I used to rummage around the libraries of my school teachers, usually the History or English classrooms, where there was a shelf lined with well-thumbed books that not many of my peers in 2008 seemed interested in -- I'd finish my tests early, pick up one of them to see if it seemed as interesting as the cover art, and dug in, borrowing it for a week, then on to the next one; I was voracious, and one of those books was Carl Sagan's 1985 novel Contact, affixed with the branding of the decade-old Robert Zemeckis film, creased at the edges, broken spine, a tiny wonderment.
I brushed-up on it before watching Robert's adaptation, and Contact is very much the sort of book that a young me was fixated on: hard science fiction with big ideas, big machines, long passages of philosophic-scientific discourse interspersed with the sad daily realities that humanize our epistemological adventurers. There was Michael Crichton, whose Sphere is still beloved by me, and there was David Niven, the master of scale, and Carl Sagan had yet to become the YouTube stoner sensation that it feels like he is today -- his novel is direct, glossy, but paved with the stones of high concept brilliance that was catnip for a young person hungry to devour all possible ideas and speculations for their own edification.
Robert Zemeckis warms-up Sagan's conceits by sentimentalizing several side-elements (dead moms instead of dead dads, a singular psychological journey for Jodie Foster's astronomer instead of a culturally pluralist team gathered from around the world, and a reverse-colonial 'uplift' by ETs towards us instead of gaining access to a wider, semi-eldritch dimension of ancient precursors). There are things you have to bend to in the process of adapting, but Zemeckis gives us a discount Spielberg in the same way that Spielberg himself smoothed out the rougher anti-capitalist edges of Crichton's Jurassic Park, turning a story about the horrors of corporate-scientific power into a rollicking adventure, sans many graphs detailing Velociraptor breeding patterns. Lest I sound cranky, I do like Jurassic Park, simply because it is Spielberg on complete overdrive, but I do not have any attachment to Zemeckis and so I may begrudge him a little more, not for 'ruining' a perfectly acceptable book, but for leaning into the standard 'audience-friendly' take on a story that in the hands of a Tarkovsky or Kubrick-type director would be refined into a inspired film.
"I'm not against technology -- I'm against people who deify it at the expense of human truth" is a line uttered by Matthew McConaughey's ex-man of the cloth, now humanitarian scientist, and it is an obvious way to mediate on Robert Zemeckis' own career and stylistic, which, like James Cameron's, has always been about using the latest in filmmaking technology to tell very old-fashioned narratives that would not seem foreign to Cecil B. Demille or Frank Capra -- this is an old tradition in the American Cinema, and one that tends to reap the largest rewards. Spielberg already had done his own version with 1977's Close Encounters of The Third Kind, one of his best works, and Zemeckis as a Spielberg protegee has many comparable films to his master. Yet I feel like, even there, Spielberg makes a thornier film about reckoning with the limits of not only the human experience, but the concept of dreams themselves being compatible with mundane life -- it is one of the rare movies of his where children are not sanctified and a domestic equilibrium is not restored at the end. Spielberg takes the non-human horizon seriously and goes all the way -- but Zemeckis, in Contact, turns a quest for the unknown into a mirror reflected back at ourselves.
It works like this: Jodie Foster gets to meet her father again (after a fashion), humanity gets to go back to the daily grind after the truth about extraterrestrial contact is suppressed by skeptical governments, and the SETI search continues in its own scrappy fashion -- much ado about nothing, except that Jodie Foster's faith and humanity have been forever altered. I do like some of that, I like the integration of the self into a cosmic perspective, I like the relatively grounded approach. But it feels so typical, and it avoids the wider implications of the novel so that it can arrive at a 'tidy' status quo -- whether the hacky screenwriters are to blame, or Zemeckis, or both, what we get is a film about navigating an ambiguous topic with kid gloves and an ever-present John Williams-esque score which tells you how to feel, where to feel it, and that this is deeper than it actually is.
On the whole, I do not think big budget blockbuster films by techy-showmen directors are the best format to explore the frontiers of alien life, UFOs, or the paranormal as a whole -- what Contact does get right is that these phenomena are so specific to the nuances of consciousness and cultural archetypes that it is important to render them in psychological/personal terms along with the metaphysical awareness that can be cultivated. But I think of a film like Larry Cohen's Gold Told Me To, a low-budget miracle shot on the gritty streets of 70s New York City, where, like in Contact, we see that religious faith is inseparable from a broader belief in non-human agency, and the societal implications of humanity coming up against something it cannot understand except through thin conventionality and conformity -- science fiction thrives in such a space. But Robert Zemeckis' film takes part in the aesthetic conformity that it seeks to metaphysically critique -- the slick camera movements, lingering close-ups, accelerated editing continuity, big movie stars, is there anything less 'alienating' than the tradition that Zemeckis takes part in? How can you effectively tell a story like this without a bolder framework?
And if we want to talk about 'trojan horsing' some truth into the mainstream, well, I think Contact does a very good job of that. It is an inspiring film, it is the kind of film that opens minds towards broader possibilities and a multivalent approach to how we interact with non-human entities, how they interface with us using symbols and patterns and memories familiar to us, how governments are ultimately ineffective at dealing with anything that does not abide by their self-centered priorities, and how science and faith are closer together than is typically considered. But the movie is so centered in a middlebrow 1990s formula for disaster films, for alien films, anything big and American, it is a mixed-bag of existentialist cliches -- when the alien answers Jodie Foster's request for every other human to see what she has seen, they refuse, saying "This is how it's been done for millions of years", small steps over lifetimes, reaching muddy hands into a great infinite beauty -- through Zemeckis' patient, conservative outlook, he nibbles at the margins of the American mainstream, whether through Contact's experience-first manifesto, the cartoon surrealism of his motion-capture experiments, or the pessimistic death-dream of Here -- this is how it has been done for at least over a hundred years in the cinema, and by short bursts of visionary experience, some day it will amount to a vision, not through individual efforts, but by contributing to a larger picture that contains within it a history of striving to shake the foundations of mass consciousness.
It is a hope to use technology to transform humanity into a better image of itself -- some days I doubt that is possible, or even desirable. But Contact convinces, if only for two hours and change.