Hollywood Utopia

154 Hollywood Utopia
Contact
Contact was co-written by the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, who echoes
Leopold’s famous ‘land ethic’ in affirming how
We have begun to contemplate our origins; we speak for the earth. Our obligation to
survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from
which we spring
(Sagan 1980: 345). 11
The film charts the story of Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), who is orphaned at the
age of 9 and grows up obsessed with the possibility of scientifically communicating
with distant planets. Like Scott’s ‘shrinking’ man, to achieve her dream she must
learn to take a leap of non-scientific faith, to grow to love such cosmic wonder
without necessarily having all the answers. Unlike Scott, who is a layman, she joins
the SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) project and devotes her
professional life to the ultimate scientific/philosophical quest. Ellie’s life quest is
finally validated by a ‘wild psychedelic ride to the alien system’, where the
extraterrestrials, in order to commune with her, construct a kind of ‘virtual reality
landscape based on her own memories’ (Davis 1999: 234).
Like its 1950s counterpart, the film is also a paean to faith and optimism in the
eternal search for knowledge of the ‘Godhead’ to reveal the true purpose of human
nature. The lack of certainty coupled with the striving for some form of meaning is
provocatively asserted by the incantation, ‘If there’s nobody out there, it’s an awful
waste of space’. This is enunciated first by her father as they contemplate the stars
and the infinite dimensions of space, second by a religious leader (who cannot yet
replace her father emotionally or spiritually), and finally by Ellie herself as she
becomes capable of affirming this utopic logic.
Psychological readings 12 in particular cite the ‘father-daughter’ reunion in space as
reinforcing regressive patriarchal norms and recreating a ‘pristine vision of early
paradise where father and daughter can be together again’. According to Jung’s
‘Symbols of Transformations’, in most religions ‘it seems that the formative factor
which creates the attributes of divinity is the father-imago, while in older religions
it is the mother-imago’ (cited in White and Wang 1998).
Religious reviewers like Bryan Stone in the Journal of Religion and Film (1998)
seek to square ‘religious’ and ‘scientific’ faith as expressed in Contact, which
consciously tries not to ‘yield to the standard Hollywood convention of trivialising
religion by presenting those who embody faith, as misinformed, confused,
ineffective, fundamentalist, or fanatic’. In spite of various reservations, Stone lauds