Reconstruction 5.4 (Fall 2005)


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Contact: Little Orphan Ellie / Andrew Gordon

Abstract: By featuring a woman scientist as protagonist, Contact (1997) is a welcome change in the largely male-dominated territory of American science-fiction film. The astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway is an exceptional woman for recent SF film: a brilliant, dedicated visionary who defies the male scientific establishment, goes it alone, risks her career and life for her beliefs, and succeeds in the end by taking a dangerous journey to the stars to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life. Although the movie is largely faithful to the novel by Carl Sagan, it deviates from the novel in certain critical respects which end up making Contact a more conventional SF film and a less feminist film than it might have been. By giving her a love interest, the movie fits into more traditional representations of women in the filmic genre of the woman's melodrama. In the movie, Ellie is portrayed as a lonely, neurotic career woman whose scientific pursuits are a sublimation of her mourning for her father and who will only be complete when she has a man in her life. Moreover, by changing her into an orphan, the movie partakes of the Hollywood movie tradition of the orphan girl in need of rescue. In particular, Ellie resembles Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Little Orphan Annie in the film Annie (1982).

<1> By featuring a woman scientist as protagonist, Contact (1997) is a welcome change in the largely male-dominated territory of American science-fiction film. There are some strong heroines in recent SF films, such as Ripley in the four Alien films (1979, 1986, 1992, or Sarah Connor in the first two Terminator films (1984, 1991), but they are not scientists, for science, in both reality and film, has traditionally been a male realm. When there are women scientists in recent Hollywood films, they tend rather improbably to be women in their twenties in tight t-shirts, such as the characters played by Laura Dern in Jurassic Park (1993), Anne Heche in Volcano (1997), Helen Hunt in Twister (1988), or Denise Richards in The World is Not Enough (1999) (Hertzel). Such characters satisfy incompatible demands: in a nod to feminism, they are tough women and highly competent scientists; yet to conform to conventional audience demands, they also add romance and the jiggle factor. And they always need the assistance of strong men who are the real heroes of the films.

<2> The astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway in Contact is an exceptional woman for recent SF film: a brilliant, dedicated visionary who defies the male scientific establishment, goes it alone, risks her career and life for her beliefs, and succeeds in the end by taking a dangerous journey to the stars to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life. Ellie is an idealist who triumphs over a corrupt system, as in a Frank Capra movie. She is also similar to some women famous in American popular culture: the aviator Amelia Earhart and the astronaut Sally Ride. This quest features a woman as the brave protagonist of an outer-space adventure instead of men like David Bowman in 2001 (1968) or Roy Neary in Close Encounters (1978), two movies which Zemeckis clearly used as models.

<3> Although the movie is largely faithful to the novel by Carl Sagan, it deviates from the novel in certain critical respects which end up making Contact a more conventional SF film and a less feminist film than it might have been. One critic complained that “Contact the movie tries to spice up Sagan's story. But it also throws away some of his progressive ideas, such as his installation of a woman U.S. president” (Wilmington). The movie also diverges from the novel by giving Ellie a major romantic interest and by turning her into an orphan. By giving her a love interest, the movie fits into more traditional representations of women in the filmic genre of the woman’s melodrama. In the movie, Ellie is portrayed as an isolated, lonely, repressed, and driven career woman who needs a man in her life. Only love will make a complete woman of her. Moreover, by changing her into an orphan, the movie partakes of the Hollywood movie tradition of the orphan girl in need of rescue. In particular, Ellie resembles Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Little Orphan Annie in the film Annie (1982).

<4> Contact took a long time to get to the screen, undergoing many changes along the way. It began as a treatment for a motion picture written by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan in 1980-81. Sagan turned it into a novel, published in 1985. It was finally made into a film in 1997, with a screenplay by James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, directed by Robert Zemeckis. One can understand why the star, Jodie Foster, was attracted to the role of Ellie. Foster picks her projects carefully and usually plays tough women who battle against the odds, as in The Accused (1988) , Silence of the Lambs (1991), Nell (1994), Anna and the King (1999), and Panic Room (2002). But Zemeckis, who had previously directed the Back to the Future series (1985, 1989, 1990), Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and Forrest Gump (1994), had no track record as a creator of films with women protagonists. Despite Foster’s presence, perhaps the domination of the project by men vitiated some of Contact’s feminist potential.

<5> Or perhaps the movie is precisely what Jodie Foster wanted. One critic argues that Foster’s performance in Contact “skirts self-parody when it recalls some of her other pictures (The Accused, The Silence of the Lambs, Nell) by positing her as some kind of middlebrow authentication of earnest female self-empowerment” (Rosenbaum). In an interview, Foster says, "I just keep making the same movie over and over again. The theme of abandonment is a really big one for me. The moment in Nell when she sits on the end of a jetty and realizes that she's lost someone and that she will never be the same. That's the same journey Ellie takes. You can say your dad is dead and accept it intellectually. But it's a much longer journey to finally be able to let go and say goodbye. I know that's a personal thing for me, not wanting to say goodbye. And the orphan thing, and the impossibility of communication” (Foster interview). In her own life, Foster was raised by a single mother. She rarely saw her father, who left the family before she was born. Perhaps for that reason, Foster is frequently attracted to the role of the orphan who feels abandoned by the father. If her heroines become empowered, it is by overcoming their mourning for the father.

<6> Ellie in the film is far more dependent on her father than Ellie in the novel. In the novel, Ellie’s father dies when she is a teenager, and her mother remarries, although Ellie becomes alienated from her mother after her father’s death and resents her stepfather. She reconciles with them when her mother becomes ill and dies, at the end of the novel, when Ellie is middle aged. After her mother’s death, she discovers that her stepfather, a professor physics, was her real father. In the film, however, Ellie never knows her mother, who dies in childbirth. Instead, she is raised by her father. The absence of the mother means Ellie lacks any female role model and is completely “daddy’s girl”; she has achieved a kind of Electra fantasy. Her father in the film is idealized as perfect: gentle, loving, and supportive of her scientific curiosity. He raises her like a son: he calls her “Sparks,” teaches her how to use a ham radio, and buys her a telescope. The opening scenes establish a totally blissful relationship between Ellie and her father. His death from a heart attack when she is only nine leaves Ellie bereft and isolated for the rest of her life. She refuses to be comforted by anyone, especially by religious authorities:

PRIEST

Ellie. I know it’s hard to understand this now, but we aren’t always meant to know the reasons why things happen the way they do. Sometimes we just have to accept it as God’s will.

YOUNG ELLIE

Should have kept some medicine in the downstairs bathroom, then I could’ve gotten to it sooner.

She goes into the house, and up to the radio transmitter.

YOUNG ELLIE

CQ. This is W9GFO, do you copy? Dad, it’s Ellie, come back.

<7> As this scene opens, Ellie sits alone and grieves on the front steps of her house, wrapped in the fetal position into which we see her throughout the film retreat at moments of stress (DVD commentary). She blames herself for the death, which she believes she could have prevented if only she had gotten the medicine to him sooner. She refuses the comfort the priest offers, walks away, and also ignores the other mourners as she retreats upstairs. She remains alone, and rejects religion in favor of technology (the ham radio), a move she will follow for most of the film. This scene suggests that the death of her father freezes her in a lifelong posture of guilt, defensive hurt, loneliness, loss of religious faith, and sublimation through science. Ellie is emotionally blocked and cannot resolve her mourning for her father or open up to anyone until the end of the picture.

<8> In an earlier scene, she had asked her father if they could communicate with her dead mother via ham radio. Her father replies: “I don’t think even the biggest radio can reach that far.” But the adult Ellie seems to retain these childish, magical beliefs, if only in her unconscious. Despite her rejection of organized religion, Ellie seems to believe that her dead parents still exist somewhere in space. If one could only use an instrument which can communicate that far, such as a radio telescope, one could be reunited with the dead. Her subsequent career as an astronomer in SETI, despite the ridicule she incurs, becomes a search for her lost objects, especially her father. Despite her rejection of religion, she operates out of a leap of faith, confusing the heavens with "heaven" and looking for gods from outer space. The film implies that her fanatical devotion to listening for extraterrestrial messages is largely a neurotic maneuver which isolates her from others, a prolonged mourning.

<9> Admittedly, Ellie in the novel is also isolated. Sagan writes, “She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all” (430). But the film turns Ellie into even more of a neurotic, and her entire career just a sublimated form of mourning, which tends to undercut her stature as a scientist. In American science fiction films, scientists are traditionally male and represent the voice of cool reason; only “mad scientists” allow their emotions to run away with them.

<10> In both novel and film, we sympathize with Ellie because she must function as the sole woman in a male-dominated field of science and fend off colleagues who would seduce, ignore, or belittle her. The heroine of the novel gets used to these games and is far more self-confident. For most of the film, however, Ellie is on the defensive. For a highly successful scientist in an administrative position, she is extremely insecure. Either she flies off the handle with anger or she does a lot of hand wringing and nervous twitching. Often she seems on the verge of tears, as when she is questioned by official committees. Although the film intends us to sympathize with Ellie as the underdog, sometimes it reduces her perilously close to the stereotype of “the hysterical woman.” One critic mentions the scene in which Ellie testifies before a Congressional committee: “teary eyed and voice cracking, she betrays her gender by showing not gentleness or depth of understanding, but weakness. That scene alone gives the lie to the rest of her performance, which is strong, intelligent, and portrays a woman committed to her profession, apologizing to no one” (Hertzel).

<11> There are other examples of Ellie’s weakness. In the novel she is extremely articulate and debates Palmer Joss and other religious leaders at great length, carefully rebutting their arguments. But in the movie, she seems to be at a loss whenever Palmer raises the subject of religion, as when she asks him for proof that God exists and he responds by asking her for proof that she loved her father, which floors her, or when she gets flustered before the committee evaluating her as a candidate to be an astronaut after Palmer asks if she believes in God.

<12> Her relationship with Palmer turns her into the heroine of a romance movie. Ellie thus fits the stereotype of the repressed career woman badly in need of a man to make her a complete woman. In the novel, she has a brief affair with Ken der Heer, the Presidential Science Advisor. Ellie is hurt when he loses interest after a few months, but she recovers and moves on. At the end, she is becoming interested in Palmer Joss, but nothing has yet developed between them. In the film, Ken der Heer does not exist and Palmer Joss is her romantic interest throughout, introduced very early in the plot. Palmer seems an obvious replacement for her father. Like her father, he is handsome, gentle, and supportive of her interests. They first kiss immediately after he echoes her father’s line about the possibility of extraterrestrial life: “Well, if there wasn’t, it’d be an awful waste of space.” Ellie stands for science and Palmer for religion, which heightens the conflict between the two in the film. Their reconciliation at the end constitutes a symbolic “marriage” of science and religion.

<13> Ellie is clearly attracted to Palmer. She quickly goes to bed with him, but when he tries to establish a relationship, she becomes uncomfortable and abruptly retreats. He leaves his phone number and she wavers but never calls. Clearly, at this point she still does not want anyone to get too close. In one of many role reversals in the film, she acts like a man who is willing to have a one-night stand but is afraid of commitment.

<14> A toy compass out of a box of Cracker Jacks keeps passing between Palmer and Ellie; it substitutes for an engagement ring and later serves as Ellie’s lucky charm. Palmer can be said to twice save Ellie’s life: first when he prevents her from being chosen for the mission to the stars in the mysterious alien machine. At a public hearing, Palmer questions Ellie’s belief in God, so the committee picks her former boss and rival, the male scientist Drumlin instead. Drumlin is then killed by a religious terrorist in a suicide bombing which destroys the alien machine. Second, Palmer saves her when he gives her the compass to carry on her voyage to the stars. She abandons her chair to grasp the compass as it floats away in zero gravity; then the chair breaks off and slams into the ceiling. Had Ellie been in that chair, she would have been killed.

<15> In yet another role reversal, Palmer plays the “female” part, loyally waiting for Ellie as she goes off on her adventure. But toward the end of the movie, he returns to the role of the male authority who must validate her:

As they leave the hearing, Palmer escorting Ellie, there is a crowd of people surrounding them, dressed in blue and carrying signs that read “Ellie has discovered the new world” and “We believe you, Ellie.” Ellie gets into the car, avoiding any questions.

REPORTER

Palmer Joss, what do you believe?

PALMER

As a person of faith, I’m bound by a different covenant than Dr. Arroway, but our goal is one and the same: the pursuit of truth. I, for one, believe her.

Ellie holds his hand. He gets in the car and they drive away.

This represents the final reconciliation of science with religion in the movie. But once again, a male authority has to rescue her and speak for her. In the novel, this was unnecessary.

<16> Father figures in the movie tend to fall into two opposed categories. On the one hand, there are idealized good men like her father and Palmer. On the other are evil father figures like the self-serving opportunist Drumlin, who ridicules SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), cuts off her funding, and later usurps her achievements; or the skeptical, power-hungry National Security Advisor Kitz, who publicly badgers her like a brutal prosecuting attorney; or the religious cultist who blows up the transport with a bomb. The only father figure who falls in between these two poles is the ambiguous Hadden, the creepy tycoon who enjoys playing God and rescues Ellie many times. At the end, Drumlin and Hadden are dead, Kitz is discredited, and only Palmer remains, along with the mysterious alien who seems like her father resurrected, or her father as she conceives of him as existing in the afterlife.

<17> The other men are brother figures, such as her assistants at the Very Large Array (VLA) of radio telescopes in the desert. Her closest friend is the blind astronomer Kent. This character does not exist in the novel, where Ellie instead is given an Indian woman scientist as a friend. Ellie in the film has no female friends, which increases her isolation. Kent’s blindness could be considered a symbolic castration; it invalidates him as a romantic interest, leaving the way clear for Palmer.

<18> The only other major woman in the film is the Presidential advisor, Miss Constantine, a tough, no-nonsense character who is a foil to the nervous Ellie. This character seems a substitute for the President, who in the novel is a woman.

<19> In a sense, though, Ellie is not really an adult woman. She remains an orphan girl, and, as such, she partakes of the tradition of the orphan girl in the movies: outcast, woebegone, beset on all sides, but plucky and triumphant in the end. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, she is plagued by wicked witches (here changed into wicked men) and takes a fantastic trip to the land over the rainbow: she is not zapped via tornado to Oz but via wormhole to distant stars, where she meets a Wizard. Afterwards, like Dorothy, she has difficulty convincing everyone it really happened and was not just a dream.

<20> In fact, Carl Sagan twice mentions The Wizard of Oz in his novel. First, when the transport blows up, and everything is flying through the air, “It reminded her of the tornado that had carried Dorothy to Oz” (267). Second, before she is launched in the second transport, Ellie feels like “Dorothy catching her first glimpse of the vaulted spires of the Emerald City of Oz. . . .she was off to see the Wizard” (322). But these are two passing references in a novel of over 400 pages. The film, however, makes the parallel central and inescapable by turning Ellie into an orphan.

<21> One might argue that Hadden thereby becomes the Wizard, except that Hadden more closely resembles Daddy Warbucks, the benevolent tycoon who adopts Little Orphan Annie. The billionaire industrialist Hadden is a morally ambiguous figure, a mysterious, Howard Hughes-like figure who manipulates events while remaining offstage and largely unseen. Physically, he resembles a Hollywood mad scientist, seemingly omniscient, with the bald dome, metal glasses, and creepy demeanor of an archvillian out of a James Bond movie (Blofeld) crossed with Daddy Warbucks. Hadden has divorced himself from the planet over which he has unmatched financial control and lives like Captain Nemo, apart from humanity. He surveys his domain from an airplane, almost perpetually aloft and aloof, and finally from the even farther distance of the Mir space station, where he lives in zero gravity to fight his cancer. He is like an astronomer himself, with a camera eye tracking movements on earth, from Ellie in the boardroom to the entire planet as viewed from the orbiting Mir. Hadden plays God and supports anyone—Japanese, Russian, or American—who can advance his plans.

<22> Hadden serves as Ellie’s fairy godfather, the only one who consistently recognizes her talent and sponsors her career. Hadden intervenes at three crucial points to rescue Ellie. First, when she has been rejected by all possible sources of funding and is desperate, he funds her search for a message from the stars. Second, when they cannot decrypt the alien code, he gives her the key to the mystery. And third, when the first alien transport is destroyed, he reveals to Ellie that there is another machine off the island of Hokkaido and offers her the chance to be the passenger.

<23> Like the role of Palmer, the role of Hadden is much expanded in the film. In the novel, Ellie was not so much in need of a lover or a fairy godfather. In the film, however, Ellie depends on these male authorities–Palmer, the religious leader, and Hadden, the capitalist-- to support her, to rescue her, and to validate her.

<24> The final scenes of the movie show a changed Ellie. She is giving a tour of the Very Large Array to a group of school kids. As she talks to them, we see something new: Ellie smiling and playing a maternal role. She tells the kids the same message she learned from her father and Palmer: “The Universe is a pretty big place; it’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of before. So if it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space, right?”

<25> Thankfully, the movie does not end with Ellie in the arms of Palmer but with Ellie alone against the universe. In the last scene, she is once again seated before a canyon at sunset as the stars begin to appear. She is in her typical fetal position, but this time she finally appears to be at peace with the world and with herself. She lifts a handful of sand, which glitters like stars, and lets it fall. This was a gesture made earlier by the alien she encountered on her trip to the stars, an alien who seemed to her mind to resemble her father.

<26> The gesture with the sand and the line she repeats to the children suggest she has successfully recreated the lost father within herself through the meeting with the alien and the love of Palmer. She has had, as she testifies before the committee, “A vision that tells us we belong to something that is greater than ourselves. That we are not, that none of us are alone.” On a personal level, she has overcome the void of her own inner space, her loneliness, by overcoming her mourning for her father.

<27> Here the movie and the novel converge, for Sagan suggests much the same thing: that Ellie has been healed by her journey: “Whatever happened next, a wound deep within her was being healed. She could feel the scar tissue knitting. It had been the most expensive psychotherapy in the history of the world” (378). As the novel ends, Ellie thinks, “She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love” (430). In the film, the alien has a similar line: “You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”

<28> Contact is mostly faithful to Sagan’s novel because he was one of the film’s producers. Like the novel, it makes us ponder the vastness of the universe and the relationship between science and religion, although one reviewer complained about the “comfortably reassuring conclusion in which scientific humanism and vaguely uplifting religiosity are squishily reconciled” (Schickel).

<29> As an SF film, Contact is in the tradition of films about human encounters with mysterious aliens whose purposes are sometimes difficult to fathom, such as The Day the Earth Stood Still(1951), This Island Earth (1955), 2001, Close Encounters, and E.T. (1982). One critic mentions Zemeckis’ “liberal borrowings from the ‘trip’ sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and from the patriarchal sentimentality of Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T.” (Rosenbaum). In E.T., the boy hero Elliott was grieving the loss of his father, who left the family to pursue another woman, and Elliott finds a surrogate father in the extraterrestrial. Ellie too recovers her father in the form of an alien being.

<30> Contact would have been a far better female quest movie if not for this “patriarchal sentimentality” and if the adaptation had not reduced the heroine via stereotypes out of other Hollywood movies: the neurotic career woman rescued by the love of a good man and the plucky orphan girl rescued by a rich man.

Works Cited

Contact . 1997. Warner Bros. Co-Producers Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan. Executive Producers: Joan Bradshaw and Lynda Obst. Producers: Robert Zemeckis and Steve Starkey. Based on the story by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan and the novel by Carl Sagan. Screenplay: James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg. Music: Alan Silvestri. Photography: Don Burgess. Production Design: Ed Verreaux. Editor: Arthur Schmidt. Director: Robert Zemeckis. Starring: Jodie Foster, Matthew McConnaughey, James Woods, John Hurt, Tom Skerritt, Angela Bassett.

Foster, Jodie. Interviewed in Boston Phoenix July 10 - 17, 1997.

Hertzel, Holly. Review of Contact. <http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Lot/3000/contact.html>.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, review of Contact. Chicago Reader July 1997.

Sagan, Carl. Contact. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

Schickel, Richard, “Mission: Predictable,” Time. 21 July 1997: 69.

Wilmington, Michael, “Making Contact.” Chicago Tribune.11 July 1997.



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