Transcendence Specialist

You may have heard that a popular Jewish film director—one famously obsessed with transcendent experience and the possibility of revelation—has a new film out this summer. Unlike his last movie, The Fabelmans, Disclosure Day isn’t very Jewish but it is the most religious film Steven Spielberg has made in years, and the aging auteur remains in full command of his gifts. When the great disclosure happens, you’ll feel a fleeting but powerful sense of awe.

The roots of Disclosure Day reach back more than six decades to Spielberg’s very first film, Firelight, of which only a few minutes have been preserved. The footage features a young couple entranced by a glowing red light in the sky; later, a little boy is entranced by the same vision. Spielberg has called it one of the “four worst” movies ever made, but, to be fair, he was still a teenager when he made it, and a few of its shots made it into his first great film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released just thirteen years later in 1977.

Close Encounters would go on to rescue Columbia Pictures from financial ruin, but it was far from the obvious choice after Jaws, which invented the modern blockbuster and earned over $1.5 billion (inflation-adjusted) dollars at the box office. Universal would have paid anything for Jaws 2, and Warner Bros. pleaded with him to direct the new Superman. Both made more commercial sense for the thirty-year-old director than his Close Encounters script but he had something stranger and more spiritual in mind—and he finally had the blank check to get it made. So he rewrote the script, fought tooth-and-nail with Columbia over an ever-increasing budget, and managed to pull off one of the strangest hits in Hollywood history. The film, which made around fifty times its budget at the box-office, is a moody, multi-POV tone piece that hides its aliens for 96 percent of the runtime. Its vaguely cathartic climax features an unstable Roy Neary, played by Richard Dreyfuss, abandoning his wife and kids to leave, more or less voluntarily, with the aliens. The climax of that movie isn’t just a close encounter, it’s a theophany of sorts. The Dreyfuss character undertakes a vision quest to a holy mountain, upon which a gargantuan luminous airship descends, emitting the blinding light of revelation. Earlier in the film, DeMille’s The Ten Commandments plays on Neary’s TV; the Sinai connection runs deep. Other religions feature, too. In the first act, a Hindu swami leads Indian villagers in a religious chant welcoming a deity in the sky. Later, as the UFO lands, a Catholic priest offers a prayer while standing in front of a console displaying two symbols: a cross and the Star of David.

The ecumenicism of Close Encounters was of critical importance to Molly Haskell in her provocative biography of Spielberg for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. Spielberg, she writes, was “born with a religious sense of awe,” tracing Close Encounters (and Firelight) to his childhood viewing of a meteor shower, and the fiery climax in Raiders of the Lost Ark (divine lightning, dead Nazis) to a mesmerizing aron kodesh at a shul in Cincinnati. However Jewish his origins, Haskell argued that Spielberg has always communicated this sense of awe in a “universal language”; his call to transcendence is offered to “every nation, tribe, and religion.” She also implicitly tied this to his desire to assimilate. Little Steve, she tells us, was ashamed of his Torah-quoting grandfather and envious of his friends’ Christmas celebrations.

The charge rings crass—especially coming from a non-Jewish critic—yet also true. In The Fabelmans (which came out five years after Haskell’s book), Spielberg’s bildungsroman, he depicted himself as an anxious, nerdy teenager who wants nothing more than to sidestep his Jewish identity and be a normal high schooler. He even dates a Christian girl, whose sexual (and comic) interest in Jewish boys stems from her understanding that Jesus was one himself. The Fabelmans are very Jewish in a suburban, American kind of way, but the most transcendent moments in the film—its revelations on the nature of self and family alike—stem from the Spielberg character’s discovery of filmmaking. His Judaism is mostly a sign that says “kick me.”

Disclosure Day is a return to the cosmic sublime for Spielberg, who has described it as the third film in a trilogy with Close Encounters and E.T. But where the former is a psychological drama, and the latter a coming-of-age story, the new film takes the form of a high-octane chase thriller infused with the 1970s paranoia of Three Days of the Condor. David Koepp’s screenplay, whose premise and structure originated with Spielberg (he took a rare-for-him “story” credit), has little use for dialogue. The movie is all about kinetic sequences of pursuit and violence, or otherworldly experience. The audience is swept up in the bounding joy of Spielberg’s camera, which has never moved faster as it pans, zooms, and swoops across what passes for the American Midwest.

Emily Blunt plays Margaret Fairchild, an ambitious Kansas City weather presenter undergoing a spiritual transformation. She’s also on a collision course with Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), a crack computer programmer in possession of proof that UFOs are real and aliens exist, which he stole from an evil corporation called Wardex. Kellner is working with the Truth Movement, the disclosure rebellion fronted by Hugo Wakefield (Coleman Domingo)—who sends Fairchild and Kellner to various locations as the odd couple flees a villainous CEO of Wardex named Scanlon (Colin Firth). Wakefield, who wears tweed, a greying beard, and a bluetooth earpiece through which he entreats and commands his minions, is the film’s Greek chorus, narrating and commenting on the story as it unfolds. But he also seems to be a Spielberg surrogate—the all-powerful story shaper.

Religion crops up early in Disclosure Day when Colin Firth’s Scanlon uses alien tech to “remote view” into the mind of Jane, Daniel’s Catholic girlfriend. As Scanlon telepathically manipulates Jane, she holds a crucifix in her fist. You think it might be her salvation, but she finally breaks this semi-demonic possession by squeezing the crucifix so hard that she drives it into her palm, drawing blood. One could, of course, interpret her wound as a saintly stigma, and Spielberg has used Christian symbolism in the past (think of E.T’s. resurrection) but here it feels more like materialism: the pain of being pierced by metal saves her, not the cross.

In any case, Catholicism recedes in Disclosure Day, along with Jane, when Daniel is captured by Wardex. At the same time, the film becomes markedly more religious as center stage is taken by Fairchild, whose close encounter with a strange bird has imbued her with a universal grasp of language—human, animal, and alien. Fairchild also has some of the classic powers of fledgling tzaddikim, future saints, and even the young Jesus, including an ability to access the memories and secrets of others. And yet when a Truth Movement lackey crosses herself and kneels before Fairchild, she backs away, almost shrieking “I will not be your religion!” Blunt is terrific throughout, reaching a career-best form in Disclosure Day, as she cycles through physical comedy, beatific humility, and empathic insight.

Blunt’s Fairchild and O’Connor’s Kellner make for a strong duo, even if their extraordinary powers were bequeathed upon them by alien gods for revelatory purposes of their own. She is the master communicator and universal translator who can access your innermost memories and make you cry. He is the brilliant hacker, the neurotic and daring technician. Their pairing may represent the director’s recognition of his own dichotomous gifts; if so this gives us an intoxicating look into the twinned megalomania and humility of Steven Spielberg near the end of his extraordinary career.

Unlike Close Encounters and E.T, there is no mothership in Disclosure Day. Instead, the film’s crescendo is a release of classified information simulcast on every television channel and phone screen in the world. It is a world-shattering revelation, and Spielberg’s camera excitedly bobs around to different living rooms and train stations across the world, so that we can see everyone watching at once. In a way it’s a universalization of the people of Israel at Mount Sinai where “all the people saw the voices,” (Exodus 20:15), but it’s also the religious fantasy of a director on the verge of eighty years—Spielberg longing for a time when everyone would just watch the same damn thing.

The simulcast itself is the highlight for the UFO freaks in the audience, who will instantly see the ticks and tells that show that Spielberg is one of them. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool believer who buys all of it—the Roswell crash, the bodies at Area 51, the eighty-year project to conceal the truth from America. The “archival” footage, ginned up with a winning mixture of practical effects, CGI and heavy film grain, is convincing enough that, for a few minutes in the dark, you’ll believe it too. There is something bigger out there, something that might swoop in from the dark sky and rescue us from the crushing boredom and terrors of modern life.Disclosure Day is a wildly sincere movie. It can be enjoyed as a paranoid sci-fi thriller or as a narrative record of an aging auteur’s obsessive belief in aliens and the power of cinema. It is both, of course. As a Jew, Spielberg the director has mostly been a tormented nostalgist, telling stories of suburban Jewish yearnings, or of the Holocaust and the Mossad. As a spiritual seeker—a transcendence specialist with an uncanny ability to communicate awe—it has been the unidentified flying objects, and the aliens he believes to be piloting them, that have brought him to the brink of cosmic wonder.

As the film ends, an alien speaks. It says “Listen—” but the Shema, at least for Steven Spielberg, ends there.