Disclosure Day

I am enthusiastic about this movie, but you have to preface that with this is a Spielberg movie. It is fast paced adventure, so there are a lot of "just go with it" moments. It is a sugary confection that melts under the scrutiny of logic of asking how would such things happen in the real world. It is a fable and thus is carried by fable rules.

Like Close Encounters, Spielberg uses aliens to bring mystery, transcendence, and awe to the very human need to connect, have a place in the universe, and to be seen and understood. Disclosure Day gives us a world about to tip over the brink into a nuclear world war three. Casually news and viewers go about their days fullfilling their mundane duties, all the while grappling with the unease of balancing life goes on with it might actually not. People raid grocery stores and still play Candy Crush.

Our salvation in Spielberg's fable is empathy, not just an emotional empathy, but an ability to understand something by experiencing it. The two leads represent the perfection of rational and emotion undersanding; not warring or being balanced against each other, but being a united expression of our truest nature. Humanity will be saved by being able to understand, an empathy is just a necessary as intellect to true understanding. We are treated to car chases, slapstick cops, montages of stunned crowds "looking up;" but the most powerful part of the movie is Margaret (Emily Blunt)'s new found ability to just understand people. She speaks any language. She knows their lives. She is connected to and deeply understands everyone; and in doing do asks us to all just listen.

From Indiana Jones to Disclosure Day; the theme of empathy as one of humanities highest values and most worthwhile endevors repeats across Spielberg. Indiana Jone's superpower is he understands the history and context of all the artifacts and people he meets. Margaret's superpower is she knows everyone and how it feels to be them. In Spielberg's world, the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes, or spaceship, is the goal of the movie.

The climax is not a scene of alien explosions, but a news caster giving a human reaction to seeing decades of imhumanity towards the inhuman aliens we have been on contact with. She apologizes to the viewers, and in doing to, so us as the movie audience. The point is to tell us that we should feel saddened. We should empathize with the aliens. We should see the alien as human and ourselves in them. The climax of the movie is a spectical and narration intended to invoke the audiences ability to empathize with something that was kept unknowable until that moment; thus creating a feeling of revalation and connection. He wants us to feel the connection, not just be told about it.

Whether intentional or just the result of a life surrounded by jewish culture, Disclosure Day is almost kabbalistic in it's presentation. The great rabbi Maimonides describes prophecy as occurring when the Active Intellect overflows into both the rational faculty and the imaginative faculty simultaneously, neither alone is sufficient. The rational faculty (Daniel's perfect pattern-recognition of the universal language) without the imaginative/empathic faculty produces only philosophy. The imaginative faculty (Margaret's ability to feel individual lives) without the rational produces only dreams or emotion. Prophecy, true revelation, is their union. The film's climax is literally structured this way: the revelation cannot happen until the two characters are together and complete each other.

The Kabbalistic resonance is also there. In the Sefirot, Chokhmah (Wisdom: the primordial flash of universal insight) and Binah (Understanding: the individualizing, processing, maternal principle) are the "father" and "mother" through which divine overflow becomes apprehensible. Daniel and Margaret are the mother and father of profecy. Neither Sefirah is superior, the tree only functions through their union.

Margaret's superpower is not just empathy in a soft sense , it's the specific ability to know someone's situation before judging them, as tought in the Talmud, "do not judge your fellow until you have reached their place". Margaret embodies the precondition for correct judgment that the Talmud says we can never actually meet. The aliens have granted it to her as a kind of gift to humanity. She know the cop who pulls her owner, she understand the fear of the woman is secretly suffering from domestic violence, she know what the korean commentator is trying to explain.

The climax, the newscaster apologizing, is then the moment this empathy cascades outward to the audience. We are asked to retroactively feel what we didn't know to feel: that the aliens were individuals with lives and suffering. The broadcast is a kind of collective return or repentance, made possible only because someone finally knew them.