Disclosure Day: Looking and Listening

Disclosure Day starts with a noisy wrestling match. As the crowd is busy watching the fighters, two uniformed individuals tell a nervous-looking man to drop his backpack. This is a film concerned with looking. It’s about the way we look, what we look at (perhaps something that is a pretence; it’s not a boxing match, it’s wrestling), what gets in the way of looking, and what we miss out on (the truth?) when we don’t see clearly.

The truth in this film is that a company known as Wardex has hidden the existence, and abuse, of aliens from the human race for decades. The nervous-looking man is Daniel Kellner, a cyber security expert who is gifted in mathematics (“the language of the universe”). In his backpack is evidence of this truth, which he and a small group of other ex-Wardex employees intend to share with the human race, and one of three alien devices. Wardex, led by Noah Scanlon, intends to stop them because, the argument goes, people can’t be trusted not to tear each other apart in the face of the truth.

Unfortunately that’s already happening. The world is on the brink of a third world war and we’re shown people panic buying food and fuel. Against this backdrop, Margaret Fairchild, a local weather reporter — whose job is to communicate what forces move in the skies above us — is visited in her home by a creature of the skies: a bird, specifically a red cardinal. She’s transfixed, not taking her eyes off the bird until her boyfriend lets it out. After this, Margaret can speak and understand languages she’s never learnt, including an extra-terrestrial one. More significantly, she can “drop in on people”: know them and the circumstances of their lives, psychically, intuitively and empathically. The word cardinal comes from the Latin for hinge, and much hinges on Margaret’s new way of seeing people (and not-people too).

Meanwhile, Daniel and his girlfriend Jane, a former novitiate nun, are being pursued by Wardex agents. Noah uses one of the alien devices to locate Jane, then to replace her eyes with his own. By forcing her to see through his eyes, he’s not only able to look into her environment and see personal details that give away the couple’s location, he’s also able to control her, making her do things she wouldn’t otherwise do. Only by causing herself very real physical pain (breaking the skin on her palm with a crucifix as if stigmata) can she break free, taking back her own way of looking at the world.

As the film unfolds, Daniel and Margaret come together; they know each other, but can’t say how. The man who provides the answer, or at least the environment for them to discover the answer for themselves, is Hugo Wakefield, another former Wardex employee. He describes the pair as “experiencers” and we begin to understand that they’ve had previous alien encounters, notwithstanding that they don’t remember them. But it’s an interesting choice of language. When people talk about wanting an “experience,” they mean going to places they’ve never been before, seeing and doing things they’ve not seen and done before. Usually having an “experience” stands in opposition to scrolling on one’s phone; it’s an active, rather than a passive, looking.

Margaret, initially, can’t look Hugo in the eye. He’s “the man who knows everything”, while she doesn’t understand anything. Who hasn’t shrank when faced with the person we believe knows it all? It’s only after she’s been back into her past (a place she feared and repressed), discovered her own truth and acknowledges the gifts the aliens gave to her (and Daniel) that she’s able to look at Hugo directly; to meet him for the first time. Fear clouds our vision; it stops us from seeing what’s really there. When we face our fears, know ourselves, put ourselves to one side instead of getting in our own sight lines, we better see others too.

This is Noah’s issue too, who only made everything “need to know” after his wife died. This too is when he began to criticise people for asking questions, for “being astonished”. Margaret and Daniel were children when the aliens gave them their gifts. We see them being gently but firmly held as a procedure is carried out on their eyes. Children are sometimes described as “wide-eyed: they look at things afresh and without judgement. When you’re learning new things everyday, you’re more accepting of the extraordinary (compare the reactions of Elliot and Elliot’s mother in ET, for example). Are the aliens, who we’re told prize empathy above all, simply preserving a child’s wide-eyed, clear-sighted way of looking at other people and the world? Is that what Spielberg, and so many other artists, are trying to achieve too?

The alternative is cynicism. Assuming we know what something or someone is; that we’ve seen it all before. Or taking people and things apart for their “failings” under the guise of criticism. If you’re only looking for the bad, that’s all you’ll ever find. But if you come with judgments to one side, just to look and to listen with a willingness to understand — and using your own eyes, not those of a bad, or simply cynical, actor — you might see something new, and possibly extraordinary. You might be astonished.

When disclosure day comes around, the evidence is broadcast on local news. The film chooses to spend time showing us how that news is picked up and transmitted to major networks across the world. If Daniel had simply posted everything on the internet as he suggests early on, we wouldn’t have seen this cardinal fact: we’re all connected (we’re not alone) and, after all,  people can be trusted to act on the truth. As the evidence is broadcast around the world, far from reacting rashly, people are shown not taking action, instead simply watching, wide-eyed, astonished.

In the quiet last minutes of the film, an alien who is significantly taller (and, for that reason, we understand, older) than the aliens in the broadcast evidence steps out of a wheelchair in the local news studio to greet Daniel and Margaret. His message, to be broadcast live around the world via Margaret, is clear, but profound: listen.