The truth we know

This post will discuss Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day. I don’t think I’m going to get into what would broadly be called spoilers, but I will say, knowing next to nothing about the film (I had only seen one teaser trailer, months ago) certainly deepened my enjoyment upon seeing it. I suspect that’s broadly true of pretty much any movie. Do as you will.

“God is up there in a crystal-chandelier space­ship, and He likes us,” Pauline Kael tl;dr’d in her 1977 review of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But any religiosity inherent to that film was left in the margins, in the eye of the beholder. It is a precisely secular science fiction story in the way that science fiction stories usually are, unless you want to delve more intently into what Richard Dreyfus’ raving-prophet daddy looks like and seems like; what Melinda Dillon’s bereft mommy must be carried by in order to reunite with her abducted-by-aliens son. It’s a movie where — notably — the brown people in the desert are the only ones chanting. All the white guys at Devil’s Tower are fiddling with their scientific instruments.

Disclosure Day, arriving this week, is the latest (last?) link in a chain of pictures by Spielberg about UFOs and extra-terrestrials that stretches all the way back to Close Encounters, 39 years ago. (Or even further to Firelight, if you like.) Across these four decades he’s invoked the E.T.s in E.T. and War of the Worlds, and played with legally-not-E.T.s in A.I. and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. (The latter, any of Spielberg’s protestations to one side, is a surprisingly on-model sandbox for ideas and visualizations he will explore with more rigour in Disclosure Day.)

Close Encounters was, among other things, a paranoia-thriller-inflected chase movie, in which the objective was understanding; Disclosure Day is much the same. The nature of the constraints upon understanding — the guardrails around it, or in this case, we might call it a steel-and-concrete reinforced border fence — have shifted. The secrets are more jealously guarded, by worse sorts of people, these days. Here, though, I might invoke Nemik’s manifesto: the tyranny is brittle. It breaks.

One of those breaks is Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a cybersecurity specialist (!!) who up till a week ago was helping keep evidence of UFOs a secret and has now decided “nah screw it, I’m giving this to the whole world.” Except Daniel puts it more elegantly than that. He says this information is “the truth we know,” which has merely been withheld from us. In saying this he seems to invoke a common human understanding, an awareness beyond mere information, one which has been depressed, suppressed, and oppressed by generations of other common human qualities: narcissism, megalomania, and greed.

Last week I was reading There Is No Antimemetics Division, a science fiction novel by a guy who calls himself “Qntm” when he’s not known as Sam Hughes. The novel involves a shadowy government agency whose purpose is to identify and neutralize creatures that wipe human memory in order to feed on, manipulate, and otherwise harm us. (It’s one of the good shadowy government agencies therefore; as opposed to the bad ones in movies like Disclosure Day.)

By the midpoint of There Is No Antimemetics Division, a memetic parasite — an idea — is close to devouring the entire human race. Our heroes determine that a countermeme, an even larger idea, is the only way to defeat the parasite.

The book is not explicit about the form and nature of the parasitic meme. The idea that is devouring the human race might be hate or it might be internet brainrot or it might be the American Dream or it might be flat-earthing. Point is, it’s bad; and bigger point is, coming as it does from an antimemetic parasite, the meme is devouring human memory and knowledge en route to enslaving us; there’s a big something we’ve all been made to forget, which is making it easier and easier for the parasite to take hold.

There Is No Antimemetics Division is even less explicit about the form and nature of the civilization-saving countermeme, the idea that humanity forgot. Like really, not much of anything here (because how could you write it? How could you write “even bigger idea than an idea so big it’s eating the world?” Think of the page count!).

I can take a guess, though. I’d guess it’s something like either “love” or “God,” and I’d guess those two are pretty much interchangeable at the end of the universe anyway. Oh: and when the countermeme is deployed, there’s a new star visible in the east. Just sayin’.

“The idea that humanity forgot,” that whose absence is leading us straightforwardly into our destruction, feels very present in Disclosure Day. For one thing, David Koepp’s clumsy and occasionally quite didactic script seems frequently to want to spit it at us: there are more than a few scenes of Major Characters speechifying the point at one another, whether it’s a magical nun reinterpreting Genesis off the dome, or a maybe-angel (played by Colman Domingo!) lambasting the evil government for criminalizing the simple act of human astonishment.

O’Connor’s Daniel Kellner is one of Disclosure Day‘s two principal characters; the other is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who does the weather on the Houston news and would dearly love to be an anchor (and based on her audition tape, would be terrible at it). One day Margaret stands up to do the news and starts hooting and clicking instead, broadcasting an alien message from her own vocal chords which is picked up by Daniel, who hears it not as hooting and clicking but as mathematics-cum-language, a language he — alone among the whole world — speaks. And the message is: “don’t be afraid of what you don’t know.”

Blunt (no pun intended) though it may be, here we have Spielberg’s thesis statement, not just in this film but across his entire canon of work, or at least the portion of the canon that deals directly with human beings encountering the divine. That divine has taken many forms across Spielberg’s career, from the literal (the first three Indiana Joneses; the afterworldly presences in Poltergeist and Always) to the science-fictional (the fourth Indiana Jones and all the other alien-related stories mentioned above; any film involving a preternaturally effective sharks, or genetically engineered dinosaurs).

I might note a third category of the divine here too, which I’d call the profoundly, proudly humanist: films like Lincoln or Amistad or his most recent masterpiece, The Fabelmans. All of these examples have some variation on the Spielberg Shot: characters looking awe-struck at some source of greater-than-real knowledge, brows expanding, lips trembling. In Close Encounters — per Kael’s review — they’re looking at the God Light pouring out of the mothership. In Jurassic Park, it’s the dinos, and Sam Neill’s clackering fingers as he fumbles his sunglasses off his face. In Minority Report, it’s Samantha Morton’s sky-eyed, babbling precog Agatha, a prototype for Blunt’s Margaret.

In Disclosure Day, it’s all of us, staring into our screens.

Okay. I guess from here, it’s spoilers.

You wouldn’t, I suppose, call a movie Disclosure Day and never actually have the disclosure day happen. Margaret even announces it — “this is Disclosure Day” — see above re: script re: clumsy, didactic.

What follows, though, is one of the best sequences of Spielberg's career, the intimate inversion of the light-and-sound-and-music phantasmagoria that caps Close Encounters. The earlier finale was all wide-open space and classical, even Disney-ish, wonder ("When You Wish Upon a Star" was, of course, invoked). The set for the mothership landing zone was, at the time, one of the largest ever constructed.

In Disclosure Day, it's a newsfeed, and parallel shots of the human race reacting, as terabytes of video of human encounters with aliens are dumped into the world. It's people boxed into airplane seats; standing shoulder-to-shoulder outside the news station window; crammed into a bus stop and then failing to get aboard the bus. The visual language is that of a species constrained and bound, wedged in, noses down where we once looked up. The human experience has become fractal. (It is thrilling to watch Disclosure Day attempt to create a monocultural moment, in a presumptively post-monocultural summer.) The disclosure in Disclosure Day is a sequence of wonder, but also one in which Spielberg is more than a little pointed about how far we've fallen from the light. "Thank God no one ever looks up in this town," Jeff Bridges quipped in Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King, meaning New York, but also meaning the 20th Century. I think about that line all the time.

As Daniel and Margaret’s disclosure goes to air it gets picked up by the major networks and then begins broadcasting all over the world. Free, unambitious sharing of a universal human truth. They were here the whole time; we were never alone; there was always something bigger than us, that we can be a part of if we choose to see it.

I want to call out Courtney Grace here: she plays the NBC newscaster who takes over analyzing, in real time, the footage that is being disbursed across the world. I don’t think her character even has a name. Grace gives a spectacular performance in Disclosure Day, perfectly modulated, both expertly capturing the tonal style of modern 24-hour news cycles, and then — carefully, lovingly — allowing the anchor’s human response to crack through the professional poise as the sheer shaking size of what she is being asked to describe overwhelms her. It’s a beautiful piece of artmaking by a performer who is in the film for not more than 5 minutes overall and comes away from it as my most affecting memory. I looked her up eagerly after the film and find no major roles prior to this. I hope this is one of the instances (Saving Private Ryan is littered with them, for example) where we watch Disclosure Day again in ten years and say, “holy shit, Courtney Grace is in this?!”

The footage Grace is describing is extraordinary. Of course it is. Perhaps it is no longer cinematically useful to render wonders in perfect 4K definition; perhaps we’ve seen it all, done it all. Spielberg manages the trick here nevertheless, and he manages it in a visual plurality that is unlike anything he’s staged before. The clips come too fast and too furious, in too much parallel, to even absorb. They conjure a world which, leaving aside the possibility that I might already live in it, I desperately wish to. A legacy of the human race going back seventy years in which it all happened, and it was all real, the sheer knowledge of which stops World War III — here standing in for all our modern venality — dead.

Interpret this as you will. I keep thinking of the idea that humanity forgot and, being an atheist, I don’t need that idea to be God. And speaking of ideas defeated by bigger ideas, I’m grateful that I read my Dawkins in my youth — even though he’s turned out to be a colossal asshole, and in love with a robot (?) to boot — for getting me aboard how much more awe-inspiring a universe without God is, than a universe with Her.

But Spielberg might just mean God, and that’s fine. She even shows up at the end of the picture, just like Kael’s “God” did at the end of Close Encounters; frail and beneficent and rolling out in a wheelchair, Grandmother’s here to forgive all our cruelties, and undo our forgetting.

But Spielberg might also just mean empathy, and there’s good evidence that the tension and counter-tension in Disclosure Day is between the tools that have been used to suppress our empathy (lies; deception; capitalism) and the simple, humanist fact that it can’t actually be suppressed, because every human being is another human being just like us, if we just look them in the eye long enough to see it. Margaret does this, and then stops doing it; looking them in the eye and getting the full-bore empathic download of their lives becomes overwhelming, and then painful, and then frightening. Here, too, is the truth: the hardest thing to do in this world is to believe that everyone has a unique, secret pain inside them that’s just as profound and painful as your own. Yes, even him. Yes, even her.

Aside from the news anchor, my favourite character in the film is Eve Hewson’s Jane. She’s Daniel’s girlfriend, and a lapsed novitiate, and she left her order because she lost her faith in people; and sister, I can relate. I seem to be losing my faith in the human race all the time lately, and unlike Jane, I never get to go on a cross-country adventure, and turn stigmata to defeat the devil trying to override my thoughts, and then commit to my new understanding by having to take a leap of faith that people might actually be better, not worse, than I sullenly suspect they are.

Maybe the idea that humanity forgot, for me, isn’t God; it’s only this: that we might surprise ourselves. That although I understand a great deal, I know very little. And that — per fifty years of Spielberg’s work — none of us need be afraid of what we don’t know.

Links and recommendations

Man it was fun seeing y’all so excited on Saturday night. I have no idea what you were excited about, mind you, but it seemed holy. Maybe let’s think about that some more some time. On to the recos:

• My cronies at Screen Anarchy have gone and created a Letterboxd account! We’ll be posting links to all the site’s coverage over there going forward. Follow along if you like.
• The A.I. Resist List. Remember: it’s not inevitable; it’s just being sold that way by people who are, to put it kindly, lying liarsons.
• I have not seen The Backrooms yet but this post by Kat made me want to, arguably, for the first time. (Substack)