E.T. The Extraterrestrial
Can set design make or break a film? In general, probably not, but it made one film for me. I remember seeing E.T. The Extraterrestrial as a kid and seeing the image of a television set with an Atari 2600 stacked on top, and cartridges underneath. It was the first time that a movie looked like something I recognized, like it could have been my house, my television. This is true of the whole film, with its middle class messiness of action figures and toys strewn about. Of course as a kid I was not exactly looking for realism in film. I saw the original Star Wars thirty some times by my last count, and spent the rest of the late seventies and early eighties searching to recreate that experience.
My identification with the set design was really just a stand in for the setting. E.T. was also a film about divorce, about a mother who is wondering if she can handle three kids on her own, and three kids, trying to figure out where they fit in this new situation. My parents had just gotten divorced the year before, and E.T. might have been the first time that I saw that same issue on film, the first time I went to the movies looking for aliens, and saw something very familiar instead. Nostalgia has put the names Steven Spielberg and Steven King together, mainly in Stranger Things, but I think that what really connects the two, besides their period, is that they were both masters of what we might call "grounding" their stories, of giving their fantastic premises some orientation within existing social anxieties. Thus E.T. can function as a case study of a middle class family dealing with the anomie of divorce, or The Shining as a film father struggling with alcoholism and writer's block. These elements of reality, or even realism, are the necessary precondition of what follows.
"In particular it allows us to grasp mass culture not as empty distraction or “mere” false consciousness, but rather as a transformational work on social and political anxieties and fantasies which must then have some effective presence in the mass cultural text in order subsequently to be “managed” or repressed. Indeed, the initial reflections of the present essay suggest that such a thesis ought to be extended to modernism as well, even though I will not here be able to develop this part of the argument further I will therefore argue that both mass culture and modernism have as much content, in the loose sense of the word, as the older social realisms; but that this content is processed in all three in very different ways. Both modernism and mass culture entertain relations of repression with the fundamental social anxieties and concerns, hopes and blind spots, ideological antinomies and fantasies of disaster, which are their raw material; only where modernism tends to handle this material by producing compensatory structures of various kinds, mass culture represses them by the narrative construction of imaginary resolutions and by the projection of an optical illusion of social harmony."
If Spielberg in some sense shaped the modern blockbuster, he did so by creating a formula in which every alien encounter, every dinosaur theme park run amok, and every adventure, is also a story of families reconciling and individuals finding their purpose. He was the master of working in not only real social anxieties but their imaginary resolution in between shark attacks and spaceships.
Where does these lead the latest film Disclosure Day? Oddly the films to seems to avoid all of this, it opens in a Wrestling Ring of all places, the ground zero of kayfabe, of the artifice that infuses modern life. From the opening scene of a book stomping down in quicky shifts to a kind of spy versus spy scenario. There is a backpack full of secrets one of many MacGuffins, and strange alien technologies, both are in the hands of Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor) who is dodging shadowy agents. We soon learn that there are two groups of shadowy agents the first, lead by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) is a government agency dedicated to concealing the fact that aliens have made contact with Earth several times, while the second, lead by Hugo Wakefield (Coleman Domingo) is dedicated to exposing this truth. We get a few lines about the politics of this division. The first group believe that the revelation of aliens will throw everything into crisis, disrupting our understanding of the world. There are a few scenes in a convent that gives this idea its weight. The second seem to think that the aliens have an important perspective about empathy that the world needs to hear. The forces of tradition and order against a new enlightenment, one based less on reason than some notion of empathy and connection. These philosophical discussions get short shrift, between car chases, and strange alien devices that offer total surveillance. This conflict takes place against a world in crisis, although the crises are not the one's we are most immediately familiar with. There are references to conflict on the Korean peninsula and something having to do with Russia, all of which gets referenced as possibly starting World War III.
Caught in the middle of all of this is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) a Kansas City weather reporter who finds herself suddenly speaking new languages, even an alien one, after an encounter with a cardinal. This encounter also gives her a kind of superpower of psychic empathy. She gets pulled over by a cop and is able to talk herself out of a ticket by offering relationship advice. Daniel and Margaret meet up and there is the notion that the two of them have the ability to bring the message of the aliens. He has the data, a backpack full of footage dating back to Roswell, and the ability to relate to data--there are some lines about his ability to think mathematically makes it possible for him to communicate to aliens, just as Margaret's empathy allows her to communicate to humans. The combination of their abilities is what makes possible the "disclosure" of the films title.
Disclosure Day
I do not want to pull a Zizek, but I am going to have to because I cannot find the quote, someone, somewhere, said that every movie is in some sense about its own construction. That does seem to be the case for Disclosure Day. Throughout the film, Hugo is seen in the process of constructing something, looking at plans, overseeing construction. At first it just seems like he might work as an architect as a day job. I do not imagine being part of a secret society trying to expose the truth about aliens pays very well. It is only in the final scenes of the film to we learn the truth. He is building a facsimile of Margaret's childhood home. As something of a callback, for me at least, this childhood home includes a television with a video game console, updated to the original Nintendo, along with a few VHS tapes. There are a few lines in the film that suggest that this is supposed to bring back her original memories, she and Daniel were both abducted by aliens as children. However, it is hard not to see this scene as a staging of its own construction. Spielberg's earlier films began in the home, and used that location to draw us in to the quotidian details of life before the aliens showed up. Now his film ends with it. The set of the home, built inside a warehouse, seems like the film not only addressing its own construction, but reminding us us of both the setting and reception of Spielberg's first films.
Disclosure Day
The film ends with Margaret back at her news desk, breaking the news to the world about the existence of aliens. We see this scene first from the Kansas City newsroom, then as it is picked up by a national station, and then as it is watched. It is not watched by people in their homes in front of their own televisions, with or without gaming consoles. Instead we get scenes of people on trains, airplanes, and everywhere, watching the news on their phones. These scenes of masses of people transfixed on their phones could just be attempts to convey how big the news is, but they seem to be scenes of the blockbuster contemplating its own demise in the contemporary attention economy. Blockbusters used to combine mathematics (digital effects) and empathy (storytelling) to create something that changed the world, but that combination seems incredibly elusive today. Spectacles do not have the same effects. At one point in the film, just as images of alien bodies being removed from crashed spacecrafts, we hear someone utter the words, "is this AI?" that line, combined with the images of people are their phones, shows that the blockbuster is up against more than a shadowy organization in trying to capture attention.
No one understands this more than Spielberg, he once combined a mechanical shark and a story about a former NYC cop seeking a quieter life on an island to fundamentally change how sharks were perceived. Or, more to the point, he combined a family of three siblings and a mechanical alien to make one of the biggest movies ever. Disclosure Day has been relatively successful so far for Spielberg, his first hit since the abysmal Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. However, anyone paying attention to film news in the last few weeks have seen that two big IP blockbusters, The Mandalorian and Grogu and Masters of the Universe, have failed to bring in their expected returns. The news has not been all bad for movies, it has also been a month for unexpected hits, in Obsession and Backrooms, the later of which moved in the opposite direction of Disclosure Day, from phones, youtube, to movies. Perhaps it is possible to still do what the blockbuster does, to still tap into those utopian longings, and dystopian fears, as someone on line, I do not remember who, put it, Obsession and Backrooms are about dating a horrible guy and having a crappy job, two "social anxieties" that are, in their parlance of our times, very relatable. I am not sure if the blockbuster can survive, or if it should, but it sees to me that the future is in connecting to existing social anxieties rather than nostalgia for the form itself.
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