Contact

Contact is a funny old film, isn’t it? Now, although I yield to no-one in my admiration for Carl Sagan, when, following an (even now) stupefying advance, his science fiction novel Contact appeared in 1985, I didn’t read it. When “big names” produce science fiction novels, it is sadly often the case that what they think is original and interesting is actually something that had been considered and written about far more skillfully decades ago by, well, sf authors in fact. (Examples, as they say, abound, but consider the sf works of P. D. James, Martin Amis, Robert Harris, Margaret Atwood, Paul Theroux (screw your courage especially tightly to the sticking place if you try his O-Zone [although this wiki link is totally unhelpful, I like it as it possibly the most tactful wikipedia entry ever...]) etc. etc. etc. ad vomitorium, and then read earlier works by Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, Arthur C. Clarke etc. etc. ad infinitum.)

Anyhoo, although I didn’t read the book, when Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film made it to DVD I did watch this, because, well, to be honest, because Jodie Foster is in it, and I think she’s brilliant (good grief, I reasoned, I even watched Dennis Hopper Alan Smithee himself while playing the saxophone in Catchfire because Jodie Foster was in it, so watching a film based on a work of Carl Sagan could hardly be a waste...)

So. The funny old business (I think) isn’t the usual complaints of the (it’s true) horrible cop-out nature of what happens when Ellie goes through the wormhole (I tend to think the film, having, as it does, a supporting cast that boasts underrated and splendid people of the calibre of David Morse and William Fichtner, probably has enough going on to be interesting even with this handicap), but that the whole thing seems to be a hymn of praise to NOMA (indeed, at times it comes perilously close to endorsing other ways of knowing claptrap.)

Obviously I must admit a personal bias here (for reasons we’ll come on to, I subscribe to Richard Dawkins’s views of NOMA), but a couple of moments in the film are particularly telling:

At a Washington reception, the Jodie Foster’s character and the warm and fuzzy religious type played by Matthew McConaughey are debating Occam’s Razor and the likelihood of the existence of God.

“Your Dad, did you love him?” asks McConaughey of Foster’s character’s late father.

“Yes,” she replies, “Very much.”

“Prove it” says the McConaughey character, with a finality that suggests, if not Sagan, then at least Zemeckis or screenwriters James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg think it’s a killer point. Rather than let Foster’s Dr. Arroway argue the point however, the scene is now interrupted by both character’s mobile phones going off, canceling the chance for any further discussion.

Later, at the congressional hearings at the end of the film, much is made of the fact that Arroway has no “physical proof” of what happened to her, and that it would be unrealistic of people to take her explanations “on faith.”

Now, we should doubtless be generous here and decide the reason this sort of thing isn't thrown straight back in the face of religious beliefs is because the point is too obvious to need spelling out, but at the end of the film, before getting into a taxi with Dr. Arroway, the McConaughey character says:

“As a person of faith, I’m bound by a different covenant that Dr. Arroway. But our goal is the same. The pursuit of truth.”

And Arroway reaches out and holds his hand. Contact indeed. That Zemeckis thinks this is a key point is clear from his commentary with producer Steve Starkey, where they say that religion and science “can go hand in hand.” Even Foster, on her commentary, says that religion and science can embrace each other and that “they don’t have to be so different,” and that “people can have opposing views and they don’t have to be in conflict.”

Argh. Let us leave the question about how there might be no conflict (however splendid and benign) between opposing views, and let us, at least partially, forgive Foster, since she says, marvelously, at the end of her commentary, “Isn’t it wonderful, and wondrous, how much we don’t know?”

But, back to this NOMA business.

To quote from the excellent post of Steve Zara’s I’ve linked to above, “It isn't just that theistic religion can't compete with science in understanding certain aspects of reality. It is that it has been shown to be of no use in understanding any aspects of reality at all. It has not provided understanding - it has imposed dogma, which has had to be rolled back in the face of falsification.”

As for the question of how you prove that you love, or are loved by, someone, that the film seems so desperate to dodge: well, along with the traditional “how can you have morality without God?” chestnut, I find this possibly the most fatuous pro-religion argument ever conceived. There is the basic point that the question of whether or not you love (or are loved by) someone or something is a totally different question to whether or not that person or thing exists: only one is a truth claim about objective reality etc. etc., and it really would perhaps be an egg sucking lecture to go on and on about this. (The point is considered further here and elsewhere.)