Florida's Film, Television and the Arts Magazine
Disclosure Day and Steven Spielberg as Cinema's Messiah
Steven Spielberg engages with the present political moment through Disclosure Day. While his most hopeful sentiments certainly do read as naive, he comes to those conclusions through brutal honesty and an external force that drives humanity together. Disclosure Day is a mess at times, buying the lemonade that it is selling, but for every contradiction and contrivance, Spielberg centers this piece of mass market cinema in fear for his own craft, fear of the power of seeking out catharsis through cinema.
While many recent films have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic and disillusionment of the right wing in America, few have done so with an empathetic perspective. Glass Onion uses the visual motifs of the pandemic like masking as a set dressing without addressing any actual politics. Eddington finds joy in ripping apart every ideology and finding base animal instincts that lead someone to cognitive dissonance. Bugonia turns that dissonance into a boiler pot where beliefs, no matter how loudly they are shouted, are overwhelmed by authority. Disclosure Day walks backwards into exploring the feelings of conspiracy theorists and political dissonates with validity. The film could superficially be read as anti-intellectual and ready to engage with the worst subsects of the political spectrum. Empathy for your fellow man is one thing but supporting delusional behavior may be a bridge too far. Perhaps the best point of comparison is David Cronenberg’s latest duology of Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds in parallel with The Fablemans and Disclosure Day. Crimes of the Future is an artist looking back on his career and life and addressing the cancers that he has infected the industry with. While Cronenberg’s analog within the film struggles to put together artistic endeavors that impress the public, a man haphazardly plastered with ears manages to stand out. The Shrouds is derangement central. After the loss of his wife, Karsh Relikh (Vincent Cassel), styled exactly like Cronenberg, puts a whole afterlife entertainment system in the ground where he can stare at her decomposing body, only to trip and fall into a conspiracy theory of international proportions. The Shrouds is about addressing the fallacy of the auteur and how fallible even the most renowned and intellectually capable person can be. Spielberg’s interest in delusions and outright psychosis are the backbone of some of his best films – see Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Fablemans, and Schindler’s List. The protagonists in all three of those films struggle to parse reality and identify how their actions affect the world around them. Margaret (Emily Blunt) and Daniel (Josh O’Connor) never sit down to discuss the potential fallout of sharing news of alien lifeforms with the world. It is a foregone conclusion, with it being Disclosure Day after all.
Blending the cinematic interests of a few of Spielberg’s contemporaries to great effect, namely Martin Scorsese and Brian DePalma, the film contemplates the nature of humanity and God within the grand scale of the universe. Spielberg cowers at his own power more so than ever, His images more perverse than ever. He dares the audience to look away from the newsreel montage like the billions of civilians glued to their phones in unison who would not dare avert their gaze for fear of missing the truth. While DePalma derives an intoxicating sense of euphoria from his voyeuristic images, Spielberg is shaken to his core. What if the existence of extra terrestrials is too much for the world to handle, too close to the original sin? Adam and Eve bring sin into the world through unbridled curiosity, and Daniel’s response to his newfound knowledge feels in the same vein. His relationship to reality is based largely around tactile evidence. He sees truth through mp4 files and math equations. Contradictions, no matter how engaging they may be, confound him. His girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), reveals herself to be a lapsed Catholic and former Novitiate who believes in the necessity of God but not necessarily his divinity. Jane stands in for the Catholic Church, trying to directly engage with the literal existence of God and extraterrestrial beings. The possibility of Jane having a life prior to his involvement in her life confounds Daniel. Spielberg himself has expressed such frustrations with his own relationships through his films, namely Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom which spews disdain for humanity in its casual racism and oppressive set pieces.
Jane, draped in her Catholic idolatry, wrestles with the consequences of the Patriot Act, stabbing herself with her Crucifix and then a knife to get out from under Scanlon’s (Colin Firth) control. While Spielberg does identify a hatred spurred on by 9/11 in Munich, the immediate fear of the catastrophe in War of the Worlds, and the unmatched might of the surveillance state in Minority Report, he has never before directly connected the religious sect and their potential guilt in America’s prerequisite role in 9/11 to the Patriot Act. Disclosure Day shares a lot of the same visual language and concerns as the Hitchcockian thriller with Scanlon diving on his targets, functionally raping the opposition’s mind and taking control of their body. The police state has never had more access and tools at their fingertips to track down anyone. Certainly more grounded in modernity, the technology utilized by Scanlon and WARDEX is quite sterile, almost like a dentist’s office. The most generic corporation now possesses the might of a futuristic military with privatization and outsourcing facilitated by the government. Instead of military choppers swarming onto the farmhouse where Daniel and Jane hide out, it is a convoy of blacked out SUVs. The power of WARDEX is their anonymity, operating as a shadow organization with seemingly unlimited power to be wielded against unknowing and nonconsenting civilians.
Spielberg exists within Margaret, albeit in incredibly complex ways. She has the parental trauma that has infected most of the more profound protagonists in Spielberg’s filmography from Sammy Fableman to Frank Abagnale Jr. to Elliott. Like the young Fableman and Spielberg, Margaret has a gift. She can literally conjure images and emotions within people by presenting as a lost loved one. The filmmakers do not possess the power to conjure the images from thin air, but Spielberg’s filmmaking comes about as close as physically possible to magic. Daniel, while decidedly less developed than Margaret, uses his gift of translation and knowledge in the background to share the truth with the world. Their symbiosis can speak to any number of working relationships that Spielberg has carried throughout his career from Janusz Kamiński who shot every Spielberg film since 1993 besides Jurassic Park to John Williams, whose work most neatly fits into the idea of alien translation, taking musical notes and evoking emotions out of them. While experiencing a panic attack, Margaret only escapes her own troubles by literally feeling the music of piano chords. Disclosure Day is about the importance of collaboration and communication and how those core tenets can bring humanity together. Margaret is viewed as a deity because of her powers, akin to the almost religious response that Spielberg’s images can invoke. Audience members at my screening were decked out in Amity Island merchandise, ready to pray at the altar of the god of the American blockbuster. Attributing such godly power to one’s own profession could be seen as a tad narcissistic by Koepp and Spielberg, but that power comes at a cost. Margaret carries the emotional weight of her lineage, and the potential for developing early onset Parkinson’s in particular. She refuses the potential title of a deity, shouting, “I will not be your religion,” as one of her potential followers kneels before her.
The final act of Disclosure Day is so profoundly devastating because of the religious constraints that the film works within. Like most things in the film, disclosing the truth comes with its ghosts. As fundamentally right as it may be to share the existence of extraterrestrial beings with humanity, prior understandings of the world come into conflict with that potential. The final newsreel, narrated by the NBC Anchor (Courtney Grace), is one of the most emotionally harrowing moments in Spielberg’s catalog. Presenting the beings as typical bug-eyed Martians reads as an active choice from Spielberg considering he has made the defining canonical alien in E.T. By presenting them as so clinically foreign with that character design and their otherworldly ships, their lack of humanity is obvious. A lack of humanity in this instance is not a negative. It is a simple fact. The beings portrayed in the files are not human. However, they do have life to them. The unmoving carcasses from the New Mexico crash relay a similar feeling to having seen a car crash played out or news footage of a bombing in Iran. Their simple ability to perish, age, and communicate creates a kinship that crosses interspecies boundaries.
“Listen.” The final line of Disclosure Day passes through a conveyer belt of whispers before being shared with the world by Margaret. Within the context of the film, It is a simple phrase broadly reading as, “Listen to your fellow man. Extend the olive branch and try to understand the other side”. That is certainly part of the text, but it speaks to something more existential about the film industry and world as we know it. Koepp is 63 and Spielberg is 79. Coming from a geriatric alien in a wheelchair, that word reads as a stab at profundity. Despite the emotional weight of the WARDEX files, “Listen,” feels light and not up to the scope of the matter at hand. It takes an existential crisis and distills it into the most accessible phrase. In its lack of specificity – listen to who exactly? – “Listen,” stands in for every reading. Listen to the experts. Listen to the crackpot conspiracy theorists. Listen to a higher power. Listen to the person across the aisle that you have never in your life agreed with. Seeking out empathy in the face of a new cold war and the existence of extraterrestrial life is perhaps the only path forward, or at least the only non-cynical one. That is the joy in Spielberg’s brand of filmmaking. Despite the deep dark flaws that exist in this world and our inability to communicate, he considers the possibility that cinema can unite the world. It is by no accident that the final 20 minutes play out largely through screens. Even the final word is delivered through the eye of a camera on Margaret. Belief in a higher power, may that be spiritual or mystical can distill the fears of the many into a uniting force.
