E.T. and Tron work as Christian allegories

By Peter T. Chattaway

THE SUMMER of 1982 was a great time to be a science fiction fan, especially if you were a young Christian who was just beginning to explore the relationship between faith and film. Movies like Tron, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan featured characters whose stories bore an uncanny resemblance to the incarnation, sacrificial death, and/or resurrection of Christ.

I was about the same age as Elliott (Henry Thomas), the boy at the heart of the film, when E.T. first came out; and seeing it again after all these years brings back a very strange mix of memories and feelings. I saw the film three times when I was young, mostly just to watch boys like me outrun the adult police cars on their bicycles; but I must confess that the film never entirely satisfied me, even at that young age. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy, which was not yet finished at that time, E.T. didn't have a lot of action, and its storyline was almost too simple.

But it was an enormously popular film -- it still ranks as one of the five top-grossing movies of all time, even after you adjust the figures for inflation -- and its success was no doubt due in part to the way it tapped into our collective longing for spiritual healing. Just as Elliott comes from a broken home, we all live in a fallen, broken world, and just as Elliott finds a friend and surrogate parent in a miracle-working alien who can telepathically share his feelings, our own healing ultimately comes through Christ, who came to this world to share his Father's love and to bear all our sins and sorrows on the cross.

Seeing E.T. as an adult, I find I am more sensitive to both its strengths and its weaknesses. The film is superbly made on many levels, from Allen Daviau's cinematography -- which finds an almost sacramental beauty in the towering redwoods of the San Fernando Valley, and which cleverly keeps all adult faces, except for Elliott's mother Mary (Dee Wallace), out of the frame until the third act -- to the unusually authentic performances by the child actors, including a very young Drew Barrymore.

But it is also a very manipulative film, thanks in part to John Williams's ubiquitous music, and I am reminded of a review I read years ago, which said that Spielberg "pushes our buttons" throughout this movie; it's true, you can almost hear him saying, "Laugh now; cry now; be in awe now."

Tron, the first movie to make extensive use of computer animation, was much less successful than E.T. in box office terms, but it was a hit among those of us who were just getting into computers -- my dad bought our family's first Osborne 1 that year -- and its use of religious allegory is even more explicit. The film is set mostly within what we now call cyberspace, and it concerns a hacker named Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who is drawn into that world in the form of a program. However, because he is a 'user' -- that is, a human being who creates computer programs -- Flynn has powers the other programs don't have, and these enable him to fight back against the evil Master Control Program (voice of David Warner), which has defied its own user and wants to take over the world.

Flynn may be a sort a Christ-figure, but so is Tron (Bruce Boxleitner), the program who teams up with him to defeat the Master Control Program. In addition to his miracles, Flynn sacrifices himself in a way that evokes both the descent of Christ into hell as well as his ascension, while in another scene, Tron communicates with his user in a way that resembles the opening of the heavens at the baptism of Christ. And all of this takes place in an environment in which programs who believe in their users are persecuted for being 'religious fanatics,' and are sent to their deaths in video-game battles that resemble ancient Roman gladiatorial fights.

Neither of these films makes a perfect fit with the life of Christ, of course. E.T. does not choose to be left behind on earth, and Flynn does not choose to enter the computer world; instead, one is stranded by accident, and the other is trapped by the villain.

In addition, Flynn even tells Tron that users are as clueless as the programs who look up to them -- imagine how different our theology would be if Jesus told his followers that God was just making things up as he went.

But it is still fascinating to see just how strong an influence the Christian story has on our culture, even -- or especially -- if the parallels were unintentional.