Film Review: Disclosure Day

It’s not about the power of whistleblowing. It’s about the power of movies

The common refrain I keep seeing in most reviews of Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is that the 79-year-old-director is too behind the times if he believes that showing people the truth will suffice to fix the world. Those complaints don’t give Spielberg enough credit. It’s too literal to read Disclosure Day as a movie about secret alien files. It’s like reading Inception as a movie about psychonautic espionage. There’s no way Spielberg isn’t aware that we’ve fallen into a cynical, post-truth world, and yet this is the movie he chooses to make at this point in history. I suspect the guy knows what he’s doing, and he knows that, precisely because we’ve stopped placing any trust in truth, this movie’s plea for unafraid openness to each other is the message we need to hear.

Moreover, I think Disclosure Day is Spielberg’s Inception: it’s his personal statement on what moviemaking means to him. (Yes, I know The Fabelmans exists. But that one merely tells us his point. This one shows us.)

It would be one thing if Disclosure Day had stuck to the character of Daniel, the hacker who steals a trove of secret government videos that prove aliens are real, and just followed him on his race against time to make the files public. That would be the kind of movie we’ve seen a thousand times, the kind of movie the haters believe they’re criticizing. But the message of Disclosure Day is not “Our problems would disappear if the truth were exposed.” What it’s trying to say is, rather, “Our problems would be seen more clearly if the truth were received.” That’s where the character of Margaret comes in. Healing the world takes more than having someone brave enough to make others see; you also need someone brave enough to do the seeing.

The power of seeing has been a constant in Spielberg’s work, most obviously noticeable in his signature move of framing a character’s awestruck face. In a couple scenes of Disclosure Day, which have been unfairly mocked by reviewers, a character who is not very well hidden manages to sneak away from the bad guys who are looking for them. That’s not a mistake in scene composition; it’s fully intentional. In this story, what marks the bad guys as bad guys is that they don’t want to see. In a movie that is so explicitly about moviemaking, that’s got to be the closest there is to a definition of evil, and that’s why the two heroes in this movie are one who shows and one who sees.

In parallel with Daniel’s quest, we follow Margaret, who after an encounter with a mysterious bird gains the power to read into people’s souls, speak in their language, understand their deepest truths. What is happening is that she has become the ideal moviegoer. Margaret sees a stranger and instantly understands their whole life. That’s what happens to you when you sit at the movie theater. Later, she gains the power to show people hidden parts of themselves. If a movie is well made, that’s also what should happen to you at the movies: the story should tell you something about you. In the most symbolically charged sequence of Disclosure Day, Margaret visits a replica of her parents’ house, which is for all purposes a movie set, so she can relive a repressed memory of a childhood encounter with aliens. She’s watching a movie that turns out to be about herself.

That’s how Spielberg feels about movies. He’s showing you a story he made up for his own reasons, but he hopes it reveals a truth about you.

There’s a scene in the middle of Disclosure Day where Daniel shows his girlfriend a sample of the files he stole. If you pay attention, you’ll see that an opening in the wall lets a bit of sunshine enter the room from behind her head. It looks just like a movie projector. That’s the Spielberg formula in a nutshell: let me show you something that will change your life. He’s been saying this, in various ways, throughout his career. In his adaptation of Minority Report, people are judged based on movies made about them (in the original novelette, the reports were written). In the night scenes of Jurassic Park, the only sources of light are the heroes’ handheld lanterns that expose the hidden dangers, effectively movie projectors that create the next bit of action.

In Jurassic Park, the idea was: let me show you… a simulation of life. In A.I., it was: let me show you… a simulation of love. In Minority Report, it was: let me show you… a simulation of you. And in Disclosure Day, the trick is turned on itself: let me show you… what’s on the other side of the simulation. Spielberg has already said plenty about the power of seeing. Now he’s trying to tell you that he sees you, and he hopes to provoke in you the no less transformative experience of feeling seen.

Disclosure Day opens at a wrestling match, a quintessential simulation if we’ve ever seen one. And the very first shot is a boot stomping on the camera. Of course Spielberg knows there are dangers to the power of seeing. In Jurassic Park, you’re safe as long as you’re invisible to the T-Rex. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, the hubris of trying to see God is what kills you. In Minority Report, your eyes are the key to how the state controls you. In Disclosure Day, the villain finds perverse uses for an alien machine that (quite literally) lets him see through someone else’s eyes.

Many have called Spielberg naïve for making a movie about his belief that movies can save us. That critique is not only unfair, but also logically self-defeating: if he didn’t believe that, he wouldn’t be making movies in the first place. How else would any sincere art exist? It’s only fitting that the ending of Disclosure Day has the entire planet turned into a movie theater, all of humankind joined in the experience of seeing something that makes them feel seen. Is that schmaltzy? Very well, let it be schmaltzy. It’s not like jaded cynicism has taken us anywhere worth being at.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Poltergeist

A house that hides much worse than skeletons in its closet

My most persistent thought during the runtime of Poltergeist was about how much of this movie's DNA can be recognized in Stranger Things. The tropes of nightmarish suburbia, a childhood immersed in pop culture, electric devices as a conduit to the paranormal, a child trapped within the walls of a house, and a danger too big for parents to protect against are elements that the Netflix show clearly inherits from this '80s classic. I wasn't so much scared as amused by its visual effects, at times reminiscent of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which in my book is not a good sign. When it aims for spooky, it overshoots and lands on goofy. I admit that in my childhood this movie would have terrorized the hell out of me, but watching it now leaves me with an impression similar to live-action Scooby-Doo. I suspect this is a recurring trait in the Spielberg-Lucas axis of storytelling: if it doesn't hook you when you're young, it never will.

Poltergeist feels like a condensation of mystical currents of thought that had gained strength during the hippie era but really date back to the spiritualist fad of the 19th century. Advances in the understanding of electromagnetism coincided with a growing interest in the inner workings of the mind, and it was only natural that a theory eventually formed linking electromagnetism with the paranormal. If you didn't know any better, it made some sort of sense: if you consider radio waves, they're an invisible force that exists all around us and can even pass through us, and have very tangible effects if you have a properly sensitive machine at hand. So it wasn't too much of a stretch to suppose that ghosts worked the same way. Poltergeist is an heir to over a century of superstition that viewed in electrical devices a viable tool for contacting the spiritual realm.

But Poltergeist does more than that. It also takes advantage of the moral panic that was forming around mass media and the way the TV set ended up altering not only the inner dynamics of the American family, but also the rhythm of daily life. People in Poltergeist time their activities by the programming schedule of TV; their day ends when the last broadcast ends. Even before malevolent spirits jump out of the screen, they're already under the spell of TV.

Putting spirits in the TV suggests an unspoken pun, as a riff on Marshall McLuhan's aphorism "the medium is the message." The movie plays with a medium (as in channel of communication) but also with a medium (as in speaker with the dead), and by blurring the difference between the technological and the mystical, it opens space for a new discursive position, one that treats electronic media as another battlefield between good and evil. Instead of a mindless machine, the TV set becomes a subject of moral analysis. And because anything that can make moral choices is effectively a person, the TV set becomes a character in the movie. You can talk to it, and it will answer. It has wants and goals. And it is very angry with you.

The family to whom all this happens in Poltergeist is presented as aspirational: upper-middle class homeowners who genuinely love each other and whose biggest headache at the moment is the construction of their private swimming pool. They don't have problems in their lives. Why make a movie about happy people?

As it turns out, their comfort rests on a pile of hidden cruelty. Their entire suburb was built on a cemetery that the developers didn't bother relocating. And this serves as an indictment of an entire way of life: these are the Reagan years, when the individualistic model of success was being preached as the definitive fulfillment of every human need. Our protagonists certainly look like they have nothing to worry about. But their happiness requires literally sweeping a lot of suffering under the rug. I don't need to recount the centuries of injustice and violence upon which American prosperity was amassed. Nor does Poltergeist pause for a single moment to moralize against our protagonists. The nightmare scenario it proposes speaks for itself: all your comfort created a debt, and that debt will come calling. And it will devour your children.

It's interesting that '80s suburban mythologizing focused so much on the children who were growing up in that space. The quasi-Puritan anxiety that rose against cities as alleged dens of vice and crime led to the creation of those artificial bubbles for raising children. But in those same '80s movies, the children are the first to fall through the cracks on that bubble.

In Poltergeist, the suburban children couldn't be more absurdly privileged. Their bedroom boasts a hodgepodge of product placement that must have sufficed to pay for the movie. They're innocent of the evil awakened by their parents, but they're its chosen targets, with their instruments of everyday joy, their toys, serving as the weapons through which their lives are snatched away. And at the top of those toys sits the ultimate entertainment invention, the provider of hours upon hours of cheap smiles: the TV.

It would seem odd to pair the unacknowledged blood left behind by American growth and the specific concerns that were circulating about the omnipresence of TV. They're two very different sources of fear. But what the TV symbolizes is precisely that prosperity. The medium is the message, and the message is that you now have luxury of spare time to sit and watch. The moral panic warned that guiding your life by the TV schedule was a scourge on society, but in reality, if you even have the time to live by the TV schedule, you're immensely fortunate. In the '80s, the TV is one of the ultimate signifiers of mass-accessible affluence (along with other traditional American life milestones, such as owning a car). So it's fitting that Poltergeist turns the TV into the executioner's weapon that will collect the old debt.

When the veil of mystery is parted and we get to see the otherworldly creatures that threaten this life of comfort, they don't seem all that scary. Of course, I say this now, having survived through The Thing and Gremlins and The Fly and Predator and Hellraiser and Beetlejuice and They Live and Child's Play and plenty of others. It's too late for me to experience those images for the first time. I have no way of confirming how horrifying Poltergeist really was, and, as I said above, the stylistic resemblance to Close Encounters of the Third Kind does its scare factor no favors. I bet many moviegoers in 1982 must have drawn the same connection in their head. Poltergeist remains as a very acute piece of social commentary, but as a horror movie, I find it rather quaint. Almost cute.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Stranger Things: A New Dramatic Animal?

Within two days of Stranger Things appearing on Netflix, I had three separate friends reach out to tell me they'd binge-watched it and I had to see it. That I would love it.

So I did. And I did. But...

I want to be very clear at the outset and say this isn't a review. I'm not going to say bad things about Stranger Things, and I'm going to try to avoid spoilers. What I'm really interested in is more of a formal analysis.

One of the biggest appeals of Stranger Things is its retro-80s vibe. I mean, just look at this poster! It's amazing. 

And that font, which looked out at me from the cover of so many Stephen King paperbacks as a kid gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies. By the end of the first episode, I was hooked. But I turned to my wife and said, "If Hopper winds up in the Black Lodge at the end of this thing, I'm going to be pissed."

See, Stranger Things doesn't just have a retro poster and a retro vibe, it actually seems to be made up of Lego bricks taken from 80s and early-90s touchstones. It's really not enough to say that it's "inspired" by E.T., Twin Peaks, Akira, The X-Files, and the music of John Carpenter. It appears to actually be constructed of those things. There are moments lifted directly from E.T., dynamics transposed whole cloth from Twin Peaks, a key character and plotline from Akira, and at one point there was a scene so reminiscent of Stephen King's It that I was able to tell my wife what was going to happen before it played out onscreen. 

I love all of those movies and stories. Seeing them all in one place was pretty cool. But I felt an odd pull I've never experienced before — part of me felt that warm, familiar nerd glow of spotting references from beloved hallmarks I grew up with, but I felt a difference between spotting the posters for Evil Dead and The Thing on the walls in characters' rooms, and saying "oh, this scene is from..."

Now here, to me, is the really interesting thing: this is a Netflix show, and with the exception of Akira, every other work I've mentioned here has been available for streaming on Netflix. Netflix was very clear when it launched House of Cards, its first original, scripted show, that its programming decisions were based on user viewing patterns. So it's probably safe to assume that people are watching the hell out of E.T., The X-Files, and Twin Peaks on Netflix. And maybe Netflix's development team said, "Can we get a show that's just all of those things, but a mini-series?"

This could be a one-off thing, or it could be a harbinger of a new phenomenon that is a direct result of the time we're living in. With viewership metrics available on a level like nothing we've ever seen before,  the slow demise of the traditional network television model, and a trend toward limited series, rather than 22-episode-per-season non-serialized dramas or comedies, there is a very real possibility that Stranger Things is something like a new narrative form. The G referred to it in conversation as a bricolage, which may be correct. Or a four-dimensional version of Picasso's early experiments with collage. 

I suppose part of me is fighting the urge to be dismissive about a work that in some ways lacks originality, but the fact that I really enjoyed it is telling. I think it will be interesting to see where this goes. I argued in 2013 that Breaking Bad was the signature show of our time not just because of its content and narrative qualities, but because of the way it used streaming services and social media to expand its audience and change viewing patterns. Maybe something similar is happening right now.

Maybe we'll have a Western to look forward to where a Civil War veteran with deep hatred of the Comanche (The Searchers) gets wind of a coming confrontation, and when he can't get anyone in town to stand with him (High Noon), he must confront his racism out of desperation and recruit a team of seven Comanche braves to help him defend the town (Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven). Who knows? 

Also, I'm available for meetings, if anybody wants to talk about setting up that project...

Posted by Vance K - co-editor and cult film reviewer at nerds of a feather since 2012. Netflix subscriber since 2004.