Spielberg Just Answered A 44-Year-Old Question About E.T
While promoting his new film Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg sat down for what was expected to be a standard press junket interview and instead found himself delivering the most unexpected cinema revelation of the summer: an official, authoritative answer to a question that has quietly bothered people for 44 years. Journalist Rachel Abrams told Spielberg that a question had long plagued her social circle and asked, simply, whether the alien in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was slimy or dry. Spielberg, visibly caught off guard but admirably game, offered a precise anatomical defense of his most beloved creation. The answer, according to the director, is neither. E.T. was moist. Specifically, Spielberg explained that the creature was moist in his healthy state and only became dry when he fell ill, and he drew a firm line at the word slimy, noting that the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise were slimy, the kind that drool tendrils, whereas E.T. had a softer, pleather-like quality that conveyed vulnerability and warmth rather than revulsion. The clip went viral within hours.
The moment struck a cultural nerve that went well beyond the moisture content of a rubber puppet, and The Independent's analysis of the exchange makes a compelling case for why: it captures something genuine about how celebrity press tours have evolved in the age of short-form video and social media, where the most shareable moment from a two-hour junket is rarely the one a publicist planned. For a director of Spielberg's magnitude, a man who has spent decades giving exquisitely considered answers about thematic resonance and artistic vision, the image of him carefully distinguishing between moist and slimy on behalf of a fictional alien he created in 1982 is both surreal and completely charming. Disclosure Day, his new sci-fi thriller starring Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor about the day humanity discovers it is not alone in the universe, has now earned nearly $100 million at the global box office in its first week. But ask anyone on the internet what they are talking about this week, and there is a reasonable chance the answer involves a puppet, a press junket, and the word moist.
