By Annalee Newitz

PEOPLE REMEMBER E .T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but they also recall its fantastic financial success – and you can bet it's warm memories of the latter that are inspiring Steven Spielberg's 20th-anniversary rerelease this week. Commercials featuring brief montages of glowing fingers and slack-jawed kids are on TV every five minutes, while movie theaters promise audiences they'll get "enhanced effects" and "never-before-seen footage" for their $8.50 tickets. Ah, nostalgia for commodities past. Return to the world of innocence and Reese's Pieces. See Elliott's psychic Coors beer binge as if it were the first time! Plus, new CGI of E.T. sailing across the moon in a Toyota!

Meanwhile, another important film of the early 1980s is also celebrating its 20th anniversary, albeit with less fanfare: DocuDrama has rereleased cult documentary The Atomic Café on video and DVD. Unlike the Marin hippie-ish, ecoliberal E.T., The Atomic Café is an explicitly political film: it's a social history of the atomic bomb and the freaky postwar propaganda movies it inspired (think "duck and cover"). Unfortunately, The Atomic Café's anniversary edition is likely to get less attention than E.T., simply because nobody is going to give it the DreamWorks SKG treatment.

Despite the difference in these flicks' ad budgets, the liberalism of E.T. matches the progressive political sentiment of The Atomic Café nearly exactly. Both films offer extremely negative images of covert government operations and military power. Who, after all, can forget the disturbing scene in E.T. when Elliott's peaceful family home is invaded by evil government agents who want to capture E.T. and experiment on him? It's a terrifying image of state power run amok that's almost as familiar as disturbing images from the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath. In retrospect, it's rather surprising to consider that two such vehemently antigovernment films achieved instant classic status (one as a blockbuster, one as a cult film) in the early 1980s, a period when popular ideology favored right-wing policies and military buildup. Although E.T. represented a triumph of the quintessentially '80s money-driven blockbuster – it's the film many in the marketing biz credit with inventing product placement – the movie was also oddly, and perhaps unwittingly, a protest against Reaganite conservatism.

In an era of traditional family values, E.T. managed to make its postdivorce, single-mom family seem as wholesome as Leave It to Beaver's. The siblings help one another out, Mom is their sweet but frisky protector, and central character Elliott radiates scrubbed suburban charm. The kids may go through divorce pains, but their "I wish dad was here" squabbles are presented as ordinary coming-of-age issues rather than the product of a degenerate culture sapped of its moral values. A tense dinnertime conversation about Dad going to Mexico with his new girlfriend is just the kind of sad thing every kid has to face as he or she grows up. Even when Elliott screams, "Penis breath!" during a spat with his older brother (a scene excised from the toned-down anniversary edition), the outburst comes across as cute rather than obscene.

What boggles the mind is how Spielberg managed to make the star of this movie – the squat, bug-eyed, bighearted doll E.T. himself – look so obviously like an adolescent penis. Bewildered, beer-addled, and prone to inexplicable erections of the neck and finger, E.T. waddles through the film alternately spouting babyish platitudes and audibly panting over Elliott's shapely mother. At one point, E.T.'s psychic connection with Elliott inspires the prepubescent boy to kiss one of his classmates in a frenzy of drunken, alien desire. In the 21st century, when even the formless Teletubbies can be accused of homosexuality, E.T.'s throbbing finger would never have been allowed to thrust itself so provocatively toward Elliott's nubile body.

I can't bring myself to believe that the goody-goody Spielberg would have deliberately made E.T. into a phallic symbol. More likely, the eroticism of the film was half-conscious. E.T.'s suggestive body made it to the screen unmodified because the filmmakers didn't engage in the kind of self-censoring they would be forced into today, searching every frame for potentially subversive sexual meanings that might undermine the film's family-friendliness. Beneath E.T.'s irritating smarminess, there lies a story that takes a fairly lenient position on child sexuality. E.T.'s erect little body normalizes children's sexual feelings in the same way that Elliott's healthy family makes divorce seem perfectly acceptable.

Of course, E.T. is also, perhaps more obviously, a stand-in for Elliott's missing father, who is off having sex with his new girlfriend in Mexico. Helping E.T. return home and enduring the loss of his kindhearted, life-giving alien friend are both ways in which Elliott learns to cope with losing his father.

In the process Elliott also learns that some father figures are bad – especially ones associated with the U.S. government. If E.T. is the warm fuzzy penis of the flick, then the bad penis certainly belongs to Keys (Peter Coyote), head of a secret government force that has been stalking E.T. since the film's frightening opening sequence. Whenever Elliott's family is about to be menaced by this group, we are treated to close-up shots of Keys's crotch and the ring of keys he wears on his belt – their scary jingling seems to suggest adult secrets best kept locked away.

Although there are some halfhearted attempts to redeem Keys at the end of the film, he's clearly the bad guy. Unlike E.T., he has no respect for "home." His henchmen invade Elliott's house with strange machines and miles of menacing plastic wrap. Keys may swear it's a "miracle" that E.T. has come to earth, but he doesn't love the alien like Elliott does. He's a bureaucrat, the most adult form of life there is. Keys has his feet firmly on the ground, unlike Elliott and his friends, who all get to take the ultimate science fiction wonder ride on their flying bikes.

The worst crime one can commit in Spielberg's universe is to display a lack of imagination. In the end, E.T. is really a celebration of wondrous, unchecked possibilities: kids can fly, divorce can be survived, sex is normal. And yet what rankles is that these utopian meanings are so easily contained, converted into hollow platitudes like E.T.'s parting words to Gertie: "Be good." Perhaps what the E.T. revival makes clear is that worshiping "wonder" is hardly imaginative or gutsy at all.