notes that E.T., like other fantasy films, uses transcendent myth as a way of expressing the perennial exigence and the rhetorical response:
Symbolically, the hero of the early and middle levels of consciousness was the ego emerging out of the unconscious to claim independence. The heroic ego is justly celebrated in countless myths of this period. Every hero must be tested by a monster or villain, and in an evolutionary perspective, the heroes of the previous stage become the dragons of the present (Rushing 35).
Rushing finds in E.T. the myth of the flying saucer coupled with the child who sees in E.T. a mirror of himself. Rushing shows how myth is used in the story of this film and in the ways in which certain mythic concepts are treated, even distorted, as the hero moves from one stage of consciousness to the next:
E.T. is above all a symbol of wholeness, a model of merg
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