Are You Seeing What I'm Seeing?

The core tension at the heart of Steven Spielberg’s filmography is between the sweeping sentimentality of his films’ text and a deeply grim irony lying underneath, the childish fantasy seen through painfully adult eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, one of his best films and a kind of ur-text for the Spielbergian project. In it, Richard Dreyfuss’ Roy Neary is the patriarch of a boisterous suburban family who allows himself to become more and more obsessed by the psychic draw of extraterrestrial visitors. His fixation becomes so dramatic that his wife and children abandon him, and the film ends with him walking proudly inside a UFO which flies away into the unknown. A mutual of mine recently called it an “embrace of psychosis,” but while there are touching details in its climax (the return of all the abductees, for one) I struggle to imagine anyone coming away from Close Encounters not thinking about the family left behind as Roy chases awe and wonder. Close Encounters, it is worth noting, is one of three Spielberg films on which he has a screenplay credit, and it has this perspective in common with the other two. In his autobiographical film The Fabelmans, his self-insert is told by his grizzled carny grandfather that giving oneself over to artistic pursuits necessitates giving up one’s family. And in A.I. Artificial Intelligence, protagonist David ends the film by giving himself a fake reconciliation with his mother and then turning off his robot brain forever. Submission to childish fantasy, in Spielberg’s films, frequently requires a kind of suicide.

Spielberg has returned time and again to the particular fantasy of alien contact, first as something wonderful and friendly (in Close Encounters and E.T.) and more recently as something terrifyingly incomprehensible (in the post-9/11 War of the Worlds and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). His new film, Disclosure Day, based on a story treatment he has allegedly been thinking about for years, is less a fantasy and more a daydream of reality. You might fantasize about being gifted a billion dollars, for example, and daydream about your boss not coming into work today. The difference is the private hope, in the latter, that the fantastical could actually come true.

Appropriate, then, that Disclosure Day opens at a pro wrestling match, a form of entertainment that even more than cinema asks the audience to actively choose to believe in its falsehoods. Wrestling can be enjoyed as pure physical performance, like dancing in a stage musical, but what makes it unique is kayfabe, that layer of narrative atop each match that we all agree to pretend is real, because it’s just more fun that way. Intriguingly, the film’s opening shot is from the GoPro’d perspective of the wrestler Brian Cage as he gets stomped, tossed, smacked around. The sound design sells the moves the way real wrestlers do—a steel chair hits his back with the apparent force of an atom bomb. In reality, of course, these moves are carefully performed to create the illusion of impact. Yet this opening POV shot is framed as though every blow is completely real. Steven Says: Be Roy, embrace delusion, believe in the kayfabe.