The Televisual Enchantment to Violence
It is one of the peculiar narrative features of the 1997 movie Contact, starring Jodi Foster and Matthew McConaughey, and adapted from the novel by Carl Sagan, that the means by which contact is made with an advanced alien civilization near the star Vega was the first-ever television broadcast, in real life, of the opening address of the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, performed by none other than Adolf Hitler. Written in the manner of hard-science-fiction, Sagan’s Contact attempts to extrapolate, from the projections of our current knowledge, a plausible story of how contact with an alien civilization would come about. The most plausible means, according to Sagan, would be an intergalactic signal and the opening address of the 1936 Berlin Olympics was the first transmission strong enough to pass through the ionosphere and travel beyond the solar system. Theoretically, were you at the right remote distance out there in the galaxy, poised with your TV set, you could still watch this speech live—I mean aside from just watching it on Youtube. Though this real historical detail adds drama and historicity to the plot its inclusion in the movie, that is otherwise a story of mystical religious conversion, is highly weird, if not disconcerting; in Carl Sagan’s fantasy Hitler is the galactic representative of humankind. But the detail also speaks a truth that is so obvious as to be unconscious: that the world’s first talking head also happens to be our most notorious mass murderer. That is: should you wish to incite a reactionary and unhappy populace into committing mass atrocities, first broadcast your resentment to the whole universe on live TV
