Lost Horizons

Brendan Boyle writes on the voyages beyond in “Contact” (1997) and “Alambrista!” (1977), in the newest installment of Double Feature, from the LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Brendan BoyleOctober 20, 2025

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This Double Feature essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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Journeys into the great unknown!

CONTACT IS the blockbuster at the end of history. There are no more worlds to conquer, so the American frontier expands to space, where an alien intelligence is trying to tell us something. That something is the design of a great machine, a ship for a single traveler who will be humanity’s emissary. The drama centers on the romance and rivalry between scientist Jodie Foster and a god-fearing intellectual—played by Matthew McConaughey, to remind the viewer this is science fiction. A billionaire (John Hurt) greases the wheels of the plot, for all things are possible through the intercession of benign eccentrics. Foster’s Dr. Ellie Arraway meets the alien intelligence, which takes the form of her departed father; the world does not care for her private revelation. The heroes are finally joined in their quest for humanity’s perfection, proudly opposed to the government cynics who are the film’s only villains. Their union is the dream of bipartisan consensus in the age of the Contract with America, faith and reason as two curves approaching the same line: the Uniparty, in other words, a romance in two dimensions. An anachronistic fantasy of a United States moving beyond party politics, much of the picture is set at the Very Large Array in New Mexico, a destination near the country’s southern border where nobody looks north or south, but Up.

The lights go down again for Alambrista!, the story of a Michoacano farmer named Roberto (Domingo Abriz) who crosses the border into the US after his wife gives birth. Roberto himself is following in the footsteps of his father, who once made the same journey but never returned. Did he die, or assimilate? Roberto finds allies in the other migrant laborers, sleeping in the brush under insulation wrapping that resembles the pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They teach him, teasingly, how to smile at a white woman, how to walk with confidence, how to place a diner order: “ham, eggs, and coffee.” He passes out on the sidewalk, where the waitress rescues him; she speaks no English but takes him into the home she shares with her child and younger brother. There is an absence here too. They go to church together, a wild revival with a racially mixed congregation where the preacher sends her into an ecstasy of devotion. Picked up in a raid, Roberto gets bounced back across the border and returns, this time with a group recruited by a white coyote: they pack into a mobile home with metal sides, then into the back of a flatbed truck, covered by a tarp and rocketed back into el norte. It is here Roberto discovers the fate of his missing father and decides, this time on his own, to go home to his family. The closing song on the soundtrack describes the film’s events as part of a folk narrative: he is one of the ones who came back, an explorer returned, an astronaut.

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Featured image: Still from Contact (1997).