Spielberg’s ‘Disclosure Day’ Should Have Listened to Religious People More
(REVIEW) Steven Spielberg’s latest film “Disclosure Day” asks how people of faith would deal with finding out aliens are real.
Sadly, one gets the distinct impression that Spielberg didn’t talk to any religious people when deciding his answer.
Spielberg is responsible for some of the most iconic movies about aliens and faith ever made. For aliens, he made “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” For faith, such hits as “Raiders of the Lost Arc” and “The Last Crusade.”
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In “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg and David Koepp try explicitly to show how religious faith exists in a world where aliens exist. The film follows whistleblower Daniel Kelner (played by Josh O’Conner) and TV weatherwoman Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt) as they try to outrun a shadowy organization run by the unscrupulous Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth).
"If this truth were just known overnight, if the government announced, ‘Yes, we have been keeping this from you since 1947,’ that would mess up a lot of people,” Spielberg told CBS “Sunday Morning.” “And the movie also takes the position of the church. What does this do to the fundamental beliefs that many of us have? Is God, our God, only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there's civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?"
Kelner’s girlfriend, Jane, is the first person in the film to express fear at what this revelation could do. A deeply religious person who, at one point, was training to be a nun, Jane pleads with Kelner not to reveal that aliens exist because belief in a supreme being is what holds society together. She feared introducing multiple supreme beings would destroy society.
In some ways, this is remarkably astute socio-religious commentary. Sociologists Ryan Burge and Jonathan Haidt have argued the same thing in their books “The Vanishing Church” and “The Anxious Generation” respectively. Human beings need a common worship of their shared values to be socially bonded in community-wide groups. And religious communities do that more effectively than any other social organization. Both Burge and Haidt largely attribute the growing divisions today to a lack of such a common religious social framework.
But this is also one of the many ways Spielberg’s film feels out of touch. Religion hasn’t fulfilled that unifying force function in America for decades. Today, aliens wouldn’t disrupt any such religious glue holding together society because that ship has already sailed.
It’s also somewhat out of touch with how actual religious communities think about how their faith relates to aliens. Most Christian thinkers who’ve actually dealt with the question are totally comfortable with the compatibility of Christianity and aliens. CS Lewis literally made a whole sci-fi trilogy about it.
Instead, as Ross Douthat explained in The New York Times, religious people have “the fear of a particular kind of extraterrestrial encounter, where supposed brothers from another planet offer themselves as shepherds of our souls, and we have to decide whether it’s a revelation or a grand deception.”
As Randal King writes, “I don’t have a problem believing in his movie aliens. I’m just not prepared to elevate them to deities who will fix us if we just listen.”
This tendency in Hollywood to deify aliens is partly why Christian figures like Rod Dreher argue aliens are probably demons. (Fittingly, he argued “Disclosure Day” is essentially running propaganda for these demon-aliens).
From a narrative standpoint, it’s unfortunate that Spielberg and Koepp didn’t incorporate these viewpoints into the film. Because it fits very well with the themes they’re going for. The film says that our self-protectiveness and fear of the other is what’s destroying us. And if we just welcome the outsider — literally the “aliens” among us — and “listen” to them, then humanity will be saved. Humanity is bad when it builds fences, but good when it builds bridges.
Perhaps there’s a reason they didn’t bring up that side of the debate. Because the way the aliens in the film behave, it kind of seems like those “closed-minded Christians” would be right: the aliens are demons. In the movie, the aliens kidnap two children, rewire their brains against their will, implant them with superpowers and then leave them with psychological and social scars, alienating them from the rest of humanity.
It goes further. The aliens give Fairchild empathetic superpowers, and she uses them constantly to turn people into obedient sheep. It’s hard to think about this for more than five seconds and still think the aliens are the good guys rather than the bad guys brainwashing humanity.
Ironically, portraying this kind of brainwashing as “empathy” makes the same case against empathy many Christians today make. There’s been a wave of conservative Christians arguing that empathy either is bad or can be bad, with books like Joe Rigney’s “The Sin of Empathy” and Allie Stuckley’s “Toxic Empathy.” The idea is that if you identify with other people’s feelings too deeply, you lose your impartiality or reason.
This also brings us to how gendered "Disclosure Day” is. Women (whether by nature or nurture or both) tend to be more empathetic than men, and men are more analytical and aggressive than women. Fittingly, the gift the aliens give Fairchild is super-empathy, and Kelner the gift of understanding really advanced math. Women are more likely to believe in the supernatural, and men are more likely to believe in aliens. So, having a reconciliation of faith and aliens and empathy and math is very much a reconciliation of the sexes.
This is one reason Hollywood films like “Disclosure Day” increasingly elevate female-coded spirituality over male-coded religion. If empathy is the highest virtue — as “Disclosure Day” claims — and women are more empathetic than men, then women are better moral guides. You see this in “Disclosure Day” where, not only are the majority of religious people women, but the only times you see positive portrayals of faith are from the women.
Again, the film is talking at religious people rather than engaging with them. There is a reason religious demographics are changing toward the male-coded and anti-empathy: everyone else has left. In “The Vanishing Church,” Burge shows that religious liberals left their conservative churches, and the liberal churches died out. Many who are left believe that empathy without truth kills real faith.
The point is not that Spielberg needs to agree with them. The point is that his movie engages with questions he wants to imagine believers have rather than the ones they actually have.
“Disclosure Day” ends with a message from the aliens telling humanity to “listen”. If Spielberg and Koepp had taken this advice, they might have had a film worth listening to.
“Disclosure Day” is playing in theaters now.
Joseph Holmes is an award-nominated filmmaker and culture critic living in New York. He is co-host of the podcast “The Overthinkers” and its companion website theoverthinkersjournal.world, where he discusses art, culture and faith with his fellow overthinkers. His other work and contact info can be found at josephholmesstudios.com.