Rereading Bruce Kapferer’s *2001 and Counting* in light of Spielberg’s *Disclosure Day*
When they go to see an alien movie, most moviegoers have a reasonable expectation: there will be aliens. But the latest film from legendary director Steven Spielberg Disclosure Day, barely features any of them — a deliberate omission that can teach us much about our current moment and the nature of science fiction.
Disclosure Day’s plot revolves around the discovery that aliens exist and a deep-state security corporation, Wardex, is keeping it a secret. Cybersecurity expert Dr. Daniel Kellner (played by Josh O’Connor) is determined to publicly release the files that prove it, even if it means being hunted by Wardex operatives. Simultaneously, news anchor Margaret Fairchild (a standout performance delivered by Emily Blunt), discovers on-air that she has a strange emotional and linguistic connection to the off-planet creatures. The two battle to initiate the titular disclosure day, revealing to humankind that we’re not alone in the universe.
Fans of Spielberg’s beloved E.T. or Close Encounters of the Third Kind might have anticipated a film with similar feel-good meditations on our place in the cosmos. Disclosure Day, however, is closer to his portfolio of political films, which becomes exceptionally clear when held against the work of PPP author and anthropologist Bruce Kapferer.
In his pamphlet 2001 and Counting: Kubrick, Nietzsche, and Anthropology (2014), Kapferer examines how Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey translates into a modern mythos for understanding the present. Kapferer approaches Kubrick’s work not as a film critic, but as an anthropologist. Through an approach he describes as “ethnographic,” Kapferer asserts that 2001 dwells on some of the “key existential questions confronting humanity in the present scientific and technological age,” and thus its contemporary context is key. He argues that Kubrick’s work moves beyond the conventions of the genre. Instead of imagining humanity’s potential futures, it asks what humanity’s present says about the future it is creating. Kapferer’s ideas apply beyond 2001 — they have implications for all science fiction, which has always reflected the present as much as the future.
Kapferer argues that it is impossible to understand the true implications of 2001 without contextualizing it in 1968, the year it was released. By acknowledging the rise of counter-culture, political revolutions, and social movements in Eastern Europe amidst the Cold War at the time the film was created, Kapferer suggests the film is Kubrick’s response to these social and political conflicts, using it as a conduit to make a plea to recognize humanity’s drive toward self-destruction and its futility. The vindictive supercomputer HAL, a tool of humanity’s making that almost becomes its undoing, is a crucial element that Kubrick uses to make this commentary while superimposing a classic science-fiction trope of evil robots plotting to take over our world. By reexamining science fiction ethnographically by throwing it into relief with the current societal conflicts, just as Kapferer did, our understanding of these films.
Disclosure Day is no exception. It is a decidedly less subtle film than 2001. Spielberg forgoes many of the inventions of the typical science fiction plot entirely. There are few fantastical elements, and the word “alien” is not uttered once throughout the film’s 145-minute runtime. Spielberg wants us to know that aliens are not the point — Disclosure Day uses the concept of extraterrestrial discovery to interrogate 2026. When viewing it through the lens of our uncertain current moment, the film’s anxieties surrounding secrecy, corporate authority, and political conspiracy become all the more powerful and alarming.
The existence of alien life is not a government coverup in the film, but rather a corporate one. Wardex, a private, deep-state firm, withholds evidence proving extraterrestrial existence for over 70 years, not just from the masses, but from the American government as well. The company’s executives cite the unpredictable nature of elected officials as what keeps them from being clued in, and rather than the characteristic government coverup of the sci-fi alien genre, the corporation lies at the heart of conspiracy. The contemporary counterpart is clear — corporations accumulate political and social influence without any accountability, and we are becoming increasingly aware of it.
Elon Musk’s stint as an unelected White House official, leading the DOGE task force, slashed over 400,000 jobs and cut federal programs, proving that powerful private figures can and will interfere with our politics and lives. Ironically, DOGE was positioned as a means to sever contracts with corrupt corporations like Wardex, yet in practice, Musk used it to slash non-profit and government agencies. It is unsurprising that contemporary science fiction imagines corporate entities as guardians of secret conspiracies, as their executives increasingly shape and control our reality. Meanwhile, pushback against the encroaching corporatocracy is on the rise. Much like the rise of counterculture in Kubrick’s day, people, especially young people, are avoiding X and expressing dissent on other social platforms, while telltale Tesla bumper stickers read “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” The increased awareness of corporate control primed audiences for Disclosure Day, with the mythos it weaves homing in on a desire to upend the contemporary corporate status quo.
Kapferer’s rumination on Nietzsche in relation to 2001 also sheds some light on the conclusion of Disclosure Day. He points to the Nietzscheian principle of the eternal return, where time is not linear, but instead exists cyclically, an ouroboros in an ongoing sequence of becoming, and the will to power, Nietzsche’s idea that humanity possesses a creative force to overcome current constraints and become something wholly new. The conclusion of 2001 — which presents cosmonaut David Bowman’s descent to Jupiter, his aging sequence, and the emergence of the cosmic fetus — represent a potential for humanity in the age of space exploration and a new cycle beginning.
In Disclosure Day, these principles, while not inherently optimistic, work against the image of an insurmountable corporate doomsday. While the crisis of control is not entirely resolved, humanity has demonstrated its capacity to break through the system that constrains it. Much like 2001, viewers of Spielberg’s Disclosure Day are not left with a definitive vision of the future, but an interrogation of the present’s possibility to overcome.
In principle, the argument that Kapferer presents on Kubrick’s film is much larger than its plot. Despite encompassing a film of epic proportions — from the dawn of man to an interstellar future — Kapferer’s pamphlet presents a philosophy that can span across the entire science fiction genre, giving us the means to make sense of the unimaginable.