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" Published in the January 2012 issue You can tell how Steven Spielberg is feeling by how he&amp;#039;s feeling about aliens. He&amp;#039;s made a lot of movies about aliens. If Spielberg&amp;#039;s not making movies about aliens \u2014 from his best, E. T., to his worst, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull \u2014 he&amp;#039;s making movies about being alien in an unfamiliar world or a familiar world turning alien without warning \u2014 The Terminal and A. I. He&amp;#039;s the least &amp;quot;outsidery&amp;quot; director in Hollywood, and yet the experience of being an outsider is one of his two great subjects. The other is innocence, so when he&amp;#039;s making movies about innocent aliens or aliens that are met with innocence, he&amp;#039;s making movies that turn into Events. When he&amp;#039;s making movies about aliens but not innocence, he&amp;#039;s making ... well, War of the Worlds. War wasn&amp;#039;t a bad movie, exactly \u2014 it wasn&amp;#039;t Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or The Terminal. It just wasn&amp;#039;t an Event. There was a time when every Spielberg movie was an Event, something you felt compelled to see because everyone else felt the same way. His movies captured the essence of what makes movies different from any other art form: They&amp;#039;re made by crowds and meant to be seen in crowds. They bear the stamp of the artist but also of the audience, and Spielberg&amp;#039;s trick from the start has been to remind us of their true nature. He&amp;#039;s famous for killing off the &amp;quot;personal&amp;quot; movies of the &amp;#039;70s \u2014 for killing off Cassavetes and even Coppola with the bludgeon of the big opening \u2014 but what made his movies Events was that they remained personal no matter how big their budgets, their box office, or their &amp;quot;entertainment value.&amp;quot;  His first Event movie \u2014 and his first movie about aliens and innocence \u2014 was Jaws. The alien was the shark. The innocent was Spielberg himself. Like George Lucas&amp;#039;s Star Wars,Jaws was a declaration of innocence \u2014 an announcement that Spielberg, and by extension the rest of Hollywood, was going to stop implicating the Americans who paid to see movies and go back to pleasing them. It was the first expression of the change in the national mood that led to the Reagan presidency, and not incidentally to Saving Private Ryan a quarter of a century later. In Ryan, Americans are not only more sinned against than sinning, as they are in all of Spielberg&amp;#039;s movies, they&amp;#039;re the aliens, and their innocence is sacrificed to the world, drenched in the most cinematic blood ever shed. Spielberg has never made another Event movie, though not for want of trying. He made six movies in the first decade of the new century, and at least three of them might be considered responses to 9/11 \u2014 The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich. But we no longer watch movies optimistically and en masse. We no longer watch them to enjoy a communal experience in the dark, and so we no longer watch them as Americans who are willing to be entertained but rather as individuals who need to be. Indeed, if you want to chart the decline of American optimism, there is no better measure than the difference between 1977&amp;#039;s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 2005&amp;#039;s War of the Worlds: In the first, the aliens are presumed innocent by the innocent and are welcomed with wonder. In the second, they don&amp;#039;t have to be welcomed because they are already here, and they turn Americans into ash that other Americans have the misfortune to taste. War Horse combines the elements of aliens and innocence in a way familiar to us since E. T. \u2014 think of the horse as the alien and the boy as the innocent who loves him. But for the better part of the last decade, Spielberg has been telling us that maybe E. T. wasn&amp;#039;t so trustworthy after all. War Horse and the animated Tintin may well be big movies; they&amp;#039;ll never, however, be Event movies. We will always like watching movies about aliens, and we still like to be flattered about our innocence, but we will never again presume that the aliens are innocent, even if the aliens are us. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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