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Early in Close Encounters of the Third Kind , Roy Neary's children are watching The Ten Commandments , the last film of director Cecil B. DeMille, on television. Close Encounters itself is, in many ways, indebted to the films of the 1950s — not only the flying saucer subgenre of science fiction but also the Biblical spectaculars. As critics have noted, the movie is a religious epic, with the aliens as gods or angels1: they are omniscient and omnipresent, telepathic, able to defy gravity, to overcome the limitations of time and space, and associated always with blinding light. Like St. Paul, the hero Roy Neary experiences a revelation at a crossroads and is born again. He abandons his previous life in an all-consuming quest for the godhead, contact with the aliens. Although he is mocked and scorned, driven nearly insane, and loses his job and his wife and children, he persists in his singleminded devotion. One critic says, “Like Moses, Neary has to reach his Mount Sinai … the Devil's Tower” (Williams, 1983, p. 27). Like Christ at his crucifixion, Neary is thirty-three. And Neary is the chosen one: among the twelve civilians who reach the mountain, he is the only one to ascend into the heavens in the mothership, the chariot of the gods.
As in the Biblical epics of the 1950s, in Close Encounters Spielberg attempts to impress through the power of light, sound, and special effects and to induce in both the characters and the audience the emotions associated with religious miracles: confusion, amazement, fear, wonder, and awe. Whereas the Biblical spectaculars relied on the power of conventional religious mythology, Spielberg draws on