What Steven Spielberg Knows About Anxiety
And what you need to know too.
Depending on the kind of anxiety you have, you may be afraid to be yourself in front of people. You may think that if you let down your guard, make a mistake, ever let people see the real you, that they will be disgusted, disappointed, disenchanted and they will abandon you.
It’s possible that some people will not like the real you. Or that you may have to find new people who do like the real you. But as far as your mistakes alienating everyone, nothing could be farther from the truth, and I’ll show you why.
It’s been a long time since the movie E.T, The Extra-Terrestrial has been on peoples’ minds. It’s a terrific film, and I’d suggest you watch it. I’m not sure how it fell into relative obscurity except that, perhaps, its insane popularity led to people becoming exhausted with it.
ET is a Steven Spielberg film that came out two years after The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars sequel which signaled that the phenomenal reaction to films about space was repeatable. People were eager to watch good space movies, and Spielberg, with a slew of great films already behind him, was both reputable and capable.
ET wins on a whole lot of levels. It’s visually stunning, has a magnificent John Williams soundtrack, and spins a gripping plot in masterful style. It’s the definition of a blockbuster, and any praise it receives is deserved. But I think the thing that actually makes the movie brilliant is a much smaller element.
For me, the best scene in the movie comes very early in the film, when Elliot and his family are sitting around the dinner table. Elliot has seen “something” in the night that he thinks is unusual, and everyone is trying to convince him that what he saw was something normal. Angry, Eliot mutters that his father would believe him.
This ups the tension considerably in the room. Mom asks if he’d like to speak to his father. Eliot responds, “I can’t. He’s in Mexico with Sally.”
Mom is devastated. She leaves the table, tries to do the dishes, and finally exits the room in tears exclaiming “He hates Mexico.”
This moment isolates our hero Eliot rather than builds sympathy for him. He has made a mistake, and you can tell how bad it is from the reactions of everyone in the room. In short, it hurts.
For the rest of the film, Eliot recovers to become a hero, showing intelligence, courage and compassion. We would have liked him if he’d been this way from the beginning. But because he’s recovering from his previous mistake…we love him.
That’s what Spielberg knew about film-making: that putting in human elements, making the characters real, flawed people, people like us, would elevate the film when the fantastic things started to happen.
Flawed. Human. People like us.
Because Eliot’s subsequent recovery, his relationship with the alien, his courage in rescuing it, then show that an ordinary person can do extraordinary things.
Anxiety tells us we have to attend to every little thing, make sure nothing ever goes wrong, that nobody ever sees us mess up. Reality tells us that recovery is better than perfection. In fact, perfection is a myth, and recovery is the norm.
As long as we’re solid on our big things, we don’t have to guard against all the little things. We just have to change course when they go wrong. If we correct, apologize, do better next time, people will not mind our human errors.
Cultivate recovery. Let go of perfection. You just might be able to release some of that anxiety as well.