Gravity’s Pull

by Peter Krämer and Rupert Read

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?

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.)

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.

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.

"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 

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

'Blue Marble', Apollo 17, 1972. Harrison Schmitt/Nasa

At the same time, near-Earth space is shown to be a new habitat for humans, who fill it up with various spacecraft. Two permanent space stations (an international one and a Chinese one) are pioneering outposts of humanity, with, possibly, significant waves of human migration to follow so that we might imagine that, like all the continents of Earth before, space as well may be colonised. Yet, this, and more generally the human use, the ‘development’, of space, is by no means unproblematic, because with human habitation comes environmental destruction (through new forms of pollution) - even in space.

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.

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.

Gravity, dir. Alfonso Cuarón (2013)

The ‘alienation effect’ of the mud hitting the camera is, we would suggest, the film’s final invitation to its viewers to heed its call, to think about what is offered in the experience of the film, to be reminded, in Wittgenstein’s sense, of what one utterly knows but can be persuaded by ideology to forget: in this case, that life on Earth is so worth saving, and that (for the foreseeable future) life for us is only possible on or near Earth. Thus the film seeks to transform us by returning us to life, to the awareness of the wonder of this life, and to the ‘fact’ (that is once again greater than any mere fact) that being alive is a gift not to be discarded. For Gravity’s space adventure ends with a renewed appreciation of many of the fundamentals of life on Earth - breathable air, fertile soil which is also the ground we can walk on, as well as great bodies of water that first nurtured life on this planet, and just as importantly, the human interconnectedness which sustains us. The space adventure in the film here stands in for the film itself, Stone’s journey representing that of every viewer: We let ourselves be taken into space by the film so as to return from this journey, just like Stone, with a renewed appreciation of our everyday surroundings, knowing them, and knowing our way about in them, perhaps, for the first time. In other words: The film is not a means of escape from our world; even when we appear to float in (its) space, we are tethered to our regular lives, not least by the pull of gravity we experience in our seats in the auditorium (and by the proximity of other people sharing our experience). Gravity is a constant reminder of our utterly-essential connection to the Earth (and to each other) - as is Gravity.

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[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.

[iii] Once more, echoes of 2001 here.

"If I go with you now my soul will never be happy": Gothic Investigation as Therapy in The Awakening

By Vincent M. Gaine

This essay discusses the Gothic themes of The Awakening, and the therapy undertaken in the film by balancing emotion and intellect.

[SPOILERS]

The Awakening, dir. Nick Murphy (2011)

The Awakening (Nick Murphy, 2011) is a Gothic ghost story 
that presents a therapeutic union of emotion and intellect. The heroine, Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) represents both scientific rationality and the dangers of emotional repression, and an initial assumption that rationality and intellect are preferable to emotion and unsubstantiated belief. Across the narrative of the film and through the development of Florence’s character, an emergence, the titular ‘Awakening’, of emotion takes place, the film presenting Florence’s encounter with the paranormal as therapeutic and challenging the initial presumption. However, the film does not offer a valorisation of emotional indulgence and a simple leap of faith, but rather a balance between the intellectual and the emotional. The film therefore presents the attentive viewer with a warning against excessive rationality but also against emotional indulgence.

Florence’s therapy is, in part, a generic resolution for the Gothic narrative, which often displays ‘the discovery and release of new patterns of feeling’ (Ellis, 458), a release that is often tied to the Gothic heroine: ‘the release of feelings as the preeminent domain of the Gothic explains the persistence of women as vehicles for delivering its effects’ (Ellis, 458). This emotional release is the resolution of a central gendered tension within the Gothic tradition between intellect (male) and emotion (female): ‘From a feminist point of view, the coherence of gender conventions keeps women oppressed’ (Ellis, 458). Whether this is the first Mrs Rochester in Jane Eyre or the governess in The Turn of the Screw, female emotion is contained (or at least should be contained according to the societal institutions of the Gothic world) by male intellect. Within the conventions of the horror film genre, the woman is often presented as both victim and monstrous, a representation of castration anxiety and the dangerous Other to masculinity. This dangerous Other needs to be contained, repressed and denied expression, especially in terms of her sexuality. The Awakening demonstrates an understanding of these conventions and plays with them to create its therapy for Florence.

The film quickly establishes Florence as a sceptic reliant upon scientific method and equipment, reminiscent of Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) in The X-Files (1993-2002). After the first scene shows Florence debunking a false séance, she is hired by a boarding school that has recently suffered a death, which some attribute to a ghost. At the school, Florence investigates and establishes that the victim died of an asthma attack, but cannot explain the mysterious sights and sounds she encounters. Aided by history master and WWI veteran Robert Mallory (Dominic West), school matron Maud Hill (Imelda Staunton) and a pupil who remains during the school vacation, Tom (Isaac Hempstead Wright), Florence investigates further. Along the way, she nearly drowns in a possible suicide attempt, develops a romance with Robert and is almost raped by the school groundskeeper, Edward Judd (Joseph Mawle). Eventually, she discovers that the ghosts are part of her own history, as she lived at the house as a child before it became a school, and experienced terrible trauma that she has repressed. Confronting this trauma both lays the ghosts to rest and reunites Florence with her full memory.

The incomplete resolution provided by Florence’s explanation of the boy’s death demonstrates a recurring disjunction throughout the horror genre, that between the normal and the supernatural: ‘The narrative quest of the horror film, then, is to find that discourse capable of solving this disjunction, explaining events’ (Gledhill, 353). This is the quest of the ghost investigator, and indeed many a detective who attempts to explain the seemingly impossible. In the mould of Sherlock Holmes, investigators endeavour to debunk supernatural explanations, such as the existence of a monstrous hound or the presence of ghosts. In this investigative narrative, resolution comes with the revelation that everything has been the act of tricksters, as demonstrated in the opening sequence of The Awakening when Florence exposes a group of con artists. Yet the explanation may be incomplete, the ghost story rife with ‘ambivalence or tension [that] is between certainty and doubt, between the familiar and the feared, between rational occurrence and the inexplicable’ (Briggs, 176). 

Ambivalence may result in a lack of certainty, but that does not prevent a resolution for the characters/viewer. This resolution however, does not come from a single source – Florence’s scientific investigation may expose the séance as a scam, but there are clear gaps in her expertise and righteousness. The victim of these con artists slaps her in anger, because the séance gave her hope that her deceased child was in the afterlife, and Florence has destroyed that hope.

The bereaved mother clings to an irrational, inexplicable hope, an emotional lifeline severed by the (limited) conception of scientific rationality that Florence operates with. The scientific explanation gives the mother no comfort, whereas believing in the scam could have. Knowledge, it seems, is not enough. Rationality and the intellect seek to contain, control and neutralise emotions, especially fear. We fear the unknown so try to understand more, know more and therefore neutralise our fear. This is what Florence does throughout the film, emphatically stating at one point that she will not live with fear. This approach towards emotion is similar to patriarchy’s attitude to women – contain, control and neutralise. Florence is unwilling to be contained, and does so through male-coded acts of professionalism, trouser wearing and scientific method. But arguably this masculinises her, and what The Awakening demonstrates are the dangers and ultimate futility in attempting to suppress and deny part of one’s own identity. The film’s therapy, therefore, repudiates and debunks patriarchal/rational containment of femininity/emotion.

The bereaved mother equates Florence’s heartlessness with her childlessness, this lack signified as aberrant and unnatural. This is perhaps ironic considering Florence’s reliance upon scientific, i.e. natural phenomena in her work and the apparatus that she uses to measure these.

Florence, The Awakening, dir. Nick Murphy (2001)

Furthermore, it relates what she does with the conceit of the Gothic genre, as ghost stories challenge the rational order with ‘what is perceived as fearful, alien, excluded, or dangerously marginal’ (Briggs, 176). These dangers may be the past, the dead, war, and challenges to the social order of patriarchy. A further demonstration of Florence’s ‘aberrance’ is the concern of Sergeant Evans (Steven Cree), who fears suspicions of both personal and professional impropriety. To the first, Florence attempts to assuage his concerns by reassuring him that his wife is very lucky, but there remains a sense that her work is aberrant and unusual. Professionally, Evans is concerned about taking instruction from a woman, finding it a compromise of his masculinity. To this, Florence is largely contemptuous, indicating her disregard for traditional gender roles.

This disregard continues, as Florence repudiates the role of a ‘lady’, a role challenged by the aftermath of the Great War in which over 30% of Britain’s male population was killed. Florence’s lover died in the trenches, and in the absence of male presence she has made a new role for herself as a professional, emancipated woman. Evans’ concerns are over the traditional role and place of women, which Florence and indeed the film has little interest in.

By contrast, the more modern Robert Mallory is comfortable with Florence’s professionalism. Robert is a casualty of war in both body and mind and, like Florence, he lost people in the War, witnessing these deaths first hand and suffering injuries himself. Furthermore, Robert displays post-traumatic-stress-disorder and performs self-harm as a form of penance. His reference to seeing ghosts himself could be literal or figurative, but in contrast to Florence he is not dismissive. Within conventional terms, he is more ‘feminine’ than she is, given to emotional indulgence through his self-harming and uncontrollable panic attacks.

Florence’s lack of femininity is characterised by her reliance on traditionally male concepts of rationality and science, and a disbelief in concepts such as ghosts, Father Christmas, the Tooth Fairy and, more controversially, God. Florence’s early description of these concepts is derisive, suggesting a scornful attitude to beliefs in what cannot be scientifically proven. To include God in this list emphasises Florence’s reliance upon science, simplistically presented as the opposition to faith and religion. Furthermore, Florence seems uninterested in significant emotion as a whole, her general demeanour one of slight amusement. It would be a mischaracterisation to describe her as cold, as she displays warmth and compassion to the children of the boarding school and there is attraction between her and Robert. Yet repression runs throughout the film, and has done so in the protagonist’s history as well.

Repression, especially in relation to women, is a Gothic trope: ‘The vast, imprisoning spaces that appear so regularly in the Gothic as castles, monasteries, and actual prisons can be read as metaphors for women’s lives under patriarchy’ (Ellis, 458). The school in The Awakening serves a similar purpose; Florence’s return to her former family home perhaps a re-entry into the oppressed position of women that her self-determined role repudiates. Being the site of her original trauma and false memories codes the house as the manifestation of the prison in her mind, which must be returned to, questioned and investigated in order to be understood. Thus it is through her investigation into the paranormal events at the school that Florence undergoes therapy as to who she is and where she came from, acquiring a more complete understanding.

Nor is repression confined to women, as the boarding school represses its students, through its stone walls, stern lines of the mise-en-scéne and its own institutionalised rules. Such a trope appears in much horror cinema, including an early adaptation of Robert Louis Stephenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, directed by Rouben Mamoulian (1932). In this film, the ‘dark, foggy, labyrinthine streets of London give an expressionist sense of the confinement and hypocrisy of this society, with its outdated Victorian mores … [and] the character of the young man hemmed in by conventionalities’ (Kaye, 244). The students and staff of the school are also trapped by particular, outmoded versions of masculinity. One of the teachers, Malcolm McNair (Shaun Dooley), keeps his students in a state of constant fear and canes them for the slightest misdemeanour. Robert tells Florence that the boys are ‘scared to death’, and this could be attributed to the school itself rather than any supernatural occurrence. 

Indeed, the goal of this discipline, the creation of sturdy young men, is misguided. McNair found one of the boys, Walter Portman, up at night, and placed the boy outside to get him to ‘man up’. The terrified Walter succumbed to an asthma attack, essentially dying of fright because of an attempt to make him tougher. The standard macho way of dealing with fear, the film suggests, is a fallacy – a more caring and sympathetic approach can produce more capable people.

The stylistic tropes of the horror film are used to create this sequence of terror, but it is significant that what is actually terrifying are completely human acts. While there have been moments of supernatural horror in the film, the revelation is that human acts of cruelty and murder are what scared and scarred Florence. As these memories resurface, scaring her afresh, the viewer shares her terror and comes to the same understanding, undergoing the same therapy. The presumptions as to where Florence came from are shown to be incorrect, as are her assertions about positive mental health as she confronts her childhood trauma.

Violence and suffering are intrinsic to the school, most obviously in the figure of Judd but also in the violent history that Florence has repressed. It is significant that Judd avoided military service but is himself violent and, interestingly, killed by a gun that Florence strikes him with to escape his rape attempt. Violent death is, it seems, not confined to the battlefield. This proves to be the case as Florence’s memories return – her father murdered her mother with a shotgun (much like Judd’s), then attempted to kill Florence herself but, accidentally, shot her half-brother Tom and then himself. Florence’s ‘awakening’ is expressed through discontinuous editing and unstable cinematography, the past and present merging as the viewer sees both the adult (Hall) and child Florence (Molly Lewis).

This trauma is the monstrous element of The Awakening. Within Gothic horror, the monstrous ‘can be seen as embodying modern fears such as alienation, the horrors of war, and sexually transmitted disease’ (Kaye, 240). World War I casts a long shadow over the events of The Awakening’s narrative, but its 2011 release and the presence of a character suffering from war-inflicted PTSD makes it very much a post-9/11, post-Iraq War film. This is the modern fear that the film taps into, its confrontation with fears that are both overt (Robert) and suppressed (Florence), offering the therapy of balancing emotional release with rational understanding. In some adaptations of Jekyll and Hyde, ‘the story of a man’s – and by way of audience identification, a country’s – descent into bestial violence had a clear metaphorical link to the conflagration just past’ (Skal, 140, cit.Kaye, 241). Similar descents appear in The Awakening – Judd is bestially violent towards Florence while Robert is towards himself. The violence of Florence’s father is linked to animality, through the portrait of a lion attacking a horse visible behind him as he kills Tom and then himself. From this image, Florence constructed a belief that an actual lion killed her parents and scarred her, whereas she was actually scarred by the same shot that killed Tom. Man collapses into animal as part of the repression of trauma. As Florence’s memories awaken, she sees her father shooting himself, the painting of the lion merely the background.

  

The therapy of this revelation is that Florence need not be terrified little girl nor (masculinised) overly rational adult – she balances the emotional with the intellectual. Her experience at the school reawakens her emotional responses, as she weeps unashamedly into Maud’s arms. It could be argued that the awakening of her buried memories restores her to proper, feminine emotionality, but this is not the film’s therapy. As well as being able to cry, Florence has also achieved her goal of overcoming her fear – now that she knows what happened to her, she no longer fears it. And there is a danger of emotional over-indulgence still to come. 

Maud, The Awakening, dir. Nick Murphy,(2011)

Another part of the revelation is that Tom’s mother is Maud, who can see the ghost of her son and stayed with the house when it became a school. She tries to create company for Tom by poisoning herself and Florence. But while Maud dies, Florence urges Robert to get her something that will make her sick, purging the poison from her system, using her scientific knowledge to save her life. Robert is unable to find anything, but Florence’s emotional plea spurs Tom to provide her with a suitable agent. Scientific knowledge combined with a plea to a loved one ultimately save Florence’s life, as her psychological life has also been saved through an overcoming of fear through recognition and embrace of emotional trauma.

As a British horror film, The Awakening inevitably echoes Hammer Films, which often ‘allow some release of tensions, [but] ultimately they deny excesses of sensuality by punishing transgressors’ (Kaye, 246). Maud is punished for her excessive connection to her dead son, being allowed to die while Florence lives, but rather than a return to repression, Florence’s salvation is also the reason for the attempt on her life – Tom saves her because Florence tells him: ‘If I go with you now my soul will never be happy’. Rather than a return to the status quo of repression (of one form or another), The Awakening depicts therapy, the balance of emotion and intellect rather than one overcoming the other. This balance helps to neutralise ‘woman as threat’ and more as an equal partner, as demonstrated in the final scene between Florence and Robert. Robert is not a paragon of machismo, being troubled by both physical and psychic injuries, but as such, he is the ideal partner for Florence, and the film ends with a clear sense of equality and mutual recognition between them.

It could be interpreted that Florence does actually die from the poisoning, as the final scene only features her speaking to Robert and apparently not seen by the school’s headmaster, Reverend Hugh Purslow (John Shrapnel). The film’s evidence is more supportive of her having survived, however, because she leaves when Maud wanted to keep her there, and the ghost of Tom is not seen again. What is striking in the final scene is that Florence seems much warmer and less haughty than her earlier scenes. From her original position of rational superiority, she has confronted her own ghosts, literal and figurative, in a terrifying experience that leaves her deeply shaken. Yet she is able to balance this trauma with an understanding that is rational and emotional, demonstrated by her final line that closes the film ‘Not seeing them, it's not the same as forgetting, is it?’ This line expresses the therapeutic philosophy of The Awakening: the importance of remembering and maintaining a sense of the past and your experiences. Florence forgot, and then re-encountered what she had forgotten. Now she need not see, but she does remember, embracing her past and keeping it as part of her future. 

As a genre, ‘the Gothic itself is locked “in the encapsulating social systems that engender repeated trauma’” (Massé, 19, quoted by Ellis, 459), but The Awakening unlocks these systems by allowing therapy for its protagonist, confronting her trauma and integrating it into her consciousness. She does not remain in the prison, the film denying an either/or opposition, and allows her to leave, with the suggestion of a continuing romance with Robert. Although Florence and Robert make plans to meet again, the film’s emphasis is not upon this union – love is not Florence’s defining feature. Good mental health (shockingly!) may be enough for this Gothic heroine.

Florence and Robert, The Awakening, dir. Nick Murphy (2011)

The Awakening uses the tropes of the horror and Gothic traditions, such as the opposition between emotion and intellect and between masculine and feminine, to show the fallacy of these oppositions, promoting instead the philosophy of integration and balance. This is the film’s therapy, a reworking of Gothic and horror tropes through an engagement with PTSD, tied both to family trauma and the horrors of war, to provide a useful therapeutic lesson.

Works cited:

Briggs, Julia, ‘The Ghost Story’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Chichester: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 176-187.

Ellis, Kate Ferguson, ‘Can You Forgive Her? The Gothic Heroine and Her Critics’, in A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Chichester: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 457-468.

Gledhill, Christine, ‘The horror film’, in The Cinema Book, edited by Pam Cook (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 347-366

Kaye, Heidi, ‘Gothic Film’ in A New Companion to the Gothic, edited by David Punter (Chichester: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 239-251.

Skal, David, ed., The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror (London: Plexus, 1993).