How We Gave Up On The Future

Who looks up at the stars and dreams?

Dominic Sandbrook on the lessons of E.T. and the late 1970s.

E.T. is a fairy-tale about growing up in suburbia and dreaming of the world beyond. It’s a film about feeling different and struggling to fit in, about the outsider hiding within us all. It’s also, very famously, a film about a child — the hero, Eliott — wounded by his parents’ divorce. Spielbe…