Contact: Religious Themes in the Film

The fact that Contact can be interpreted as an examination of the human encounter with God is latent in both the resolution of the story line and the attributes of character informing the narrative. This is the case even though the manifest content of the film is that of a science-fiction adventure story. Such an interpretation can be justified by the fact that the narrative action begins when astrophysicist Ellie Arroway realizes that the radiotelescope transmissions being received contain cryptographic instructions for building a device suited to space travel across many light years and (presumably) galaxies. Once and for all the question of whether "we are not alone" is resolved. But that information is important because it carries myriad cosmological implications.

Ellie has a serious scientific purpose and mind-set: Her life is her career, and she relies on facts and science, not intuition or emotion, still less religion. Memories of her father are learning memories, as if the emotional bridge to him was mediated by transmission of scientific knowledge and as if her career is a tribute to him. She is specifically opaque to attempts

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a word Tillich uses to describe, first, the human impulse toward a God-concept, and second, the Christian doctrine of the Christ as the fulfillment of longing, as it were the material confirmation of the impulse toward faith, or the symbol of the fulfilled promise of affinity with the divine. But one does not have to be Christian to see the analogy. Tillich cites Otto's term the idea of the holy in that regard, describing the reach for the eternal principle. The realm of consciousness in full, not the realm of the senses or of logic individually, is the content of this dynamic. Contact between materiality and consciousness, or as it were between certainty and the abyss, together with the human inability to bridge the disconnect except in conceptual structures, is the thematic content of Ellie's space-wormhole adventure. Yet having returned to material reality, convinced that the adventure was not conceptual only, she is forced into acknowledging that she cannot convey the truth of the connection. But the experience is decisive; she reorders her material priorities to make herself more available to cosmic unconditionality. Historically, theological God-concepts treat of what (and perhaps whether) God is and does. What is believed a
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2583
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)