Contact: film review

By Robin Marie on April 17, 2011

A few weeks ago, I was reminded of the Jodie Foster film Contact, which I enjoyed immensely as a teenager. Reflecting on how jam packed the film is with the questions of religion, science, and God, I decided to revisit it through my adult – and atheist – eyes. First, I learned an interesting fact about Contact – it is based on a book by Carl Sagan, hence the dedication “For Carl” at the end of the film. As I have never read the book and, perusing the summary on Wikipedia seems to indicate there are a couple of possibly important differences between the book and the film, I’ll leave this fact aside for the purposes of this discussion. But I thought it was worth noting.

Contact tells the story of the discovery of intelligent life, contacted through radio signal. As the story unfolds, Contact operates as a discussion between a New Age believer and an atheist scientist. Some of the most common lay arguments for the existence of God are put forth by Palmer Joss, a former priest who becomes a popular spiritual commentator and also the romantic interest of Ellie Arroway, the atheist scientist. First, we hear the argument from personal experience, while Palmer tells Arroway about an intense religious experience:

All I know was that I wasn’t alone – and for the first time in my life I wasn’t scared of nothing, not even dying. It was God.”

Ellie asks if it is possible that “you had this experience because some part of you needed to have it?,” but he insists this was beyond the realm of conscious or subconscious manipulation.

Years later, Palmer and Ellie have gone their separate ways, and Palmer has built a career on critiquing the “worship” of technology. In an interview on Larry King (the film awkwardly insists on having real media figures parading around, including a speech by Bill Clinton!) Palmer makes an argument based on the problem of meaning:

The question that I am asking is this: are we happier, the human race – is the world a fundamentally better place because of science and technology? … We feel emptier, lonelier, more cut off from each other than any other time in history. I think it is because we are looking for the meaning, what is the meaning?”

However, Palmer goes on not to suggest cultural conservatism or moral rigidity, but to critique materialism and consumerism. Therefore we see that the version of “faith” presented by the film is not the dogmatic, and culturally stunted faith of fundamentalists or even evangelicals, but a liberal, nonconformist concern for spiritual well-being which, for purposes of simple definition, I’ll refer to as “New Age” faith.

Finally, Palmer makes an argument based on the existence of love. After Ellie makes the discovery of messages from an alien civilization, the two are reunited and continue to talk about their opposing worldviews. Ellie insists that she needs proof for God. Palmer responds by asking her if she loved her father – and when she says yes, he replies, “Prove it.”

Ellie’s argument for her atheism, however, receives far less attention. Indeed, the fact that the script has her asking for proof of God, rather than evidence for God, distorts I believe the position of most atheists. By and large, we are not people who would never believe in God unless he was as obvious as a table in our living rooms – there are a lot of things we believe in, such as evolution, which we cannot directly observe at any given moment. However, the evidence for the theory of evolution does not only exist, it is overwhelming – whereas the evidence for God is either extremely weak, or (depending on how strong an atheist you are), totally lacking entirely.

And after all, in a strict sense nearly nothing, except for mathematical proofs (and if one wants to get very postmodern about it, not even that) can actually be proved – it is merely that once evidence becomes overwhelming, we start treating things as facts rather than conjectures. (Dawkins makes this point well in his book, The Greatest Show on Earth.) If we talk about what we can assume we know based on evidence, it is quite easy to provide evidence of love, and therefore to become sure of its existence, in the same way we assume other things with ample evidence exist.

Despite the fact that the film gives Ellie less convincing arguments, it does clearly argue for the legitimacy of her position. In a tough competition to be selected as the passenger of an alien craft (the blueprint of which has been beamed down from outer space), her status as an atheist clearly becomes problematic for her. The political response to the discovery of intelligent life, moreover, includes antagonistic conservatives and religious fanatics who are clearly hostile to science and scientists. So there is, therefore, some sense of the alienation American atheists can be confronted with.

Finally, the film clearly argues against a dogmatic or fundamentalist interpretation of faith – the first space craft built by the United States is destroyed when a religious fanatic blows himself up. Therefore, the unambiguously ugly side of religion is clearly acknowledged. Ellie is clearly portrayed, moreover, as an honest, brave, and principled person, and therefore quite the opposite of the negative stereotype of an atheist.

However, the film almost seems to argue that nonetheless, Ellie’s need for evidence is, ultimately, problematic. Without going into too much detail, she has an experience in the course of testing the new alien space craft which she cannot prove – and is therefore left able only to testify to how profoundly real it seemed. Ellie admits, however, that she could have imagined the whole thing – an admission, I might note, a theist rarely if almost never makes. However, she goes on to say:

I had an experience, I can’t prove it, I can’t explain it, but everything I know everything that I am tells me that it was real. I was given something… a vision of the universe that tells us undeniably how tiny and insignificant and rare and precious we all are. A vision that tells us that we are a part of something greater than ourselves, that we are not, that none of us are alone.”

Therefore we have a film which seems to suggest that while science can be awe inspiring and meaningful, there are some arenas in which an evidence-based approach simply will not do and that, indeed, these arenas are among the most fundamental and important to mankind.

Were it not for two things that complicate this picture.

First, it is revealed at the end of the film that there actually is evidence for Ellie’s story – a recording of 18 hours of static, which was precisely how long Ellie believed she had been gone from Earth. In a way, I am almost surprised this decision was made, as it seems to negate the “faith based” importance of Ellie’s experience, implying that things that are real will indeed leave real, measurable, empirical traces.

Second, the film never puts forward any clear cut theological claims. Indeed, when Ellie visits with the alien ambassador and asks him how they built the transport, he replies that they did not – another civilization, which died out long before they arrived, did so. Therefore, the question of ultimate or original cause is never answered, and it is clearly suggested that we don’t know. (This would seem to be consistent with Sagan’s position, as he apparently considered himself an agnostic rather than an atheist, although I think many atheists today would dispute the sharp difference between the two and rather consider the difference as consisting mostly of a different position on the same continuum.)

On the whole, this is a film which believers will like more than atheists, but atheists will like more than believers that are more doctrinaire – many conservative Christians, for example, would probably be opposed to the sort of ‘anything goes’ version of spirituality the film advocates, just as they were hostile to the The Da Vinci Code, another product of the popularity of New Age spirituality. The film clearly argues that faith and science are ultimately compatible – whether or not this is true is another discussion, but for this reason it is a fascinating film to watch. I was particularly interested in how common the arguments coming from Palmer are – the argument about love, for example, is something you run across often. People have a rough time thinking that love is ultimately composed of chemical responses in our brains, based on associating a particular person with a host of memories and experiences. This doesn’t bother me, but that it bothers other people is quite clear.

Thus overall I highly recommend Contact, both for the interesting questions it raises and also as a useful window into cultural trends in religion today. It might be particularly helpful to watch with someone of an opposing view, as more extensive discussion could then follow. Finally, one of the few claims clearly made by the film – and this is coming from the ambassador of the super-intelligent alien civilization, so presumably they know something – is something I agree with whole heartedly, and think is as good a basis for a morality amongst human beings as any I know:

You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, but you’re not. See, in all of our searching, the only thing we found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”

Amen to that.