Subject: Retrospective: Contact (1997)

From: [email-masked] (Cheng-Jih Chen)
Date: 28 Feb 1999 21:03:28 GMT

I've gone and reacquainted myself with "Contact" on DVD.  A wonderful
film, but I don't think it's a great film.  It has Spielbergian awe and
wonder, and a strong performance by Jodie Foster: conflicted, but stoic
and determined, with a touch of weepiness at all the right moments
(though she sits at the edge of the bed looking pensive a few too many
times).  And, perhaps most importantly, "Contact" addresses a Big Issue
-- Science versus Religion -- in a way that Americans can feel good
about.  Spirituality is affirmed, Scientists are redeemed, and we
therefore have an Intelligent Movie (tm).

I do recommend this movie (I do, I do), but I want to make it clear
that it's a Hollywood film, and that the reviewer who called it the
"Best Film of the Decade" has either only seen Van Damme movies for the
past 7 years, or is the same one who called "Batman" the "Movie of the
decade" back in 1991.  The Big Issue is addressed in typical fashion:
religion is presented in either its full Southern Baptist moral
rigidity caricature, or it is somewhat soft peddled, used more to
highlight the spiritual hole in Foster's heart than to express its own
tenets.  This soft-peddled, comforting spirituality is there to provide
background and meaning to her affirmations, and to launch her on a
climatic leap of faith.  The Big Issue is not explored beyond this.

In any case, the gist of the film is that, perhaps like Helen Hunt's
tornado chaser in "Twister", Jodie Foster's character is determined to
make contact with intelligent life in far away places.  There are
childhood scenes, where she plays with the short wave, and makes
contact with Pensacola, FL.  While her father wasn't sucked up by a F-5
twister (nor was her sister abducted by the Cancer Man), Foster's drive
is similarly made flinty by the death of her father.  

In later life, declining tenure-track teaching posts, she goes down the
path of "fringe science" and spends her time searching the skies using
the big radio telescopes your tax dollars have made possible.  This
search is ridiculed, it's funding cut off; the National Science
Foundation director thinks the whole thing is hokum.  Eventually, after
scrounging for funds, she's able to continue her research, and is on
hand to find a radio signal from the star Vega.  The signal is clearly
artificial and of intelligent design: it beats out the prime numbers,
speaking in the universal language of mathematics.  When the signal is
clearly established and monitored, it increases the quantity of
information by mimicking our television broadcasts (no, ET doesn't send
back the O.J. Trial, with the caption "He did it," stenciled in the
image).

We get a blueprint for making a vessel capable of sending one human on
a journey (proving that ET has watched "This Old House").  We go out
and build the thing (please note that $300 billion is a good 4% of
American GDP, and apt to be missed somewhere).  Jodie, of course, takes
the trip, and echoing David Bowman in "2001", we experience awe and
wonder, and she is marvelous expressing this awe and wonder.

The meat of this film is the intertwining of Science and Spirituality.
The Science of the film is presented as a cold atheism whose
practitioners demand hard facts to justify belief.  Belief without
facts is discounted.  But such Science is an spiritual desert:  Foster
is emotionally incomplete until she has a "religious" experience in
traveling to the center of the galaxy.  Science, in this film, is
presented as out of touch with 95% of the people on earth, despite,
say, the real life example of Einstein, who believed in both god and
relativity, without the exclusion of the other, and in complement of
each other.  As said, there is a reconciliation of Science and
Spirituality at the end, but this reconciliation feels a little like a
capitulation of rationality and hard thinking.  (Note:  I'm under the
impression that the book goes into more detail about god.  Apparently,
the book talks about "circles in pi" as evidence for the existence of
god, the creator of the universe basically putting his signature into
the fundamental fabric of the cosmos.  Arguably, if there were images
embedded into transcendental numbers or into Planck's Constant, it'd
say, "Intel Inside" or "Win95 Compatible".  Note that "circles in pi"
would not constitute proof of god.  It would be a non-sequitor, and not
evidence of design.)

I'm being nitpicky, but sending along the instructions for building a
vehicle is not sufficient for us to construct such a thing.  The
technology may not exist to make, say, steel of sufficient strength and
lightness.  People of the 1850s may comprehend the architectural schema
of the Empire State building, but they would not be able to execute
it.  Also, I'd argue that being able to build a vehicle of this scale
would to a fair degree tell us how it works.  This isn't quite
assembly:  we're required to manufacture the bits and pieces first.
And, as said, $300 billion is a whopping big piece of change.

The aliens are much like the Vulcans of the Star Trek Borg movie.
They're benign, mainly interested in telling us that We Are Not Alone
in person (though, arguably, sending the primes in a radio transmission
would be sufficient to prove intelligence), and to help us in our next
step in development.  Perhaps, like in Star Trek, we're redeemed by the
knowledge of a universe teeming with life, enlightened and willing to
put aside our petty squabbles, though that is only a hint at the end.
And it's a relief to see aliens who aren't not out to blow up New York,
only to get creamed by a well-placed Macintosh virus and an American
President ready and able to kick some ass.

The popular butchering of Occam's Razor continues.  The first mention
of the Razor in this film was acceptable, if not quite correct; more
than anything else, the Razor is just a statement favoring parsimony in
explanations, an exhortion not to multiply entities. (Though I was
surprised that a seminary student, interested in the interaction of
science and religion, would not have heard of it.  But then, he was
trying to pick up Jodie at a party, so I guess he was thinking, "I'll
just sit here and nod.")  The second mention was just damn stupid: we
are to accept that a conspiracy theory conforms better to the Razor
because such a theory would preclude contact with extraterrestrial
intelligence.  But, as presented in the film, contact is a far more
parsimonious explanation.  I suppose that in the film maker's mind, the
Razor always excludes ETs.  True, it's used to demolish "UFOs did it"
arguments in real life (as well as any number of conspiracy theories,
for that matter), but that's because there are better explanations than
ETs for pretty much all UFO sightings (e.g., "I was drunk").  (Crop
circles are a wonderful example: which is a more parsimonious
explanation, aliens came down and traipsed around in a wheat field, or
a bunch of drunk frat boys decided to play a prank?)  A string of prime
numbers being transmitted on the frequency of pi times a fundamental
property of hydrogen, and coming from 26 light years out (and this
distance cannot be faked because of parallax) can only lead to one
sensible conclusion.

One last thing I found interesting: at one point in the film, Foster is
required to have faith, to believe despite evidence to the contrary.
We, as an audience, are in a small way also required to have a moment
of faith, to believe or not.  But, for us, this is a Hollywood test
of faith: it is an easy test, and, to top it off, we are given proof.
It would have been more interesting if we had to choose between equally
sympathetic points of view, and if our choice had not been validated at
the end.  That proof and faith may be contradictory apparently escaped
the film's notice.

(This review isn't as good as I'd like it to be, but I'm not sure how
to fix it.  The interaction of science and religion is something I've
given some brain power to, so this film _did_ wander into old dark
corners of my intellectual attic.  I lean towards the harder Martin
Gardener style of skepticism, and believe that there are arguments that
can be dismissed out of hand.  But I do not preclude the existence of
god or any such; that simply is a question that cannot be addressed by
science.  More, if there is a god, then either god is embodied in
physical law, or that you must subscribe to the Church of Last Thursday
(i.e., the universe was created last Thursday, with an appearance of
looking 15 billion years old).  I think in the end, I was hoping for a
more rigorous argument in the film.  Oh, whatever.  You have the
review.)