I’ll Be Right Here: Disability Intimacy & Medical Trauma in E.T.

Marissa Spear

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Steven Spielberg’s 1982 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was an integral part of my family’s classic movies, a list that also included The Wizard of Oz, It’s A Wonderful Life, the original Star Wars trilogy, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. E.T. chronicles the story of an alien (E.T.) stranded on Earth who is discovered by a young boy, Elliott, and his siblings. Elliott and E.T. develop a psychosomatic connection as they attempt to keep E.T.’s existence a secret. When E.T. falls ill and is captured by government agents, Elliot – who simultaneously falls ill – and his band of friends come to the rescue, helping E.T. escape back to his family in space.

My family watched E.T. constantly, so much so that iconic lines became mantras my dad repeated over and over. As I grew older, and chronic illness and disability became a newfound part of my identity, I began to see E.T. anew.

Disability and science fiction have a long and complicated history. As medical historian R.E. Fulton has written, “Early science fiction…appealed strongly, vitally, to those for whom science was at best a mixed blessing, a tool of infinite promise and limited returns.” To some, science fiction has been seen as a site to “cure” disability, harmfully erasing disabled people from the future all together. Others, in the tradition of Octavia Butler, have used science fiction to see marginalized communities as leaders, building on “their ability to live outside acceptable systems” as “essential to creating new, just worlds.” Though E.T. and Elliott are never explicitly named as disabled, their simultaneous journey of deteriorating health firmly puts them at the whims of the medical system and the U.S. government. And thus, I argue, placed in the canon of disability and science fiction.

Throughout E.T., we catch layers of foreshadowing about the fate that awaits E.T. Early on, Elliott makes direct statements about what might happen to E.T. if adults find him: “…they’ll give it a lobotomy or do experiments on it or something.”^[1] There’s the frog dissection scene in which Elliott, intoxicated by proxy due to E.T.’s experimentation with beer, frees the frogs intended for biology class dissection while E.T. makes a plan to return home. Or when Elliott’s mother reads his little sister Gertie a Peter Pan bedtime story about an untimely poison.

This foreshadowing is coupled with E.T. ‘s constant connection to Elliott, and by extension, to the living world. Elliott increasingly talks about himself and E.T. as a “we,” telling his brother Mike that E.T. is “feeling everything” as the flowers seem to bloom and wilt to match E.T.’s state of being.^[2] Spielberg’s cinematography places the movie firmly in Elliott’s and E.T.’s points of view. For the majority of the movie, the viewer never sees an adult face except for that of Elliott’s mother. Everything is literally from the eyesight of a child—for example, we only see the government agent “Keys” from the belt loop down until the climax of the movie. The viewer comes to understand E.T. and Elliott’s world as a shared entity—this special connection only adding to the viewer’s emotional reaction to their shared deterioration.

The more I watched the tenderness between Elliott and E.T., the more I was reminded of disability intimacy, and in particular what disability activist Mia Mingus refers to as access intimacy – “that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else ‘gets’ your access needs.” There is the obvious intimacy of Elliott’s and E.T.’s shared feelings, shared actions, and shared deteriorating health, but there’s also the way Elliott and E.T. meet each other where they are with no pretext. Elliott (and his siblings) exhibit a childlike curiosity in getting to know E.T. In contrast to the adults around them, the children’s attempts to “teach” E.T. their world are never condescending, and their attempts to understand E.T.’s world are never extractive.

Speilberg’s layered foreshadowing however, does not make the movie’s climax any less scary: Elliot and E.T., both blue and pale, lying on the bathroom floor; men in hazmat suits coming over a hill along an orange horizon; the absence of John Williams’s score emphasizing the eerie silence. As a child, the medical scenes terrified me – from the chaos of men in personal protective equipment to the beeping of the machines, the cross talk of the doctors, against the backdrop of Elliott’s and E.T’s wails. It was not until I was an adult, watching it after years of doctor’s appointments, surgeries, and failed attempts to advocate for myself, that I realized how real Elliott’s fears are. Elliott is a child enduring medical trauma in real time. Like most kids, and disabled kids in particular, Elliot is repeatedly ignored and viewed as an unreliable narrator of his world. Elliot keeps crying out: “You have no right to do this…You’re scaring him.”^[3]

The best science fiction has its roots in the realities of history – whether it’s episodes of the drama series Evil calling out the medical racism baked into the U.S. healthcare system, or The X-Files episodes about the government stealing women’s ova, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes about medical experimentation and hysterical women confined to asylums.^[4] And E.T. is no different. Elliott knows that the government, and by extension, the bureaucracy it sustains, is killing E.T.

We live in a world where increasingly it’s not just illness or pandemics that are killing us, but the bureaucracies that exacerbate that slow death. It’s the fact that insurance won’t cover routine medical procedures, leaving us in debt or crowdsourcing medical bills. It’s the fact that there is no infrastructure to support equitable access to free vaccinations, air purifiers, and high-quality masks in an ongoing pandemic, nor is there government acknowledgment that long COVID continues to disable thousands. It’s the fact that there is no infrastructure to support disabled people in need of evacuation in increasingly horrific natural disasters due to climate change; instead, they are just left to die. It’s the fact that there is always money to destroy communities and countries abroad in Palestine and Sudan, but never enough to keep people alive. Disease may kill us, but the bureaucracy of capitalism may kill us faster.

Some viewers may argue that E.T. would have eventually deteriorated if he had stayed with Elliott, but, by Elliott’s own assertion, he would’ve known what to do. He would’ve known how to take care of him. Elliot knows what every disabled comrade knows – that disabled communities have saved each other over and over, especially when the government and the medical system neglect us at every turn.

Towards the end of the movie, a lullaby-like theme plays as Elliott mourns E.T.’s supposed death. Elliot says: “You must be dead…I can’t feel anything anymore,” alluding to their otherworldly connection to each other.^[5] This same theme plays early on in the movie when Elliott welcomes E.T. into his home, repeating in small moments between E.T. and Elliott and each of his siblings. John Williams’s orchestration (literally and figuratively) underscores the disability intimacy between E.T. and Elliott, each moment punctuated by the childlike wonder and care exchanged between them.

The final words E.T. says to Elliott in their tearful goodbye are: “I’ll be right here,” placing his finger on Elliott’s forehead.^[6] It feels fitting that E.T. echoes the sentiment I often feel among my disabled friends. That I will be here – in whatever way they need me, just like they’ve been for me. With my disabled friends across the country, that means commiserating over shitty doctors, swapping flare-up tips, or sending each other relatable memes. With disabled friends closer to home, that means driving each other places when we’re too in pain to do it ourselves, bringing each other meals when we can’t get out of bed, showing up with all the supplies and pain management tools, and sending each other relatable memes.^[7] We will be right here, just like Elliott and E.T., whenever our disabled comrades need us. And we will save each other, over and over again.

Notes

1. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, directed by Steven Spielberg (1982); New York, NY: Universal Pictures, 2012), DVD. ↑
2. E.T. (1982). ↑
3. E.T. (1982). ↑
4. For Evil episodes about medical racism see Season 1, Episode 2, “177 Minutes” and Season 1, Episode 11, “Room 320.” For The X-Files episodes about government experimentation and the government stealing women’s ova, see Season 3, Episode 9, “Nisei,” Season 3, Episode 10, “731,” and Season 4, Episode 14,“Memento Mori.” For Buffy episodes about medical experimentation and asylums, see Season 2, Episode 18, “Killed by Death” and Season 6, Episode 17, “Normal Again.” For more on history and The X-Files see Contingent Magazine’s Jose Chung’s December Issue (2023). ↑
5. E.T. (1982). ↑
6. E.T. (1982). ↑
7. For more on disability justice and care work see the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice) and Stacey Milbern. ↑

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Featured image caption: An artificial limb and human hand touch at the index finger. (Courtesy cottonbro studio on Pexels)