I saw _Contact_ on Wednesday. I've since thought about it & discussed
my thoughts with the scientist who attended the film with me.
I have serious reservations about its representation of science
vis-a-vis religion, which requires a slightly different way of
talking about the film than I've yet seen here. & I believe certain
problems with Arroway's characterization are implicated in these
problems.
******************************************************************************Warning:
my discussion is a definite spoiler.
******************************************************************************
First, let me say what I *like* about this film. I adored the
opening sequence. It captured for me, visually, a certain breathless
wonder one finds more often looking at the natural world(s) than
in reading science fiction (though certain sf writers & readers
do like to *talk* about "wonder" a lot!). It was a pleasure to
me to see the depiction of a forceful, assertive woman as scientist
& protagonist who makes productive things happen. I liked seeing
an sf film that wasn't, for a change, an epic of nonstop adventure/violence.
& finally, I got a lot of pleasure from the wormhole sequence
& Arroway's meeting with the alien on the alien world.
That said, I believe the problems some list members are having
with the characterization of Arroway has to do with the film maker's
desire to make science *epistemologically* analagous to religion.
My argument is complicated, & contains two parts. First, characterization:
it's important that Arroway not be taken for a full character
at all, but as an icon of the driven, passionate scientist.
There is no other way to regard the inconsistency in the characterization
that allows us to make sense of it. The film gives us her childhood
only up to age 9, & attempts to explain her passion for the SETI
project as an effect of her relationship with her father & her
bereavement. What it does *not* explain (or attempt to explain)
is how she developed from that nine-year-old girl into an adult
woman who is easily assertive, easily able to express anger, fully
confident in her own capabilities & intellect, & able to ignore
authority figures & power structures as irrelevant obstacles.
Boys are often raised to become adults with such attitudes &
psychological capacities. It's part of their standard socialization.
But for a girl to become such an adult requires at least one
of two things: either she is nurtured along the way, & not punished
(but encouraged) for being headstrong & self-assertive (& all
institutions are against this: even parents determined not to
let their daughters be tarred with the good-girl/bad-girl designation
that is used against girl children as soon as they enter to school
as a means of behavior control find this almost impossible to
achieve); OR as a young woman she undergoes a long struggle to
achieve this capacity, in which case her relationship with authority
is likely to be seriously conflicted for a long time to come.
We know the latter can't have been the case for Arroway, since
authority figures mean nothing to her, & their evaluations of
her don't interest her, except insofar as they might be useful
for helping her to achieve the wherewithal to pursue her research.
But we also know the former can't be the case, because she has
absolutely no family ties, no family friends, no MENTORS. Her
life as a character stops at age 9 (with her feeling guilty, by
the bye, for her father's death-- something any child would need
a helpful nurturing adult to overcome), & picks up with her getting
her PhD from Stanford (apparently without any ties to a mentor
there). In other words, Eleanor Arroway is not depicting a real
person, but an icon of the self-made scientist who never had a
lick of help or support or encouragement that wasn't self-generated.
(Which supports the mythology that anyone could do anything without
any kind of help or benign negligence along the way.) Which is
okay-- only we need to understand that that's the case when we
talk about her character in the film.
As an icon, the film maker needed to make her sympathetic to the
audience (lest they see her as simply monomaniacal-- which of
course she is), so that the audience will sympathize with her
quest. The manipulative emotional scenes of her father's death
& the relationship with Palmer achieve this. These are the only
affective relationship she has. Otherwise, she is a total affective
blank. (But then she's an icon, not a character.)
I realize Sagan made the progagonist female in his book. But
this femaleness allows the film-maker to portray her as not quite
all there when she's testifying in the jerk politician's conspiracy
hearings. Suddenly she is no longer a trained scientist able
to marshall the obvious points. Rather, she's an emotional, inarticulate
WOMAN. She's actually browbeaten with the greatest ease into
saying that it was "possible" that Haddon could have faked the
whole thing. Now anyone paying attention would KNOW that scientifically
speaking it was NOT possible to have faked it. The transmission
was checked from several positions-- this being the very first
thing that Arroway did when she discovered the transmission.
No satellite could have generated such a transmission. A reminder
of this fact would have been the immediate response that a scientist
like Arroway would have made to the jerk politician's disingenuous
question. Second, no scientist would have confused ontological
with epistemological "faith." Or *optimism* with "faith." Scientists
are often highly *optimistic* about the truth of their conjectures.
But they *don't* discuss their conjectures' validity in terms
of *faith*. They're perfectly capable of "believing in" their
conjectures (read: being optimistic about the validity of their
conjectures) while reserving judgment until definitive evidence
comes in. Further, the film-maker deliberately conflated this
optimism with what any sf reader will recognize as "wonder."
(Which the film-maker wants to claim is the same thing as believing
in God, I guess.)
Second, the federal govt's depicted attitude toward the project
of building the alien technology was absurd, as was the idea that
real scientists faced with such schematic plans wouldn't be determined
to understand *everything* involved. If such schematic plans
came into the hands of the federal govt, they would damned sure
"reverse engineer" them. There would have been an enormous team
of physicists put to work on them. Second, they would have done
all sorts of runs & experiments before fully implementing it--
running it at 20%, say, again & again, to determine exactly what
was physically & theoretically happening as they "powered" the
thing up. That being so, Arroway should have been able to put
forth theoretical reasons for arguing that she really did travel
to another world in that split second. (& even if they *hadn't*
reverse-engineered, there would have been plenty of theoretical
physicists she could have called on to help her construct a theory
for how her trip could have happened.)
& finally, the idea of equating the use of Occam's razor to talk
about epistemology on the one hand & ontology on the other is
a downright manipulative category error. & using the protagonists'
interactions with children at the end of the film was a particularly
pernicious way of enforcing it.
I haven't read Sagan's book, but it's hard for me to believe a
scientist would be party to this kind of disingenuous, manipulative
argument.
Timmi
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:29 PDT