹⁰ John Angus Campbell notes, however, that there are “ultimate” rhetorical exigences which are enduring and thus do not precisely fit Bitzer's model. Death is such an exigence: “Beyond the pragmatic world of manageable, mundane exigences and manageable responses,” claims Campbell, “looms mortality itself as the omnipotent exigence energizing the ‘trail of symbols’ which is human history as narratives, as lived experience.”¹¹ The need to overcome a sense of separation from self, society, and the universe is another such “omnipotent” exigence. As death is “beyond the capacity of any symbolism whatever ultimately to assuage,” so is the lack of wholeness.¹² And yet, as we respond to death with funerals, so we respond to division with rituals and words. We are moved to speak, knowing that our speech is in itself inadequate. Why, then, do we address universal exigences when we are aware that our acts cannot remove them?

One possible answer is that discourse which addresses cosmological matters performs its rhetorical function in relation to history. My general thesis is that contemporary statements addressing the need for transcendence respond to an exigence which is both enduring and developing over time. Such advocacy operates not primarily to remove the exigence, but rather to reaffirm the centrality of the present as one chapter in an evolutionary and cosmological narrative that stretches into the past as history and into the future as spirit. In developing this thesis, I will first recast the universal exigence of fragmentation/holism into a philosophical framework which sets forth more clearly its evolutionary place in the cosmological scheme of things. Such a view is found in the “Philosophia perennis,” a term coined by Leibniz, popularized by Aldous Huxley,¹³ and refined by diverse writers. I will then use this framework to examine E.T. as a particularly eloquent statement of how this exigence is both presented and addressed in mass mediated public discourse.

THE PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

Universalize the idea of purpose (as when the mark of God is seen in each creature). Then identify the individual with this universal design. The result is invigorating. But let anything go wrong with the identification, and all that is left is a sorely protruding ego, a very self-sick self.

—Kenneth Burke¹⁴

The rudiments of perennial philosophy are found in the mythic lore of all cultures, and its fully developed forms are the core of the world's highest religions.¹⁵ It is embraced, in whole or in part, by such minds as Plato, Hegel, Schopenhauer, William James, Whitehead, Einstein, Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, Capra, and Ken Wilber. Huxley calls perennial philosophy “immemorial and universal,” and defines it as:

the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being. …¹⁶

The position holds that the Absolute is not an ontological Other separated from humanity by nature, but rather, the ground or condition of the universe.¹⁷ The Infinite exists as a psychic potential within all individuals at the same time that it is greater than each individual. Perennial philosophy is concerned, then, with the One and the Many, defining them as identical.

Though one typically experiences oneself as a separate being, located in time and space, one is actually connected with every other person and with the whole of the universe. Einstein calls this separate self-sense “an optical delusion of … consciousness … a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from that prison.”¹⁸ Or, we might say, to respond to the exigence of felt fragmentation. For the ground of being, from which we came and to which we return, is not limited in time and space. It is, rather, what Paul Tillich calls “the eternal now”: “There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time.”¹⁹

Though Spirit is infinite and eternal, it is, according to Hegel, also in the process of its own becoming.²⁰ It is actualized only by its development through its end. History, or evolution, is this development, and it is a movement both of Spirit and toward Spirit. History is driven by the telos of “absolute knowledge,” in which Spirit returns from separation from itself to itself on the highest level of the evolutionary hierarchy, at which stage subjectivity and objectivity are identified. In Hegel's words, “the present stage of Spirit contains all previous stages within itself. These, to be sure, have unfolded themselves successively and separately, but Spirit still is what it has in itself always been.”²¹ Huxley states this view in typical paradoxical form: “Only the transcendent, the completely other, can be immanent without being modified by the becoming of that in which it dwells.”²²

Thus, history is the unfolding of human consciousness.²³ Teilhard de Chardin's “Law of Complexity-Consciousness” describes this development as the capstone of the evolution of lower forms of life. The law states that evolution proceeds in the direction of increasing complexity, order, and interdependence, accompanied by a rise in consciousness, culminating in human spirituality.²⁴ The human psyche evolves, that is, from an unconscious state of absolute oneness with Spirit, through consciousness of its separation from Spirit, to conscious transcendence of boundaries in a reuniting of itself with Spirit. The evolution of consciousness matures from matter to body to mind to soul to Spirit. Or, to put it another way, it grows from preconsciousness (matter and body) to consciousness (ego/mind) to transconsciousness (soul and Spirit).²⁵ Mythologically, preconsciousness was Paradise, consciousness was the Fall, and transconsciousness, the ultimate unity of the cosmos, for which we even now yearn, is yet to come.²⁶

Whereas perennial philosophy posits an evolutionary telos of unity (and thus differs from the Darwinian claim of random natural selection), it does not imply that the reaching of this telos is absolutely predetermined. Rather, humans, individually and collectively, may choose whether to transform themselves to the next stage of consciousness. Given such transformation, they may also choose whether to negate the former stages, or eventually to negate this negation, thus integrating and preserving all prior stages. That is, true transcendence is open to human choice and praxis and this choice creates both responsibility and the necessity for rhetorical discourse.

It is this choice, also, which creates the opportunity for division—for fragmentation within the self and for separation of the self from the universe. For while each person intuits the true nature of all souls, he or she is also terrified of actual transcendence, for this implies the “death” of the isolated self-sense. In order to satisfy the self's greatest desire, one must sacrifice that very desiring self. “And there is the dilemma, the double-bind in the face of eternity.”²⁷ Since the dawn of the conscious age, people have attempted to resolve this ultimate bind by refusing to accept the inevitable death of the separate self and by embracing instead the drive to perpetuate their own egos as surrogate gods.

The Western world now finds its conscious self in full dominance. The collective ego has become an entity separate from the cosmos.²⁸ The emergence of the ego has brought self-analysis, reflection, philosophy, and science—great prizes for humanity. The dark side of these achievements lies, however, in the increased sense of the self as separate, with the ego confronted with an ever more intense fear of death. And whereas transcendence requires eventual integration of the preconscious realms of matter and body with the mind, the ego instead has responded to its fear of death with violent repression of them. In the average consciousness of the West, the ego has become dissociated from the lower realms, distorting and deforming both the body and itself. “The ego rose up arrogant and aggressive … and began to sever its own roots in a fantasy attempt to prove its absolute independence,” claims Wilber.²⁹ In addition, the typical self of today does not realize that this is not the highest mode of consciousness to be achieved, but has begun, tragically, to “remake the cosmos in its own image.”³⁰

The contemporary exigence of fragmentation, then, interpreted in light of perennial philosophy, is our failure to understand the ego as a part rather than the whole, a transition rather than the telos. This failure is widely felt as a disconnectedness from both roots and future, and is expressed as fear that the extensions of consciousness will overwhelm preconsciousness and deny the possibilities of transconsciousness. It results in warnings that technology overshadows spirituality, that science denigrates emotion and intuition, and worst of all, that nuclear weapons may end history. However it is expressed, this conviction of urgent need underlies all the discourses alluded to above, which collectively comprise a formidable plea for action.

ANALYSIS

Extraterrestrial life is an idea whose time has come.

—Carl Sagan³¹

In E.T., as in other fantasy films, the perennial exigence and rhetorical response are communicated in the form of a transcendent myth.³² As Capra notes, “The language of mythology, which is much less restricted by logic and common sense, is often more appropriate to describe transpersonal phenomena than factual language.”³³ The “lexicon” of transcendent myth is archetypal symbols, which become meaningful only within the context of the entire narrative.³⁴ In E.T., the most important symbols are the hero, the villain, the flying saucer, and the child. In what follows, I will first interpret these symbols from the perspective of perennial philosophy, which illuminates their import at this particular time in history, and then demonstrate how they attain their special significance within the overall context of E.T.

As critics have pointed out, the central rhetorical symbol in a myth is generally a cultural hero.³⁵ In a truly transcendent myth, although the hero may be from a particular culture and thus appear in a time and space-bound guise, his or her message will be universal. In addition, from the perspective of perennial philosophy, the mythic hero evolves, and thus will take different forms in different ages. As such, a “hero,” says Wilber, is “one who first tries out the next major structure of consciousness.”³⁶ That is, the hero's treasure, bestowed on the rest of humanity, is the next and higher stage of evolution toward Spirit.

Symbolically, the hero of the early and middle levels of consciousness was the ego emerging out of the unconscious to claim independence. The heroic ego is justly celebrated in countless myths of this period. Every hero must be tested by a monster or villain, and in an evolutionary perspective, the heroes of the previous stage become the dragons of the present. This is so because the emergent layer of consciousness must first negate the lower level before going on to preserve and integrate it. Thus, the “Great Mother” or “Great Goddess,” worshipped in many guises during the preconscious age, became the dragon to be conquered by the heroic ego.³⁷ In most respects, that particular battle is now over; the heroic ego has won. In fact, today we face “a new dragon”—the egoic structure itself, which was the hero of the last stage.³⁸ Having severed itself from its roots in Mother Nature (the Great Goddess of the preconscious), rationality and its extensions now threaten to kill her. And having emerged victorious, reason has pronounced itself its own end. “No longer harmony with the Heavens, but a ‘conquering of space’; no longer respect for Nature, but a technological assault on Nature.”³⁹

The proclaimed “New Age” of transconsciousness is undoubtedly much farther away than those impatient for its arrival would like to think.⁴⁰ However, popular myth has for quite some time begun to display the ego as villain rather than hero. The villainous ego most commonly appears in the guise of rationality's most obvious products—science and technology. Frankenstein gave us a technologically created monster on the loose,⁴¹Superman an array of evil geniuses, 2001 the treacherous computer, HAL, and Star Wars the half-man, half-machine Darth Vader. In the latter, Joseph Campbell finds the same mythological theme as that of Faust:

Are the machine and the machine maker going to dominate the human spirit, or is the human spirit going to be served by the machine? Luke Skywalker and his father, Darth Vader, represent the two positions. The father has capitulated to the machine and become robotized; the son will not capitulate. He rescues his father.⁴²

This theme, he says, is “the crisis of contemporary life,” and the films show “how the conditions of the time determine the images and bring the spiritual problem into focus in a contemporary way.”⁴³

If the new mythic monster is technological, then the new hero would be trans-rational. This hero's treasure is a state of mind which is centauric (mind and body united), intuitive, and psychic.⁴⁴ In myth, we could expect this hero to appear as a symbol of wholeness, to search for a holistic treasure, and possibly to be announced or preceded by other holistic symbols. There are countless wholeness symbols in mythology—among them, the jewel, the pearl, the flower, the chalice, the golden egg, the quarternity (usually embedded in a mandala), the golden ball, etc.⁴⁵ In E.T., the relevant wholeness motifs are the UFO or flying saucer, which brings the extraterrestrials to earth, and the child, who discovers in E.T. a mirror of himself. Jung's interpretations of the UFO and child motifs are particularly useful because he sees them as significant collective images of dissociation in modern times. Thus his reading of these symbols is consistent with perennial philosophy and helps to explain their import in contemporary times, and within the film.

Jung has analyzed the widespread sightings of UFOs in the last few decades, whether real or imagined, as an example of a “visionary rumour,” told all over the world, which expresses an unconscious attempt to heal the split between the conscious and the unconscious in our age.⁴⁶ They stem from a situation of collective distress or danger, and are a modern manifestation of the mandala, an individuation symbol known to medieval alchemy, which assumed the soul to have the shape of a sphere, analogous to Plato's world-soul. The mandala portrays the archetype of the self, which can unite apparently irreconcilable opposites. Jung found that the UFO inhabitants were often rumored to stand about three feet high, to be weightless, and to look vaguely like humans or like “technological angels”—sometimes dwarfs with enormous heads bursting with intelligence, sometimes lemur-like creatures covered with hair and equipped with claws, or dwarfish monsters clad in armour and looking like insects.⁴⁷ Sometimes they were carrying out a cautious survey of the earth, but typically avoided contact with humans. They obviously had superior technology, and were occasionally feared as destroyers of the planet. More often, however, they were credited with superior wisdom and moral goodness which would enable them to save humanity. Many imagined them, for example, to be concerned about our capacity for nuclear destruction. It is characteristic of the contemporary age that the symbol of the self would take a technological form. “Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man.”⁴⁸

In addition, as critics have pointed out, E.T. is not just about mandalic spaceships and alien creatures, but about children, and it appeals especially to them and to the child in those of us more advanced in years.⁴⁹ Indeed, the child can take on heroic proportions. Visions of the child appear in both the dreams of the individual and the artistic images of a culture when a dissociation has taken place between past and present.⁵⁰ The child, like the mandala, is a compensatory symbol, corrective of “the inevitable one-sidedness and extravagances of the conscious mind.”⁵¹ The child symbolizes not only the preconscious state of infancy, but also the preconscious stage of the evolution of humankind, the childhood aspect of the collective psyche, and its imagistic repetition reminds us of the link with our origins.⁵² More than that, however, the child also represents latent possibilities. Because it will grow into an adult, it essentializes the transconscious phase of humankind. It is the repository of past as well as future possibilities. It is therefore, a “symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole.”⁵³ We shall now see how these archetypal symbols—the hero, villain, flying saucer, and child—interact as a whole within the film.

E.T. opens with a dark, misty, dreamy sequence—a primeval-looking redwood forest is lit only by the soft halo-ish glow of a round spaceship. Squatty little elfin creatures, presumably from the landed ship, poke about, carefully collecting plant samples from the forest. The dimness is suddenly pierced by the harsher light of earthbound vehicles. From these trucks emerge giant, threatening men. Through the eyes of one of the small creatures, with whom the camera leads us to identify, we see that the men are hunting it down like a fugitive, blinding it with the shafts of their headlights. The creature hides in a ravine, covered by a protective mist, and watches as they jump over it, its own heart-light flashing with fear within its chest. The spaceship takes off hurriedly as the creature crouches, the yellow lights of the suburb beyond the trees twinkling benignly. “He was alone, three million light-years from home.”⁵⁴

The whole of E.T. is visually enfolded within this first scene, a subtly complex interplay of lights glowing from each source that will play a symbolically important role in the ensuing drama. Though it does not dominate the scene, as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the spaceship is the usual circular, mandala-like shape. From its comparatively soft illumination, it is clear from the outset that this UFO is no destructive force. Rather, its crew members are collecting samples from all the vegetational eras, trying to save earth's foliage before its inhabitants completely annihilate it.⁵⁵ To the abandoned creature, the real aliens are the adult earthlings, tall faceless men with rings of threatening keys at their belts and relentless flashlights in their hands. Indeed, this dwarfed traveler left on earth by the mandala from the sky is imprinted with its wholeness, as we shall later see. But we do not see the creature clearly yet. Rather, we follow the distant lights to the suburban home, which itself houses a small creature who will first “see” the abandoned one.

The space creature wanders into the backyard of the house, alone, bewildered, and exposed to the harmful effects of the earth's gravity (he is weightless at home).⁵⁶ He hides quietly in the toolshed. Meanwhile, the house reverberates with activity. A group of children is playing “Dungeons and Dragons,” filling the family room with fairy tale chatter and strewing its contents with middle-class paraphernalia. Amidst the confusion, however, the film's focus is unmistakably the ten-year-old child, Elliott. He lives a materially comfortable life with his mother, adolescent brother, and younger sister. But he obviously misses his father, who has left his mother. Elliott is not quite old enough to be accepted fully into the inner circle of his brother and friends, routinely says the wrong thing at the wrong time, and is, as the book informs us, a “twerp.”⁵⁷ Like E.T., he seems alone, unconnected, at loose ends.

The child almost always appears in myths and fairy tales as abandoned and exposed to danger. Since the child is evolving towards independence, it cannot accomplish this without detaching itself from its origins. Abandonment represents the precariousness of the possibility of wholeness; there are enormous difficulties to be overcome in attaining this “highest good.” It also symbolizes “the powerlessness and helplessness of the life-urge which subjects every growing thing to the law of maximum self-fulfillment [in perennial philosophy, transcendence], while at the same time the environmental influences place all sorts of insuperable obstacles in the way of individuation [substitute transcendence].”⁵⁸ Elliott is initially a symbol of the dissociation in our evolving consciousness; he appears to warn us that we have abandoned our childhood state, that we have “lost our roots,” and have forgotten who we are. The danger is that if the childhood state of the collective psyche is repressed to the point of total exclusion, the unconscious will overwhelm the conscious, inhibiting or even destroying its realization. “Archetypes have a strange way of making sure of their effect.”⁵⁹ But this film is not The Exorcist, The Omen, or Carrie.⁶⁰ The child is precocious, but kind, and he will provide hearth and makeshift home for the abandoned alien.

Elliott wanders into the backyard. When he hears a sound coming from the toolshed, he throws a baseball into it. To his astonishment, the ball is thrown back to him. His family investigates. Finding nothing, they are, of course, unbelieving. But Elliott's curiosity leads him to lure the “goblin” from the shed Hansel and Gretel style. At first sight they are both goblins to each other, and they shriek at their mutually discovered surprise. But slowly the space creature's face and form are revealed to us, and to Elliott, who “sees” him for what he is—a strange, but frightened visitor who is no more threatening to Elliott than his little sister. They make friends, Elliott christens him (“it” is male, we find out) “E.T.” for “Extra-Terrestrial,” harbors him in his closet, and comes to know intuitively that E.T. is “a great treasure.”

Spielberg wanted in E.T. a creation that only a mother could love,⁶¹ and he does take a bit of warming up to. But he is, indeed, marvelous. Visually, E.T. is an oxymoron, creating the initial shocking effect of that trope. His looks are a key to his character. He has a heart-shaped head. He has huge, bulging eyes within a large head, archetypal symbols of rationality,⁶² as well as a heart that flashes a red light whenever emotionally aroused. His grey-green reptilian skin is “as homely as a turtle without its shell,”⁶³ and yet the children treat him more like a pet, evoking in them and us a “basic puppy-feeling.”⁶⁴ His drooping stomach is “in touch with the terrain,” yet he is “low-slung and contemplative.”⁶⁵ He is a plant lover (he brings sagging plants back to life with the merest touch or thought-wave) and a computer whiz (he fashions the transmitter which ultimately allows him to phone home from computerized toys and spare parts around the house). He uses his long, rootlike fingers both to manipulate objects and to heal human wounds. He can be clumsy and awkward, as when he catches his web-like toes in the forested underbrush as he is chased at the beginning, but also graceful and soaring, as when he lifts the getaway bicycles over the trees in the final chase to the starborne ship.

E.T. appears oxymoronic because he represents the integration of all the evolutionary stages of the human race. He is in touch with matter, earth, plant life, animals (Harvey the dog worships E.T.), emotions, instincts, logic and technology. Moreover, he is heroic for Elliott and the other children because he has evolved into the next stage of consciousness. He not only demonstrates psychic powers, but also establishes a telepathic connection with everything from plants to animals to Elliott to other extra-terrestrials.⁶⁶ Plants in the house die when E.T. gets sick; Elliott (begins with “E,” ends with “T”)⁶⁷ gets tipsy at school when E.T. drinks his first beer, and kisses a startled schoolgirl while E.T. watches a love scene at home on T.V. (Spatial boundaries are eliminated.) An unconscious sense of interconnectedness with externals is characteristic of the first evolutionary stages, but E.T. is quite aware of his unity with the cosmos, and this is characteristic of transconsciousness.

The important thing about this hero is, then, that he does not repress or ignore former stages of consciousness as he moves into the next. E.T. is above all a symbol of wholeness, a model of merged contradictions. In him, even temporal boundaries are eliminated, creating a true paradox. For, with his wizened rib cage, pot belly, and oversized cranium, he is both a wise old sage—ten million years old, in fact—and a vulnerable little baby. Elliott understands this. As he is showing E.T. around the house, “The long, rootlike fingers entwined with his, and Elliott felt he was leading a child younger than himself, but then the rippling wave washed over him again, bearing star-secrets and cosmic law, and he knew the creature was older than he was, by a great deal.”⁶⁸ Ariel Dorfman captures the audience's paradoxical feelings about E.T.: “However much E.T. is beholden to worms, dragons, and insects for his looks, he is above all an overweight fetus, a wise old man from outer space in the garb of an infant.”⁶⁹ Young and old, he is the child of humanity's infancy and its promise of future possibilities.

E.T. forms a bond with Elliott rather than others for several reasons. Both have been abandoned and are in need of a friend. As representative of the “child motif,” Elliott and E.T. seem to recognize themselves in each other. Both are treated as insignificant by some of the people around them—Elliott by his brother's friends and E.T. by Elliott's mother. The divine child is generally treated as “a mere child,” as “insignificant,” because the conscious mind does not readily recognize the child's redeeming possibilities. It appears unexpectedly in the unlikeliest of places (generally close to nature) and in ambiguous forms—e.g., Tom Thumb, a dwarf, a human child, an elf. Symbolic of the devalued past, “It is therefore easily overlooked and falls back into the unconscious.”⁷⁰ This is why Mary, the mother, does not see E.T. when she practically trips over him in the kitchen and when she looks right at him among the stuffed animals in Elliott's closet.⁷¹ Neither do the adults entertaining the trick-or-treaters “see” E.T. as real when he rings their doorbells on Halloween, standing boldly on their doorsteps. He does not stand out because they are adults, representative of consciousness. Elliott, as well as his brother and sister, see E.T., certainly, because they are loving, trusting, and curious,⁷² and because it is traditional in children's tales for the adults not to see the supernatural while the children do.⁷³ More important, however, as children, they represent what our age most needs—to retrieve our collective childhood and allow ourselves a glimpse of our old age. Elliott is interchangeable in this regard with the small boy in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Childhood is thus in a double sense the “treasure hard to attain” of the modern age. E.T. (and by extension, Elliott, who is now indelibly linked to him) is its representative here. E.T. is both a hero and a treasure in the same way that other truly transcendent figures have been both. E.T., that is, has found the treasure of transconsciousness, become one with it, and now is that treasure for others. As hero, he simultaneously shows the way and is the way. He demonstrates how to become what we can be. Elliott intuitively knows he has been given a wonderful gift, and that he must hide E.T. in his closet, even before he sees the trucks spying on the house from the streets. For great treasures are always in great danger of being stolen, devoured, desecrated, ripped apart, or stuffed. “It is a striking paradox in all child myths,” Jung writes, “that the ‘child’ is on the one hand delivered helpless into the power of terrible enemies and in continual danger of extinction, while on the other he possesses powers far exceeding those of ordinary humanity.”⁷⁴

Indeed, E.T. and Elliott become very ill. E.T. turns light grey, then white. Elliott, now cosmically united with E.T., also burns with fever, and the houseplants die. “Still bound to their planet, Earthlings can't deal with the ache of universal love.”⁷⁵ It is telling that E.T., this ancient traveler in the void, would get sick here on Earth, exposed to our environment. “In our society,” warns Capra, “a truly holistic approach will recognize that the environment, created by our social and economic system, based on the fragmented and reductionistic Cartesian world view, has become a major threat to our health.”⁷⁶ E.T. has lost hope his transmitter will allow him to phone home, and that his fellow space botanists will return for him. Although he obviously loves Elliott, “Cosmic loneliness had gotten to the marrow of his bones.”⁷⁷ Toulmin speaks to what E.T.'s illness represents:

The world of nature is the place where, as members within the larger evolutionary scheme of things, human beings are “well adapted,” and so “at home”; or, at the very least, where they have the power to make themselves “at home”. … [T]he program of cosmology thus has an intrinsic connection with the ideas of “natural status” and “home.”⁷⁸

In dream and myth, home generally symbolizes the whole self. E.T. simply cannot feel at home here, where technology-on-the-loose is so marring our fragile planet. He is sick because he is divided from himself.

To make things worse, powerful enemies have now located the extra-terrestrial, and have marked Elliott's house with an “X” on their maps. Spielberg's monsters are never aliens—they always dwell among us—in our oceans, highways, houses, machines, and psyches.⁷⁹ In E.T., the portrait of the villains is chillingly accurate. They are adult, male, technologically advanced scientists, astronauts, doctors, and government agents. Adults represent consciousness when they are contrasted with children as symbolic of pre- and transconsciousness. Mythically, males represent “the solar ego,” hero of the egoic evolutionary stage that replaced the Great Mother with the “sun god” and matriarchy with patriarchy.⁸⁰ Embodied in the scientists, these adult men are literally “off on their own ego trip,” neither stopping to pay respects to their parents (their child) nor to their wiser elders.

Visually, the film is quite clear that these are the enemies. We see them rise ominously from behind a hill, their outlines wavering in the heat of the sun, slowly gathering in numbers. Once at the house, they drape it in plastic vinyl and, dressed in spacesuits, enter forcibly through a pneumatic tube; unlike Elliott, they want to ensure no contaminating contact with the transcendent creature. Though they are trying to help, they insist on doing it their own way. It does not occur to them that the extensions of their own egos may not be able to “fix things” this time. As Kotzwinkle has it, “Keys” (the one most intent on finding E.T.), “had not considered that too much expertise might be dangerous, that a little spaceman who thrived on M&Ms did not need intravenous feeding, nor a possible organ transplant.”⁸¹

In spite of Elliott's screaming, “You're hurting him! You're killing us!” the doctors continue to poke and prod both Elliott and E.T., sticking them with needles and hooking them to machines. In the throes of their own hubris, these men want to possess the cosmos rather than to become one with it. Instead of being one with God, they try to play God. Their efforts are to no avail on E.T.; the EKG reading shows his heart has stopped. Elliott's fever subsides, however, as E.T. “expires.” The men in the suits pack the creature in dry ice, zip him in a plastic bag, plop him in a lead coffin, and shove him in the van outside. The film's warning of danger is that yesterday's hero will become tomorrow's monster if this hero desecrates its origins and refuses to die for the sake of its own transcendence. The theme is similar to that Langdon Winner finds in Frankenstein. Like Victor Frankenstein, the men in E.T. are brilliant scientists. But Victor, like them, “never moves beyond the dream of progress, the thirst for power, or the unquestioned belief that the products of science and technology are an unqualified blessing for humankind.”⁸²

In the face of such powerful enemies, Elliott and E.T. seem alone, exposed, and insignificant. Myth emphasizes, however, that the “child” will unexpectedly pull through despite all dangers.⁸³ Just when we are sure that E.T. will become a stuffed display of the Allen Space Center at the Smithsonian, his heart-light shines through the dry ice. Elliott joyfully unzips the plastic bag, and hears once more the irrepressible “E.T. phone home!” Apparently the transmitting device is working, and Elliott and the other children, chased by their enemies, drive, bicycle, then “fly-cycle” E.T. to the spot where E.T.'s beloved mother ship lands in a beam of lavender light. As Elliott gazes at the ship, transfixed, he imagines it “E.T. multiplied a millionfold, the greatest heart-light the world had ever seen.” Indeed, “Her command lights shone their elegant patterns around her hull, and he felt the mind of the cosmos therein, in its most evolved form.”⁸⁴ In a moment of attempted loving possession, Elliott begs E.T. to stay. But E.T.'s task on Earth is finished. He has shown the way to transcendence through love, which dissolves all opposites, and must now return from whence he came. (Besides, who would ever want to give up transcendent bliss for a California tract home?) He embraces Elliott and, placing his graceful glowing finger at Elliott's temple, says, “I'll be right here.” He leaves the three children (three is the number symbolic of time—past, present, and future), boards the ship and streaks off, leaving a rainbow in the night sky.⁸⁵ Like Horatio, Elliott is left to carry on.

Elliott is transformed. He has learned much, and likely will never be the same. He has survived a grave illness, typical prelude to transcendence.⁸⁶ The boy becomes a man, but we sense he will take his “child” with him. He has made friends with one of the “enemy” scientists who remembers E.T.-like fantasies from his own childhood, yet he has also experienced the depths of his emotions. Touched by the hand of E.T., Elliott is left as leader of those who have also experienced his wisdom. Above all, E.T. will live in his head and in his heart.

IMPLICATIONS

E.T. is one example of a rhetorical message that combines a vision of the eternal with a plea for change in addressing the contemporary form of the ultimate exigence of fragmentation. It links the world of time with the universe of permanence through a modern hero myth. The foregoing perspective and analysis suggest several implications concerning mythic rhetoric and the space fiction genre.

A theory of the modern hero myth at the height of the age of consciousness would require, of course, a careful comparison of many like stories.⁸⁷ Besides the ones already mentioned, recent media examples might include The Dark Crystal, Tron, War Games, Splash, 2010, Dune, and Starman. This analysis can, however, pose a few features of such a myth. First, analogous to the classic hero myth of the emerging ego, the modern hero's task is to achieve the next stage of consciousness. This next stage is the “treasure hard to attain” and the hero is that treasure. This time, however, the treasure is transconsciousness rather than consciousness. And whereas the task of the egoic hero was to separate itself from the grip of the devouring monster (the Great Mother) to achieve independence, the task of the modern hero is to merge this independent ego with the Great Mother and to transform consciousness.⁸⁸ Thus, the egoic hero's achievement was dialectical, and the modern hero's achievement will be transcendent. This implies that the transcendent hero will not slay the dragons, but will ultimately integrate them—even make them into friends. Indeed, E.T. integrates the flowers of technology into his character and Elliott begins to befriend them. Perhaps the modern hero myth will be less violent than the classic one, more collaborative than competitive.

A more complete contextualizing of E.T. with other modern popular culture artifacts dealing with technology would likely demonstrate that we are not yet certain whether to vilify, canonize, or transcend the extensions of the ego. 2001's evil computer, HAL, finds his counterparts, for example, in TV's Six-Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman—forces of good rather than evil. The computer in The Demon Seed forcibly rapes its owner's wife and impregnates her with a computer/human “half-breed,” but computers are hailed as the saviour of failing elementary-school children and as concerned with women's rights in TV commercials for Texas Instruments and Apple. The villainous medical scientists in E.T. find their opposites in such “doctor shows” as Marcus Welby, M.D., and Medical Center; here, the technical advances of modern medicine are praised and their practitioners worshipped. It is perhaps worth speculating that, in a period of evolutionary transition, techne would vacillate between hero and villain in countless stories, and that it would be both preserved and transcended in only a few.

In addition, if E.T. is a clue, visions of transcendence may occur in the most mundane of places and the most humble of forms—that is, not on a mountain-top but in a middle class suburb, not in a charismatic leader but in an ugly little elf. Perhaps this is Spielberg's version of the manger and the stable—the “insignificant” child appears in insignificant places. Because of the current cultural dissociation with our roots, the “child” is a particularly apropos vehicle for the mythic communication of wholeness. We might also expect to see feminine characters increasingly playing the heroic role. Calling for a new Hero Myth, Wilber expresses his hope that “as the male once rescued consciousness from the chthonic matriarchate, the female might today help rescue consciousness—and her brother—from the patriarchate.” Although the new consciousness will be mentally androgynous, “the lead in this new development can most easily come from the female, since our society is already masculine-adapted.”⁸⁹ Unlike in many myths, such as the American Western, women would not be incidental to the heroic task.

There is also a certain irony surrounding this motif of “insignificance.” Just as the adults in the film did not “see” E.T. when he was plainly visible to the children and to the audience, neither did most of the critics “see” E.T. as much more than a charming and entertaining, but ultimately insignificant (except in the financial category, of course) “children's” film. Scholars are likewise prone to dismiss as trivial, not only children's films, but also entertainment media in general. We tend to stumble over them, when it is possibly that they best reflect the changing consciousness of our times, simultaneously envisioning exigences and imagining responses.

Perhaps it is just this—that visual media are addressed to the eye—that ironically keeps us from “seeing.” As rhetoricians, we are more familiar with the word than the image, the enthymeme than the myth. Attuned to logos, such non-sensical rhetorical forms as visual paradox are especially perplexing. While myths may not all be paradoxical, it is likely that the new hero myth will take on this form. Wilber is again helpful: “[The mind] cannot adequately look at or map spirit because spirit transcends it. And when spirit is described in mental terms it is not in the nice, common-sensical, down-to-earth categories of empiric-analytic thought or even in the subtler symbolic logic; it is in the slippery, paradoxical, poetical terms of mandalic reason.”⁹⁰ Paradox “is simply the way nonduality looks to the mental level.”⁹¹ Of course, the fact that reasoning about Spirit always generates paradox does not mean that paradox always indicates Spirit, and it would certainly be foolish to go around uncovering the Absolute in every contradiction.⁹² On the other hand, in the present analysis, it is possible that the medium fits the message in this regard. In explaining perennial philosophy, one must resort to such “A = non-A” statements as “the eternal now,” “lose your life to gain it,” “negate in order to preserve,” and “reality is both permanence and change.” In embodying this perspective, the film's hero is, as we have seen, a creature of contradictions. He is a child and an old man, a treasure and, as the hero, not a treasure.

If E.T. and other recent films are indicative, it may be that space fiction or fantasy is the most important contemporary genre for presenting and responding to the rhetorical exigence of fragmentation. In a prior article, I explored the dialectical interplay of individualism and community as values inherent in America's premier myth—the Western. I argued that reaffirmation of this dialectic, the preservation of tension between opposites, is preferable to either emphasis on one of the opposites over the other, or to their pseudosynthesis. But I also suggested that it is possible that a hero will come along eventually who will transcend the dialectic altogether, and that the most likely context would be space films.⁹³ Space naturally suggests the cosmic rather than the cultural, and is thus in a real as well as a mythic sense “the New Frontier.” Perhaps space fiction can ultimately demonstrate that there is no tension to be had between individualism and community, since the individual is the whole and the whole is the individual. In E.T., paradoxical transcendence rather than dialectical reaffirmation is the task of the modern mythic hero.

E.T. is a significant experiment in the rhetoric of mythic transcendence. It is true, of course, that the film does not deal with the nitty-gritty of rhetorical contingency. It argues eloquently that we need to recognize the monster the extensions of the ego have become; we must unite with the cosmos rather than possess it. E.T. does not, however, suggest how to make science subservient to humanity rather than humanity subservient to science. Practical debate, though, must be derived from the vision rather than vice versa. Perhaps E.T., in his “wisdom of all the ages,” had read Robert Frost, who would remind us to “Choose something like a star / To stay our minds on and be staid.”⁹⁴

Notes

1. C. G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1959), Vol. 9. I., par. 50.

2. C. G. Jung, The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: The Viking Press, 1971), pp. 456-789; Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By (New York: Bantam Books, 1972); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1959); Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (Berkeley: Shambhala, 1975); Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1983); Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1973); Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1974).

3. Campbell, Hero, p. 104.

4. Stephen Toulmin, The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 224.

5. Toulmin, pp. 237-56.

6. Others have noted similar wholeness themes in some of these films. See, for instance Dale E. Williams, “2001: A Space Odyssey: A Warning before Its Time,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1 (1984), 311-21; Thomas S. Frentz, “Mass Media as Rhetorical Narration,” The Van Zelst Lecture in Communication, published by Northwestern University, The School of Speech, May, 1984. Joseph Campbell notes these themes in the Star Wars trilogy, in Charles Leroux, “Grasping Myths to Extend the Reach of Man,” Chicago Tribune, 19 Jan. 1984, Section 5, p. 3. Similar themes are attributed to the horror film The Shining in Robert A. Davies, James M. Farrell, and Steven S. Matthews, “The Dream World of Film: A Jungian Perspective on Cinematic Communication,” Western Journal of Speech Communication, 46 (1982), 342.

7. Gene Siskel, “Look Out Summer, Here Comes Indy,” Chicago Tribune, 13 May 1984, Section 13, p. 7.

8. James M. Wall, “Summer Movies: Four That Matter,” The Christian Century, 23-30 June 1982, 59.

9. “Sand Castles: Stephen Spielberg interviewed by Todd McCarthy,” Film Comment, May-June 1982, 53.

10. Lloyd Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 1 (1968), 1-14.

11. John Angus Campbell, “A Rhetorical Interpretation of History,” unpublished ms., University of Washington, p. 9.

12. John Campbell, p. 9.

13. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

14. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 315.

15. Huxley, p. vii.

16. Huxley, p. vii.

17. Ken Wilber, Up from Eden: A Transpersonal View of Human Evolution (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1983), pp. 3-4, 314-15.

18. Cited in J. Gowan, Trance, Art, and Creativity (Buffalo, NY: Creative Education Foundation, State University College, 1975).

19. Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963), p. 125.

20. George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Reason in History, trans. Robert S. Hartman (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill), 1953. In addition to the citations from Reason and History, I am indebted in this discussion of Hegel to Wilber's interpretation of Hegel's work, pp. 313-17.

21. Hegel, p. 95.

22. Huxley, p. 2.

23. Wilber, p. 7.

24. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper, 1964). Teilhard was a Jesuit mystic, geologist, and paleontologist. Fritjof Capra notes that Teilhard's thought is quite consistent with general systems theory in biology, which finds the general pattern of evolution to be moving toward “the progressive increase of complexity, coordination, and interdependence; the integration of individuals into multileveled systems; and the continual refinement of certain functions and patterns of behavior,” in The Turning Point, pp. 288, 303-304.

25. Wilber, pp. 7-11. On this evolution of consciousness, see also S. Radhakrishnan and C. Moore, A Source Book in Indian Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1976); and Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden (New York: Ballantine, 1977).

26. See Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1960).

27. Wilber, p. 13. See also Norman O. Brown, Life against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1959); Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973); and Ken Wilber, The Atman Project (Wheaton, Illinois: Quest, 1980).

28. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 181. This “mental egoic” period is estimated by various scholars to begin with the Iliad, the Odyssey, or sixth-century B.C. Greek philosophers.

29. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 182.

30. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 182.

31. Sagan, The Cosmic Connection, p. viii.

32. I am assuming a distinction here between “sacred” (transcendent) or universal myth, as described by such theorists as Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, and purely cultural or “ideological” myths, as described by such theorists as Roland Barthes. For a similar distinction, see Jeff D. Bass and Richard Cherwitz, “Imperial Mission and Manifest Destiny: A Case Study of Political Myth in Rhetorical Discourse,” Southern Speech Communication Journal, 43 (1978), 213-32.

33. Capra, The Tao of Physics, p. 43.

34. See Walter R. Fisher, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument,” Communication Monographs, 51 (1984), 1-22. I am using “archetype” in the typically Jungian sense, as a universal symbol, and not in the sense sometimes used by literary critics. Northrup Frye, for example, defines “archetype” as “a typical or recurring image” and “archetypal criticism” as “primarily concerned with literature as a social fact and as a mode of communication,” The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 99. He reserves the term “anagogic” for criticism of truly universal symbols and myths, pp. 115-28.

35. See, for example, Hermann G. Stelzner, “The Quest Story and Nixon's November 3, 1969 Address,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 59 (1973), 160-67; Martha Solomon, “The Positive Woman's Journey: A Mythic Analysis of the Rhetoric of STOP ERA,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 65 (1979), 262-74; Walter R. Fisher, “Romantic Democracy, Ronald Reagan and Presidential Heroes,” Western Journal of Speech Communication, 46 (1982), 299-310; Sarah Russell Hankins, “Archetypal Alloy: Reagan's Rhetorical Image,” Central States Speech Journal, 34 (1983), 33-43; and Janice Hocker Rushing, “The Rhetoric of the American Western Myth,” Communication Monographs, 50 (1983), 14-32.

36. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 180.

37. Wilber, Up from Eden, pp. 111-294. See also Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955).

38. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 260.

39. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 187.

40. Many so-called “New Age” enthusiasts actually confuse the preconscious with the transconscious, according to Wilber, Up from Eden, pp. 322-23.

41. See Langdon Winner, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 306-35, for an analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's original Frankenstein.

42. “A Conversation with Joseph Campbell,” U.S. News and World Report, 16 April, 1984, p. 72.

43. “A Conversation with Joseph Campbell.”

44. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 260.

45. C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” in C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963), p. 79.

46. C. G. Jung, Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, trans R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).

47. Jung, Flying Saucers, pp. 11-16.

48. Jung, Flying Saucers, p. 22.

49. See, for example, Charles Michener and Katrine Ames, “A Summer Double Punch,” Newsweek, 31 May 1982, 62; Richard Corliss and Martha Smilgis, “Steve's Summer Magic: E.T. and Poltergeist,” Time, 31 May 1982, 54-55; Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: The Pure and the Impure,” The New Yorker, 14 June 1982, 119-121; Andrew Sarris, “Films in Focus, Spielberg's Sand Castles,” The Village Voice, 15 June 1982, 59; and Stanley Kauffman, “The Gospel according to St. Stephen,” The New Republic, 5 July 1982, 26.

50. Jung, “Psychology,” p. 81.

51. Jung, “Psychology,” p. 81.

52. Jung, “Psychology,” p. 80-81.

53. Jung, “Psychology,” p. 83.

54. William Kotzwinkle, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial Storybook (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1982). The book is based on the screenplay by Melissa Mathison; she wrote the screenplay after Spielberg told her the story. Changes were made in the script during the shooting of the film, so that screenplay, book and the film correspond to most, but not all the particulars.

55. William Kotzwinkle, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in His Adventures on Earth (New York: Berkeley Books, 1982), p. 11.

56. Though not explained in the film, Kotzwinkle's account in the Storybook has it that earth's gravity will eventually twist E.T.'s spine out of shape.

57. Kotzwinkle, Adventure, p. 38.

58. Jung, “Psychology,” pp. 87, 85.

59. Jung, “Psychology,” p. 75.

60. See Sarah Russell Hankins, “The Rhetoric of the Demonic Child,” unpublished manuscript, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1982.

61. “Creating a Creature,” Time, 31 May 1982, 60.

62. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 239.

63. Corliss and Smilgis, 60.

64. Ariel Dorfman, “Norteamericanos, Call Home,” The Village Voice, 24 August 1982, 39. See also Corliss and Smilgis, 56; and Kael, 119, both of whom note E.T. is the children's “pet.”

65. Kotzwinkle, Adventure, p. 32.

66. Both books give more detail in this regard than the film, although the film does suggest telepathic connections.

67. Kael, 120.

68. Kotzwinkle, Adventure, p. 59.

69. Dorfman, 39.

70. Jung, “Psychology,” pp. 76, 89.

71. For an alternative interpretation of the latter scene, see Dorfman, 39.

72. Kaufman, 26.

73. Kael, 120.

74. Jung, “Psychology,” p. 89.

75. Kotzwinkle, Adventure, p. 172.

76. Capra, The Turning Point, p. 320.

77. Kotzwinkle, Adventure, p. 186.

78. Toulmin, p. 260.

79. In his first full-length movie (for television), Duel, the enemy is a ghostly semi-truck intent on running over Dennis Weaver. It is a blind, technological death force, exhibiting only at one point a beckoning human arm. Jaws locates the enemy in the unconscious—the awesome “Bruce” is the classic deep sea monster who, like Jonah's whale, swallows his victims up—unfortunately, not whole. Close Encounters of the Third Kind finds the monsters in suburban homes—they are the ordinary people who refuse to admit the possibilities of the unknown. Poltergeist releases the monsters from television, one of the more pervasive technical forces, implying that they haunt an innocent family's tract-house because it was built on top of Indian burial grounds in the name of “progress.” Humanity cannot long repress the past without grave consequences.

80. Wilber, Up from Eden, pp. 177-260.

81. Kotzwinkle, Adventure, p. 245.

82. Winner, p. 313.

83. Jung, “Psychology,” p. 89.

84. Kotzwinkle, Adventure, p. 245.

85. Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander (South Bend, IN: Regnery/Gateway, 1979), p. 82.

86. Campbell, Gander, p. 171.

87. For a theoretical attempt to integrate singular media events into rhetorical patterns, see Frentz.

88. Wilber, Up from Eden, pp. 111-31.

89. Wilber, Up from Eden, p. 260.

90. Ken Wilber, Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), p. 70. For alternative views of the function of paradox in rhetoric, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “The Rhetoric of Women's Liberation: An Oxymoron,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1 (1973), 74-86; Phillip K. Tompkins, “On ‘Paradoxes’ in the Rhetoric of the New Transcendentalists,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 62 (1976), 40-48; Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Femininity and Feminism: To Be or Not to Be a Woman,” Communication Quarterly, 31 (1983), 101-08; and James W. Chesebro, “The Symbolic Construction of Social Realities: A Case Study in the Rhetorical Criticism of Paradox,” Communication Quarterly, 32 (1984), 164-71.

91. Wilber, Eye to Eye, p. 180.

92. Wilber, Eye to Eye, p. 188.

93. Rushing, 32.

94. Robert Frost's Poems, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Washington Square Press, Inc., 1967), p. 262.