[COLUMN] Disclosure Day Finds Steven Spielberg Trying to Use His Powers for Good | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Disclosure Day, the new Steven Spielberg film, which is in theatres this weekend. If you’re looking for a quick review: I really liked it. It’s not quite as good as the recent two-fer of West Side Story and The Fabelmans, but those are two of the best films of Spielberg’s career. This is solid mid-tier Spielberg, with films like The Post or The Adventures of Tintin, which puts it in the upper echelons of blockbuster filmmaking. 

Steven Spielberg is one of the defining American filmmakers.

“For more than 50 years, his imagery has epitomized American movies, maybe even epitomized America,” Wesley Morris wrote of the director in a profile of the director for The New York Times in the lead-up to the release of Disclosure Day. Meredith Hindley argued that Spielberg’s filmography reads as “a bibliography to American popular culture.” Michael Newton contends that Spielberg’s films reflect America’s “confident ability to impose on the world its compelling dreams of itself.”

Spielberg is synonymous with American culture. Spielberg is the top-grossing director of all-time at the global box office, his films having grossed over $10bn. He has built a multimedia empire, including television cartoons, video games and theme parks. For decades, and to entire generations, Spielberg was shorthand for “director.” He would appear in cameos on animated television shows, films like Austin Powers in Goldmember and even headline his own video game.

Spielberg was the rare New Hollywood director to survive the industry’s transition out of the 1970s. Contemporaries like Martin Scorsese or Francis Ford Coppola ran aground into the 1980s, but Spielberg’s hold on the culture only grew in that period thanks to the success of films like E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial, although it arguably wasn’t until the 1990s that Spielberg was fully embraced by the establishment, winning Oscars in that decade for both Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan.

However, there was always a certain anxiety around Spielberg and the hold that he had upon the American psyche. Alfred Hitchcock dismissed Spielberg as “the boy who made the fish movie.” Other critics suggested a more systemic issue stemming from Spielberg’s success. “It’s not so much what Spielberg has done but what he has encouraged,” Pauline Kael noted. “Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilization of the culture.”

Although Spielberg insists such criticisms have no basis in fact, he concedes that in the years that followed he “felt a responsibility that comes along with such a powerful tool as filmmaking.” There has always been a latent anxiety about the power of the image in his films. The climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark finds a bunch of Nazis burnt alive by projections of pure light as a camera rolls in the background. “Don't look at it, no matter what happens!” Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) screams.

However, this anxiety has become more pronounced in Spielberg’s films since the 1990s. Jurassic Park is a film about the horror of spectacle, in which a bearded showman (Richard Attenborough) creates a theme park that runs amok endangering those who would visit it. In A.I., Artificial Intelligence, an old inventor (William Hurt) engineers an emotionally stunted robot (Haley Joel Osment), destined to remain a child forever, content to live out existence in a nostalgic simulacra of its earliest memories.

Minority Report imagines a future where the power of the image is so strong that human beings are convicted and sentenced based on the footage pulled directly from inside a human’s mind (Samantha Morton) and projected onto screens to be analyzed and explored by cops like John Anderton (Tom Cruise). Ready Player One depicts a future consumed by the 1980s pop culture that Spielberg helped usher into being and encouraged, where children live entire lives in a virtual hall of mirrors.

This simmering anxiety perhaps culminates in The Fabelmans, Steven Spielberg’s “auteurbiography”, an extremely lightly fictionalized account of his own childhood. One might expect Spielberg’s account of his own youth and childhood to be somewhat triumphant, the story of a young Jewish kid who grew up to become one of the most famous and beloved filmmakers of all-time. Instead, The Fabelmans is a sort of a weird psychological horror story about the nightmare of seeing.

Throughout Spielberg’s films, there is a deep-seated fear of both seeing and of being seen. In The Fabelmans, young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle) effectively destroys his parents’ marriage through filmmaking, his camera picking up the emotional affair taking place between his mother (Michelle Williams) and his father’s best friend (Seth Rogen) before even they do. His bully (Sam Rechner) has a psychological breakdown confronted by the idealized image of himself captured in Sammy’s movies, a fantasy version to which he can never live up.

All of this bleeds through into Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day. Kansas City weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) dreams of being a news anchor, but finds herself cursed with the ability to communicate and connect with others in a supernatural fashion. She can read minds and put people at ease. She can speak foreign languages reflexively. She can control what others see, even allowing Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) to see his deceased wife (Patricia Connelly).

Margaret does not want this gift. She did not ask for it. She wanted to be part of the entertainment industry, but she never set out to find herself so deeply enmeshed with the lives of complete strangers. One imagines that Spielberg feels the same way about the generation of children and adults who were raised on his films, who feel that innate connection to his work through a foundational attachment to movies like Jaws, E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial and others.

As in other Spielberg projects, most obviously Minority Report, eyes are fairly central to Disclosure Day. Margaret’s gift seems to work based on eye contact; she needs her subjects to remove their glasses and Scanlon warns his goons not to look her in the eye. One of the central conceits of Disclosure Day is “the device”, an alien artifact that allows Scanlon to “dive” on others, to remote view. He can see through their eyes, his eyes taking on their color and their eyes taking on his color. Using this “magic wand”, he can also direct them.

Screens are very important within Disclosure Day. Much of the movie takes place on screens, literal or metaphorical. Even setting aside computer monitors, phones and tablets, action is often glimpsed through windows. Characters are often framed with their own reflections, whether in mirrors, windows or even knives. There is a sense that, within the world of Disclosure Day, the thing itself is often indistinguishable from its own image. 

Disclosure Day is strongly tied to Spielberg’s history and his filmography. When she collapses on air, Margaret is rushed to hospital, but she finds herself going on the run with her boyfriend Jackson (Wyatt Russell). The casting of Wyatt Russell as one half of a fugitive couple on the road cannot help but evoke Spielberg’s first American theatrical release Sugarland Express, which starred Russell’s mother Goldie Hawn. Another sequence, in which a red car is pushed into a train, lifts a beat from Spielberg’s earlier Duel, a television film that was released theatrically internationally.

The imagery of a red car crushed by a train has special significance for Spielberg. In the opening scenes of The Fabelmans, Sammy witnesses a similar spectacle in The Greatest Show on Earth, and his first short film is restaging that crash over and over again. When Margaret escapes from the car into the train with Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), Daniel tries to calm her panic attack by drawing her attention to the deconstructed pianos in the carriage. Spielberg’s mother was a pianist.

More broadly, the film’s focus on aliens also harks back to Spielberg’s earliest work. His first feature film, which is now mostly lost, was a UFO film called Firelight. That would prove a major influence on his early work, most obviously Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It does seem like aliens are quite close to Spielberg. Of the five of his own films on which he has a writing or story credit, four involve aliens (Firelight, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and now Disclosure Day). The fifth is The Fabelmans.

Disclosure Day builds to the revelation that Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo) has been building a painstaking replica of Margaret’s childhood home inside a warehouse, to provide a framework for Margaret to restage her childhood trauma. It’s an interesting choice for Spielberg to make directly after making The Fabelmans, a movie that was so close to his one childhood that he recalls the first day of shooting, “I turned around and there was my father and mother, and I just burst into tears.”

It is no exaggeration to suggest that Disclosure Day is in some ways about the trauma of making The Fabelmans, of having to bear one’s soul and to recreate one’s childhood as mass media entertainment. It is about how strange it must be to have that level of connection to the public, without ever explicitly wanting it. “I will not be anyone’s religion!” Margaret warns Hugo at one point, as she wanders into a perfect replica of her childhood home built by craftspeople.

What is interesting about Disclosure Day is that it feels in many ways like an extension and development of these anxieties that have been simmering through Spielberg’s filmography. If anything, Disclosure Day is about reckoning with what it means to have been central to the American culture at a time when the monoculture is completely collapsing and fragmenting, when everything seems to be falling apart.

Over the past couple of decades, the media landscape has fractured. People no longer have a shared collective reality. They instead disappear down rabbit holes looking for media sources that validate their pre-existing worldviews. People are increasingly trapped in echo-chambers. Significant portions of the population believe things that are not only untrue, but fundamentally insane. Everything that disagrees with what a person believes is “fake news.” Everybody is entitled to “alternate facts.”

This is clearly a concern for Spielberg. The Post was a nostalgic paean for the era when mass media held enough power that it could help hold a corrupt presidency to account, depicting the leak of the Pentagon Papers to The Washington Post and ending with a segue into the Watergate Scandal that would end the Nixon Presidency. It was released in 2017, just a few years after Jeff Bezos bought the paper and a few years before he would completely gut its political coverage.

Nixon is unsurprisingly a major player in Disclosure Day as well. It is revealed that Nixon’s carelessness in showing off a bunch of alien corpses to “some fifties TV star” led to the decision to move control of those resources away from the government and towards the private sector. Indeed, The Post is a surprisingly large reference point for Disclosure Day, another story about the power of mass media to expose the truth to the waiting public.

The opening shot of Disclosure Day is a boot stamping down repeatedly on the camera. The opening sequence takes place at a wrestling match where a wrestler clad in red (Lance Archer) beats a wrestler clad in blue (Brian Cage) as a crowd in predominantly red baseball caps look on. The first confrontation between Kellner and Scanlon takes place out the back of the arena, near posters, bags of popcorn and crates of soft drinks and beer. Entertainment and politics collide.

This makes a certain amount of sense. After all, the current President of the United States is a reality television star. Ronald Reagan was a movie star. Arts and politics are interwoven in the American consciousness. However, there is a sense in Disclosure Day of a hollowness in American life, an absence created by the death of a shared sense of reality. Religion is a major recurring theme, with Kellner’s girlfriend Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson) being a former novitiate.

Spielberg has long been fascinated by religion. Raiders of the Lost Ark is in many ways the story of an atheist being confronted by the reality of divine power. When the aliens arrive in War of the Worlds, one of the first things that they do is to tear through a church. In Minority Report, the citizenry has started to “deify” the precognitives who provide visions of crime from their “Temple.” Jad Watson (Steve Harris) concedes, "We're more like clergy than cops.”

Much has been written in recent years about the loss of faith in American life. This is not necessarily a loss of belief in organized religion, but a broader faith. It can often seem like America no longer believes in its own inherent goodness or exceptionalism and that the country has lost faith in the future. America seems to have lost faith in everything, and when faith does not exist, it is replaced by a sort of grim nihilism. Jane does not argue for God as a concrete force that binds the universe together, but instead as an idea that holds societies together.

To return to Spielberg and to Spielberg’s place in culture, there has been a lot of anxiety in recent years over the decline of cinema as the dominant American artform. Cinema attendance has been trailing down for decades now, a trend accelerated by the recent global pandemic. Linear television is also in decline. Spielberg’s two most recent films, West Side Story and The Fabelmans, are among the lowest-grossing of his career.

Disclosure Day is set against the backdrop of a looming apocalypse, as tensions flare between the United States and Russia over North Korea. However, what’s interesting about the film is that this existential threat doesn’t ever really take focus. It plays out in the background of the film, with quick glimpses and references. This is not like the alien invasion in War of the Worlds or the Pentagon Papers scandal in The Post. There is a sense the world could end and the characters might miss it.

However, at the climax of the film, Daniel and Margaret make a desperate play to save the world. They do this by exposing evidence of a massive cover-up stretching back to Roswell in 1947, near the dawn of the American Century, and presenting it to the public on a local Kansas news affiliate that is picked up by New York and which then goes global. It is, in many ways, a romantic fantasy of the power of mass media to create a shared consciousness, one that has been fractured and broken.

It is also perhaps an argument for the power of cinema. Repeatedly in Disclosure Day, Spielberg has objects smash through the walls of a family home. At one point, clumsy armed goons trip through the front window of Margaret’s reconstructed family home. At another point, in what feels like an homage to one of the great stories about early cinema, characters run out of the way as a car smashes through a wall, a car that will soon be smashed itself by a train.

At the heart of Disclosure Day is an argument between two bearded grey-haired men, Scanlon and Wakefield, about how the public will handle this revelation. Scanlon argues that people will tear themselves apart. Wakefield insists people can handle it. Inside us, two Spielbergs wrestle. One is a cynic, the other an optimist. Wakefield argues that the aliens believe that “empathy” is the most important emotion in the cosmos, playing into Roger Ebert’s argument for cinema as “the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts.”

It is a romantic idea, but Disclosure Day feels somewhat ambivalent on the point. After all, what is Scanlon’s “magic wand” but the most literal sort of empathy machine, a device that allows the person using it to literally see through another’s eyes? That device is portrayed as a gross violation and weapon. It tortures both the person being observed through it and the person doing the observing. Over the course of the film, its use seems to diminish Scanlon, to exhaust him.

There is also something ambiguous about the aliens at the center of the film. The audience is invited to feel sympathy for these creatures, exploited and tortured by Scanlon for his own material gain. However, the creatures plead with humanity for empathy by torturing children. Daniel and Margaret were abducted by the aliens as children, lured away by comforting nostalgic fantasies of magical animals, and subjected to traumatizing experiments that left them with swathes of their lives missing. Depending on the angle, the device that the aliens employ on the children looks like either a halo or a crown of thorns. Scanlon is a monster, but is Hugo too quick to take them at face value?

This seems to be the heart of Disclosure Day for Spielberg. As anxious as he has been about the power and the influence that he holds over pop culture, and as conscious as he is about its diminishment, Disclosure Day seems to suggest that Spielberg feels an obligation to use what power and influence he has in service of something greater and better. Is it possible to help heal a fractured nation and broken world by trying to convince people to believe in something again?

The film’s final 20 minutes or so are as pure and romantic a fantasy as anything Spielberg has conjured, as the footage goes viral. The recordings are picked up and syndicated. They are broadcast and streamed across competing networks, in the way that only Spielberg could imagine to be possible. If Spielberg could get Universal to license Back to the Future for Warner Bros.’ Ready Player One, he can get ABC to stream an NBC newsfeed. On the edge of the abyss, mere minutes away from doomsday, humanity is confronted with the horrific suffering of another sentient species and the revelation that they are not alone in the cosmos. It is pure spectacle. It is almost religious in nature.

However, in his old age, there are perhaps limits to Spielberg’s idealism. While Disclosure Day allows Margaret and Daniel to get the message out into the world, the film cuts off abruptly before it can reveal the consequences of the revelation. For all that Spielberg draws from his own history and filmography making Disclosure Day, there is one very notable missing piece of Spielberg iconography: “the Spielberg face”, that classic Spielberg reaction shot of a human face reflecting awe and wonder at the audience.

Spielberg has played with the Spielberg face before. A.I., Artificial Intelligence imagines a childlike robot frozen with Spielberg face forever. In Disclosure Day, the Spielberg face is notable by its absence in a movie that casually quotes Spielberg films like Duel, Sugarland Express and The Fabelmans. In the final 20 minutes, Spielberg shows a sea of human faces watching the live stream of confirmation of alien life. They watch around the world. They watch in cars, at bus stops, on military bases. They watch on televisions, phones and laptops.

However, with the notable exception of Jackson, a character played by the son of one of Spielberg’s earliest collaborators, Spielberg declines to show any of these people reacting with awe or wonder. He doesn’t show them reacting at all. Their faces are still and frozen. Against all odds, Daniel and Margaret have confronted humanity with proof that something greater than mankind exists, they have managed to bring all of humanity together as one. However, there is a lingering ambiguity about what happens next. 

After all, one of the more depressing aspects of the modern era is the sense that people have lost the capacity for emotional response. The declassification of hours of footage of unidentified aerial phenomenon met with a shrug. Actual and demonstrable proof of the wealthy and political elite engaging in horrific crimes didn’t provoke any meaningful response. Fittingly, Disclosure Day leaves the viewer to decide whether humanity is capable of coming together in the face of a seismic revelation or whether things are so broken that communion is impossible. It’s a bold ending, but it speaks to Spielberg’s maturity. All he can do is make the argument. He cannot dictate the outcome.

Disclosure Day is a bold and humanist swing from a filmmaker who was once at the very heart of American life, trying to harness his power to make an appeal for the importance of a shared sense of community and culture in an increasingly atomized world. It’s surprisingly powerful for one of the most effective visual storytellers in the history of the medium to build towards a very simple and counter-intuitive plea as the last word of the film: “Listen.”