In The Varieties of Religious Experience, his landmark book on the psychology of religion, William James delineated the traits that all mystical experiences have in common. For James, the first and “handiest” mark of a mystical experience is ineffability: “It defies expression.” An encounter with the divine draws us so far beyond the relatable, rational world of the everyday that it is impossible to convey in language. When we try to explain the depth and power of those experiences to another person, our words fall short. If you have had a powerful experience in prayer or on a retreat, you can probably relate: Even if you tell someone what happened, it is nearly impossible to tell them what it meant.
In Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss), an ordinary electrician, experiences the ineffable. One night on a deserted highway in Indiana, he sees four mysterious glowing vessels hovering above his car. He follows them for miles before they race off into the sky. Awed, Roy rushes home to tell his wife and children. But as he tries to explain what he saw, he trips over his words, fumbling to express not only the experience but its significance. His family is more confused than anything else.
Roy’s encounter was with U.F.O.s, not God—but it is a transcendent experience nonetheless. He now believes in things that he never thought were possible, and his life has taken on new meaning. Watching his worldview-shaking encounter, it is hard not to think of St. Paul being struck down on the road to Damascus.
That is no accident: An earlier version of the script written by Paul Schrader was a “metaphysical, updated version of the life of St. Paul,” as he told Cinefantastique magazine in 1978. Schrader, the brooding Calvinist-influenced filmmaker who directed “First Reformed” and wrote “Taxi Driver” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” among other films, imagined “Close Encounters” as a deeply personal meditation on faith. That didn’t gel with Spielberg’s more crowd-pleasing instincts—but the final film retains Schrader’s spiritual angle.
[From “Taxi Driver” to “First Reformed,” an interview with Paul Schrader]
Roy’s experience is one of conversion after encountering the supernatural—with all of the struggle that entails. He becomes consumed by visions of a flat-topped mountain and finds himself compulsively crafting it out of clay and even the mashed potatoes on his dinner plate. As he draws deeper into his obsession, he begins to frighten his family. His behavior is all the more disturbing because he cannot explain it. After sculpting his mashed potato mountain, all he can manage is: “This means something. This is important.”
Like many real mystics, Roy only finds understanding among people who have had similar experiences: Jillian (Melinda Dillon), a mother who witnessed the same U.F.O.s and whose son was later abducted, and Lacombe (legendary director François Truffaut), a French scientist investigating a mysterious, five-note musical sequence left behind by the aliens. Together they seek answers, leading to a stunning climax on top of a mountain (the ironically named Devil’s Tower). When the U.F.O.s arrive, they appear in a wave of clouds descending on the summit: an allusion to God arriving on Mount Sinai, wreathed in clouds, in Ex 24:15-18.
The sequence plays out almost entirely without dialogue as Earth scientists trade musical sequences with the alien ship, the tunes eventually harmonizing and building on each other. It is a beautiful cinematic depiction of connection, but we never actually learn what messages are encoded in those notes. Similarly, when characters venture aboard the alien craft, the camera does not follow them inside. A later “special edition” of the film included a sequence on board the U.F.O., but Spielberg wisely removed the footage from the version currently in circulation, feeling that it ruined the mystery.
He was right: Revealing the inside of the spaceship would be an attempt to express the ineffable and could only disappoint. In Varieties of Religious Experience, James writes: “One must have musical ears to know the value of a symphony; one must have been in love one’s self to understand a lover’s state of mind. Lacking the heart or ear, we cannot interpret the musician or the lover justly, and are even likely to consider him weak-minded or absurd.”
When we try to communicate the transcendent, we may come close (St. Paul had more luck than Roy), but we always fall short. The sacred is, fundamentally, beyond our comprehension: We cannot understand until we experience it for ourselves.
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is available to rent on Apple TV+ and Amazon Prime.
