Michael Wood: At the Movies

Michael Wood

We may have mixed feelings about the title of Steven Spielberg’s new movie, Disclosure Day. Doesn’t it sound a bit legal? How close is ‘disclosure’ to its apparent synonyms ‘revelation’ and ‘exposure’? Spielberg invites us to dismiss these worries and enjoy our liberal selves. When, about halfway through the film, a character talks about ‘full disclosure’, meaning a sort of triumph, he is looking forward to a spectacular, worldwide explosion of revealed meaning and trust in the unknown. The scene takes place in the vast screen-filled offices of an American television company. What is going on here? And where is the critical doubt or irony?

The short answer is that the film makes wise or second thoughts seem stingy. Don’t we know how to take a risk now and again? Surely we can endorse maxims like ‘People have a right to the truth’ or ‘Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know’? Of course, we are likely to wake up with qualms about our courage and begin to think of all the occasions when it’s better to keep quiet about the truth. But not yet. Not until the film’s spell fades.

Much of Disclosure Day is devoted to elaborately organised crash scenes. At one point a car drives straight through a house – in via one wall and out through another. Elsewhere a fast train smashes into and accidentally picks up a car; its passengers cling to the side of the train until it reaches a station. In a way we are in a crash scene immediately since the film’s opening involves a wrestling match in which the contestants hit each other with wooden chairs. In the crowd are two of the main characters: Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) and Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor). Scanlon is the director of a covert government contractor called Wardex – short for Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction – that deals with extraterrestrials. Kellner is a former employee who has left Wardex, taking with him a vast amount of data proving that the organisation has long abused and killed the creatures it was meant to negotiate with and learn from. Kellner has not yet decided with whom to share the data, but Scanlon is determined to stop him.

Kellner and his girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson), take refuge in a convent where she once trained to be a nun. Although she never took her vows, her former mentor, Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel), is willing to hide them. Much of the rest of the film follows Kellner’s violent escapades, even as he fails to act on the information he has stolen. There is, however, a brief flicker of a great film when Scanlon uses a mysterious form of torture to get Jane to tell him where Kellner is.

An interesting chunk of the movie begins when we meet Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a meteorologist at a TV station in Kansas City. She has a talent for empathy and always knows what other people want and need. One immediately startling aspect of her gift is her ability to speak fluently in the language of anyone she talks to. Late for work one day she is stopped by a policeman who wants to see her driving licence and car registration. She produces them amiably but is impatient with the delay. Reaching for another aspect of her talent, she reads the mind of the policeman; realising he is worried about his partner and child, she says their names and asks after them. The policeman lets her go, and she gets to work just in time to face her microphone. On air she begins to let out strange click-click sounds, which suggest that she may be possessed by some non-human entity. (Blunt does all this with an elegant, mildly flustered skill that doesn’t seem at all like acting.) Soon some men show up and ask to interview Margaret. They claim to be from the FBI. She doesn’t need her talent to know they’re not telling the truth. Along with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), she takes to the road; the pair form a parallel with Daniel and Jane, who are also on the run from bad guys and in search of the right listener.

Scanlon may not have started out as a bad guy. He may have felt, in the early days of his research into extraterrestrials, that people weren’t ready to deal with proof of alien existence, and that this could lead to all kinds of human madness. He may even have been right about this, but the film asks us to judge him on his behaviour, not his principles. This is where the torture scene comes in.

In stories like this one, there are many ways of talking to people in person without being in their physical presence. Scanlon’s arrangement for talking to Jane belongs to the old days of science fiction, the age of H.G. Wells rather than Octavia Butler. He sits in a dentist’s chair in his office, wires himself up with some borrowed equipment and sticks a metal shard in his mouth. This is all very painful, and he may be suffering more than the tortured Jane. He contacts her not through any sort of aerial thought but by lifting himself into the room she is in, while also remaining in his own chair. He tortures her as he asks his questions by pressing a metal gadget in his hand, making Jane bleed until she tells him what he wants to know. The mixture of real, insistent cruelty and the imaginative poverty of the science is amazing.

This is partly Spielberg’s idea of fun, but it is part of something else too: his use of the extraterrestrial as a stand-in for almost anything strange. It’s not always a virtue, but there may be interesting thoughts behind the ragged obvious ones. Think of the phrase Spielberg likes to use in interviews when speaking of visitors from other worlds: ‘We are not alone.’ Margaret may well feel something like this when she hears herself speaking a language she doesn’t know; she certainly feels it when the hidden behaviour of Wardex becomes global news.

By this time, we have reached the moment I described too swiftly in my opening paragraph. The extraterrestrial has become an ideological question rather than a creature. It means freedom to know what there is to know, and what has been repressed for far too long. (There’s a shot of Richard Nixon as president examining the evidence of a supposed visit from other skies.) The enthusiastic plea for full disclosure comes from Colman Domingo as Hugo Wakefield, a defector from Wardex in search of an old idea of truth, and in charge now of a pro-revelation organisation. Following him and our heroes, we are so caught up in the happiness (and correctness) of the thought of not being alone that we can’t even imagine that some of our future friends may be monsters.

David Koepp, the writer of this and four other Spielberg movies, says they tried to avoid the word ‘alien’ because of its political echoes. They do so with one exception, where the speaker seems embarrassed. But it’s hard to think about everything the extraterrestrials may represent, even if we love them, without some smatterings of politics. It’s hard to recognise too that however gallantly we treat the unknown, we rarely stop converting it as fast as possible into a predictable old friend.

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