“Is this the movie we’re watching?” my wife asked me during the opening scene. Good question. It was a bloody “professional wrestling” match, closer to the schlock previews we’d suffered than to the Spielberg of the Fabelmans. Spielberg pulls away from this spectacle into his plot, where the hero tries and fails to rescue his girlfriend from abduction.
Obviously something that obtrusive has to carry the heart of the film. Here it is.
The elements count. The wrestling is theatrical, a show of faked rage and attack. The fakery (aka Theatre) can later be read as a parallel to the American government’s performative obfuscation of our messengers from outer space. Also, the violence of the government’s treatment of the creatures, the assumed enemy.
The scene’s later antithesis is the climactic “staging” or theatre when our heroes transmit the documentary footage of the ETs and their torture on every TV network in the world. Here the heroes break down our division into separate audiences, separate networks, separating languages and cultures, in the hope of rediscovering the unity and overriding community of the human race. (That would take creatures from the beyond.)
The scene’s more important connection is to the key discussion between the two major political antagonists. Indeed, the film could be summarized as a fight between the dehumanized Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth) whose very name reduces him from God-serving saviour to a destructive enemy of mankind, and his erstwhile and abandoned colleague Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo).
Their conversation conveys the film’s central ethic: our need for empathy. That’s what made us and its loss ends us.
The two men’s constructive unity ended when Scanlon’s loss of his wife froze his heart and turned him callous, isolationist in the cosmos as in his company. The wrestling scene is a brutal dramatization of the absence of empathy, indeed its dehumanizing antithesis. When the spectator takes a side, when we identify with one of the savages, we perform a parody of empathy because we’re encouraging harsher violence.
In contrast, empathy is the strength that propels the two central heroes, Morgan Fairchild (Emily Blount) and Daniel Kelner (Josh O’Connor). The supernatural empathy is Fairchild’s ability immediately to read strangers’ minds and fluently to speak and to understand foreign languages. — to her own shock. It saves her repeatedly.
This super-verbal understanding and communication also parallel the climactic collapse of all TV networks into one story, one language, one emotional embrace and the rejection of normative fragmentation and antagonism. Like the wrestlers’.
The call to empathy — and our outrage at its loss — is the film’s clearest response to America’s current political situation. The president has been charged with many things: racism, treachery, lying, rape, financial corruption and impropriety, indeed a scale of corruption, self-service and destructiveness unprecedented in democracy.
But he has never been accused of empathy. To that extent this film is about him. And the Us he’s shaping.
The parallel goes further. Scanlon’s army has the viciousness and indiscrimination of Trump’s ICE, equally abhorrent of the newcomer, whether from space or Not America. Scanlon also matches Trump’s domination of the media and his subversive politics.
Oh, and then there’s the wrestling. The opening scene clearly puts the film into the context of Trump celebrating hia birthday with a ballyhooed (and anticlimactic) cage match on the White House greens.
Of course that match didn’t happen until very late in the film’s scripting and achievement. But Trump has had long association with the pro wrestling circuit. The match was a culmination of his friendship and collaboration with the sponsoring czar. Trump actually appointed one wrestling mogul Secretary of Education — honest, he really did — , with the mission of closing down the operation. (Her reign was characterised by confusing AI with the A1 bar-b-q sauce. Nobody’s perfect.), Indeed the “sport’s” blood capsule has been suspected of accounting for Trump’s miraculously regrown ear in an ostensible assassination attempt.Trump was associated with the fakery and violence of prof wrestling clearly enough to inspire Spielberg’s opening scene. With his cage match Trump usefully played into Spielberg’s poetry.
