The first time a movie ever really surprised me was the 1997 film “Contact.” In itjilimacao, humans are sent plans for a machine that, once built and used, appears to transport Dr. Ellie Arroway — played marvelously by Jodie Foster — through a wormhole to an alien planet. She experiences what feels like nearly a day on this other planet, but on Earth it appears she never went anywhere at all. She is grilled by members of Congress over claims that her journey was an elaborate hoax.
At the end of the film, it is revealed that Dr. Arroway’s recording devices actually captured 18 hours of static, suggesting she had in some way traveled to worlds beyond. I was a middle schooler when the movie came out, and my mind was blown by this twist.
Nowadays, it takes a lot more to surprise me. And given all of the wild events leading up to this election, it feels as if nothing could surprise me at this point.
Heading into the final month of the campaign, political observers are on the alert for an “October surprise.” And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about an article in Politico that I read back in January about what possible election-year surprises might look like. The article outlined all of the “unpredictable but entirely possible” events that could “throw 2024 into turmoil”; pundits and academics put forward guesses for what kind of known unknowns, if you will, could alter the course of the presidential race.
Politico asked, “What might be the ‘Black Swan’ event that disrupts the seeming inevitability of the 2024 campaign?”
And even though we haven’t had an actual October surprise, when I go back and read that article now, it strikes me that in the past year we haven’t seen just one unpredictable event, we’ve had quite a few: the Alabama Supreme Court ruling on frozen embryos that heightened anew the debate over reproductive issues, an assassination attempt on Donald Trump that resulted in the death of a man attending one of his rallies, and a Middle East war that is entering its second year. Most prescient, perhaps, given the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and now Hurricane Milton bearing down on Florida, was this prediction offered by Alec Ross, the author of “The Raging 2020s”:
“The election outcome will not be known until more than a month afterward because of the difficulty of administering an election with millions of Americans dislocated from their homes and home states due to the storm.”
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