HOLLYWOOD EXECUTIVES UNDERSTAND there is more to the success of Independence Day and Men in Black than choosing the right special effects sub-contractor. UFO’s and the idea of life on other planets are heavy, ‘meaning loaded’ concepts in the wake of the last generation of modernist thought, which defined human beings as chemical accidents, alone in a corner of the universe.

The notion of alien visitors to the earth has proved remarkably adaptable to film genres: romance (Starman), comedy (Men in Black), parody (Mars Attacks), comic strip action (Independence Day) and tear-jerker (E.T.). You get to thinking that all that is left is the serious examination of the philosophical implications for science and faith of contact with extra-terrestrials. This may sound unmarketable and naive. But that is what Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future and Forrest Gump) has attempted with his latest film Contact.

Contact is based on the screenplay and 1985 sci fi novel of the same name by the recently deceased Carl Sagan and his wife Anne Druyan. Sagan, one of the most prominent popularisers of science this century, was a prolific author, produced and wrote the television series Cosmos, and was a key theorist and motivator for SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence).

Sagan used the certainty of an evangelist to communicate the less marketable circumspection and qualifications of science. “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be”, is the first line of Carl Sagan’s immensely popular book Cosmos. He said he found it “elevating” rather than “demeaning” to describe himself as only a “collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan”.

Contact brings together Sagan’s faith in science and very secular awe at the universe, and places it in some sort of dialogue with religious America. It is the story of agnostic radio astronomer Ellie (Jodie Foster) and her discovery of a message beamed from the star Vega, 26 light years away from earth. The message contains blueprints for a machine that will, she presumes, somehow transport just one person from earth to Vega.

Ellie lost both parents when she was young and, feeling alone in the universe, sees the machine as the answer to what she has “always been searching for”, something she is “willing to die for”. Ellie’s counterpart in the dialogue is Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey ), a young and handsome Harvard Divinity graduate who has turned freelance spiritual pundit, author of the best-seller Losing Faith: Seeking for Faith in the Age of Reason. Joss, who has risen to carrying an almost Billy Graham-like mantle of spiritual adviser to the President, speaks eloquently on Larry King Live that technology doesn’t bring “meaning” and uses C.S. Lewis’s (and Augustine’s) analogy of love in his arguments with Ellie.

JOSS IS AN example of the updating of Sagan’s mid-’80s script. Sagan’s Joss was a sideshow freak with the world tattooed on his torso, who has a near death experience after being struck by lightening. He is a polemical televangelist, albeit one who is well-read. The film Contact airbrushes most of Sagan’s caricatures, turning him into laid-back theist (he never mentions Jesus), who will sleep with Ellie at a whim (he quit the priesthood because he “couldn’t handle celibacy”) and talks to her about God post coitus.

The scriptwriter seems to have borrowed something of Michael Lerner for the character. Lerner is editor of the influential Jewish journal Tikkun, coiner of the phrase “politics of meaning” and something of a spiritual counsellor to Hilary Clinton.

Contact ostensibly seeks to develop a rapport between science which demands proof and faith which points to experience (or revelation) by giving Ellie an interstellar experience she can’t prove. Upon returning from Vega, she discovers that, from earth’s perspective, she never left at all. All she has are experiences which are no more verifiable than those one would get watching Total Recall on LSD.

The film ends with overdone music and the aphorism that “the most important thing is you all keep searching for your own answers”. But the subtext of the film is a bit different. In Ellie’s encounter with the extraterrestrial (which of course the filmgoer believes), she is told that we are alone in the universe, and that “the only thing that makes it bearable is each other”. The debate in America has been whether the film’s key message is tolerance or tolerance of the misguided.

Carl Sagan was a man deeply in awe of the universe, but someone who also yearned to discover that humans were not alone in the universe. Contact is almost his own personal sci-fi fantasy. The Bloomsbury Dictionary of Cultural Icons described Sagan’s writing as now sounding “increasingly old fashioned and inflexible in a world beset by doubts about the bounty of science’s more wonderful creations”. His wide-eyed descriptions of the “billions and billions” of whatevers in the universe, in the series Cosmos, while quaint in the first episodes, made you want to wipe the saliva from his chin further into the series.

His religious awe was almost desperate. It was as if, after blithering about the mindless chance of the whole shebang, he couldn’t bare the universe he was describing and in a rash emotion just had to hug the nearest, er, galaxy.

Sagan was, technically, an agnostic. But he was so close to atheism it made no difference. Interestingly, the only religions which have ever remotely appealed to him were Hinduism and Jainism. The former, because it was the only one that came close to describing the length of the universe (a brahma year is 8.6 billion ordinary years) and the latter because it taught a reverence for all of creation.

Contact, for all its efforts to smooth out Sagan’s less appealing notions for middle America, ends up looking clumsy. Jodie Foster is cold, science-obsessed, tight lipped, barely two-dimensional (mind you, that’s twice as good as anyone else). And the attempt to develop a love interest with Joss fails completely. The film’s only energy is of the sci-fi philosophical variety. For the most part, Contact is fascinating for the deep questions it deals with but in the end frustrating when it gets simplistic and strident.

 DB

Reproduced courtesy of “Shoot the messenger” websit http://www.shootthemessenger.com.au. That site is worth a visit.