Jon Katz 25 July 1997
The biggest problem with living on a mountaintop is that I'm far away from my beloved megaplex, the Sony in Wayne, New Jersey, with rows of two-story, digital sound-system screens, and where my daughter and I have a time-honored system for getting to movies like Contact sometime opening night.
The fact that I had to drive more than 20 miles, into Vermont, to see Contact in a place with a tiny screen and no pretzel bites only heightened the anticipation and made it more of an experience.
Yes, I was excited. This was geek culture at its most promising. Was this another milestone in the evolving geek culture we've been thrashing out on HotWired and elsewhere?
I was thinking during the drive to the theater - yes, sometimes I suffer from preconceived rants - that this column would surely be about Jodie Foster, perhaps even chronicling her ascent to Queen of the Geeks, if the reviews I was reading were any indication.
They weren't. Gillian Anderson of The X-Files still rules.
Contact should have been the geek movie of the year. Its premise was a metaphor for the lives of geeks. In it, geek outsiders struggle bravely to do what they do best - be brainy, obnoxious, combative, obsessive. Geeks are never casual about whether there's life out there. They care deeply about it, want to find it, and want to be there when it's found. Put them together with machines and mysteries, and they're off and running.
In this movie - as in life - every step along the way the characters encounter contempt, betrayal, ridicule, hostility, blockhead bureaucrats, clueless journalists, and sneerers. The only people they can trust are each other. Geeks use technology as a means to an end, rather than the end itself.
John Hurt plays a character who is a Bill Gates in old age - a ruthless, eccentric, and powerful billionaire who has lots more gumption and curiosity than the president of the United States and his advisors, and who lives only aboard airplanes or floating weightlessly in spaceships.
The government has to raise money from all over the world to build the giant Rube Goldberg machine that's supposed to transport our heroine into extra space. But Mr. Hadden gets hold of the plans teleported by radio into the New Mexico desert and builds one all by himself somewhere out in the ocean, just for kicks.
In between, he dispenses billions to favored projects and communicates via elaborate, generally inefficient geek toys. Picking up the phone seems out of the question for him. He'd rather send high-tech choppers and messages by laptop, invading computer systems, and using video screens and satellite.
So far so good. Foster's character, Dr. Ellie Arroway, is an ethical and brilliant astronomer who believes we are not alone and means to prove it. She is pitted against a God-loving, hypocritical, opportunistic, and scientific political and media culture ready to thwart her every step of the way.
Contact is a gorgeous movie, taking special effects and computer animation to new, even spiritual heights. But non-geeks got their hands on the story line - which, at times, becomes so ham-handed, gooey, and dunderheaded one can't help but invoke the no-nonsense, feet-on-the-ground Scully and the resourceful evil cigarette-smoking white men with whom she and Mulder constantly struggle.
Not content to imagine so compelling a story as a scientist receiving intelligent signals from space and building a mysterious machine to go and meet them, the producers looked at their marketing studies and transfigured Contact into a Hollywood-style, utterly shallow science-vs.-God morality debate into which Matthew McConaughey is foolishly injected as weird spiritual advisor to the White House, and who nearly derails Ellie's encounter with Them.
You, sir, are no Fox Mulder. In this light, it's not hard to appreciate the core integrity of The X-Files, which has managed for several years to avoid this inane moralizing and the need to crudely inject some sexual element into a plot where it is neither needed nor credible.
Contact is also something of a real-life journalistic scandal and ethical morass. Sadly, Washington journalists have long thought nothing of taking bit parts in movies, perhaps to get even closer to Hollywood notions of stardom and fame. But CNN's news broadcasters are an elemental part of the cast of this movie, popping up every 30 seconds or so with breathless reports about Dr. Arroway's space transport machine. This is bad enough, but given that the movie was released by Time Warner, which owns CNN, it seems the movie was portraying the wrong ethical dilemma.
Journalists have no business taking bit parts in fictional movies, and CNN has no business touting itself in a Time Warner movie. Were politicians to engage in this kind of smarmy conflict of interest, journalists would be up in arms and howling for blood.
Like Scully, Foster's Dr. Arroway portrays a new, admirable kind of casting for women.
Like Scully, the doctor is a bit on the humorless side. Like Scully, she is a post-political female, strong, able to resist the machinations of sexy men and even push them out of the way, intelligent, and brave. Like Scully, she takes her feminism for granted, and doesn't make an issue of it.
But Contact was hijacked from a geek drama into a soap opera. Not content to make an imaginative science-fiction movie that portrays the stirring impulse many of us feel to know what's out there, whatever and wherever it is, the producers set up a ludicrous spirituality drama where Dr. Arroway - and the rest of us - are presented with the notion that science is antithetical to God, and that if you choose one, you reject the other.
In fact, Dr. Arroway is forced to declare her faith in God or lack of it at one critical point in the movie, a question that puts her whole participation in the project at risk.
This also reminds us of Chris Carter's intelligently conceived X-Files, where Agent Scully, the ultimate scientific rationalist, wears a cross around her neck without feeling any contradiction at all. This commonplace reality seems to have never occurred to this movie's screenwriters.
It's certainly true that offline, our culture is suffused with fake piety and God talk. An avowed atheist could never run for president, senator, or hold a major appointed office. Nor, probably, be chosen to be the first human to go to outer space and meet our new friends.
Online, this is much less true. Although there are plenty of religious and spiritual people on the Web - there are an estimated 12,000 Web sites devoted to spirituality alone - it is not expected of us all, nor are our discussions and conversations bounded by it as they are in politics or mainstream media.
Geeks, atheists, nerds, and skeptics post happily alongside evangelicals, the deeply spiritual and countless shades of seekers. I get email every day from people who believe passionately in God, and people who find the idea completely ludicrous. There aren't many places in the culture where that's true.
This leaves Contact as a promising, sometimes enchanting, geek movie gone bad. Geeks are curious. They want to know what's out there, and are used to fighting legions of lunkheads and moralizers and their many phobias and concerns to get the freedom, money, and resources to do it.
But even though it's already showing signs of wear and tear, The X-Files is still our true geek drama, leaving Dana Scully's title as Queen of the Geeks safer than ever.
