Your Weekly Dose of EEE #10: Does Contact (1997) Stand Up Today?

And some not-exactly-light-but-also-necessary reading

One of my favorite places to take pictures. Horn Pond, Woburn MA. Photo by my eldest child.

Hey there,

How’s your week been?

It’s school vacation week in Massachusetts (yes, all of Massachusetts), and it’s starting to look like spring! There’s been lots of family time this week, and I’ve had to make the most of my work time—and it’s worked out okay! It can feel frustrating to only have one day per week to work on the novel (and some weeks, like this one, ZERO days), but knowing that in advance has actually been very helpful for my focus and my mood.

Ready for your hit of EEE? Let’s go!

What’s Exciting Me?

I’m in a pretty good place with the sequel. As always, I wish I were working faster and had more time to devote to it (I wrote the first draft of When We Were Mothers in six weeks!), but time and mothering are what they are, and I’m just proud of myself for staying committed, something I wouldn’t have done in years past.

Oh, also—I got some photos done. They were fun, and I think they turned out okay!

Photos courtesy Josh London Photography

What’s Entertaining Me?

I’m going in a different order this time, because I have a lot to say about something I just watched and I’m going to save that for last.

🎶 Working music this week has been a Flow State playlist from Apple Music. But that’s boring, so I’ll throw this one at you, too. You’re welcome, fellow 90s babies. [(Author’s note: This song hit pretty close to home back when it was released, and while it seemed super cool when I was a pre-teen in methamphetamine-infested middle America, its look at addiction actually makes me really sad now. But, nostalgia is nostalgia and I’ll still perk up when it comes on and whoop if it doesn’t skip over the extended bridge (as this video does.)]

📖 Finding time to read this week has been a struggle, but I try to read at least a few pages before bed. This week’s bedtime reading is back to City of Day, by October Santerelli, which I’m enjoying…just slowly. I’m about 20% through and definitely curious what happens next—if only I can stay awake long enough to get to it!

📺 This week, we re-watched Contact. Apparently there is more than one film with that name, so to clarify: This is the one with Jodi Foster, Matthew McConaughey (I will never get that right without looking it up), Tom Skerritt, and a few other people you might recognize.

I’ve always been a huge fan of the outer-space, alien-contact genre of science fiction, and I remember really enjoying the film when I first saw it years ago. (Apparently it’s 26 years old now and featured by Turner Classic Movies, which doesn’t make my bad knees flare up at all.) I’m pleased to say that, for the most part, the movie holds up. But, I do have a few thoughts.

First: Why did it have to be so long? I get that I’m a victim of today’s attention-deficient climate, but I do see a couple of places where there was just too much. The film was 150 minutes long, and I bet it could have come in closer to two hours if they’d decreased the length of the test launch scene and the interrogation scene at the end. I get building suspense and not giving the viewer exactly what they want, exactly when they want it, but at some point these scenes seemed to drag.

And speaking of the interrogation scene, WTF? What is actually the point and premise of this hearing? Essentially, Ellie perceives going through a wormhole to an alien planet, has a conversation with someone there, sees some incredible things, experiences some rad shit, and then when she comes home, people don’t believe her. But the dude interrogating her doesn’t even think she did anything wrong! He thinks some dead guy played a trick on everyone. So why did he have to be such a royal a-hole to her? (Despite the obvious answer, of course, which is that this is often the way men in power treat women in public spaces. Christine Blasey Ford’s name comes to mind.) This scene weakens the entire film for me, and I wish they’d done it differently.

The scene that stood out the most, though, was when Ellie’s boss (?), Drumlin, who has stolen the seat on the interstellar travel mission from her, says to her something like, “Listen, I wish the world worked the way idealists like you want it to. But it doesn’t, and I know how to manipulate things to get what I want.” That’s a complete paraphrase, but the point is that I identify so much with Ellie in that scene, and I think many of us do. I’m a very “Why can’t everyone just love and trust and care for each other” kind of person, and I still have a really hard time operating in a world like the one we live in, where sometimes we have to do the wrong thing to get the right outcome. (Reminds me of McNulty (and Daniels, and so many other characters) in The Wire…)

What’s Enlightening Me?

I started writing this Note on Monday and left this part blank, certain that something would come up this week. After writing a dissertation about my Schitt’s Creek sweatshirt as it relates to Us, Them, and physical/psychological safety in our political climate, I realized I just have a lot of thoughts swirling in my head about the state of the US right now. I wanted to share a few newsletters/posts that I’ve found useful to connect and understand, in hopes that we can all grow in our knowledge and support of one another.

Robin Taylor (he/him)

writes a newsletter called That Trans Friend You Didn't Know You Needed, and his newsletter sheds light on what it's been like for him to be a trans person in today's world. This issue was especially poignant and reminded me of my dear late friend and his journey.

I saw this post by

Monique Judge

from off the record today about how exhausting it is being a Black person dealing with “Not all white people” syndrome day in and day out. Spoiler: The more effort someone puts into proving they’re not prejudiced, talking over the marginalized people who are trying to educate them, the more prejudiced they seem (and the more exhausting it is for the people who are already exhausted from dealing with the prejudice and violence of our society on a daily basis.

And finally, at a time when both abortion rights and trans rights are being threatened in different ways in different places on a more-than-daily basis,

Jessica Valenti

with Abortion, Every Day and

Erin Reed

from Erin in the Morning are here to keep you updated on those battles. Erin even has a legislative map so we can keep things straight.

This might not all be super light reading, but it’s important to be informed, and these publications/posts definitely do that job.

As always, the comments are open. Let me know your thoughts there. What should I/we be reading, watching, listening to, and aware of today?

See you next week,