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| Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013) |
The
true miracle is not walking on water or walking on air,
but simply walking on
this earth - Tich Nhat Hanh
Let’s begin by acknowledging that Gravity is a very unusual Hollywood blockbuster (here's the trailer). Basically it is a story about a single character, cut off from the rest of humanity for most of the duration of the film. And this character is a woman (unlike Robinson Crusoe and his Hollywood descendants, including the character played by Tom Hanks in Cast Away, and the Robert Redford character in All is Lost). The film itself acknowledges that its focus on a female character is unusual. The character is called Ryan Stone because, she explains to mission commander Matthew Kowalski, her parents wanted a boy. In other words: the woman at the centre of this movie is taking up a place usually reserved for men. She may have been ‘unwanted’ - but there she is.
The
fact that Ryan Stone is female is crucial for the story because it makes it
possible for her once to have given birth to a child. She is (was) a mother.
This allows the film to focus on the primary and most primal bond between two
human beings - that between mother and child - and on the sense of loss that
comes with the severance of that bond. At the same time, Gravity’s
dialogue refers to our planet as ‘Mother Earth’, so that Stone, cut off from
other people, appears as that Mother’s daughter who is herself about to be
lost. We can go even further: Earth is a giant rock in space, and the woman at
the centre of this story is a ‘stone’ circling around it (and if she were to
die up there, she would, after a while, be as inert and cold as stone). This
intimate character study and the spectacular space adventure are thus presented
in close parallel with each other.
Let’s
take a look at the character study first. Ryan Stone’s daughter Sarah died in
an accident when she was four years old, and Stone has never been able to
process that loss. In some ways her life has been suspended ever since (could
we say that she has almost turned to stone?) She says that since Sarah’s death
her life has consisted of nothing but work (as a doctor in a hospital) and
driving from and to work (while listening to music - never talk - which fills
the void surrounding her).
On
two occasions during the film (in conversation with Kowalski at the beginning
and in a monologue towards the end) Stone states explicitly that she does not
have any intimate bonds with anyone. There appears to be no boyfriend, nor does
she seem to be close to the father of her child. She does not mention her
parents or any siblings - presumably because the former are dead and there
aren’t any of the latter (or, if there are, she isn’t close to them). Nor does
she appear to have any friends. Perhaps she intentionally keeps her distance from
people because she does not want to experience another devastating loss.
Now,
what better way could there be to keep one’s distance from other people than to
go into space? Indeed, Stone hints at this motivation when she responds to
Kowalski’s question what she likes most about space with ‘silence’ - that is,
one presumes, the absence of the noises made by human beings (rather than the
absence of the sounds of the natural world, although, as we will see, on some
level she might long for the absolute silence of death). Of course, at this
point, there is no silence, because she is talking to Kowalski, and even when
he is silent, the tinny music he listens to can be heard. There is a tension,
then, between Stone’s desire for silence (she isn’t keen, early in the film, on
Kowalski’s constant verbal burbling) and her need nevertheless for verbal
communication (and perhaps music). The need for verbal communication – for
connection with others – is something that becomes clearer as the action of the
film proceeds.
Intriguingly,
there might be a parallel to this in Kowalski’s entire story: he is a raconteur
in space, relaying tales about life on Earth, which revolve around failed human
connections (an ex-wife who cheated on him, a Mardi Gras date that is over
before it even begins). His ambition in life is to go on the longest space walk
in history, floating around the Earth all on his own. And he gets to realise
this ambition. The circumstances are tragic, but also slightly ambiguous: He
has saved Stone after a terrible accident in space, and she ends up holding on
to a tether that prevents him from spinning off into space - and death. He
argues that she won’t be able to pull him in because her own ties to the space
shuttle are too tenuous; instead he will pull her with him into space - unless
he severs their bond, which he does very quickly, indeed possibly almost
eagerly. Is this just a noble sacrifice, or does it also have a tacit
semi-suicidal dimension?
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| Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013) |
In
any case, it is a crucial moment. Ryan Stone may have gone to space to keep her
distance from people and to find silence; if that is the case, she gets more
than she bargained for. The accident in space cuts off all communication with
Earth and kills all crewmembers of the space shuttle except for her and Kowalski
- who now leaves her behind (although he will be able to speak with her for a
little while longer). At the same time, Kowalski’s almost-eager noble sacrifice
points to his willingness to cut his links with humanity for good - and to die
all alone. Importantly, Stone refuses for a while to accept his apparently inevitable
loss.
The
film does not fill in all the psychological details, but it does suggest that
space - and eventually death - is a void that some people, especially those who
have lost loved ones, may want to escape into so as to prevent further
suffering arising from their bonds to others. Stone herself suggests this when
she later imagines Kowalski’s magical return which, in a powerfully-filmed
scene that one experiences largely from Stone’s point of view, is not initially
signalled as her fantasy but is eventually revealed to be just that. In this
fantasy, Kowalski gently accuses her of wanting an easy way out of life’s
struggles by giving up the fight to survive, instead peacefully going to sleep
until she is poisoned by carbon monoxide. This is indeed what Stone is trying
to do - but it is also, one might say, what Kowalski has already done.[i]
Stone’s
will to live is revived by her fantasy of Kowalski’s return. On some level,
perhaps, this fantasy establishes the kind of link to another person, which,
she says, she no longer has on Earth. She feels connected to Kowalski who (in
her fantasy) knows her well enough to identify her wish to die and who cares
about her enough to confront her about it so as to change her mind. At the same
time, of course, this very fantasy ensures that, at least in her mind, in her
soul, Kowalski is still alive; death is not the end. (We will return to this
point.)
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| Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013) |
Not
coincidentally, we think, her last words to him (to the person she remembers)
concern her daughter; she asks him to look out for her in the afterlife.
Earlier on she seemed to believe that only death could re-unite her with Sarah,
but perhaps now she knows that her daughter is with her, just like Kowalski, as
long as she can imagine her. Some of the dialogue in this sequence (which is in
fact the monologue of a woman who secretly wants to talk herself out of
committing suicide) might be claimed to be all too clichéd - but the central
idea seems valid, and indeed deep: We can accept the loss of loved ones better
if we think that, because we have shared so much with them, they do live on in
us, which in turn gives us a reason to go on.
Later
on, Stone is reminded of such bonds when she establishes radio contact with a
man on Earth - not someone from the space centre in Houston, as she had hoped,
but a radio amateur who speaks in a language unknown to her, but manages to
communicate something important anyway by bringing a dog’s voice to the
microphone and then (closer still) a baby. Stone is (ambiguously, tenuously)
delighted when she hears him singing to the baby, perhaps because it reminds
her of her singing to Sarah and also her having been sung to by her own
parents. This temporarily renews her sense of human interconnectedness and
perhaps undergirds her decision, after an internal struggle, to struggle on.
Gravity, then, deals with grief. And
here our argument is supported by the wonderful fact that the Latin root of our
word grief is the same as that for our word gravity. ‘Gravis’ is the common
root of gravity, heaviness, and grief. Grief and gravity, in our historical
subconscious, are the same thing: the grave, the heavy, that pulls us down and
grounds us. Grief, we would argue, centrally concerns a refusal to allow that
the world no longer includes the dead person.[ii]
Both phenomenologically (i.e. in terms of our lived experience) and logically
(i.e. conceptually), grief is the pain of a ruptured life-world. Grief is the
lived refusal to accept that someone important has been taken from us. For when
that person was a constitutive element of our world, an over-hasty acceptance
of their exit would mean that we were not really denizens of that world, but
merely observers of it, merely passing through rather than living, inhabiting.
Grief
is rational, for it is rational to have a world, and to care about those in it.
Indeed, we would suggest that grief is essential to our humanity. One would
have to be some kind of inhuman monster, and/or disabled in a profound way, not
to feel grief under appropriate circumstances. However, grief can be
pathological if it becomes permanent, turning into depression. Stone is letting
go of that depression, at last, when she overcomes her desire for death and
realises that, due to their shared experiences, their influence, their values,
her daughter (and also Kowalski) lives on in her. Thus, grief - and Gravity
- is a forceful reminder of the ‘fact’ (that is deeper than any mere fact) that
we are not separate from another, but always connected, even beyond death. (In
this sense, to vary William Faulkner: The dead aren’t dead. They’re not even
past.) The film is thus about accepting
(inter)dependency, rather than striving for independence (this striving being
so closely associated with American culture). Interdependence - and none more
so than the relationship between mother and child - makes us vulnerable but it
also ensures that we live on in each other.
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| Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013) |
Gravity adds another dimension to its renunciation of depression and its plea for life, which is to emphasise and make palpable the sheer excitement life can generate. Right from the beginning of the film, we find ourselves moving around in space high above the Earth, enjoying breathtaking vistas but also soon experiencing extreme danger and utterly disorienting movement. Initially, the film’s largely computer generated imagery creates the illusion of a camera’s continuous movement around spacecraft and bodies, and also into the very positions from which characters view the world around them (such subjective point of views being signalled by the clouding of space helmets which partially obstructs our vision). The deployment of director Alfonso Cuaron’s trademark ultra-long tracking- and panning-shots in Gravity is a technical tour de force, which may draw attention to its own virtuosity, but also adds to the film’s thematic concern with the connectedness of inside and outside, character study and space adventure. (Later on, conventional - and less noticeable - editing, moving from objective to subjective shots, achieves the same effect.)
In
any case, spectacular views of Earth and space, and rapid camera movement
provide us viewers with (the illusion of) a visceral experience, especially
when watching the film in 3D. As first Kowalski and then much later Stone says:
‘It’s a hell of a ride!’ ‘Ride’ here initially refers to space travel, but,
more generally, to human life - and also to the film we are watching. In other
words, the film takes us on a ride, which is meant to remind us of the thrill
of being alive. This continues for most of the story, which moves from exterior
space to the interiors of various spacecraft until, finally, Stone plunges back
to Earth in a small capsule.
Before we get to this point, the film examines the ambiguities of space exploration. Stone is in space because a device she developed for use in hospitals can also be used in the Hubble space telescope that, we are told, is designed to reach out to, and gather information from, ‘the edge of the universe’. Thus, exploring and healing the human body is connected to the exploration of the whole universe; looking inward and looking outward are two sides of the same coin.
The film never mentions the physical exploration of outer space - manned and unmanned spacecraft escaping Earth’s gravity altogether so as to go to the Moon and beyond. This is part of its much-greater realism than most of its predecessors as to the nature of life in space – which is likely to be virtually impossible for healthy human beings for periods longer than a few months, or at most years. Instead, in this film, people and their craft remain in Earth’s orbit, which provides them with spectacular views of the planet’s surface. Indeed, Kowalski’s last words - while drifting off to his death in space - concern the beauty of Earth and thus, it is implied, of life, and they are spoken precisely so as to give Stone a reason to go on. He speaks of the beauty of the sun shining on the Ganges in the hope that this great, glorious, grave beauty, together with Earth’s gravity, will pull Stone home.
However, the view from space has another dimension. Where there is night on Earth, the artificial light resulting from human habitation looks like a slow burning fire destroying everything in its way (like lava flowing off a volcano). In a tradition going back to the first widely disseminated pictures of the Earth in space (notably the ones known as ‘Earthrise’ and ‘Blue Marble’ from the late 1960s and early 1970s), seeing the globe reveals both its beauty and its vulnerability.
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| "The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth" - Command Module Pilot Jim Lovell, Apollo 8. 'Earthrise', 1968, NASA |
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| Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013) |
.jpg) |
| 'Blue Marble', Apollo 17, 1972. Harrison Schmitt/Nasa |
When
a Russian rocket destroys one of the Russians’ own satellites (a spy satellite
with sensitive technology it would seem), a chain reaction is triggered,
whereby debris from the first satellite slams into other spacecraft creating
more debris etc. This (a realistic potential scenario) is the cause of the
accident that kills all members of the space mission Stone belongs to - and
also leads to the abandonment of the two space stations she flies to in search
of an escape capsule. With accumulating space debris forever circling the
Earth, humanity’s colonisation of near-Earth space has already begun to cancel
itself out.
In
this context, the film’s title takes on a range of meanings. Most banally, one
might say, the story concerns a serious, ‘grave’ situation - Stone finding
herself stranded in space as the lone survivor of an accident. The ‘gravity’ of
this situation is intensified precisely by the fact that any outside help would
now have to overcome the pull of Earth’s gravity so as to join her in orbit -
and by the fact that space debris is held in the very same orbit by Earth’s
gravity. Even if it was not extremely difficult to send a rocket to her rescue,
such a rescue mission would be almost impossible due to the dangerous debris
circling the Earth.
We
can also note that Stone herself is circling the planet at great speed, so that
the centrifugal force created by her movement balances the pull of Earth’s
gravity, creating the experience of weightlessness. Complementing the pervasive
imagery of tethers - tenuous, yet vital links between people or between people
and spacecraft -, Stone’s floating in space is the result precisely of being tethered
to Earth by the planet’s gravity. Rather than drifting off into empty space,
she continues to be connected to Mother Earth by a kind of ethereal umbilical
cord.
When
she finally manages to find a spacecraft with which to return from her orbit to
the planet’s surface, gravity is a potentially deadly force. Gravity
accelerates the plunging capsule so much that it almost burns in the atmosphere
- and yet it is only the pull of gravity that can bring her home. And here we
are reminded of the trauma Stone has been trying to escape from: Her daughter
played at school and fell down, gravity (together with her own momentum)
pulling her to the ground with such force that she broke her neck. At the end
of the film, then, we are reminded of the deadliness of gravity - and also of
the fact that it is the basis of our lives. This reiterates, on another, global
level, the central point we have made before: The film’s focus on grief serves
to emphasise the fact that humans are dependent on each other, which makes them
both profoundly vulnerable and indestructible. Similarly, the film’s focus on
gravity expresses our dependency on the Earth - it ties us, sometimes pulls us,
down, and also gives us life as well as a kind of material afterlife, because
eventually our bodies become earth.
Now,
Stone’s return to Earth is presented in archetypal imagery. She confronts the
four basic elements of old: the air of the atmosphere, the fire that almost
burns her capsule, the water of the sea into which the capsule falls, and the
earth she crawls on to afterwards. There is also the eerie vision of what
appears to be virgin land, untouched by human habitation, a kind of paradise
which Stone is allowed to (re)enter – while the radio messages on the
soundtrack have assured us that she is not in fact alone, that human company is
on the way. Gravity thus depicts both the continuity of human
connections and the promise of a new beginning, not just for Stone but also,
perhaps, for humankind.[iii]
The film emphasises the fact that she has to come very close to death before
she can step on the Earth again; to be born again, first one has to die. As
soon as she opens the capsule, it fills with water and sinks, and when she
escapes from it, her space suit fills with water as well, dragging her down
(Stone is indeed sinking like a stone). The technological devices that have
protected her in space (capsule and suit) have to be abandoned for survival and
a new beginning to become possible.
It
is only after she has come very close to death for the second time that Stone
can finally make her way back to the surface and to land. In retrospect, the
capsule filling with water and the sea appear both as death traps and as wombs
from which she is born again, her movement echoing the development of life on Earth
- from water to land, and, on land, from crawling to walking. Indeed, the film
includes a reminder of this development by briefly focusing on a frog swimming
upwards, like its amphibian ancestors that were the first to make the
transition from water to land (and whose descendants are proving the most
vulnerable of all to anthropogenic extinction). Another reminder of broader
developments is Stone’s passionate embrace of mud, the mud that provided living
space for the first creatures to emerge from the sea. She says ‘Thank you’,
looking down into the mud. Perhaps she is addressing a divine entity she
believes in, or, possibly, the people who helped her get to this point
(especially Kowalski, also the nameless radio amateur), or even the gravity
that pulled her down, or, most likely, the Earth itself, producing this
gravity, and its fertile soil (earth) that is here represented by this mud.
Finally,
there is Stone’s struggle to get back on her feet (once again echoing untold
millions of years of evolution). At the very end of the film, it takes every
effort for her to stand up, finally towering majestically above the camera
(which stays on the ground, looking up to her). It is hard to stand up and
walk, as hard as it has been for Stone to overcome depression and return to
life, return to the Earth. It is hard to accept and to cope with the pull. And
it is wonderful.
Importantly,
this final shot contains a reminder of the presence of the camera - similar to
the breath clouding helmets in earlier point-of-view-shots and to reflections
and refractions of light on the camera’s lens in numerous other shots. Here it
is mud and water which has been splashed onto the lens by Stone’s movements. As
the camera is positioned on the ground, we can say that the dirt on the lens
reminds us of its - and our - immersion in and reliance on mud, the same mud
that Stone clawed into and cherished after having extracted herself from the
water.
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| Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013) |
It
also reminds us of course of the very existence of the camera and the fact that
we are watching a movie. Thus, it is equivalent to the direct looks at the
camera in the last frames of the action in both 2001: A Space Odyssey
and Avatar (two films we have previously written about for the
ThinkingFilmCollective). Both films revolve centrally, like Gravity,
around the idea of re-birth (an astronaut being reborn as a Star Child, a human
being reborn as a Na'vi) and around the need, and the possibility, to gain a new
perspective on the world we live in (on): The Star Child gazes at the Earth
before it turns towards the camera, and Jake Sully abandons his human body so
as to be able to live permanently in the (for humans so hostile) environment of
Pandora. When they both stare at the camera and, through it, at us, the films
remind us that what is at stake in these stories is our perspective as
well. Are we willing to see the world anew? And what might we be willing to do
as a consequence of our new perspective? Might we, for instance. decide not to give up on the challenges we face today?
We are talking now about us as individuals, us as part perhaps of a movement –
and us as a species. Gravity ‘s ending addresses us in the same way,
serving like that of 2001 and Avatar as a call to action.
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| Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013) |
[i] All of this is somewhat reminiscent of the harrowing
Ray Bradbury story 'No Particular Night or Morning' from The Illustrated Man.
Here a man suffers terrible loss on Earth and goes into space to disconnect
himself from everything that could produce further pain, eventually denying the
very existence of the past and of ever more aspects of the present, including
his own body, which he experienced as extremely vulnerable when a meteor hit
the spaceship; in the end he drifts into empty space in his space suit,
accepting only the existence of his own mind. The difference is that Bradbury’s
story is very much a meditation on scepticism as to other minds (or solipsism)
as a disastrous philosophical challenge, whereas Gravity is interested
in solipsism only as an (un-)ethical, self-protective temptation. The
difference between 'No particular Night or Morning' and Gravity then is
the difference between something that can be lived only at the cost of
psychosis and something that can be lived more easily – at the cost of
neurosis. It is the difference that Stanley Cavell famously describes as the
difference between madness and tragedy. Gravity is interested in the
latter, in depression, separateness, and the temptation to retreat from life,
from the vulnerability that comes with one’s inevitable attachment to others. At
the same time, Gravity replays many aspects of 2001: A Space Odyssey:
the dead astronaut Frank Poole’s body drifting away into space; the tenacity
with which the lone survivor of the Jupiter mission, David Bowman, clings to
life and eventually is able to return home, after he is reborn, from his death
bed, as a Star Child; and much else. In particular it is worth noting that the
curve of the astronauts’ helmets in Gravity echoes the curve of the Star
Child’s protective cocoon, and that in some shots Stone adopts a foetal
position and slowly spins around like the foetal Star Child in 2001.
[ii] See Read’s examination of ‘The logic of grief’,
forthcoming.
Fantastic exploration of the film. well done
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