Hollywood Utopia

the film’s courage in exploring spirituality and matters of faith head-on, which is
still rare in Hollywood cinema.
Like Men in Black, the opening sequence of Contact with its seemingly endless
zoom-out from galaxies and stars to the hero’s eye, counterpointed with the wormhole
journey to an alien environment towards the end of the film, evokes and
visually reinforces a transcendent connection between humans and the(ir) cosmos.
Towards the end of the film, Ellie contemplates a handful of sand that sparks off
images of a tropical beach (narratively derived from the rather crude painting of
Florida which she created as a child) that becomes her personalised objective
correlative for eventual contentment as an eco-sapien. The grains of sand help to
recapture her comforting ‘vision of an alien world’ where her biological father
becomes materialised for her benefit.
Somewhat like Sol in Soylent Green to be discussed later, she is ritualistically
escorted into the spaceship to make her journey into space. Oriental escorts
ceremoniously bow before they leave Ellie alone to face her fears. The subsequent
exaggeration of confinement - rarely if ever used to dramatise claustrophobia for
male astronauts - helps to affirm her heroic yet at the same time stereotypical
gender-based role. The emotional narrative trajectory of her character in this film
is similar to The Accused (1988) and more particularly Silence of the Lambs (1990),
where the heroine is also driven by a psychological block, which must be resolved
before becoming psychologically ‘balanced’. The journey to meet her father
simultaneously allows her to satisfy a scientific urge to witness alien life and a
personal desire to become psychologically whole again after the loss of her parents.
In the end, everything in her transcendent psychological space is represented via
‘chocolate box beauty’, which is equivalent to the mantra of the hero in Forest
Gump, the directors’ earlier Zeitgeist movie. This visualised sentimentality is
strongly contrasted with Ellie’s first realisation that astronomy will dominate her
life. She recalls to her would-be lover how she remembered observing Venus and
being told that its beauty was primarily visible as a result of the various poisonous
gasses circulating around its atmosphere, which convinced her of the primacy of
the discipline. But apparently because of her psychological impairment she is
unable to transcend the restraining carcass of self sufficiently enough to truly feel
‘glacial time’ as expressed earlier and therefore must remain a faulty protégé and
agent for eco-human engagement. Consequently her ecological agency, namely her
wish to find holistic harmony, remains fatally compromised.
The pervasive nuclear fears explored initially in the 1950s are countered by
spacemen, who give hope in a world where vision of the stars is sometimes
obscured by pollution and the ever-present potential of nuclear destruction. This
otherwise utopic vision of space-agents is further obscured by a regressive form of
4 Conspiracy Thrillers and Science Fiction 155