Document Type
Article
Abstract
By featuring a woman scientist as protagonist, Contact (1997) is a welcome change in the largely male-dominated territory of American science-fiction film. The astronomer Dr. Ellie Arroway is an exceptional woman for recent SF film: a brilliant, dedicated visionary who defies the male scientific establishment, goes it alone, risks her career and life for her beliefs, and succeeds in the end by taking a dangerous journey to the stars to contact intelligent extraterrestrial life. Although the movie is largely faithful to the novel by Carl Sagan, it deviates from the novel in certain critical respects which end up making Contact a more conventional SF film and a less feminist film than it might have been. By giving her a love interest, the movie fits into more traditional representations of women in the filmic genre of the woman's melodrama. In the movie, Ellie is portrayed as a lonely, neurotic career woman whose scientific pursuits are a sublimation of her mourning for her father and who will only be complete when she has a man in her life. Moreover, by changing her into an orphan, the movie partakes of the Hollywood movie tradition of the orphan girl in need of rescue. In particular, Ellie resembles Dorothy in the film The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Little Orphan Annie in the film Annie (1982).
Repository Citation
Gordon, Andrew. "Contact: Little Orphan Ellie." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 5, no. 4, 2005, pp. 1–10. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol5/iss4/4
Included in
Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Fiction Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons