In Field of Dreams, a man is reunited with his long dead father and with the vague images and fantasies that remained of his mother, who had died when he was a small child. Contact, a film released nearly ten years later, makes explicit this theme of reuniting with a father who is long gone and, through him, a mother who is only imagined.
Contact deals with the search for intelligent life beyond our solar system and for meaning and God here on Earth. Whenever people actually cross such a frontier they may well encounter experiences and observations that are beyond our current comprehension; but attempts to give form to our fantasies about these encounters tend to fold back to our earliest experiences, the part of what we have already encountered that remains most mysterious.
The film begins on a jarring note. We suddenly find ourselves in space, looking down on the Earth, while greeted with a cacaphony of music and other sounds. As the view pans back, farther and farther into space, the noise settles into more discrete images, and we begin to realize that as our view rapidly races further into the galaxy, the audio images are moving back in time, through Nixon’s “I am not a crook” to Kennedy’s assassination, to “A day that will live in infamy”, to the barely heard voice of Hitler. This is followed by silence as we race through rocks and gases, a view at times quite beautiful, and finally end in a reflection in the eye of a young girl. This opening is meant to depict the travel of radio and television waves, carrying images into space, the older images always at a greater distance from Earth than the more recent ones as they move at the speed of light. Its meaning will become apparent later in the film.
Clearly, this introduction is also intended to give us a sense of a little girl, Ellie Arroway, searching into space. We find out shortly what she is looking for. She is attempting to make contact with anyone out there on a short wave radio, while her father looks on, encouraging her with the patient advice, “Slow moves, Sparks, slow moves.” After a few moments, she makes contact with a man in Pensacola, Florida.
We next see her at work in her bedroom at night, accompanied by her father, marking the distance to Pensacola from her home. She asks her father if she can broadcast to the moon, to Jupiter, to Saturn. He is encouraging, saying she’d need a big enough antenna. Then she asks, “Can I reach Mom?” He tells her that no one can reach that far. The film has told us in relatively unambiguous terms what she is looking for—her mother, long gone. We later learn that her mother died from complications of Ellie’s birth. She is looking for a mother she has never known. She then shows her father a picture she has drawn of Pensacola, a simple beach with blue skies, water, and palm trees. Its link with her question about her mother will prove important.
The film flashes forward to Ellie as a young woman staring at a large radio telescope somewhere in the jungles of Puerto Rico. She now has the large antenna she needed. The search for her mother, begun with a short wave radio, has expanded to the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and beyond. Ellie has devoted her life to SETI, search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.
We soon learn that she is also searching for her father. Ellie tells a young man she has met, Palmer Joss, that her father died when she was nine. As she leaves Palmer, clearly upset by the revival of her memory, we see her father’s death through her mind’s eye. She is on a porch watching shooting stars, waiting for her father to come out with popcorn. She hears a noise in the house, and goes running in to find her father on the floor, popcorn spilled from a broken bowl. She runs upstairs to get his medicine, but in the next scene we see a minister trying to comfort her with the words that her father’s death was meant for a greater good. She tells him her father might have been saved if she had thought to leave medicine downstairs, then runs upstairs, past mourners in the parlor, to her short wave radio where she cries out her call signals, saying, “Daddy, come back!”—for me, the film’s most heartfelt moment.
The body of the film is driven by Ellie’s attempt to make contact with extra-terrestrials and, beneath the surface, with her parents. We see her struggle through a series of setbacks and rebounds, culminating with her journey to the star, Vega. The film’s opening sequence makes sense when Ellie’s team receives a transmission from Vega with a television image of Hitler announcing the Berlin Olympics. It is explained that that was the first strong television signal sent out into space. It took twenty-six years to reach Vega, and the inhabitants of Vega were returning the image to us, with amplification. They also sent the blueprints for a machine apparently designed to send someone to Vega to meet them, preparing the way for Ellie’s voyage.
Along the way, Ellie is offered partial replacements for her father, with varying success. The first is Dr. Drumlin, the scientist who holds the purse for her project. He claims a fatherly attitude towards her while putting obstacles in her way. When she confronts him after he has cut off funding for her project, he tells her he is doing her a favor, saving her career from the crazy detour she has chosen. But his fatherly words are a hypocritical screen. He is a self-serving narcissist pursuing his own ends.
There is also her lover, Palmer Joss. He is her age, and makes no real claim to a fatherly role with her, but he has subtle links with her father. The first is simply that he is referred to as “Father Joss” because he attended divinity school, although he never entered the priesthood. In their first meeting, he hands Ellie a compass, which through the course of the film, moves back and forth between them, a symbol of the guidance they offer to each other. Palmer Joss also has a more intimate link with Ellie’s father. When Ellie discusses with him the possibility of intelligent life beyond our world, Joss echoes her father’s exact words, “If there isn’t, it’s a terrible waste of space.” She is clearly surprised, and for the audience familiar with the unwritten rules of movie watching, it attaches a sign to him linking him with her dead father and giving special meaning to their relationship.
Finally, there is Ellie’s powerful and mysterious benefactor, Dr. Hadden. After Drumlin cuts off her funding, Ellie searches for money to continue the project. She is making her presentation in a large board room, and has just been turned down when the haughty man who called her work “science fiction” gets a phone call and tells her the project has been approved. Spying a small television camera above her, she waves her thanks to the mysterious benefactor behind the camera, the evil genius in charge of Hadden industries.
Four years later, just as Ellie learns that Drumlin has again undermined the project, she finally gets a signal from space, in the vicinity of the bright star, Vega. At first it is a rhythmic pulse, but soon it stops and begins, with the same pulses, to count out prime numbers, demonstrating an intelligent source. Suddenly, the project is the focus of world wide interest and government control. Drumlin, now the President’s science advisor, coopts leadership of the project he had twice disowned. Step by step, Ellie’s team discovers the television signal coming from Vega, with Hitler opening the Berlin Olympics. A second signal is discovered, with thousands of pages of symbols, awaiting decoding. Enter Ellie’s mysterious benefactor.
Ellie gets a strange message on her home computer and a phone call. She goes to a rendezvous with an airplane somewhere out in the desert, and is told she should be honored because “he” seldom lands. Her rendezvous is with Dr. Hadden. He lives in an airplane, feeling safe from his enemies by flying around continually. (Go figure!) He has a round, shaved head, glasses, and the style and smile of Hannibal Lecter. In fact, the encounter between Ellie, played by Jodie Foster, and Dr. Hadden, is eerily reminiscent of her earlier character in The Silence of the Lambs meeting with the psychopathically brilliant, yet vaguely fatherly Hannibal Lecter. Hadden shares Ellie’s father’s interest in science as well as his interest in Ellie. He has researched her life, calling her one of his best investments, and he acts as her powerful protector. Hadden presents her with the solution to the message from Vega that will lead to construction of a machine believed to be able to send one traveler into space.
Ellie and Drumlin become the leading candidates to be that traveler after the top candidate drops out in a scene that further echoes Ellie’s loss of her father. This man won’t go on the mission because his children are afraid of losing him. We see his two small children on a television screen looking back at him and saying, “Daddy, please don’t go.” (I was reminded of seeing one of Christa McAuliffe’s young children saying she didn’t want her mother to go on the Challenger.)
Ellie’s candidacy is undermined by Joss, who clearly does not want to lose her. He confronts her in front of the selection committee with the question of her belief in God. His belief in God began with an epiphany, an unusual experience that told him without doubt that there was a God. Ellie had questioned it, asking how he knew it wasn’t simply a cure for his loneliness. Her comment came just before she described the source of her own loneliness, her father’s death. Later in the film, when she asks if he has any proof of the existence of God, he counters by asking if she can prove her love for her father. The question of God, loneliness, and the search for missed parents have been intertwined.
Ellie’s guardian angel, Dr. Hadden, comes through for her again. After Drumlin and the original machine are blown up by a religious fanatic, Hadden contacts Ellie again. This time he is aboard the Mir space craft, and he tells her that he has helped build a second machine in Hokkaido, Japan. And, of course, he has arranged for Ellie to make the journey.
To this point, all of the film’s messages about Ellie’s search for her father and mother have been explicit, enough so that we can safely assume that they were consciously intended by the filmmakers and consciously understood by the audience. When Ellie begins her journey to Vega, we enter a realm in which the messages are not written in capital letters, but in visual imagery that is suggestive, appealing to us preconsciously, set up by the earlier explicit messages. At one point in her voyage, Ellie says, “You should have sent a poet” to describe the beauty of what she is seeing. I also feel I need the help of a poet—or novelist—to describe the imagery, but I will describe her journey as best I can. On the surface, we are presented with a fantasy of traveling to a distant star, but the visual imagery evokes a more deeply rooted fantasy, the kind a child might entertain, of traveling back through the birth canal to reenter the womb, and then to be reborn. I will use italics to highlight the images of travel through a canal and floating in a womb-like space.
The machine consists of a small capsule that is to be dropped into a spherical space marked by large spinning rings. No one knows how it is supposed to work. As the machine approaches its full power, Ellie sees flashes of light. The control room begins to lose her televised image and then her voice. The onlookers see the entire machine enveloped in bright light. Inside the capsule, Ellie tries to describe what she experiences. She sees herself traveling rapidly through space with vortices of multicolored gases in front of her. Then she is in space. As she watches, she reports back, “I’m going through a tunnel with a bright light at the end.” She takes it to be a “wormhole” (a space/time shortcut). She comes out of it in space, a bright star in front of her which she takes to be Vega. Ellie enters another wormhole and then another, finally finding herself in space, viewing a “quadrupal system—it’s beautiful.” She sees lights below, suggestive of civilization. She enters another wormhole, and the shaking of her seat causes her to lose her grip on Palmer’s compass, which begins to float away. She frees herself in her chair and floats freely in the capsule grabbing for the compass. The chair breaks up from the vibration and the lights in the capsule go off. Ellie lights a flashlight. She is floating in the capsule in space, looking up at a stunning, multicolored vortex of gases, awed by the beauty. “I had no idea. I had no idea.”
As in the beginning of the film, the camera now focuses into her eye, and then we see her gently falling, seemingly asleep, in a fetal position. She lands by some water, on a beach. She looks up to a beautiful, rainbow vortex, a spiral of clouds around a sun. Ellie reaches up and touches it with her finger. It shimmers, like a liquid membrane. (She is actually in a small, enclosed space.) Then she sees a figure coming towards her on the beach. As it gets closer, the image resolves into her father.
He greets her with his pet name for her, “Hi, Sparks.”
“Dad?”
He puts his hand to her face and hair and says, “I missed you.”
She puts her head to his chest and they hug.
He says, “Oh, I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you.”
Ellie moves back and looks at him. “You’re not real. None of this is real.”
He acknowledges it without leaving character. “That’s my little scientist.”
She says that they downloaded her memory while she was unconscious, “Even Pensacola.”” She looks around at the beach scene that brings to life the drawing she made many years ago after asking about her messages reaching Mom.
“We thought this might make things easier for you.”
He picks up some sand in his hand as Ellie asks why they contacted us.
“You contacted us,” he replies, referring of course to the TV signals sent into space, but also reminding us of young Ellie’s short wave radio messages sent out to Pensacola—and to her mother and her father. He explains to her that they didn’t build the machine, that it was built by others, long gone. “Maybe they’ll come back again some day.” He says that many civilizations have been contacted this way, that there are many others, as he shows her the bright grains of sand in his hand.
He takes her hand, saying, “You have your mother’s hands. You’re an interesting species, an interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. You see, in all our searching, the only thing we find that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. “
It is a peculiar idea, especially to those of us who live in big cities, that with several billion people on Earth a sense of loneliness can be cured by contact with a few trillion more out in space—unless that contact is understood as a reunion with the parents of our youth.
Ellie asks, “Now, what?” and is told that now she must go back. She protests that she has so many questions, but he reminds her of her father’s words at the beginning of the film. “Small moves, Ellie, small moves.” They look up together and see a beautiful meteor shower, sharing what they missed on the night he died.
Then Ellie sees a whirlpool above her and is swept into it, into another tunnel. Suddenly she is back in the capsule falling down into the water below. From the control room, they tell Ellie that the machine malfunctioned, that the capsule fell right through the machine into the net and the water. We see what they saw: The capsule moves into the spherical space of the machine amidst bright light, then something opens up below and it drops out into the net and the water.
What has happened here? On her return, Ellie is told that the spectators saw her capsule fall straight through the machine into the water below in a matter of seconds. In the world of the film, Ellie has either gone through space through a worm hole to meet with those on Vega, or, as the film’s skeptics argue, she had a fantasy, a dream. She is challenged that she has no evidence that what she experienced truly happened, but she answers that she believes it because of the reality of the experience. This links her with Palmer, who had earlier described such a leap of faith to explain his belief in God. In fact, we learn that there is evidence, kept secret by the government officials: that although there was nothing but static on her videotape, it was eighteen hours of static, the exact amount of time that Ellie had experienced on her journey. The viewer is clearly meant to feel that it happened.
The answer is that Ellie has traveled into space to get to Vega and that she has realized a fantasy of going back through the birth canal to the womb to meet her father and then to be “reborn”. Work with patients in psychoanalysis teaches that we develop many fantasies as children about the mystery of conception and birth. As adults, we maintain these fantasies out of our awareness. Ellie has traveled through tunnels, floated in an enclosed space, floated down in a fetal position, then found herself on a beautiful beach with links to her father and her wish to reach the mother she never knew. There, she is really again in a small space, enclosed by a soft, fluid, membrane. She meets her father, then goes back through the tunnel to be dropped down into a net. The imagery is of moving through tunnels to a small magical membranous space, then back through the tunnel to drop out into water in a sudden, violent rebirth.
I began suggesting a comparison with Field of Dreams. In that film, the focus was on the pain of difference between a father and son. It ends in a magical field that overcomes death, allowing Ray Kinsella to have a catch with his long dead father. The field, with its negation of death, reunites him with his mother, who had died at a much earlier age. The mother who was lost at essentially a preverbal age cannot be remembered in detail, but the field itself is a magical space, like the “Pensacola” on Vega of Contact, while the reunion is achieved more vividly with father.
If Field of Dreams was vague, requiring much conjecture, Contact is more explicit. Ellie never knew her mother, except in the womb, and the fantasy of reunion with her is expressed in a return to the womb. But in the absence of a real mother to remember, the film provides a fantasy of reunion with her father. She meets him in her mother’s womb, at the site of her own conception. In both films, the father had to act as both father and mother, and in both films, the father must stand in for the flesh and blood reunion, while the mother is represented through a fantasy of a maternal space.
After her rebirth, Ellie goes on with her work but she appears calmer. In the terms of the film, we might speculate that the fantasy has helped resolve the trauma of her double loss and freed her to be reborn and to go on with her life, comforted by her magical experience. As for us, the viewers, we are reassured through fantasy that we can go home again.
Prior publications of versions of this film analysis: PANY Bulletin, Projections and Double Feature by Herbert H. Stein, M.D. (EBooks)