Cate Blanchett and Michelle Pfeiffer were among the names featured in WWD’s coverage of the MoMA Film Benefit honoring Steven Spielberg with Chanel. The gathering brings together celebrity, fashion, and film culture, but its most interesting subject is the work being honored: movies that make enormous experiences feel personal.
For a film audience, the occasion offers a useful invitation to look beyond familiar images and examine how those images acquire emotional weight. Spielberg’s flying bicycles are instantly recognizable. The child who must eventually say goodbye to the passenger on his bicycle is what makes the spectacle matter.
This is commentary on the tribute and a character-focused retrospective of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, rather than an account of speeches or private conversations at the benefit. Spoilers follow for E.T., including its ending.
What the MoMA honor asks us to remember
MoMA describes its Film Benefit as supporting film acquisition, preservation, and exhibitions. That purpose gives the Spielberg tribute a dimension beyond an evening’s photographs. Preserving cinema allows future audiences to encounter the work itself, with its rhythms, awkwardness, humor, and contradictions intact.
Blanchett and Pfeiffer give the coverage recognizable faces. Their presence should not, however, be treated as evidence of particular opinions about Spielberg’s films. Attendance is attendance; a critic’s interpretation belongs to the critic. The valuable question here is what an audience might discover by returning to the movies after the celebration.
My answer begins with E.T.. Its emotional achievement is more demanding than its reputation as a comforting childhood favorite suggests. Spielberg makes attachment feel miraculous, then asks his young protagonist to accept that attachment does not give him ownership over someone else’s future.
Elliott wants a friend before he understands a responsibility
At the center of E.T. is a stranded extraterrestrial and Elliott, the boy who befriends him. Their relationship begins with an imbalance that is easy to overlook. Elliott has found something extraordinary within reach of his ordinary life. E.T. has lost access to his own world.
For Elliott, the encounter creates intimacy and importance. He becomes the person who knows, shelters, and understands this visitor. For E.T., that shelter is valuable without being a permanent solution. The same friendship therefore answers two different needs: Elliott wants closeness; E.T. needs help getting home.
This difference is the film’s dramatic engine. Elliott’s affection is real, but affection does not automatically tell him what is best for his friend. He must learn to listen to a desire that could leave him lonely again. That is a substantial moral challenge for a child, and Spielberg allows it to remain painful.
The familiar request, “phone home,” is crucial because it gives E.T. an objective independent of Elliott. The visitor is not simply an adorable answer to the boy’s unhappiness. He has a destination, relationships beyond the screen, and a life that the human characters cannot replace.
Why the children’s perspective makes the danger work
Elliott and his siblings help E.T. while government agents pursue the visitor. Told as an institutional problem, this could become a story about identifying and containing an unknown organism. Experienced through the children, it becomes a story about whether someone vulnerable will be allowed to remain a person.
That distinction explains much of the suspense. The children already have a relationship with E.T.; the people approaching him do not share that history. An intervention can therefore appear orderly from one perspective and terrifying from another. The audience’s allegiance comes from time spent with the friendship.
Spielberg’s strength here is the way extraordinary danger grows out of ordinary dependence. Children need adults, yet they cannot assume that adults will recognize what they recognize. Protecting E.T. requires decisions that exceed their usual authority. Their smallness becomes a practical obstacle rather than merely a visual source of cuteness.
The approach also makes character observation essential to the adventure. A comparable question runs through our analysis of Ginny’s resourcefulness in Friday the 13th Part 2: suspense becomes richer when survival depends on how a character understands another being, not only on how quickly someone can run.
The spectacle earns its place through the friendship
The bicycle flight works because movement becomes an answer to vulnerability. Characters who have been constrained by their size and circumstances suddenly escape those limits. The exhilaration belongs to them before it belongs to the audience.
Seen in isolation, the image can look like a declaration that anything is possible. Within the story, its meaning is narrower and more moving: help is possible, escape is possible, and the children’s loyalty can accomplish something. None of those possibilities guarantees that Elliott gets to keep his friend.
That qualification is why I find the film’s sentiment persuasive. Its grand gestures serve a relationship whose eventual outcome cannot be negotiated into permanent happiness. The adventure can succeed while leaving its protagonist with a loss.
There is room to resist Spielberg’s emotional emphasis. The film presses hard on fear, relief, and tenderness, and viewers who prefer more distance may feel that pressure. Yet the underlying conflict is not cheaply resolved. Elliott’s reward is not possession of the extraordinary creature. It is the experience of having loved him well enough to help him leave.
The goodbye changes the meaning of home
When Elliott asks E.T. to stay, he expresses the wish the film has taught us to share. The departure is difficult precisely because their bond has become convincing. A convenient substitute would weaken that bond; a promise that nothing will change would evade the story’s central problem.
E.T.’s assurance, “I’ll be right here,” offers something more delicate. Physical separation need not erase an encounter’s influence. Elliott cannot preserve the friendship by freezing its circumstances, but he can carry what it has given him.
My reading is that this is the film’s deepest account of growing up. Maturity does not require Elliott to dismiss wonder as childish. It requires him to stop confusing wonder with something he must keep within reach. He can believe in the experience and still accept its ending.
That distinction also helps explain why returning to a childhood movie can be revealing. As our essay on the lasting pull of childhood movie theaters explores, the remembered setting and the remembered feeling become intertwined. Revisiting the film gives us a chance to notice the difficult emotions that nostalgia may have softened.
What lasts after the tribute
The MoMA benefit’s combination of Blanchett, Pfeiffer, Spielberg, and Chanel naturally draws attention to the public life of cinema. The preservation purpose points toward its longer life: the possibility that an unfamiliar viewer will sit down years from now and encounter a character’s dilemma without already knowing how to feel.
E.T. makes a strong case for that kind of continued attention. Its lasting value lies in the tension between the feeling we want and the decision the character must make. We want Elliott’s happiness. We come to understand why helping E.T. means accepting an outcome that hurts him.
For me, that is the most meaningful way to read the Spielberg honor. A celebrated image can survive as a cultural souvenir, but a film survives more fully when its characters can still challenge us. Behind the familiar flight is a boy learning that love sometimes means making another person’s departure possible.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: November 13, 2026 at 10:55:42 PST (Los Angeles time)
