The Director’s Fascination with Religious Themes Ultimately Points to More Earthbound Concerns
For Steven Spielberg, the sacred and the spooky, the angel and the alien, have always been separated by a paper-thin gap. The director’s first foray into the question of otherworldly visitors, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, saw its protagonist drawn to an ersatz holy mountain with the mad mysticism of a prophet. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial featured a Christ-like visitor from the heavens who healed with a touch of his hand. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the director’s third foray into outer space, Disclosure Day, is perhaps the most explicitly religiously concerned alien flick Spielberg has made to date.
Disclosure Day Plot Summary: Daniel Kellner, Margaret Fairchild, and The Archive
The plot follows two seemingly unrelated characters: whistleblower Daniel Kellner, a former operative on the run from Wardex, the top-secret government contractors whose sinister ends he once served; and Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist with a dead-end boyfriend and dreams of becoming a news anchor.
Daniel, along with his girlfriend Jane, has gone on the lam because Daniel has stolen two items with the power to completely and permanently disrupt our civilizational status quo. He has taken a recovered alien artifact, a piece of technology with immense capacities that seem to defy the laws of physics as we understand them. And he has also taken “The Archive,” a hard drive full of footage documenting the entirety of the United States’ attempt to simultaneously exploit and conceal extraterrestrial life, from Roswell onward. Margaret, meanwhile, after a series of paranormal happenings in which she acquires various psychic powers, is being drawn, mysteriously and ineluctably, towards Daniel.
What Actually Happens at the End of Disclosure Day
Eventually, the two plots converge. Daniel and Margaret are brought together. They learn that each was chosen (and abducted) by the aliens in childhood, and given special abilities, in order to prepare them for their role as heralds of the aliens’ disclosure. Wardex and its machinations to recover The Archive and silence the chosen pair are finally thwarted. Daniel and Margaret make their way back to the Kansas City news station, where, armed with her new hyper-persuasive abilities, Margaret convinces her boss to let her commandeer the anchor’s desk for a special report. Footage from The Archive begins broadcasting and is quickly picked up by every news station, on every channel, around the world. Just before the movie ends, Margaret prepares to give her report. She begins with one word: listen.
Stigmata, Pentecost, and a New Eve: Spielberg's Christian Imagery
From the first scenes of the movie, religious motifs abound.
Jane's Stigmata at the Monastery of St. Clare
When they go on the run, Daniel and Jane take refuge in the Monastery of St. Clare, where Jane was once a postulant. Later, when the director of Wardex uses remote viewing and mind control to hypnotize Jane into betraying Daniel, she avoids surrender by digging a crucifix into the palm of her hand until it bleeds. In her resistance to something that almost amounts to possession, Jane gives herself a stigmata.
Is Margaret Fairchild a Marian Figure?
Margaret’s transformation begins when a cardinal, a traditional symbol of the Holy Spirit, flies into her apartment while she gets ready for work. She begins speaking fluently in foreign languages she has never studied and develops the ability to read the thoughts and hearts of strangers she comes into contact with. A second Pentecost, it seems, has occurred. Margaret’s new ability to read the hearts of others, and offer consolation and guidance accordingly, means that as the film progresses, she is increasingly treated by others as a quasi-Marian figure. She is the new Eve to Daniel’s new Adam, half of a human pair who will bring a new world into existence. When we flash back to the childhood night when Margaret is first visited by aliens, they take the form of animals paying her homage.
If this all sounds like a confused and confusing jumble, you aren’t wrong. Spielberg is clearly fascinated by Christianity, and sees it as entangled with his interest in aliens in some important way. But to what, exactly, does all this use of Christian imagery cash out?
Could Christianity Survive First Contact?
Is Spielberg interested in exploring how a Christian cosmology could plausibly be maintained given the acknowledged existence of aliens? This question is raised by Jane, who believes that if the contents of The Archive are widely disseminated, the masses will lose their faith (Jane, like many lapsed Catholics, no longer practices, but still regards the faith she has lost as somehow intangibly precious). She voices an attitude that the secular often hold toward religion, but which is totally foreign to any believing and well-catechized Catholic: first, that religion is a kind of noble lie, whose truth claims are vacant of import but which holds civilization together; second, that God is merely a supremely powerful entity, whom, in theory, another sufficiently powerful entity could eclipse and replace.
Maybe the Aliens Are Just Angels
Although this underlying attitude remains unchallenged, Spielberg disposes of the supposed incompatibility of an alien arrival with Christianity in a few moments. In a moment of panic, Jane calls up her former Mother Superior. The Bible says that humans are God’s highest creation; Jane worries over the phone. Unruffled, Sister Maura corrects her: humanity is God’s highest creation on earth. As Sister Maura reminds us, we already know we are not the most powerful beings in the cosmos; we already live in a universe populated by invisible angelic intelligences. Perhaps this is how Spielberg wants us to see his aliens—as a species of angelic intelligence, who serve as heralds of God’s grace and messengers of His plans.
The Aliens' Big Reveal Is Just a TED Talk About Empathy
If the aliens are divine messengers, what is their message? For the most part, Spielberg deliberately leaves this vague and unexplained, ending the movie just before Margaret begins transmitting the alien communications. What we do get is thin gruel indeed, a budget TED Talk rhapsodizing about how the aliens consider empathy a superpower.
Whether he realizes it or not, a vague and content-free gospel of empathy is not really where Spielberg’s heart lies. Not till the film’s final moments do we see the vision that really animates him. As Margaret prepares to give her report, footage from The Archive flashes across the screen behind her. News anchors around the world, stunned, race to confirm. The entire global political order has been forever altered by the luminous images playing on one enormous studio screen.
Why Disclosure Day's Ending Doesn't Work in the Age of Deepfakes
This, of course, requires more suspension of disbelief than the aliens themselves. In the age of algorithmic feeds, influencers, hyper-targeted partisan media, and AI deepfakes, it is simply not plausible that visual media of any kind, from any source, could universally and instantly settle a question beyond a doubt. There was a time when it could; there was an age of blockbuster movies and news anchors with the gravitas of sages, a time when the screen was not only a source of information, but of authority. But the screen has fragmented, and that time is over.
The Screen as Sacred Space: Spielberg's Real Religion
This is what Spielberg, the filmmaker, the lover of movies, longs for: a restoration of the unified, larger-than-life screen’s near-religious authority in the culture. This is why Daniel and Margaret take refuge in the Monastery of St. Clare, the patron saint of television. It is why his aliens play the role of angelic messengers. As religious scholar, Diana Pasulka argues in American Cosmic: UFO, Religion, Technology that beliefs are starting to take on the trappings of a new religion, one in which technology is the object of worship and the screen a space of sacred communion.
The first word of Margaret Fairchild’s disclosure report is “Listen.” Had Spielberg been more honest, with himself or with us, he would have written: “Watch.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about the film, religious symbolism, faith and science.
Is Disclosure Day a religious film?
Not in any doctrinal sense; Spielberg has no interest in catechesis. But the film is saturated with Christian iconography: stigmata, Pentecost, a Marian heroine, a monastery named for the patron saint of television. The theology is decorative rather than argued, borrowed for its emotional register more than its truth claims.
Why does Spielberg send Daniel and Jane to the Monastery of St. Clare specifically?
St. Clare of Assisi is the Church's patron saint of television, a title she earned somewhat by accident: bedridden and unable to attend Mass, she reported seeing and hearing the liturgy projected on her wall. It's a fitting hideout for a film that ultimately cares less about God than about the screen as a vessel of revelation.
What is the aliens' message once The Archive finally airs?
The film cuts away before we hear it, offering only a preview: some diffuse rhetoric about empathy as a kind of superpower. It's the thinnest part of the script, closer to a keynote address than a gospel, and it suggests Spielberg is less interested in what the aliens have to say than in the fact that everyone, everywhere, stops to listen.
Is Margaret Fairchild meant to be a new Eve?
The film gestures that way. Margaret is repeatedly framed as a vessel: chosen, marked, and paired with Daniel as though the two of them constitute the seed of some new order. Whether Spielberg means this as a genuine allegory or simply reaches for the nearest available symbol remains unresolved, as is true of most of the film's borrowed theology.
What does Margaret mean when she says "Listen"?
It's the film's last word and its most revealing one. Spielberg frames disclosure as an auditory event: a message received, a truth spoken aloud. But everything that precedes it argues the opposite: that belief here is produced by images on a screen, not by anything heard. The word "Listen" reads less like a thesis than a Freudian slip.
