The movie ET came up in my Netflix queue recently, so I sat down with my children to watch it. Everything was there, just as I remembered it – the Halloween scene, the trail of Skittles, Drew Barrymore’s “Is he a pig? He sure eats like one” – but while I was prepared for the film to make me nostalgic, I didn’t anticipate this: that it would unleash a surge of love for America.
It is a strange thing to live in a country for which one has no native affection – or rather, for which one’s affection has been dismantled over the years by the creeping understanding that it is founded on bogus mythology. The American dream is rigged and rooted in rightwing ideology; modern America’s origin story underplays or overlooks slavery; all roads, in the current mindset, lead to Trump.
You might think the exceptionalism of New York could survive this, that for those living in the city, some of the old romance of the American self-image might persist. And perhaps for liberal Americans, it does – after all, post-Brexit, I don’t “hate Britain”. For outsiders, however, the US is a tough place to love at the moment, and I find myself frequently saying I can’t stand it.
Of course ET, or rather Steven Spielberg at his height, is just the vehicle for getting around this. I was six years old when the film came out, and it set up the quaint and now very unfashionable delusion that America is a place where you leave the house on a pushbike and at some point break free of gravity to fly across the moon. I thought of other American things that I love: big fridges, free refills, the expectation that things that are broken might one day be fixed, not having to preface every request with a sheepish apology. In the final 10 minutes, as John Williams’ score soared, I found myself welling up. (It had been a long week.)
Kneejerk anti-Americanism is as tiresome as flag-waving, but there is still a sense that only a sucker would fall for all this. And yet the American style can be hard to resist. If British self-esteem is based on the power of understatement and the American ego is full of hot air, Trump’s presence at the helm cannot obliterate America’s material vastness: this country is a place where the optimism is brighter, the pessimism more violent, where weather systems in every sense are more extreme than elsewhere and transcend the smallness of the man in the White House.
It was the camerawork in ET that got me in the end – the way Spielberg inhabits the kids’ mental space by shooting so much of it from waist height, making those in charge seem like clumsy behemoths with no idea of what’s going on at ground level. And while the impulse of Elliott and his siblings to protect the alien in their midst now looks innocent to the point of obscenity, as a fairytale it’s still there, tugging at one’s imagination.
• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
