Invasion of the mind snatchers: The assaultive empathy of Disclosure Day

Note: This discusses the entire plot of Disclosure Day, spoilers abound.

Aliens are real, and “they regard empathy as an evolutionary advantage, as the foremost evolutionary advantage. In fact, the core of animate existence. Our rejection of this understanding is leading us to our extinction.” So says a character in Disclosure Day, and what better place to advance this argument than a movie? “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy,” Roger Ebert famously wrote, but the machine was breaking down at my screening. In his latest flick Stephen Spielberg mixes earnest action with at-times awkward staging and blunt dialogue, as other critics have noted he’s swerved into Shyamalan territory. Something easy to laugh at, and yet I don’t think that fully explained the people behind me cracking up for much of the film, giggling not just at the dialogue’s corn but at any time Colin Firth opened his mouth. An inside joke gone nuclear? A stoned session pre-film? I was trying to get into their heads to figure out what prompted their increasingly distracting reactions, when it was likely they were just being kings of da highway. And in any case, the real issue was that they were unwilling to pick up what Spielberg was laying down. They were unwilling to let him into their heads. 

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There is a very sick joke in Disclosure Day where humans are shown ruthlessly probing an alien, an inversion of the typical narrative. And in a similar reversal, the film is about outside invasion that is not physically alien — whether the open attack in War of the Worlds or the surreptitious infiltration of Invasion of the Body Snatchers — but human mental domination. This is done through alien intervention, yes, but Spielberg’s concerns (as mediated through David Koepp, who scripted from Spielberg’s ideas) are more down to earth. The plot revolves around Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt trying to disclose proof of alien existence to the rest of humanity as World War III looms, the emotional throughline is about how humans deal with the communicative powers granted to them by a bunch of largely off-screen Greys. O’Connor is able to understand alien communication, while Blunt can speak and converse in all human languages and more importantly immediately access human minds, telepathically plucking current thoughts and buried memories with ease; the aforementioned Firth cannot enter other minds on his own but uses stolen alien tech to force his way in, bending victims to his will. There is another great joke here, where Firth’s army of corporate goons disguises themselves as and outright aligns themselves with cops, while Blunt and O’Connor’s allies (led by corporate goon defector Colman Domingo) work with firefighters — the former group breaks down your door to cause you harm while the latter breaks down your door to save you. But they’re both destroying barriers you’ve put up.

Firth’s mental attacks, particularly an extended breaking of O’Connor’s girlfriend Eve Hewson, are not crude bombardments but the work of an empathetic torturer. He works to understand Hewson’s weak points and find agreement there, prying into her religious objections to releasing information about aliens and upsetting others’ understanding of God’s creation. Spielberg is very blunt in this regard, far more than Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s elliptical style, but Firth is up to the same thing as Masato Hagiwara’s mesmeric serial killer in Cure — digging deep and exploiting what is there, making a connection that the person he is connecting with would rather keep buried. In many ways Firth is putting in more effort than Blunt, who constantly reads people without the help of any alien doohickey and gives them direct, sound, Dear Abby-esque advice — leave that abusive partner, apologize to your wife because you’re both frazzled, etc. And she is even more direct with how she forces manipulative confrontations with a person’s — a victim’s? — memories. While Firth (and Hagiwara) find fault lines in relationships, Blunt builds bridges of sap, escaping Firth and his minions by jamming visions of loved ones in their heads, parents and spouses saying the magic words of apology and reconciliation and love that turn violent mercs to goo. These emotional moments are completely phony of course, but Spielberg very effectively films their impact. An expertly portrayed imagining of an entirely fictional scenario — where have I seen this before?

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Spielberg can still craft a great setpiece — the big train scene delivers, although it owes a bit to Indiana Jones on the tank in Last Crusade. But he has some odd whiffs here as well. I ultimately had to admit the cackling crew behind me had a point as we watched O’Connor crouch behind a split rail fence and sneak by several dozen armed goons all looking the other way. And when the goons finally discovered O’Connor, they failed to turn him and Hewson and their car into the final reel of Bonnie & Clyde; any idea that this was part of some plot to keep the pair alive was dashed by a Firth-manipulated Hewson trying to stab O’Connor to death. This kind of confused action plagues the film, threats of real violence undercut by lack of execution — the train sequence stands out because Henry Lloyd-Hughes’ furious deputy goon actually wants to kill people and the rest of the film feels like Spielberg replacing guns with walkie-talkies in real time. This reaches its nadir when Blunt telepathically conceals an entire warehouse full of people and material from Firth and his army; Spielberg retreats into risible goofery as mercs trip and flop over “invisible” boxes. It’s a restaging of the imaginary food fight from Hook, a mawkish slab of garbage that Spielberg apparently felt the need to revisit here. 

And not just in wack action — the prior sequence, the turn of the movie, riffs on Hook as well. A flashback reframes O’Connor and Blunt as Peter Pan and Wendy, two former kids who in the middle of the night wandered off into a strange and unsettling world. Never-Never Land does not have an area where aliens probe children’s brains; but the real Hook connection is how these lost children are now adults crashing back into their forgotten youth. Re-experiencing what was lost, a kind of empathy with the self that is very therapeutic but reinforcing the specialness of these folks, not their connection with others. And what they are experiencing is the act of those Greys jamming their heads full of power they did not ask for — Spielberg is very canny here, filming this as a scary experience mitigated by the connection between two children; you could also read this as victims of abuse reframing their trauma. It has been a very long time since I saw Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, which is in some way about two lost boys, but there seems to be some overlap here. 

O’Connor and Blunt’s recall is set in motion by Domingo and his army of true believers recreating, down to the detail of photographs on the mantel, Blunt’s house from when she was ten years old and lured into that alien surgery. It is a perfect memory and one that could only have come from Blunt’s head, plucked from there by the aliens themselves and passed on to Domingo and his crew, and all of a sudden Blunt is a lot less sanguine about the idea of invading a person’s brain when it’s her mind under assault. Or not even assault — that implies defense, opposition, and just as Blunt was able to walk into others’ heads it appears that Domingo’s Grey buddies were able to walk into hers. Empathy is is the erasure of barriers. “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face,” Corinthians tells us. “Now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” Empathy cuts both ways. “All the things that used to be inside me are outside me now,” Hagiwara tells the detective pursuing him. “And so I can see all of the things inside you, Doctor. But inside of me is empty.” Empathy on a large enough scale is all-consuming, something to be awed by. Before she walks into that perfectly recreated house, Blunt rebuffs the adoration of one of Domingo’s minions: “I will not be anyone’s religion.” But she doesn’t really have a choice in the matter, does she?   

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Blunt is superb throughout all of this, allowing frustration and fear while maintaining a core warmth and an entirely believable innate goodness that reflexively uses this new power in the way that we typically define empathy — concern for others and understanding their own emotions and how to react to them. It’s easy to get caught up in not the righteousness but the rightness of her cause, how she doesn’t need permission to take over her local news station in order to broadcast that footage of alien existence because it is the noble thing to do. However, she is not the most empathetic person in the movie. That would be Courtney Grace, an actor who formerly worked as a TV news reporter and anchor (and while Blunt is good it is striking how much better Grace is at the cadences and delivery the job entails) who portrays the face of a national news program that Blunt and company patch into, saying they’ve got a bigger story than DEFCON-1. 

As unimaginable images roll across the screen (that aforementioned alien probing does not appear to make the cut but multiple dead Greys are seen — a snuff film, leading into an alien autopsy?), Grace is thrust into the role of describing, contextualizing, reacting to things she has had no time to comprehend yet must mediate for the ever-increasing audience. She is a conduit, fully opening herself to what she sees and passing that to the entire world. This too garnered yuks from the audience in my theater, Grace is speaking in the oft-cliched language of TV news and her expressions are visibly distraught (she has already become a meme), to me it was heroic. Grace is thrust into an impossible situation with even less time to deal with it than the film’s leads and she chooses to give herself over to it while bringing her self — her professionalism and abilities — to bear on it. She is the element that makes this more than an info dump and turns it into a message, finally realizing the empathetic feedback loop Koepp and Spielberg have been promising. Empathy not as direct connection but an action in itself. While so much of the movie feels off or strained, this hits with the force of Spielberg films of the past.

Although it’s a little weird that this TV broadcast is the plan, right? At the start of the movie O’Connor is ready to dump the entire cache of alien footage online, where it can be disseminated immediately and he’s told no — that won’t work. The internet is too diffuse, too easy to refute. It won’t convince people in the way the need to be convinced. It won’t get in their heads. (I can tell you that footage would definitely get on television though, there is nothing TV news likes more than drafting off a viral video.) So the net is out and Spielberg doesn’t reach for the cinema either. Movies generally require you to come to them, either at the theater or by selection at home. Both of these ultimately require some kind of choice from audience, to select from the stream of the internet or to engage with a specific film. (Let’s not even bother with the behind-the-curve option of print.) Television and specifically TV news can short circuit this, or maybe straight circuit it — it is not necessarily that everyone agrees on the truth of the presentation, it’s that everyone feels the need to pay attention to the same thing. 

It is not hard to see the appeal of this for a projector of images like Spielberg — the power to put one thing into all minds. But what might that thing be? Grace relays the proof of alien existence to our entire planet, but then Domingo’s crew wheel out an actual alien. A special guest! He speaks in his own language to O’Connor, who translates in a whisper to Blunt, who then looks out into the camera in the film’s final seconds and tells the audience: “Listen.” Listen to the person who can crack into minds like so many eggs, speaking the words of a being not of this earth. And Spielberg has shown us this before, hasn’t he? What happens when an eager audience tunes in to a god with the face of a woman? All the things that used to be inside are outside me now.

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The ending of the film is probably not the apocalypse of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but I don’t trust it. I’m not letting it in. It turns out I have more in common with those laughing audience members than I thought. Maybe that is empathy too, no one said it had to be uplifting. Empathy requires trust; without it, there is no equal exchange. Spielberg is very good, just as Firth is, and I think he knows it — he lets Firth off the hook at the end and maybe that’s sympathy with the devil, one master of playing on people’s emotions nodding to another. Ultimately the empathy only flows one way from him. And Spielberg and Koepp create an interesting tiered empathy in the film, where Blunt invades and blows the minds of people she meets and has her mind invaded and blown by aliens, but they don’t close the circle. The aliens are here to guide us, not to take from us, if only we will let them into our lives. But they won’t let us into theirs, instead hiding in the forms of uncanny CGI beasts, insults to both animal and animatronic and an unwitting synecdoche with their essential lack of substance. What is in their minds?

“Last night, he could not make it / he tried hard, but he could not make it,” Frank Black sings at the start of the Pixies’ “Motorway to Roswell.” “On a holiday, so many miles / looking for a place to stay near some friendly star.” On their prior album, the band laid out a Disclosure Day-esque situation in “The Happening,” where Black describes a mass of people convening on Las Vegas after aliens land on the Strip. It’s a wonderful, hopeful song that ends in the way the movie does, right before the big moment of minds meeting but with the anticipation and faith in connection. But here Black is narrating the death of the alien that started it all, the one who crashed into New Mexico in 1947. And in his telling, this Grey was just a guy, out on the road and in need of a bed and out of luck. “How could this so great turn so shitty / he ended up in army crates / and photographs in files.” Black is making up a guy to get sad at.

And this is also empathy. Black’s words and voice, Kim Deal’s arpeggiated bass and David Lovering’s steady drums in a driving yet melancholy rhythm, Joey Santiago’s mournful haunting guitar — they probe a mind outside of their own in order to make it known to anyone who will listen. They create a story and in the creation dissolve boundaries, the way Grace’s recognition of wonder and horror brings her viewers in. The anthropomorphizing might deny a true alien encounter but the familiar sketched emotions and actions are a way into the unknown, not just an alien but his final moments. “He started driving for the motorway / and he came right down,” Black sings as the song crescendos, keyboardist Eric Drew Feldman throwing out skirls and smears as Santiago goes off, playing the blur and scream of a spaceship’s final moments and putting the listener there with the pilot, seeing the Earth in sight and the end approaching.  

That is what I hear and what I see, what is put in my head by these sounds that can only go so far and require me to go the rest of the way. This empathy is a choice, I don’t know what’s in the band’s head and they don’t know what’s in mine. Spielberg calls for faith in an other being’s expressway to your skull, I prefer meeting on the motorway. The song ends with Santiago’s looped guitar trailing off like a comet and Feldman’s keys twinkling like stars, remote but close enough to wonder at, here on the ground. It’s a sound that flows both ways, yearningly beaming out into the unfathomable sky and rippling down to earth from whatever is out there in space, a sound beyond language but clear as day. Listen.