The E.T. Book

The first detailed exploration of Steven Spielberg’s film E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, investigating the film's legacy and impact on contemporary culture, as well as the role it played in consolidating Spielberg’s legacy and authorial identity.

E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (1982) was, until the release of Jurassic Park in 1993, Stephen Spielberg’s most successful film, taking $792 million at the box office. The film was a global phenomenon and established the Spielberg "brand" going forward. As with both Jaws and Jurassic Park, its popularity was also catalyzed by an aggressive and widespread marketing and merchandising campaign.

The E.T. Book follows The Jaws Book and The Jurassic Park Book to complete the editor's trilogy dealing with Spielberg’s three major blockbusters and their legacies as landmarks of popular cinema and culture. Through a logical progression, the book considers E.T. from a number of different critical, contextual, and historical perspectives, including its production history; its (trans) cultural contexts; and its (transmedial) cultural legacy and impact. It interrogatates the film’s engagement with the politics of 1980s America, how E.T. has embedded itself in and across global popular culture, and how it is resonant today in a contemporary cultural moment mobilized by a nostalgia for the popular cinema and culture of the 1980s and the experience of childhood in that decade. Moreover, it incorporates wider discussions of the representation of "otherness" and the Alien across Spielberg’s work, drawing on a range of UFO-centric texts, while engaging across the chapters with discourses of and cultural preoccupations with UFO-ology.