Film music

How E.T.’s Music Makes Us Feel Time

Waiting, flying, leaving: John Williams and the moments we wish could last forever.

Written by Ellis Vane · 10 September 2026

Written under a pen name, with generative AI assisting in exploration, drafting and editing. Not all factual claims have been independently verified. The decision to publish, and responsibility for the result, are mine.

There is a peculiar sensation that accompanies watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) as an adult. You may remember the bicycle, the glowing finger, the extraordinary silhouette against the moon. You may remember crying at the ending. What you might not remember is how much of the film is spent waiting.

Waiting for something to emerge from the darkness. Waiting for Elliott to be believed. Waiting for E.T. to communicate. Waiting for the adults to discover what the children already know. Waiting, eventually, for someone to leave.

Steven Spielberg’s film is full of movement, yet much of its emotional power comes from the anticipation of movement: the possibility that something wonderful might happen, or the terrible knowledge that something wonderful cannot last.

John Williams’s music does more than accompany these experiences. It changes our perception of their duration.

A few seconds can feel interminable. A journey across the sky can seem to exist outside ordinary time. A farewell, though inevitable, can arrive before we are ready.

Perhaps this is one reason E.T. remains so affecting. Its music does not simply tell us how to feel about what is happening. It teaches us how to feel the time in which it happens.

Consider the film’s opening encounter in the forest.

We are introduced to a world of nocturnal sounds, strange lights and creatures moving through vegetation. The atmosphere is mysterious, but not conventionally threatening. Williams’s music helps establish the extraterrestrials as curious, vulnerable presences before we have properly understood them.

Then human intrusion changes everything.

Vehicles arrive. Searchlights cut through the darkness. E.T. is separated from his companions, and the spacecraft departs without him.

What makes this sequence affecting is not simply that E.T. has been abandoned. It is that we experience the separation through a creature who cannot control the speed of events.

There is no opportunity to negotiate. No reassuring explanation. No promise that everything will be all right.

The music moves between wonder and urgency, altering our sense of how quickly the world is closing in.

As the danger intensifies, musical activity creates the impression of time accelerating. Yet the emotional experience is paradoxical: the faster events unfold, the more desperately we want them to slow down.

• We want E.T. to reach the ship.
• We want the ship to wait.
• We know, almost instinctively, that it will not.

This is one of cinema’s simplest manipulations of time: the audience experiences an event as unbearably short precisely because it wishes the event could last longer.

Williams understands that suspense is not only about uncertainty. Sometimes it comes from knowing what is about to happen and being powerless to prevent it.

The opening plants a temporal wound that the rest of the film will attempt to heal.

E.T. has been left behind. From this point onwards, time is something he must endure.

When Elliott begins communicating with E.T., the film enters a different relationship with time.

The urgency of the opening gives way to hesitation, observation and discovery.

Two beings who have no shared language must learn how to occupy the same space.

Much of the pleasure comes from small actions: watching, copying, offering food, reacting to unfamiliar objects. The comedy and tenderness depend upon the film allowing these encounters room to breathe.

Williams does not insist that every discovery become a grand musical revelation. The score can withdraw, leaving the sounds of the room, the performers’ movements and their tentative responses to carry the scene.

This restraint matters.

If music continually announced the importance of Elliott and E.T.’s friendship, the relationship might feel predetermined. Instead, the film gives us the sensation of watching affection develop.

• A pause becomes an invitation.
• A gesture becomes a question.
• A response becomes a small victory.

Time here is neither racing nor running out.

It is being shared.

And there is something recognisably childlike about this rhythm. Childhood, at least in memory, is often organised less around appointments and obligations than around discoveries: the afternoon when you found something extraordinary, the evening when you stayed awake too long, the apparently unimportant hour that became unforgettable.

We rarely remember precisely how long such experiences lasted.

We remember how completely we inhabited them.

The score’s willingness to make space for these encounters helps us inhabit them too.

It is worth distinguishing this from the idea that Williams simply makes the film sentimental. The tenderness works partly because he knows when not to supply it.

Sometimes music makes us feel time most powerfully by allowing us to notice its absence.

One of the film’s most remarkable transformations occurs when ordinary movement becomes extraordinary.

A bicycle is, after all, a modest form of transportation. It has familiar physical limitations. It moves along roads, negotiates corners, and requires its rider to keep pedalling.

Then, in E.T., it leaves the ground.

The celebrated flying sequence is often described as magical, which is true but insufficient.

The more interesting question is how Williams makes the magic feel physically possible.

In the sequence associated with the cue commonly known as Flying, the music’s rhythmic momentum gives the sensation of forward propulsion. Its rising melodic gestures and orchestral expansion suggest that the characters are no longer merely travelling across a landscape. They are escaping its limitations.

The orchestra seems to discover greater space as the bicycles discover greater altitude.

This is crucial because flight presents an unusual cinematic problem.

If the characters are suddenly free of gravity, what gives their movement weight? What makes their journey feel like an event rather than a special effect?

Williams supplies an answer through musical momentum.

The score provides a sense of effort, release and continuing motion even when the bicycles are suspended impossibly in the air.

The result is a wonderful contradiction: we feel the speed of the journey and, simultaneously, the desire for it never to end.

In everyday experience, speed makes time disappear. A journey passes quickly because our attention is occupied.

Here, the music makes movement feel expansive.

The faster the characters seem to travel, the larger the moment becomes.

This is why the famous image of Elliott and E.T. crossing the moon has such extraordinary staying power. The silhouette itself is almost motionless in cultural memory. We remember it as an image that could be held indefinitely.

Yet its emotional power belongs to a sequence defined by movement.

Williams helps turn an action into an experience of suspended time.

For a brief moment, the ordinary rules of childhood, geography and gravity cease to apply.

We are not simply watching Elliott fly. We are experiencing what it might feel like to have an impossible moment last long enough to believe in it.

There is a shift in E.T. that is easy to overlook because the film makes it feel so natural.

The same possibility that offers the story its resolution threatens to destroy the emotional world we have come to inhabit.

This is where Williams’s score becomes especially sophisticated.

The music has spent much of the film encouraging our attachment to E.T. and Elliott’s shared experiences. Now that attachment changes the meaning of time.

Every moment together has acquired an invisible deadline.

Consider the extraordinary emotional reversal surrounding E.T.’s apparent death and revival.

The hospital-like environment, with its clinical apparatus and adult interventions, feels painfully distant from the playful domestic world in which the friendship developed.

Time is no longer measured by discoveries.

It is measured by signs of life.

A heartbeat, a movement, a response: small changes become enormous because the possibility of losing E.T. has made every second consequential.

Williams’s restraint and subsequent return to warmth help transform the scene’s emotional rhythm. The apparent finality of death gives way to the astonishing possibility of more time.

But that reprieve is not permanent.

E.T.’s recovery does not restore the earlier innocence of the relationship. Instead, it brings Elliott closer to the knowledge that love sometimes requires letting someone go.

And this is a different kind of suspense from the opening.

We no longer want the spaceship to wait for E.T.

We want E.T. to wait for us.

The film has reversed our emotional allegiance without making either desire unreasonable.

That is a remarkable achievement.

The climactic bicycle escape is among the finest examples of sustained musical storytelling in popular cinema.

Williams’s extended finale, often identified with Escape/Chase/Saying Goodbye, does not merely decorate the action. It helps organise our experience of the sequence as it moves through pursuit, danger, liberation and farewell.

The music is constantly changing the emotional meaning of movement.

During the chase, rhythmic energy drives the characters forward. We feel the pressure of pursuit, the physical urgency of escape, the narrowing opportunities for success.

Then the bicycles take flight.

The transformation is both visual and musical.

The orchestral writing opens into a more expansive, triumphant expression. The chase has not simply become faster. It has become freer.

What previously felt like a race against time becomes, briefly, an escape from time.

And yet the freedom is inseparable from the approaching goodbye.

This is what makes the sequence more emotionally complex than an ordinary triumphant climax.

In another film, the flight might represent victory. Here, it represents the successful completion of a journey whose destination will break our hearts.

The music allows us to celebrate what is happening even as we understand what it will cost.

That dual awareness is central to the film’s emotional power.

• Relief: E.T. will survive.
• Delight: the children have escaped.
• Exhilaration: the bicycles are flying.
• Grief: goodbye is approaching.
• All at once.

Williams does not require us to choose between these emotions. The musical sequence carries us through them, allowing each to emerge from the last.

The result feels less like a series of separate dramatic events than a single, continuously unfolding emotional experience.

In other words, the music gives the climax its own sense of time: one in which excitement, relief and sadness are not successive states but overlapping ones.

The farewell is devastating partly because it is so simple.

There is no elaborate explanation of what Elliott and E.T. mean to one another. No assurance of a future reunion. No attempt to disguise the permanence of the moment.

E.T. touches Elliott’s forehead and says, “I’ll be right here.”

It is a promise that changes the meaning of absence.

Physically, E.T. is leaving. Emotionally, something of him will remain.

Williams’s music gives this idea a form that dialogue alone could not achieve.

As the farewell unfolds, familiar musical feeling returns, now transformed by everything we have experienced. Warmth is inseparable from loss. Wonder is inseparable from memory.

The score does not make the goodbye less painful.

It makes the pain feel meaningful.

And here we arrive at the most interesting paradox in the film’s treatment of time.

The ending feels too soon, even though we have spent the entire story hoping E.T. would make it home.

We want the separation to be over.

Then, when it arrives, we want it postponed.

What has changed?

Not the destination. Not the necessity of departure.

What has changed is our attachment to the time spent getting there.

Williams’s music has helped us invest emotionally in the duration of the friendship. Its anticipation, hesitations, discoveries and moments of liberation have become part of our own experience of the film.

We have lived alongside Elliott and E.T. long enough to resent the fact that their time together must end.

And then comes the final musical release.

The spacecraft departs. The score expands towards its conclusion. The film gives us a sense of completion without pretending that completion and happiness are identical.

It is possible for an ending to be right and still hurt.

Perhaps especially when it is right.

There is another dimension to E.T.’s music, one that exists outside the film itself.

The experience of hearing it changes as we grow older.

A child watching E.T. may identify most immediately with Elliott’s adventure: the excitement of hiding an alien, the injustice of adults interfering, the exhilarating possibility of flying.

An adult may find themselves responding to something else.

The smallness of Elliott’s world. The vulnerability of his family. The knowledge that extraordinary friendships, however formative, do not necessarily last in the form we want them to.

And yet Williams’s score can make those earlier experiences feel briefly accessible again.

A familiar melody can collapse decades of distance. We hear it and find ourselves remembering not only the film, but the circumstances in which we first encountered it: a living room, a television, a particular age, perhaps people who are no longer present.

This is not something unique to E.T., of course. Music has a remarkable capacity to evoke autobiographical memory.

But E.T. is unusually well suited to this phenomenon because its story is already concerned with the relationship between presence and absence.

E.T. leaves, but Elliott carries him forward.

Childhood ends, but something of it remains available through memory.

And the music becomes one of the means by which we revisit it.

It cannot return us to the past.

But for a few minutes, it can make the distance between then and now feel unexpectedly small.

This is perhaps the most literal sense in which E.T.’s music makes us feel time.

We hear not only what is happening on screen, but something of the years that have passed since we first watched it.

There is a temptation, when writing about John Williams, to reach for the vocabulary of greatness.

Majestic. Iconic. Sweeping. Unforgettable.

These descriptions are not necessarily wrong, but they can obscure the more interesting question of what the music actually accomplishes.

In E.T., Williams helps us experience time in several distinct ways.

• Waitingstretches it.
• Discoveryallows us to inhabit it.
• Movementaccelerates it.
• Flightseems to suspend it.
• Separationmakes us conscious of its limits.
• Memorygives it an afterlife.

None of these effects depends solely on the music. Spielberg’s direction, the performances, the editing and the film’s carefully constructed dramatic rhythms are indispensable.

But Williams gives those rhythms an emotional continuity that makes them feel like parts of one larger experience.

The opening abandonment and the final departure become musical and emotional reflections of one another.

What begins as the terror of being left behind ends as the sorrow of allowing someone to leave.

Between those moments lies a friendship whose value cannot be separated from its brevity.

Perhaps that is why the score feels so moving.

Not simply because it makes an alien sympathetic, or a bicycle ride extraordinary, or a farewell heartbreaking.

But because it understands something about our relationship with time that we rarely articulate while living through it.

We want the frightening moments to end.

We want the wonderful moments to continue.

We want the people we love to remain.

E.T. gives us a little over two hours to experience these contradictions.

John Williams makes us feel every minute.

And somehow, when the music finally ends, it still feels too soon.