ed is idiosyncratic and virtually impossible to share. Or at least it is impossible to share relative to the manner in which reason and evidence come together to make sense of material experience. In Contact, Ellie's experience is materially real, or anyway not her imagination, but it is also strongly at odds with the material experience of the scientists. Because hard-science reality is grounded in the evidence of material time, space, and objects, the effect of her experience is that its reality is spiritual or magical, hence less important than material reality that human beings share.
Ellie's failure to convey the reality she has felt and her conviction that what she experienced was direct and tangible for her are what make Contact a proxy for the encounter between man and God--or more exactly for the unavoidable encounter between man and the problem of
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