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Steven Spielberg has long celebrated the outsider as source not only of moral rectitude but of superior knowledge so that spiritual and social development requires openness to what lies outside outside oneself outside one's culture radical empathy indeed deference to the outsider the other the alien he's a mythmaker for a post-war American and Western culture in general and the culture hero of his myth is always the outsider this has all been said before it just happens that the outsider is now

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grotesque and monstrous and I'm going to get into why I think that but you already had some of this with ET of which the aging directors slightly hackneyed latest possibly final movie disclosure day is a sort of extreme retelling I'm going to summarize the plot and sort of make my points as I go so heavy spoilers ahead disclosure day screenplay by David Koepp Koep story by Spielberg himself sees humanity on the brink of a world war and it's at this critical juncture that a cybersecurity

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specialist called Daniel Kelner steals secret files as well as some alien technology from a government-linked corporation called Wardex the files reveal the extent of secret human alien contact and the fact that Wardex even has an alien in custody and Daniel is forced to hide out with his girlfriend Jane while he tries to get this information out there because he's not into posting it on X or Substack or YouTube apparently he wants mainstream legacy media to pick up the story so Spielberg is boomerizing a little bit

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there deferring to old sources of authority you could say Another very typical Spielbergian element, by the way, is that the good guys here are rebels against a repressive authority, Wardex, even though they actually represent a far greater structure of control and even coercion, the aliens themselves. Protagonists always imagine themselves as enemies of a power structure even when they align with power. Power is parasitic on the romance of rebellion in post-war American culture. That's a very

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important element. But anyway, Wardex CEO, Noah Scanlon, he's played by Colin Firth, uses alien technology at some point to possess Jane, Daniel's girlfriend, to get a hold of Daniel, but she can stop his remote influence by causing herself pain, which she does by holding a cross pendant and cutting her hand open, essentially giving herself a stigmata, interestingly. So, devotional Christianity, Christian piety, not the original theology, because Jane is sort of a former nun and lapsed Catholic, but

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the devotional pious elements of Christianity end up being instruments for the good guys here. They serve the cause of Spielberg's disclosure. Christianity has been instrumentalized. That's very interesting. While Daniel is hiding out, a woman called Margaret Fairchild, played by Emily Blunt, she's a meteorologist, is apparently developing psychic abilities. During a live broadcast, she starts making weird sounds that turn out to be an alien language. That sets off alarms at Wardex, so they

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start going after her as well. And she has to go into hiding. Part of what she says in alienese translates to don't be afraid of what you don't know. Again, the theme of opening up to the outside, the unknown, the alien. Ultimately, suppressing your immune response to the strange and even the violent. Again, I'll get to that. Daniel is finally caught by Wardex and gets locked up. Margaret follows certain visions until she discovers the black site where Daniel is being kept. She uses her psychic abilities, her extreme

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empathy, to get the guards to let him go and they escape together. Daniel and Margaret are rescued by one of the whistleblower employees at Wardex called Hugo Wakefield, who takes them to an exact recreation of Margaret's childhood home. Wakefield is probably an alien in disguise, but that's not spelled out. This recreated childhood home is meant to act as a psychological trigger to awaken repressed memories in her because in truth Daniel and Margaret already know each other. As children, they were

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both abducted by aliens and subjected to some procedure that led to their having complementary abilities. They were selected from early childhood to eventually reveal the aliens message as ambassadors, as translators, so to speak. The procedure that they underwent is understood to have been deeply traumatic because they repressed the memory or it was repressed for them and they react with anxiety when it has to be recovered, when it has to resurface. Spielberg is justifying trauma and abuse here since the aliens who do all this

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are the good guys in the film. There's no getting around that. Now, as a result of these childhood procedures, Daniel got certain intellectual gifts that allow him to understand the complex mathematics and language structure of the aliens. >> Do you understand what she's saying? >> I hear it. It's gibberish. So again, it. >> Look, >> care. >> So that he can relay their message, his ability complements Margaret's psychic and empathic power. Daniel and Margaret

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eventually find a way to reveal what they know on television. They tell the world that Wardex has a tortured alien in its custody. You could read this as the use of atrocity propaganda to get humanity to empathize with the other and eventually to defer to the other. This is also the version of Christianity that's sort of latent in the movie. Authority comes from suffering. The one that has suffered has authority over you once you can pity that one. The tortured alien is the Christ of the movie. Your

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critical faculties, judging whether what they say is true or not, are less important than your empathetic instincts. To compensate for its suffering by submitting to it in some sense. Because indeed the Wardex whistleblowers produce the tortured alien that was in Wardex custody and it communicates its message to Margaret and Daniel on TV. The message being the word listen, which can be read as a soft-hearted plea or a command. Now, very importantly, the child version of Margaret was singing a song from Disney

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Sleeping Beauty, the animated film. >> Someday >> [music] >> my prince will [singing] come. >> Before the aliens, disguised as cute woodland creatures, appear, also very much in Disney style, to lure her into getting abducted. So childhood aesthetics here are instruments for kidnapping. She goes along and encounters what is referred to as the Hansel and Gretel house. That's the ship, presumably. So she would be Gretel and Daniel would be Hansel. He is the prince she was longing for or maybe the

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aliens are the prince with respect to humanity, like the substitute for the bridegroom Christ marrying the bride, humanity in Christian theology. Given the use of religious symbolism, including Christian symbolism, throughout the film, that seems like a likely substitution going on here. Margaret and Daniel were placed on examination tables or beds, which remind us of the often sexual content of reported abduction experiences and the long-standing conspiracy theory trope that this kind of abuse is used by certain elements of

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the government and elsewhere to induce dissociation through trauma and activate psychic abilities in people. You don't have to believe that, but that is a big part of the conspiracy theory lore, and Spielberg is using symbols from that lore. Importantly, the appearance of animals who are actually not animals is, of course, a recurring part of abduction accounts and relates to jinn or fairy stories in the folklore of cultures the world over, where they impersonate animals, which reminds us of Jacques

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Vallée's theories concerning aliens that they're actually spiritual beings. At times, what was traditionally, in a religious context, referred to as demons. Spielberg has, of course, worked with Vallée in the past and would be consciously referencing that as well. The fact that the alien ship is remembered as the Hansel and Gretel house is also very significant and very ominous. What happens there, in the original fairy tale, is that the children are fattened up for a witch to eat them, and they end up defeating that

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witch, but there is no defeated witch in this movie. What they encounter there are the aliens. That's who the house belongs to, just as the house belonged to the witch in the original story. So, the aliens are the witch. The supernatural and indeed dark element is actually quite explicit here, albeit its meaning is reversed. The procedure, the trauma that the children face would be the food the witch feeds Hansel and Gretel, and the abilities that they gain would be their being fattened up. Right?

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That's the equivalent. The final defense of the aliens, the relaying of the alien message to all of humanity, becoming agents for the aliens, is being eaten up. It's the final consumption of Hansel and Gretel by the witch. They are made part of the witch. They act on her their behalf. And with them, all of humanity, right? They're kind of luring humanity the way they were lured as children. For Spielberg, this is presented as all a good thing, but for us as viewers watching with a critical eye, it's a bit

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of a revelation of how dark the mentality here really runs, I would suggest. The message of this movie, the framing of abuse, frankly, the use of the Hansel and Gretel trope give me pause because Spielberg is essentially justifying trauma-based initiation and of children, no less, as well as basically the uncritical adoption of guidance from some outside source of authority that perpetrates that trauma, that abuse. The movie is counter-traditional, counter-initiatory. Trauma and memory suppression instead of

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lucid spiritual exercise, meditation, prayer. Abilities gained from trauma instead of gifts through prayer. Empathy basically as Stockholm syndrome instead of love, transcendence through technology. The aliens are more advanced than us. You have the outsider, that which is alien and strange instead of that which is genuinely beyond or transcendent. Okay, bit of a rant really. I didn't take time to write this script out too systematically. I just wanted to put this out since the movie has been released and I wanted to share

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some thoughts. Thank you very much for watching. As always, please do like and subscribe, support the channel, join me on Twitter. You can buy me a coffee, you can join me on Substack, become a paid member of Substack, buy my book, etc. Again, thank you very much and until next time.