We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. –Carl Sagan, Cosmos.
Poster for Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997).
“For as long as I can remember, I’ve been searching for something, some reason why we’re here. What are we doing here? Who are we?”—Ellie Arroway, Contact
In one of the most memorable opening sequences in science-fiction film since its predecessor (and obvious inspiration) 2001: A Space Odyssey, the camera pulls slowly away from the Earth into deep space. On the soundtrack we hear the aural artifacts of humanity in reverse order from chart-topping music hits to the rich baritone of Martin Luther King and finally, silence. As we speed through the universe, interstellar clouds, nebulae, and zooming galaxies converge into a single point of blue light; a gleam in the iris of young Eleanor “Ellie” Arroway1 in Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film Contact. Ellie (Jodie Foster) is a seeker. She goes from a precocious young girl attempting to reach truckers on her HAM radio to a SETI astronomer listening for—in her own words—“little green men.” Contact may be a film about one woman’s journey through space, but it is also about Ellie’s spiritual journey as she becomes a female Columbus in search of much more than a new world.
Opening images from Contact.
I first saw Contact when I was ten years old. Before that, I saw the original Star Wars trilogy when it was re-released in the late 1990s, sparking a love affair with all things extra-terrestrial that persists today. I was equally fascinated by science fiction and science fact, reading everything I could find about astronomy and NASA and practicing my Force powers in the backyard. In second grade I dressed up as Darth Vader for Halloween, proudly wielding my red lightsaber in a crowd of girls dressed as kittens and princesses. I dreamt of being an astronaut though I was terrified of riding roller coasters and therefore was not an ideal candidate for space travel. I knew the books and movies I loved would provide my only experiences beyond Earth’s orbit.
The author dressed as Darth Vader for a second grade Halloween parade.
Although I obsessed over Star Wars, Contact was my first intellectual science fiction film. Truly great science fiction relies on two essential elements. First, a thought experiment related to humanity’s relationship to science and technology and its potential consequences. You can summarize any science fiction narrative by using these “what if” premises: What if an android-hunting detective started to suspect that he might be an android himself (Blade Runner)? What if the police could predict a crime before it happened (Minority Report)? What if our world is actually a simulation devised by intelligent machines to enslave us and use our bodies as an energy source (The Matrix)? Questions like these are what separate exemplary science fiction films from most contemporary big-budget drivel. Contact’s “what if” scenario—what if humanity received a message from an alien civilization with instructions to build a mysterious machine? —raises the many other questions that drive the film’s plot. Would we build the machine? Who gets to be the first to test it? How would the scientific and religious communities react to the apparent appearance of extra-terrestrials? If you had the chance to be the first human to meet an alien, what would you say to them? Contact—so influenced by 2001—is ultimately about the next phase in the evolution of our species as our technology continues to advance.
The machine built from plans sent by an unknown intelligence.
The second requirement for great science fiction is that the narrative—even if it’s crawling with talking robots or blue-skinned aliens—is actually about us, attempting to answer a question that has captivated scientists and prophets alike: what does it mean to be human? Are we defined by our individuality? Our choices? Our memories? With its dual focus on outer space and our inner selves, science fiction is deeply existential in nature, which is part of what attracted me to it. Raised outside of organized religion by a spiritual, feminist mother and a culturally Jewish atheist father, I have always been a seeker: struggling with the idea of a higher power but profoundly curious about what else might explain the existence of the universe. Using Ellie’s story as a metaphor for the debate between science and religion, Contact tells us that faith in science does not necessarily negate other types of faith. In fact, Carl Sagan—in the novel that inspired the film—writes that they are inextricably related: “In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist’s signature.” Sagan seems to be saying that the perfection of physics and mathematics demonstrates that there are unexplainable forces at work in the universe.
Jenna Malone as Young Ellie.
Contact also influenced me significantly because its protagonist is a woman. Any female science fiction fan knows that well-developed, complex women are few and far between. I saw Contact before Divergent, Battlestar Galactica, and Hunger Games. I had yet to meet Tris, Kara Thrace, or Katniss—my heroes were Meg Murray from Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time and real adventuresses like Laura Ingalls Wilder, Amelia Earhart and Sally Ride. My favorite franchise offered Princess Leia, but she’s—in my opinion—a mixed bag. Though she is outspoken, brave, and a capable leader, she occasionally seems like window dressing (think gold bikini), lacking Han Solo’s wisecracking swagger and Luke Skywalker’s Jedi abilities.2 Therefore, I more easily saw myself in Ellie—smart, precocious, a bit of an outcast, with a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge about herself and the world around her.
Ellie (Jodie Foster) listens for patterns in the chaos.
Ellie’s importance as a bridge between the realms of science and faith is what makes her a new type of science fiction hero. Not the typical space cowboy, Ellie is something fairly rare: a female mystic. Ellie is often chastised for being outspoken, stubborn, and passionate: qualities often seen as positive in men and negative in women. However, she is also deeply emotional, intuitive, and receptive—the reason she is the first to pick up the signal from outer space is because she uses headphones to listen for patterns in the static from the radio telescopes instead of relying on a computer. Through Foster’s masterfully expressive performance we come to know Ellie: her sorrow, her rage—at being denied both funding for SETI and later the so-called “Machine Seat,”3 — and her pride in her work. Ellie is a self-proclaimed atheist, however, her choice to work for SETI demonstrates that she does believe in something she cannot yet prove. When questioned about why she is convinced other intelligent species exist, Ellie often repeats a phrase she picked up from her father: “If it’s just us…seems like an awful waste of space.”
Notably, the sudden traumatic death of her beloved father as a young girl catalyzes not only Ellie’s atheism but also her deep-rooted desire to understand why things happen. The film’s most memorable sequence—Ellie’s eventual whirlwind journey through space—is both a quest for the answers to our biggest questions (what science-fiction humor writer Douglas Adams deemed “life, the universe, and everything”4) and a deeply personal spiritual experience. In a series of visually breathtaking scenes, Ellie travels through a series of wormholes. At one point, she arrives on the edge of a beautiful peach-tinged galaxy with a bright white-yellow sun in the center giving off unearthly rays of light. Ellie, narrating her experience for the record, is moved nearly beyond the point of the speech. Her voice trembling, Ellie whispers: “Some celestial event. No – no words. No words to describe it. Poetry! They should’ve sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful…I had no idea.” In a bit of cinematic genius, the face of young Ellie is superimposed onto Foster’s, the expression and voice flickering between that of the woman and child. The implication is that this journey is healing not only for Ellie but also for the little girl grieving the loss of a parent.
Ellie’s voyage becomes even more fantastical when she wakes up on an isolated beach with stars and galaxies hanging impossibly close in the sky overhead. A familiar figure soon joins her: her deceased father. No “little green man,” Ellie quickly realizes that he is actually an alien who has taken on her father’s form. The alien’s appearance as a dead loved one is part of the mystery of Ellie’s experience. Is this real, the ultimate wish fulfillment, or both? Regardless, the alien does what Ellie’s father Ted did for her as a little girl: tries to give her answers to her questions. Their brief conversation reveals that there are “many others” i.e, intelligent species beyond Earth, and that some of them have taken the same journey using the same cosmic transport system. In one of the signature lines from the film, the alien tells Ellie:
You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone. Only you’re not. You see, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found to make the emptiness more bearable…is each other.
Because she is a woman in a mostly male field and the scientific community considers her work for SETI fringe at best, Ellie is often alone and misunderstood. Because of the loss of her father, Ellie imposed isolation on herself, refusing to open up to people for fear of losing them. The alien’s prescription for humanity—that we realize how deeply connected we are to one another and the cosmos—is also a prescription for Ellie’s loneliness.
Ellie has a mysterious encounter.
When Ellie returns from her journey, she finds that all proof of her experience has been erased and her colleagues believe her memories are the result of psychosis. As an atheist and a skeptic, Ellie is put in the ironic position of having to defend her belief in an experience she can’t prove actually occurred. During a Congressional investigation, Ellie is asked why she can’t admit that she hallucinated or is lying about her journey:
No longer the atheist defending her lack of belief in God, Ellie is now an evangelist attempting to convince others to believe. This reversal makes Ellie a prophet of sorts. It is significant that in Western tradition most explorers and nearly all prophets are men—Moses bringing God’s law to his people or Columbus discovering the so-called “New World.” In Contact, however, it is Ellie’s combination of scientific reason and female intuition that makes her such a powerful symbol. While Ellie is deeply shaken by the trial, she exits the courthouse to find a crowd of supporters cheering her name and holding signs that say, “Ellie discovered the new world.” Contact is such a significant film in the science fiction canon because it is a female hero’s journey. Ellie is not Uhura waiting by the phone while Kirk and Spock explore the foreign planet—she is the hero, following her destiny through a series of obstacles and returning home to deliver truth to us all.
Luckily, alongside soulless science-fiction blockbusters like Transformers and yes, Avatar—movies with great special effects but no heart—there have emerged a few gems. Films like District 9, Moon, and Her may be smaller in scale, but they share the same generic DNA as the best of their predecessors, making us think and entertaining us simultaneously. In addition, a handful of films and TV series such as Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica, The Hunger Games, and Orphan Black have delivered a new generation of female sci-fi heroes. As a female science fiction fan, I am often disappointed. So I hold out hope that there will be another Contact, a film that has stayed with me for over a decade and reminds me how powerful a storytelling tool film can be. I think about that little girl in her Darth Vader costume, lightsaber in hand, and am reminded that each of us has a quest of our own and the chance to seek out greater understanding. To boldly go.
To Coleen Hubbard and Larry Bograd, parents and longtime editors for encouraging all my obsessions from Star Wars to rock collecting to writing and for being the first to introduce me to this film. You are my guides through life, the universe, and everything.
Image Credits:
1. Contact movie poster.
2. Opening images from Contact(Robert Zemeckis, 1997).
3. Author as Darth Vader (photo from author’s personal collection).
4. The machine built from plans sent by an unknown intelligence (Contact Robert Zemeckis, 1997).
5. Jenna Malone as Young Ellie (Contact Robert Zemeckis, 1997).
6. Ellie (Jodie Foster) listens for patterns in the chaos(Contact Robert Zemeckis, 1997).
7. Ellie has a mysterious encounter (Contact Robert Zemeckis, 1997).
Please feel free to comment.
NOTES
Young Ellie is played by Jenna Malone who went on to appear in multiple films including Saved! and the Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Mockingjay.
This was later expanded on in the Star Wars Expanded Universe novels: Leia becomes a Jedi Knight in her own right but chooses politics instead, serving as Chief of State for the New Republic and giving birth to three children who all become Jedi Knights themselves.
This is the name of the person chosen to test the machine, which is determined to be a spacecraft of some sort. Initially, the seat goes to Ellie’s rival David Drumlin, but he is killed when the first machine is destroyed in a terrorist bombing. Ellie discovers that a second machine has been built in secret and is then given the chance to go.
This is part of a running joke in Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series: the answer to “life, the universe, and everything,” (also the name of the third book in the series) is the number 42 but know one knows what the question is.