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This Spielberg Week article contains spoilers for Disclosure Day, which is to say: The truth is in here.
Steven Spielberg is, to all appearances, a spry and sharp 79-year-old, and if the gods are kind, he will bless us with many more movies before his time is up. But like Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Spielberg’s most recent movies are infused with the knowledge that they could be his last. The Fabelmans finally dragged the childhood trauma that has informed so much of his work out of the subtextual shadows, an autobiographical origin story slipped in while he’s still around to tell it. Disclosure Day not only returns Spielberg to his most persistent subject—the existence of extraterrestrial life—but feels like it closes the book on a fascination that stretches all the way back to his teens. It’s the period at the end of a 60-year sentence.
It feels like a tacit acknowledgment of how often Spielberg has made movies about aliens that Disclosure Day begins in the middle of the story, after cybersecurity expert Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) has already stolen the proof of their existence from the top-secret government contractor where he works. Daniel, as he’ll later explain, “keeps secrets for a living,” and though he’s recently found out more—enough to convince him that those secrets are too important to stay hidden—the implication is that he’s known at least a little for a long time. In fact, according to the movie, a lot of people have. David Koepp’s script is crammed with references to rumored close encounters, from the famous Roswell crash to a bizarre legend about Richard Nixon showing alien corpses to Jackie Gleason. (The latter is identified only as a “TV star from the ’50s”: If you know, you know.) The suggestion, playful but not unserious, is that everything you’ve heard, every whispered tale about Air Force pilots and downed flying saucers, actually happened. It’s all true.
If you count 1964’s Firelight, the now-lost feature shot when he was 17, Spielberg has been saying as much since high school. But 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the chance he got to match the force of his belief with the power of his artistry. After the industry-shaking success of Jaws, he could have done anything he wanted, and what he wanted to do was depict what it would be like if a regular working-class guy suddenly knew for certain what the world’s greatest scientists had been working decades to prove. Richard Dreyfuss’ power-company repairman struggles mightily to put that knowledge into words, so much so that his wife and children think he’s simply lost his mind and flee their house in fear. But he understands, on a level deeper than his conscious mind can process, what he’s meant to do, and where he’s meant to be.
Disclosure Day hinges, in a sense, on the gap between knowing and understanding. On the surface, it’s an information-age parable about the end of secrecy. We have lived, for somewhere between the 79 years since Roswell and all of human history, in a world divided by lines: between nations, between languages, between those who have knowledge and power and those who are denied it. And it has, in this movie’s world, brought us to the brink of extinction: cities in flames, missiles armed, a low background hum of imminent annihilation. So enough with all that! The first thing the aliens bless the two “experiencers” with whom they form a psychic bond with is the ability to either speak or understand every language there is, including some we don’t even think of as languages. When Emily Blunt’s TV weather forecaster, Margaret, suddenly starts broadcasting in clicks and gurgles, Daniel immediately understands her, but the language she’s speaking isn’t some obscure or primitive tongue: It’s math.
Margaret isn’t just the world’s most fluent polyglot. She hears the things that people don’t say, the thoughts they don’t even dare to form. When a short-tempered cop pulls her over, she knows he’s a new dad who’s been fighting with his wife, afraid he’ll fail their child the way his own father failed him; she knows Colin Firth’s Scanlon, the outwardly heartless head of the movie’s evil deep-state corporation, Wardex, still grieves his dead wife in private. The head of Wardex’s splinter faction, the ones working to disclose the company’s secrets to the world, tells Daniel that the aliens taught him math—“the language in which the book of the universe is written”—so that we could understand them. But they gave Margaret the gift of reading other people’s emotions so that we could understand ourselves, because “they regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage.” For an artist as famously sentimental as Spielberg, it hardly needs saying, but the movie says it anyway: The most powerful force in the universe is the ability to feel.
Translation plays a key role in Close Encounters as well. At least three languages are spoken in its opening minutes, where long-vanished planes are discovered in the Sonoran Desert, and Bob Balaban’s French-language interpreter becomes a significant character in his own right, not just an appendage to François Truffaut’s scientist. (Balaban also acted as the real on-set interpreter for Truffaut and wrote a delightful book about the experience.) But it’s also clear about the point where language fails, or at least becomes irrelevant. The movie’s aliens communicate with humans through implanted visions—the image of the Devils Tower, which Roy drives away his family by re-creating in their living room—and through a five-note musical phrase, which is considered so expressive that when Truffaut’s scientist explains it to a room full of colleagues in French, the movie doesn’t even bother to translate his words.
On Inside the Actors Studio, host James Lipton suggested, to Spielberg’s apparent astonishment, that Close Encounters’ use of music as a universal language, as played on computers, was his way of reconciling the discord between his father, a computer engineer, and his mother, a concert pianist. Rather than building up to that insight (although it does include a late scene of Daniel soothing Margaret by holding her hand against the strings of a grand piano), Disclosure Day begins with it. The facts, such as they are, are already known, at least to Wardex’s higher-ups and a shadowy cabal that spans private industry and the Department of Defense. But the people who know those facts aren’t capable of understanding them. Rather than seizing the opportunity to forge an interspecies bond, Firth’s Scanlon tortures the rare alien we see taken alive, vivisecting it while it screams in pain. Releasing that information to the entire world might be enough to end the question of whether or not aliens exist. But figuring out what to do next requires a deeper, more intuitive level of understanding. And so the last word Margaret speaks to a rapt global audience—the last word, at least for now, in Spielberg’s oeuvre—is a simple plea: “Listen.”
Although it’s less nakedly autobiographical than The Fabelmans, Disclosure Day has the same feeling of a person looking back over the long span of his life and wondering: How did I end up like this? Spielberg even implicitly links the two movies by including a set piece of a train smashing into a car—the image that, as The Fabelmans reminds us, he got into making movies to re-create. The existence of extraterrestrial life is, for him, the answer to the biggest question there is, but that answer has always come with a price, whether it’s breaking up a family or melting your face off. (The characters in The War of the Worlds, for one, would have been a lot happier left in the dark.) In Disclosure Day, however, he’s lost his faith in other options. The institutions we might once have trusted to know in our place are no longer safe or functional. So the only solution left is to let everything out and let the chips fall where they may. As Daniel says, “It’s not up to me to decide if it’s good or bad for people to know.”
Disclosure Day’s most idealistic—and, frankly, most boomer-ish—belief is that releasing this information to the world could unify us: that filling billions of TV screens with the same images will be enough to shock us to our senses. (It’s like a globe-spanning version of The Post, with a hero whose name sounds like he’s about to leak the Pentagon Papers.) And for Spielberg, the place that world comes together is, as it’s always been, a movie theater. Disclosure Day is the biggest, most classically Spielbergian spectacle he’s made in years, and while the highest-grossing filmmaker in history has nothing to prove in terms of box office, the movie bears a message that he wants a global audience to hear, preferably in the company of other people. As the proof of alien existence floods the world’s airwaves, a stunned anchor reaches out to reassure her viewers that whatever is happening, it’s happening to all of us, crossing borders and boundaries and uniting every person on the planet in a single experience. And when she speaks to them, she’s also talking to every person in the theater, including, perhaps, the person who put those words on the screen: “If you are seeing this, you are not alone.”
Read the rest of Spielberg Week.
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