Unclear and Present Danger - Contact

Episode Date: January 18, 2025

On this week’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, Jamelle and John watched Contact, the 1997 science-fiction drama directed by Robert Zemeckis. Based on the book by Carl Sagan, Contact stars Jodie Foster as Dr. Ellie Arroway, a SETI scientist who discovers extraterrestrial life and is eventually chosen to make first contact with the alien life. Foster is joined by a stacked cast of character actors, including Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, Tom Skerritt, William Fichtner, John Hunt, Rob Lowe and Angela Bassett. In their conversation, Jamelle and John discuss the distinctly neoliberal politics of the film as well as the extent to which Contact is a prominent example of the “end of history” utopianism that marked political and cultural life as the 1990s came to a close.You can find Contact to rent or purchase on Amazon or Apple TV.For the next episode of the podcast, Jamelle and John will watch Air Force One, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring Harrison Ford as the president who punches. And don’t forget the Patreon, where they watch the political and military thrillers of the Cold War and talk about the politics of those decades! On the most recent episode of the Patreon, Jamelle and John watched the 1970 political drama WUSA. You can listen to that and more at patreon.com/unclearpod.Our producer is Connor Lynch and our artwork is by Rachel Eck.

The message contains instructions. Ten, nine. We're building some kind of a transport. Eight. Seven. From the Pulitzer Prize winning author. Six. And the Academy Award winning director of Forrest Gump. When you come back, everybody that you care about, be gone.

A journey into the heart of the universe. Three. Joey Foster. Two. Matthew McConaughey. We are not alone. Contact. Redid PG.

Sneak preview July 5th. opens July 11th. Welcome to Unclear and Present Danger, a podcast about the political and military thrillers of the 1990s and what they say about the politics of that decade. I'm Jamel Bowie. I'm a columnist for the New York Times opinion section. I'm John Gans. I write the Substack Newsletter on Popular Front.

I'm very soon going to be a columnist at the nation. Oh, congratulations. Thank you so much. Maybe my first column will be out by the time listeners hear this. I'm not sure yet. But yeah, I'm going to have a monthly column at the nation. and I'm the author of the book When the Clock Broke, Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. That's so great. I'm really glad to hear that.

Oh, thanks. I mean, this is a weird thing to ask on air, but who cares? Who's your editor? Well, so far, it's Don Guttenplan, the editor-in-chief. I think he might pass me up, pass me over to another editor, but that's who I'm starting with. Cool, cool. Who was a great guy. Well, read John's column.

Yeah. That's so cool. All right. On this week's episode of the podcast, we watched the 1997 sci-fi. I wouldn't call it a thriller kind of sci-fi drama, perhaps. Yeah, the 1997 sci-fi drama Contact, co-produced and directed by Robert Zemeckis and based off of the 1985 novel of the same name by Carl Sagan. Zemeckis, you may or may not know, is. is one of the, I mean, kind of biggest filmmakers in kind of Hollywood history. His films include Romancing the Stone, which is a great movie, Back to the Future, Who Frame Roger Rabbit, Back to the Future Part 2 and 3, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, contact is 97, what lies beneath a movie I think is okay, other people don't like it, castaway, and legitimately one of the biggest hits of the 21st century that is played every year. The Polar Express, a terrible film, but plays every, every Christmas. It looks like shit now, too. It looked like shit at the time. But here we are. The back half of his career has not been as strong. He had a very

strange 2007 animated Beowulf adaptation with Ray Winstone. I've never heard of that. It's strange. He had a 2009 Christmas Carol adaptation, which is also quite bad. He had 2012's flight with Denzel, which is, I think is actually, I wouldn't say great. It's very good. But mostly off the strength of Denzel's performance. He did like a film version of or rather a feature length adaptation of the story of the dude who was in the documentary. Man on Wire. That movie is bad, the walk.

I'm going to go through the rest because there's just a lot of weird stuff. Allied with Brad Pitt and Marion Coetiot or Coetard, I'm sure you'll say your last name. Cotillard, yeah, I think that's right. With Brad Pitt as a Canadian intelligence officer and Cotillard as a French resistance fighter. Welcome to Marwin, a bizarre film starring Steve Carell, The Witches, a bad adaptation. Pinocchio, a bizarre adaptation. And then here, a very strange movie about a house. So his stuff gets kind of like high concept as he, as time goes on. And he just has lots of money to throw in it. But very successful director, at least for that first 30 years.

Anyway, contact, directed by Robert Zemeckis, starring the great Jody Foster, who we just last saw and we watched Taxi Driver for the Patreon last month. She was much younger, of course. Much younger. How old is Jody Foster? Did he Foster is 62? Wow, she, I, yeah, yeah, she would have been, what, 13 in taxi driver? Yeah, that makes sense.

And then about 35 in this. It also stars Matthew McConaughey, James Woods, Tom Scarrant, William Fickner, John Hurt, Angela Bassett, Rob Lowe, Jake Busey, and David Morris. In contact, Jody Foneman. Foster plays Dr. Ellie Aeroa, who works for the SETI, shorthy, shorthyial intelligence at an observatory in Puerto Rico. She pursues a career in science, kind of inspired by her father who died when she was young, and her work mainly involves listening to radio emissions with the hopes of finding signs of intelligent life in the stars. The program loses funding,

but then she receives financial support from S.R. Hayden, a secretive billionaire industrialist who runs Hayden Industries, and that enables her to continue doing her work in New Mexico, when on the eve of the termination of the SETI program, pushed by Drumlin, played by Tom Scared, who's sort of like a science bureaucrat, she does discover evidence of intelligent life in the star system very. Vega, and thus begins an effort to decode the transmission from Vega, which it turns out is a blueprint for some kind of device. Humanity commences building the device. The film tells us this costs about a third of a trillion dollars, which is quite a bit of money, even in 1990, even in 1990s. And there is a contest, basically, to determine who might be the passenger in this. vehicle. Airway hoped to do it, but her former love interest and current, I guess,

religious advisor to the Clinton administration. What's the character's name? What's the character's name? He's played by Michael Matthew McCona. Paul. Palmer Joss. Played by Matthew McConaughey torpedoes her bid when he reveals basically that she is an atheist. Drumlin is selected to go, but he is killed by a suicide bomb, which is a scene that has a weird resonance, obviously, now these days. I'm not sure suicide bombing was quite a recognizable trope in the 90s. But anyway, the bomb destroys the construction, kills Drumlin. But there's another one built by Hayden. Airway is chosen to be the pilot in that one. They have the test, or they have the launch, and she finds herself being shot through a wormhole, not unlike the end of 2001

Space Odyssey. And she arrives on a beach where a extraterrestrial figure taking the appearance of her dead dad explains to her that this is basically sort of like the first step of humanity's journey into an intergalactic world. She loses consciousness, wakes up. According to everyone around her, she did not go anywhere. Nothing happened, but she insists that she saw something and she asked the public to take her on faith. The program is deemed a hoax.

There's an investigation, but we learn her video recording of a device did record 18 hours of static, corresponding to the 18 hours, she said she was gone and she returned. That gets her more support for the SETI program from the U.S. government, and she returns to her research, and that is the film. The tagline for contact. There are a couple taglines. The two I'll go with are a message from deep space, who will be the first to go, a journey to the universe.

that's the one that's on the poster and then there is the one that you probably would have heard in a commercial from the Academy Award winning director Forrest Gump and Pulitzer Prize winning author of contact take you on a journey to the heart of the universe

so two taglines and you can find contact to watch I think I bought this years ago to watch on Apple TV so I just did that but you can watch it on i buy it to stream or rent on itunes and amazon contact was released on july 11th in 1997 so let's check out the new york times for that day okay let's see what we got

uh nato troops kill a serbian suspect in war atrocities another man arrested self-defense shooting in first effort to seize fugitive man hunts ruled out nato led peacekeeping troops seized one bosnian served war crime suspect and killed another today in a shootout in northwestern Bosnia in their first attempt to arrest any of the dozens of suspects at large. A British soldier was slightly wounded in the operation, which was conducted by British troops with some support by the United States. A senior administration official said President Clinton was briefed about the operation advance and approved the United States' assistance on July 5th. One suspect, Simo Drosha, I was going to say, former police chief in the northwestern town of Prijador, fired the troops when they confronted him and the peacekeepers were turned fire and self-defense, killing Mr. Dragyaka, Dreyasha, I don't know.

NATO officials said, the other Milan-Cosevetich, director of the hospital in Priyodor, was arrested at the hospital without incident in a separate operation, NATO official said. Mr. Kosevich, a former head of the local government, was to be turned over to the International War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague. Netherlands later today, NATO officials said both men were considered to be among the prime architects of ethnic cleansing in the Pryodor area. Well, this is part of the NATO intervention in the Yugoslav civil wars, the post-Yugoslav civil wars, and the atrocities committed in Bosnia by Bosnian Serb militias, which was considered to be kind of the model of, I don't know. I don't know, what do you want to call it? Post-Cold War, post-historical humanitarian intervention. Yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah.

And, you know, in some ways, was quite successful. Major war criminals were brought to justice. I think that this world, which some people call the rules-based international order, is over for better or worse. I'm not among those who believe that NATO's intervention in Bosnia was merely an exercise in Western imperialism. I think they had a point. I think that it was good that the war criminals were brought to justice. I think unfortunately now some of the United States allies are war criminals of similar or greater degree and are unlikely to be brought to justice by a NATO coalition, unfortunately. I mean, not by any other coalition, but one day we can hope that some of them are brought to justice.

Yes. Yeah, I hope. I certainly hope so. But yeah, I think that this is an interesting little time capsule into the way things were done and we thought they might be done for some time after that. In a way, the Iraq war sort of breaks this. Right. I mean, what's so interesting, right, is that in the 2000 election, you have George the Bush running explicitly against these kinds of of intervention, saying that he will promise to have a humble foreign policy.

That's sort of, I think it's a direct quote. And pushing against the notion that the U.S. must be the policeman of the world. Right. Light isolationism. Light isolationism, although that was always belied by the fact that his foreign policy advisors were these former Cold Warhawks who were clearly looking for some kind of recapitulation of like great power conflict yeah and so when 9-11 happens it's sort of all the the intellectual energy in you want to call it that in the Bush administration was pushing towards

we got a you know we got this is a great conflict of civilizations we got to have like the more muscular and aggressive approach to the world and we we know what happens next yeah I think I think that's all right. What else we got here? Mexico and drugs was U.S. napping. Early last year, a handful of senior American officials in Washington received an alarming secret intelligence report on Mexico. It was on its face, officials said, the sort of documents that can force policymakers to change the way they think about a country or region. In a matter of just weeks, the National Security Agency reported Mexican drug traffickers had laundered some $6 billion in illicit profits through their country's financial system.

The spy agency based this conclusion on an elaborate surveillance of the contacts between drug gangs and their business associates. Almost immediately, State Department officials delivered an angry protest to the Mexican ambassador over the apparently vast breach in his country's defenses against drug trafficking.

Then, however, American officials' outrage gave way to chagrin. The agency, they realized, was asserting that Mexico had taken in a flood of dollars to nearly equal to its entire foreign investment that year without any discernible impact on its economy. It just couldn't have happened. And you have to ask, what reports am I supposed to believe? An examination by the New York

Times, based on scores of interviews and a review of classified documents, indicates that the agency's discredit assessment was by no means an isolated lapse of the United States intelligence on drugs and corruption in Mexico. Rather, as the United States weighed momentous decisions from Mexico in the 1990s from the North American free trade agreement to the $12.5 billion bailout of the Mexican economy after currency crisis, American policymakers were blindsided by some important developments, misinformed about others, and intentive to make to many more. Wow. I mean, this is really interesting, I think, because intelligence failures became, I mean,

as we were just talking about Iraq, intelligence failures became. either kind of designed or accidental, kind of became a huge part of the next 20 years, 15 years of foreign policy. I mean, we did not see 9-11 coming properly, or we did and ignore the signs. We had erroneous information somehow, some deliberately emphasized in Iraq. You know, and we continually have these intelligence failures. There was one in Afghanistan. Our intelligence agencies got the Russian invasion of Ukraine right. That was a notable success. But yeah, I think that this is an underrated part of understanding America's difficulties.

It's not that these surveillance, these intelligence agencies and the surveillance state is all powerful. They're, you know, they're subject to error. and policy can be made through these very severe errors. And, you know, we've seen the tragic and in some cases, I think, criminal results of that. There's something about Neanderthal DNA. Anything else look interesting to you? Nothing really. I mean, there's just headline about Poland joining NATO.

I have no commentary on that. This is kind of funny headline. Hun Sen says he's enjoying being Cambodia's sole ruler. Yeah. He spoke of Richard Nixon and Mike Tyson of Crocodiles and Kings. He lighted a cigarette and leaned back slightly as an aide fanned him with a pink file folder. Second Prime Minister Hun Sen is the supreme leader of Cambodia now, a position hard-earned by force of arms, and he savored his power today in his first public appearance since staging a coup last weekend.

I know nothing about this. No, me neither. And I remember there's a coup against Sianuk. I remember that, but I don't remember anything else. He is, he still, he currently serves as president of the Senate of Cambodia. He was prime minister. I mean, he was in power until last year. Not last year, two years ago.

Just August, August, 2023. Nice going. Wow. Don't forget to take plenty of pictures, he told the photographers as he sat alone as he sat alone at the head of a long table in his first cabinet meeting since ousting's coalition partner, the first prime minister, Noradam, oh, Riharad. Yeah, this is really, yeah, not, don't know too much about post-Paul Pot, Cambodia, but yeah, pretty funny story. all right contact uh john have you seen this before i see i saw this in theaters with my parents uh i liked it as a kid this does feel like a movie that you tape to see your kids like you're 12 year old well i was 12 and uh there you and i i was into science i was into aliens like i think

most kids are fascinated by the idea of aliens you know UFOs um i remember liking it now watching it again, I really did not enjoy it. I was really annoyed with this movie. Okay, so Roberts and Meckis I have mixed feelings about it. I think of Who Frame Roger Rabbit, like not even as a joke is like a genius movie. I think it's like a brilliant movie. No, I think absolutely it's one of the great films of late 20th century Hollywood. Yeah, it's a great Hollywood movie.

It's, you know, aware of itself. It's ironic. It's a lot of fun. but it calls back to a lot of, you know, cool golden age Hollywood stuff. It's just a great film. The rest of his filmography I struggle with because of its sentimentality, and this movie has that in spades. I mean, also some of its politics.

I mean, we've talked before about the vision of Zemeckis in Back to the Future or in Forrest Gump. you know there's a weird like uh i don't know what to even call it it's just like white people are always like innocent and also the agents of history in his stuff and it's like always a callback to like white pristine um nostalgia and then there's just a ton of sentimentalism in his movies and this movie in this movie just is so schlocky in my view like you know, she, this thing about her relationship with her father and then the stuff about faith. And it's just, I found it very hard to take. I think also that's just kind of my aesthetic objection to it. I would say where that begins to become a more political critique,

and this may be taking the film a little too seriously, but I think that's what we do on this podcast. That's sort of the whole mission of the show. It's taking things a little too. seriously, is that I really thought this movie was sort of the worst neoliberal ascendancy film I can remember. You have its deification of, almost literally, of this billionaire, eccentric billionaire, Ross Perot, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk figure of Aunt La Letra, who is kind of a little sinister but ultimately benevolent in his desire to like make things for the world. You have these individuals who, you know, are arguably kind of crackpots, being, you know, chosen for, you know, lionized by the film and made into the film as heroes. and then ultimately, who are the villains, politicians, right?

People who actually have their power through some kind of actual public mandate and not through either making a ton of money or just having their crazy convictions. You have the congressional committee. You know, there's two ways of approaching congressional committees in film. One is there these kind of righteous tribunals of the people, people getting at the truth and the other there are these you know evil McCarthyite um witch hunts going on i mean both are potentially true i suppose but i didn't like that the way the film you know showed a congressional committee was of this careerist nasty politician who i think

his position is actually reasonable like there's no reason to believe like after she believes in evidence and this move this is also to its subplot or i don't know plot about faith the relationship between faith and science, which I don't really buy. You know, why would we take all this just on, it turns out there is some evidence, but she has no evidence. The Congressional Committee seems totally reasonable in its skepticism about this and then the way the taxpayers' money have been spent. I think now we're dealing with a lot of public credulity about UFOs, which I think of

are being drummed up by the United States government. That's my own conspiracy theory. But, um, and I think films like this, you know, made it seem acceptable. I, I've gotten more negatively polarized against alien stuff because of arguing about it with people. And I just don't find the idea that we have, there is no compelling evidence to me that we've made contact or an alien civilization is trying to make contact with us. I just don't see it.

It's something that people really want to happen. I guess the movie's connection to it with some form of distorted religious faith is that way. But also, what is going on, Jamel? Like, that aliens impersonate her father? Is that even, if this is some moral, irrational being, why would they use this manipulative, sentimental technique to make contact? Why wouldn't they just meet her as another rational individual and say, say, uh, we are, you know, so and so, they like tantalize. Why are they doing that? Why won't they

just be like, it's nice to meet you human beings? We've, we've been meaning to make contact it. Instead, they contact her with this apparition of her father and say, we're going to, we're going to give you a little bit of information because this is the way we do things. And then we'll give you a little bit more. What is this bullshit? What is this bullshit? If I were her, I would be pissed off. But she's like, oh, it's so nice to, to like, like, this is not really her father. It's a fake. It's a phony. That's, that's evil, I think, on some level. Anyway, these are some of my initial thoughts about the movie. I did not like it this time around, was pissed off. I'm interested to hear what you have to say about it. I did not text you.

Usually we text each other when we're watching the movies being like, I hate this, or I'm loving this movie. And I didn't do it because I was like, you know what, I want to see, I don't want to contaminate, I don't want to have a pre-conversation. I want to see what the pure takes are. Okay, so my pure take is I like this movie. Okay. I don't love this movie. I'm not like, I'm not like, you know, I watch it maybe twice in the last like seven or eight years. So this is not something I'm like watching frequently. I haven't seen it since I was a little kid.

Yeah. But I do like this movie. I like it in part because I'm just a sucker for any kind of process-based film, right? Like any film where like professionals of some sort experts, it's no matter who they are, are going through a process of doing. something and then they do the thing I that that is like my favorite type of movie whether it is journalists going through documents whether

it's like an assassin plotting an assassination like whatever it is watching people who've dedicated themselves to their craft performing that and this is that movie like it's we call it the drama and I think it technically is drama but it very much

is I feel like much it's it's in the same realm as any kind of film you can imagine where much of the movie is kind of just like preparation procedural almost procedural yeah yeah and I that's that's I just sort of vibe with that kind of movie you know that stuff was cool I grant that yeah when I agree with you that I mean so Zemeckis is a sentimental

filmmaker yeah this is the case in all of his work even more so than Spielberg I'd even say Spielberg has sort of like a really hard edge about him that can come out at times but Zemachus, not so much Zemachus can have a bit of a cynical edge can be a little a little naughty you might say

but he doesn't I don't think he has a kind of he has a hard edge at all and this is a film that's pure Zemeckis sentimentality all the way through the Palmer Jaws subplot I think is sort of the weakest part of the whole film And I know why it's there structurally to give them a reason not to give Jody Foster's character the space on the ship.

But I just don't buy Matthew McConaughey as like a spiritual guru type of the kind of guy. I don't buy Matthew McConae as the kind of guy who'd be like we can't send an atheist into space. Why the hell not? I just don't like the decision like I get that in the thinking of the period it would be like the movie superficially you'd be like, yeah. the religious people would be upset. I just don't know if that's the case. Anyway, keep going.

I'm sorry. Oh, no worries. Aesthetics aside, I think you're right to notice the neoliberal assumptions of the politics of this film. The extent to which the hero is this eccentric billionaire who's presented as sort of like an largely uncolonel. just a weird guy, but, like, not, not particularly complicated or, or worrisome. The extent to which there is sort of like underlying, especially after the voyage, I suppose, there is a skepticism of, you know, government effort, public action that is uninterrogated. there's no sort of like there's no one on screen saying even if this was a hoax the kind of

expertise knowledge we built doing it was like useful it's very much sort of like this was a big waste of money and even you know in the movie they make it clear that like it's private contractors doing a lot of work too there's sort of a nod to the fact that no one really has a state capacity to do this we have to rely on private industry to make it happen I do think it's interesting. I mean, the reason why I wanted to do this movie, the reason why it's been on the docket, is it does, it is sort of one of these,

you know, there's these two genres or two types of post-Cold War American hegemony picture. In one of them, and we can actually, we can, like, frame this as two space movies. One of them is Independence Day. We're sort of like the thing that, vindicates American leadership, American global leadership, and actually points a way forward

to a more unified, although American-led global order, is an external threat. It is aliens invading. It is something. Something is forcing everyone to put aside their petty differences and stop the big, bad, but this is going to happen under the leadership of the United States because of their preeminent global power. Contact is the other type of this movie where it's not so much a threat as it is sort of like this is an opportunity we have to collectively do something together. Right. Yeah. That that that gives us an opportunity to put aside our petty differences. Yeah.

And I think it's interesting. Like there's clear we're in the back half of the decade now. And there is this clear yearning, I think, in the culture for some kind of unified. national purpose and it might even be international purpose some sort of sense that here's something we can all do together

you you we're going through the New York Times we talked a bit about humanitarian intervention sort of the some of the American domestic support

for humanitarian intervention was exactly this this sort of like we can lead the world to stop you know ethnic cleansing to stop genocide

we can and we you know we neglected to intervened a couple years ago in Rwanda, look what happened. So we can, we have a responsibility to stand up and do this. And also, this can be a way that we can bring the world together. George W. Bush, a few years later, kind of leans on this in making the case to invade Iraq, right? Like, this is, you have a responsibility as a global community, and the United States can lead to disarm Saddam Hussein.

vindicate American global leadership. But there, I think there really is, in this sort of like this late post-Cold War period in the 90s, at least, the late 90s, there is a sense that there, we ought to be doing something bigger than us, collectively. We can't just be shopping. And this was, I think this was coming through in, in the films very much. I don't know.

What do you think? I think you're right on the money. There's a desire for some kind of utopian project that often has a cosmopolitan element, like a uniting of different cultures and peoples for a shared project, a shared scientific, peaceful project, like the one in this movie. There's nothing wrong with that. The idea that there could be some kind of synthesis or accord between faith and reason and science. I think it was also kind of a sub-theme that people hoped for. There's very utopian dreams here. I'm not so annoyed with that.

I kind of miss. And, you know, I actually, I was, I did an event last night for Collette Shade's new book, Y2K, about that era. And it goes, the book goes from 1997 to 2008. And it points out, you know, before September 11th, and it's a, if you, if you, Guys are a fan of the show, you would definitely enjoy the book, so go out and get it. It pointed out that, you know, before 9-11, there was a lot of this kind of energy that was looking for peaceful, utopian, cosmopolitan projects. The dot-com boom was obviously

commercialized, but had lots of hopes that it was going to create a new world of interconnection and understanding and self-exploration and so on and so forth. The loss of that and the rude awakening back into history, I don't know, that happened with 9-11 and what came after in the financial crisis. I don't celebrate that. I just lived through it. So I find some of the things that you're talking about charming to look back on. I think in this movie I found it cloying in other ways, like in hackers, for instance, I found it charming. But in this movie, I was just like it's not it's no longer believable and i'm a little bit irritated by its sentimentality um but yeah i think your your reading of the movies political and social consciousness is correct um i have another

reading on a different level which is two two things first of all i mean you could do like a kind of psychoanalytic reading in the movie which this movie is just about her looking for her daddy and, like, you know, she finds it, the father figure in these different ways, you know, in, she goes through transference, essentially, where she at first sees in this kind of strange father figure, she can't have a, have a sexual relationship with another, with a man and settle down. She's very averse to, you know, that for, because the loss of her father or whatever. So she's avoiding Palmer Joss's advances, even though they do sleep together, but she doesn't want to commit. And then she has this transference with her weird father figure in the billionaire. And then she connects with this fake father figure, kind of her therapist. You know, she goes through psychoanalysis in a way going through the wormhole and having this experience with her father. Well, I'm not really your father, but we thought it would be easier if we could do this.

And then she comes back and what is she able to do? Well, she's able to believe in herself and she's able to enter into a romantic relationship. So I think in a way, in a weird way, the movie is about the, you know, people's personal trauma, like how do we live through our personal traumas and, you know, we need surrogate parents to kind of live through them and experience transfers. That's one way of looking at it. So the movie is not really about science at all, but about the inability for people. contact, the inability for people to find love and sexual fulfillment, which I think is in anxiety obviously as old as time, but is, you know, modernity creates new versions of that.

The other thing is, the other reading is, isn't it interesting to me that the, and it obviously creates some drama in the film and it's kind of funny, that the first TV, they send a TV radio signal back, right? And the radio signal is Adolf Hitler. It's the 1936 Olympics, and there's a reason for that, which is that it's the first outer space, you know, TV broadcast that would have reached that part of space. But, you know, if alien, first of all, if aliens started broadcasting Hitler back to us, I would say, take out the nukes.

Yeah. I would be like we're, we got it immediately, like, arm ourselves. Yeah, and it's considered to be like... Our top scientists say we have Hitler particles coming directly from Vegas. Yeah, exactly. I would be like, we're shooting nuclear weapons out there. I think that that, you know, and then it's kind of like James Wood, the bad guy is like, maybe they're saying, like, this is our kind of thing.

I would wonder, too. But I think it's also interesting just in terms of the ideological compensation. position of the movie that you discussed, that the fascist era, the war era is the signal that comes back, right? So an era of shared purpose, sacrifice of defeating this foe of democracy and of mankind kind of reinitiates the project. And I think, you know, as you've pointed out many times when we've discussed this, there's a lot of nostalgia and mourning going on.

in the 90s for the loss of the greatest generation and the loss in effect of an anti-fascist utopianism of, you know, and we've seen the, you know, effects of that in our present era with, you know, its last gasps and the kind of resistance against Trump. And, you know, I happen to have an opinion on this, but I can step back from it and say, perhaps there's something going on with our debate about fascism and it says more to do about looking for some kind of meaningful framework to understand a very confusing new situation. But I think we've noticed in many films we've discussed, the idea that the last time the United States or even mankind had a purpose commensurate with its greatness was the war.

It was the crusade against fascism, which was obviously dystopian in some ways. It was the worst thing that ever happened in the history of the planet. It was the most destructive war ever. But you had communist Russia making common cause with capitalist United States to defeat a common enemy. There is something kind of utopian about that. So that's my thoughts about the Hitler particles coming back. But I think it jibes with your reading of it a lot as a kind of like a desire for shared utopian project and shared sacrifice, not sacrifice, but shared endeavor. I think I think supporting that reading is just we can just look to Zemeckis as a filmmaker.

Zemachus is maybe the prototypical boomer filmmaker. He's born in 1952. He does not experience the 60s as an adult. He's a teenager through the back half of the decade. I think the boomers present themselves as having experienced the 60s and the 70s. But you have to remember, the boomers were kids during the 60s for the most part. the youngest generation perhaps were teenagers during the 60s. But like the Beatles, for example, they were a generation prior, right?

Like these are the people who we remember the 60s for were not part of the baby boom. And part of, I think, to the extent that you want to talk of a generational psychology, which is always tricky. But at least with sort of like a certain cohort of, you know, Anglo-American. middle class, you know, relatively educated baby boomers, the kinds of people, the kinds of people like Robert Zemeckis, right, like Steven Spielberg. To the extent that that, you can say anything specific about that generational cohort, it is sort of a sense that they missed out, right? like they missed out on the on the turmoil of the 60s what they got was the tune out ethos of the 70s or some of the cynicism of the 70s generation stuff the narcissism yeah the narcissism the

narcissism the curdling of expectations that's what they got and so it doesn't really all that surprised me I'm going to I mean let's just use let's really use Zemeckisness Spielberg, it's prototypical here. In the 80s, both Zemeckis and Spielberg work on, together, they work on a World War II picture, 1941, which is sort of a war comedy. It's directed by Spielberg. It's the screenplay as by Zemeckis and Bob Gale, though. And it's not particularly good, but it actually makes total sense why these two would be interested in doing a war picture. It's basically exactly the kind of thing that would have been in their consciousness as kids and teenagers. And when you begin to look at their preoccupations, Zemachus' preoccupations, it's either, you know, Zemachus is looking back to the past, to his childhood with Back to the Future, to the childhoods of his parents with Hufre and Mard

Drew Rabbit. His parents should have been kids and teenagers in the 30s, right? In the 40s. Or he's looking to sort of like relive the kind of the boomer years, the prime boomer years, the movie like Forrest Gump, which is just sort of like, this is how I remember these years from perspective of someone who was a kid. And what if I can kind of try to communicate that feeling of how I experienced those years to a broad audience. And it makes it makes sense to me that a guy like Zemeckis, a filmmaker like Zemachus, would make a movie that is about like a wistful desire for, like you said, the kind of utopian project that characterizes the times that he missed, right? Like that character, the utopian projects

of the 60th, utopian projects of the 30s and 40s. He did not get to experience that. And he wants to. And in the 90s, right, like in the 1990s, it is the political class is exactly these people. It's, it's, you know, Bill Clinton is exactly this person, you know, the utopian project there is maybe we can, we can build sort of like a virtuous, you know, cycle of global trade where everyone wins. Yeah. And that's our project. And on the right, we, With the Bush, with the George W. Bush, it is, well, maybe our grand virtuous project is another fight for democracy. Right, right, right, right. Against a new looming enemy.

I don't know if you remember, I remember this so clearly, like the Charles Crouthammer is, like, all those types, like, earnestly arguing that right, like, Islamo-Fascism is the new Nazism. And it's like, yeah, these are non-like, Islamof-fascism is a nonsense term. it's like it's genuinely stupid yeah i mean you know and i it has been it has been said that i'm doing this i don't think fairly that i'm doing the same thing um but uh i mean i mean you know you know i i i agree with you on this on this question yeah like i don't i'll i'll just say we're not going to litigate this on okay i'll just say that when like the the youth vanguard of political movement. It's filled with people who like kind of idolize actual Nazis. I don't think I don't think you're too off base. I don't know. Well, that's my, I mean, I think I have some

empirical, you know, I think I have some empirical points in my favor. I mean, I don't think I'm just making up a framework without anything to back it up. But anyway, yeah, I don't want to litigate this on the podcast. Done that enough. I wanted to ask you something, though, because I know that you're a big fan and it's a movie you've thought a lot about of 2001 of Space Odyssey and so and this movie obviously has callbacks to that so I just wanted to get your thoughts about what you think the dialogue if any between these two films is about alien life forms human you know effort to make contact all this science faith etc yeah I would say that Sagan and his wife Andrian are the ones who wrote the story on which this movie is based. Beyond the visual callbacks to 2001,

both see or understand the search for extraterrestrial life as being far more about kind of like internal human meaning, like not so much about what's out there, although that may be interesting, but more about like what does it mean to be a human being. 2001 makes it like super explicit and that like the two characters were basically a human being and a artificial intelligence. And the movie is like raising questions about like what does it mean to exist either way. I'm trying to think is Zemeckis, Zemeckis, the callbacks to 2001. Why is 2001 a better movie? I'd say 2001's a better movie. Part of it's just sort of what, I mean, it was groundbreaking at the time.

It's a visually much more interesting and striking film. It's deeper in a way, I think, no? Yeah, it's not so. I mean, it's, 2001, I think, is a much more abstract movie. Like, contact is very explicitly say, and it's very explicit about it. It's sort of like, this is a search for personal, religious meaning or whatever. Yeah. 2001, in addition to like the conflict between Hal and, um, uh, it's Dave being sort of like this

interesting glimpse in the sort of potential conflict with artificial intelligence, it's a movie that is much more abstract than its concern, sort of like it's not, it's not directly telling you, think about spirituality, but it's like it's raising that. And, and I think it's vision of the universe is actually a little more mysterious than context is. Like contact is quite explicit. She goes to the wormhole and the alien representation of her dad is like, listen, I'm basically sort of like the neighborhood greeter of an extraterrestrial like confederation. There are a lot of us out here.

We have this whole process by which, you know, if we think that you're not too crazy, we send you some messages. We hope that you decode them. He says we've been doing this. It's been this way for a billion years. So we just, we hope that you figure it out. You figure it out. You meet me.

I show up as like a representation of something that matters to you. And then I send you back on your way with the knowledge that we exist and you'll figure out more later. Whereas in 2001, right? Like he goes through, he goes through the wormhole thing. He becomes the star child. And he's sort of like in this, it's like this, it's totally abstract. It's like what is even happening here? It's not clear that it's the product of a directed intelligence.

It's just sort of like, it's true mystery of the universe stuff. And I think that's maybe like the aesthetic difference. I also am not sure that Kubrick, 2001 isn't like political. I mean, this contact taking place in bureaucracies with government officials, all these things, makes it sort of like explicitly political in a way that 2001 simply isn't. no I think those are those are good points of difference I mean I I don't I like 2001 I'm not a huge fan but I think it's a really beautiful and interesting looking movie and I mean with 2001 like part of the part of what you're going for is not necessarily like plot or

story but simply like visual spectacle like yeah yeah it's best enjoyed on a big screen on a 35 millimeter print yeah IMAX print like whatever that's that's you're watching it like the ideal 2001 experience is getting completely baked and watching it on iMX like that's that's how you watch 2001 yeah the other thing about it is i mean obviously i mean 2001 is a piece of art that assumes a certain amount of intelligence of its viewer um that i think already zemeckis movie is um not doing because it's explaining things and creating backstories and and origin stories and so and so forth, which is a tendency that we've only seen, you know, proliferate in Hollywood and get worse. So there's just

more interpretive work to be done on the side of the audience, more left to the imagination of the audience or more to excite the imagination of the audience. And I think that this is more it's it's a harder piece of art i mean like you know and there's a lot of spoon feeding going on in contact um right and we've gotten too now we've gotten to ridiculous degrees of spoon feeding which we've complained about many times um where every character's or they just have to continually fan service and um you know expand it's like telling stories to a baby they want to hear more and more, you know, I don't know. Anyway, we've, we've, we've, we've, we've taken this gripe to its conclusion, but

I mean, okay, we've taken it to its conclusion, but I'm going to complain about it real quick. Okay. Just because, just because I watched a not good movie recently. Okay. And I was kind of stride, like, like, not an old one from the 90s, but I watched, it was, I watched Alien 3, uh, recently. Yeah.

Which is David Fincher's first feature. Oh, really? And, yeah. They, they hired, he, he, he, he was. was a music video director and they hired him thinking he just sort of like do whatever they wanted him to do. And he turned out to have ideas of his own and it became a very difficult shoot. But Alien 3, not good, bad movie. But it is striking how even like the blockbuster slop of the early 90s didn't feel the need to be like, oh, well, this guy is here because

of he had this backstory and here's like a bunch of flashbacks. It's just sort of like if it comes up in the character's relationships with each other, it'll come up. Some characters will allude to their backstories, but nothing else will be said. You don't need, you can just let things be mysteries if you need them to be. And I just thought it was interesting that sort of like even a movie that objectively does not work on multiple levels, it still does not fall into these sort of traps. Because rightfully so, people understood that kind of thing to be bad writing. It's like bad writing to rely on essentially exposition dumps to tell an audience about a character. You can kind of just like, you should be able to write a character in such a way that you can

learn a good deal about them just through conversation and behavior. Right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's a strength of the, yeah, have a character express themselves both through the script and the actor understands it and is able to do something with their acting that you feel like you the character is well expressed right did you I mean did you there is a I read a thing this is now completely off topic but I read a thing uh about how producers for like Netflix they tell

directors that like if there's something happening on screen it's like primarily visual because this is of course a visual medium they want them to have someone say something describing what's happening on screen so that people who are looking at their phones will under will have to look up to understand what's happening and it's just sort of like like if i if i were a director and i got that note from a producer i would just quit find someone else so yeah it's so depressing it's so depressing like do you want to make a movie here or like uh like an audio book like what do you want yeah god i don't know um yeah anyway uh contact uh yeah um i don't have any anything else to to say about the movie.

I'll say I will, in praise of the film, in praise of the film, I said I didn't buy Matthew McConaughey in this film. He's just, it doesn't seem right for it. But, Jody Foster is excellent. And I'm a big,

I'm a huge Jody Foster fan. I think she is one of our greatest actresses. And her, she does a good job. And she communicates just sort of like raw intelligence so well. Yeah, on screen. And I think she's terrific in this.

I love William Fickner. That's an actor who I'm always excited to see when he shows up. He plays the blind scientists in this film. And I'm happy to see him. And I think Tom Scarrett's great. Speaking of aliens, Tom Scarratt in the cast of the original alien. Yeah. Contact is kind of exactly the kind of movie that isn't really made anymore

at a blockbuster budget, which is sort of just like kind of an expensive showcase of well-liked actors, adult drama, but you can take a kid to it, you know, everyone goes to see it, mixed opinions, but everyone's like, yeah, this is what, you know, this is, this is what, this is the movie of the month at the multiplex. And there's not really, like Chris Nolan maybe makes this kind of movie these days. And that's about it. Yeah. And you, You can kind of imagine a Chris Nolan version of this kind of movie. I mean, it exists. It's called Interstellar.

Yeah, yeah, and I think it's a finer movie. Oh, yeah, I think, I mean, I think Interstellar is a masterpiece. Yeah, I'm going to watch that again. Every time I see it, every time I see it, I'm like, the first time I saw it, I was like, I really like this. Second time I was like, oh, this is actually great. Third time I saw it, and at this point now I'm like a parent, I'm like, oh, this is a masterpiece. This is one of the great movies of this day. decade like that in the social network or like the two great two great movies of that decade yeah social

network mostly because it just it's just it was just it was like it just like nailed nailed that type yeah uh yeah it was a very astute portrait contact 97 roberts and mechus there's so many other movies in 1997 it's just my last point is like look look 1997 had LA Confidential the greatest maybe my opinion, one of the best movies ever. Anyway, that's all I'm going to say. 1907, great year for movies. Should we do LA confidential? I mean, it's not...

It doesn't really fit. It doesn't really fit, but I love it so much, and I've given a lot of thought. There isn't a political... Well, there's politics. I mean, any excuse to watch that movie, I think we could have an interesting discussion about it. Maybe we could toss it on the Patreon.

I would love that, for sure. Yeah, let's toss it. the picture because I also love L.A. Confidential. I think it's so fucking good. Yeah. I'm excited for that. Okay. Yeah. Well, yeah, LA Confidential toss the picture. All right, you can view contact. Like I said, you can rent it or buy it. I don't know Amazon if you want to check it out. Otherwise, that is the film. And thus, that is the show. If you're not a subscriber, please subscribe. We're available in iTunes, Spotify and Google Podcast and wherever else podcast are found. If you subscribe, please leave a rating and a review.

It does help people find the show. You can reach out to us on social media if you'd like to. I'm on Blue Sky. John's on Twitter and kind of on Blue Sky. I'm on TikTok, although TikTok is probably going to be not like non-existent in the U.S. I think that's fine. I'm sorry. I know that you're into it, but I'm just kind of excited to see something actually get destroyed.

It seems like these platforms only grow and it's nice to see that they can be stopped. I guess maybe if they're Chinese, but yeah. But I'm also on Instagram and various places. Good old American Instagram. Good old American Instagram. You can also reach out to us over email at unclear and present feedback at fastmail.com. For this week in feedback, we have, we have an email from Steve titled Die Hards. Happy New Year, gents. And this is our first main feed episode of the New Year. So, hello.

Yeah, happy here. I'm new to your podcast and recently completed my holiday tradition of watching two die-hard movies set at Christmas and one in the heat of the summer. So, of course, I went back and listened to your episodes and die-hard. My take when I watched them back-to-back is the progression of McLean's character's propensity to violence. In the first film, he's reluctant to kill the terrorists. The first one to die was accidentally when in a melee they fell down the stairs and the terrorist broke his neck. The next shootout, McLean tells the terrorist to freeze before being fired upon. One of these baddies then tells McLean not to hesitate next time.

In Die Hard 2, the McLean character suddenly has a heightened capacity for sniffing out suspicious behavior. But in his first interaction in the baggage sorting area, he again announces himself as police to the terrorist before a gun battle ensues. He doesn't engage in a firefight in a movie in that movie that isn't instigated by the terrorists. But then in Die Hard with a vengeance, his this capacity to sniff out terrorists is so heightened that the first engagement is an elevator scene you mentioned in the episode where just noticing the bad snubber in combat boots, he opens fire immediately. And again, later on in the tunnels, he just walks up to the dump truck and shoots through the door. This is definitely more in line with the character of Martin Riggs, who this character was supposed to be.

Yeah, that's right, because this was like a lethal weapon kind of, yeah. Anyway, this march toward more immediate and more lethal police work or something I picked up and watching these diehard movies. Thanks for the thoughtful and entertaining show. Steve. Thank you, Steve. I think that is quite interesting. I mean, the trigger happy cop is like a longstanding trope.

But like now these days, it's like in media typically presented as like scary. And I think in the 90s, yeah, it's more sort of like, oh, yeah, well, this guy just, he just has an insy trickery going to shoot bad guys. It wasn't as, at least before a certain point, it wasn't as much of a, this is a scary kind of thing. But I think you're right. I think it's interesting that you know how the McLean character becomes more quick to use violence. I'd say, you know, if we get to these, there's, of course, the other two die hard movie is live free or die hard and then a good day to die hard where McLean kind of becomes. like an unstoppable action hero along the lines of a Schwarzenegger or a Stallone. And it's sort of, it's the character looping back.

Like if McLean and Die Hard was an intentional subversion of the action hero archetype, you know, ordinary looking, balding, a cop, you know, very, it's Bruce Willis, so like very handsome and charismatic. Of course, he's a movie star. But like relative to Schwarzenegger, a much more ordinary. guy, yeah, average Joe. By live for your die hard, Willis is basically just a Schwarzenegger type. Yeah. Yeah, I think I agree with all of this. I'm not a huge, I like these movies. I'm not a huge connoisseur, but I think this is well observed. I think that this is just some Hollywood bad habits kind of creeping in.

in sequels, you know, like maybe it was a little more considered in the first movie, the character, and then they kind of just were like, make them shoot a bunch of people. But, yeah, I think that sounds reasonable to me. Yeah, I mean, the other thing to remember is that the second movie is Roney Harlan, I believe, directs it, and it's just sort of like, yeah, it's going to be a dumber movie.

And then with the third movie, which wasn't originally a diehard script, McTiernan is clearly trying to up the ante and up the action. And it is very much, like, it's a very 90s action movie. I mean, it's very kind of like in its aesthetic, in its tone, it's much more,

it's very 90s in the way that Die Hard was like very much still an 80s action movie, even if it was subverting, subverting the genre somewhat. Thank you, Steve, for the email and for the feedback. Episodes come out every two weeks.

So we'll see you then with an episode. What's coming up next? List up. Contact. What's after contact? With an episode on one of the greats that chronicles of President Punch, Air Force One. Oh, hey, you know what? I think we should get our friend Max Reed on for that one if we can do it. Let's do it. Yeah, because I know he's a great fan of this genre and that film, so I'm going to get in touch with him. Let's do it. Air Force One directed by Wolfgang Peterson starring Harrison. The Fate of the Nation rest on the courage of one man. Have I ever told, we'll talk about this in the episode. I think this movie

helped elect George W. Oh, absolutely. I think you're 100% right about that. There's no down in my mind. Yeah. I think this movie, I think America, this movie was fucking huge. People loved it. Yeah. And I think America was like, we want president punch. Yeah. Give us president punch. And they've liked, yes, I think you're totally right. Anyway, next episode, Air Force One. I'm excited to watch this. I have a 4K Blu-ray. I'm going to have a great time. Even though I think this movie is,

politics are bad, but I'm still going to enjoy it. Yeah. It's still a ton of fun. You can find Air Force One to stream or rent or buy on Amazon, Apple, YouTube, Google Play, the usual set of services. Don't forget our Patreon, where we watch the films of the Cold War and try to unpack them as political and historical documents, for $5 a month, you get two bonus episodes every month as well as access to the whole back catalog, and we're almost two years, I mean, we're quite, we're a couple years deep at this point. You can sign up at patreon.com slash unclear pod.

The latest episode of our Patreon podcast is on WUSA, a kind of not very good, but still interesting little film starring Paul Newman. from 1970, Paul Newman as a kind of right-wing radio host, so I think it's worth checking out. Our next episode on the Patreon will be the Sweet Smell of Success. One of the most entertaining movies of the 1950s, when did that come out? Sweet smell of... 1955. Am I right?

155, but 1957, close. Oh, close. Directed by Alexander McKendrick and starring Bert Lancaster, Tony Curtis, who's inherited Martin Milner. A lot of, I mean, I'm a huge Bert Lancaster guy, one of my favorite actors. Tony Curtis is so good in it as well. It's such, it's such a triumph.

So that's our next movie on Patreon. All right. Until then, that's it for us. For John Gans, I'm Jamal Bowie. And we'll see you next time. You know, I'm going to be. You know,