Corporate Pirates (A Review of Captain Phillips)

This isn’t the first time that a character played by Tom Hanks has been stranded. A little over ten years ago, he starred in the film Cast Away from the year 2000, about a FedEx employee who lives through a plane crash and ended up on a deserted island somewhere in the vast Pacific Ocean, forced to survive on his own for several years. And in 2004, he starred in the Steve Speilberg film Terminal, in which he played a visitor from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia stranded in an airport because his visa is no longer valid. The tenor of both of these films was vastly different, even though they both dealt with transformations and abandonment. The first one demonstrated a change of tone, where the confidence and airiness of the opening was transformed by a descent into silence and despair. The latter film was a light-hearted and uplifting story colored by comedic touches and an overall optimism.  What is comedy if it doesn’t involve a type of restoration of balance, a type of reunion and reaffirmation of the bonds that hold societies together even in the face of momentary destabilization?

In the film Captain Phillips, released in 2013, we have another instance of a stranded character. This time Tom Hanks plays the eponymous protagonist who is in charge of a cargo ship following a dangerous route past the eastern coast of Africa. It is a route that begins in the port of Oman and ends in Kenya, but in a more general and allegorical sense, it is a psychic voyage that strips the protagonist of his certainties and his sense of safety. What had seemed so far away and so exotic, something safely contained, erupts suddenly to overwhelm and challenge them.  The chief danger is posed by the Somali pirates, a woeful band of desperate and illiterate men who are forced to venture out to sea to capture ships and demand ransoms, but they are only a catalyst. The danger is, or course, is a constitutive part of a system, one that doesn’t have to do only with conditions in the developing world and the horn of Africa specifically. It has to do with an entire worldwide economic system.

There are various themes that become apparent in this film. One of these is the similarity between the developing and developed world. The underlying worldwide economy, after all, has become increasingly globalized during the past decades, and it has displaced and distorted economic practices everywhere. There are no longer localized and self-reliant economies, everything is tied together, and the instabilities are quickly manifested everywhere. Such as the case, for example, in the global economic meltdown of 2008, which caused a global economic contraction.  In an era of transnational capital and distributed production, we have an erosion of fundamental protections that had been achieved even in industrialized countries such as the United States. As the character of Captain Phillips notes in the beginning of the film, on a bleak and cloudy morning as he prepares once again to leave on another job assignment, competitive pressures are become more and more pronounced and workers are become more and more vulnerable.  He states that, once, a worker could “hunker down quietly” and have a career, without having to face the continual threat of downsizing and displacement, but now they have to constantly struggle to work harder and faster, to upgrade their qualifications in order just to tread water. Of course this is a global phenomenon, and the common theme is that workers have become more and more vulnerable, exploited and discarded by a directing class that holds all the cards.

This is echoed in the plight of the Somali men, whose livelihood, the film seems to assert, has also suffered in the fact of these worldwide pressures. They can’t make a living from fishing anymore, because there are too few opportunities and, fundamentally, too few fish. The trawlers prowl in international waters, gathering up vast catches and leaving nothing to local workers, who are left scrambling while they impotently watch the giant cargo and tanker ships streaming along their coasts. It is a symbol of a economy that is leaving them behind.

These illiterate and desperate Somalis are also controlled by bosses, who take advantage of their desperation. These “bosses” hold all the cards, and find them easy prey for schemes which involve participating in the new economy of extortion, one in which desperation finds hope in risky schemes. They go out into the ocean and capture these ships that stream by so indifferently, then demand ransom, a windfall of millions of dollars. The profits, of course, only accrue to the bosses, never to the workers. It is easy to see that one of the themes of this film, then, is a critique of the current economic order, where destabilization wears many changes of color.

But this is also a film that reaffirms the seductions of the center, of the American way of life, of consumer culture and the idea of making a trip to the big city, to New York.  The chief pirate proclaims over and over that he is also “American”, for isn’t that a state of expectation and a hope for improvement, and not just a nationality? It is a matter of those on the outside who wish desperately to join the party, because long before the era of globalization there was already a cultural shift in evidence, where the people living in the developed world were exposed to the seductions of the developed world and the consumer economy. The Somalis are no different from the working classes in the United States, no different than the peasants from rural China who stream into the big cities, no different from the protestors of the Arab Spring who wanted to topple long-ruling autarchs and take control of their societies.  They wish to desperately gain a leg up and storm into the middle classes. The film seems to argue, thus, that there is a fundamental convergence between the two, between the illiterate fishermen of Africa and the undereducated workers of America, in a system that thrives on just this type of disjuncture because it propels the expansion of this system. It reminds me, then, of the thesis presented in the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where fundamentalism thrives on extremism and these ideological dysjunctures that involve treating people as means and not ends.

In this film we don’t quite see the warm and likeable Tom Hanks that we have come to know from so many previous films. It is undeniable that the actor has a charisma all his own, a warmth that appeals to audience members and binds us to him immediately. Here, he plays a more subdued character, almost dour, who commands the respect of his crew but doesn’t seem to have any real friends. He chides his workers for taking long coffee breaks, and behaves like a corporate hack when he remonstrates with them when they complain about the risks they face in light of a possible attack. When his crew confronts him to complain about these unreasonable risks, he dangles the prospect of unemployment, telling them that they can sign the paperwork at the nearest port of call and have them leave his crew.  He yells at them over and over, “You knew the risks, you signed up knowing the risks”, and this gives him a certain unsympathetic air that foreshadows precisely what will happen to him. As an agent of a crushing and exploitative economic order, of course he will be crushed and traumatized by what will happen next.

As an adventure story, this film is engaging. We see the long odds faced by the band of pirates, serious and frail men almost all of them deathly thin, driven by desperation and fueled by the drug khat (a narcotic found in the leaves of a native plant), traveling on precarious longboats with broken engines that would surely seem to be no match for the gigantic cargo ships. They are challenging Leviathan, of course, and we can understand their motivation even if we don’t agree with their way of achieving their objectives. They are desperate but also enterprising men, pushed by the same values that drive corporate executives, the drive to take risks, and the menacing captain of the Somalis with the overbite, Abduwali Muse (played by a lean and boyish Barkhad Abdi, an actual Somali refugee), bends to the pressures of being a captain. There can be no scope for collective decision-making in such an enterprise (it is a business, after all!), and Adbuwali succumbs to the pressure to become a CEO, a tyrant who has to control his crew and be ruthless, engaging even in violence. He is another cog in the system, of course, and this is their only chance to prove themselves, the only way in which an intrepid band of four pirates wielding automatic weapons will commandeer a mammoth ship.

The film is one long journey in the education of Captain Phillips. Having been unable to sympathize with the plight of his fellow workers, and reacting with hostility to the statement made by one of his crewmembers who states he is a “union” man but never signed up for these risks, he comes to understand their plight and desperation from his close contact with the pirates. Captain Phillips is brave, of course, and is a creative and competent leader who saves many lives, but he trusts too much in the system. He is a cog in a system who refuses to accept this understand, and seems incapable of finding common cause. Can there be any more way of exposing the predatory impulses of this economic order if it doesn’t involve illustrating the violence that it engenders? The science fiction writer H.G. Wells found another way in his classic The Time Machine. He imagined the process of evolution as applied to the capitalist system, wherein workers would eventually become carnivores (the Morlocks), eating the progeny of the effete directorial classes who would grow too used to their life of splendor and luxury and become Eloi.

Are these Somali pirates truly as inhuman and bloodthirsty as they seem? It is easy to portray them as parodies of viciousness and unreasonable third world anger, and they scowl, bicker and yell at each other more so than they do at the American crew. They issue threats and wave guns, administering beatings with maniacal intensity, never acknowledging the crew but evincing all the while that they are out of their element. They bumble through the ship, but they are dangerous precisely in their vulnerability. And the captain seems to recognize this desperation, almost as if they were echoing the complaint of his own crew members, one which they never express to him but which we can visualize in their faces, in their confusion, in their manic intensity: “We never signed on to this!”. They too are injured, they too are incapacitated, they too are wounded, first one by stepping on glass, then the Somali captain himself whose hand is injured when he is captured by the crewmembers. What sort of madness has overtaken them?

There is a convergence once again, and the pirates become slightly more sympathetic to the degree that their order breaks down in the face of an overwhelming show of force. It is a moral descent that assumes hellish proportions, for when the pirates escape the boat in a small lifeboat, holding Captain Phillips hostage, they face increasingly long odds.  The small lifeboat is soon surrounded by the giant naval ships of the Americans, a confrontation that can’t auger well even in the face of the pirate leader’s tired insistence that everything will work out, everything will be okay. Two captains come to the realization that they are both cogs in a system that relies on violence and the threat of force, they are both collateral damage.  For all his clever strategems, for all his “tricks” and his quick thinking, Captain Phillips is still confined in a precarious lifeboat, still in peril of losing his life, still subject to beatings, still forced to deal with what he comes to recognizes are the consequences of a worldwide system. “You are no fishermen”, he tells the captain. No, in such a system, they can’t be.

In the end, one becomes almost seasick by the cresting and falling waves of emotion and tension. The captain is heartened by hope, but the presence of these naval ships seems only to drive his captors to more and more desperate measures, to increased threats and to brutal beatings as the pirates in this futile dynamic where the superior force can’t let the other group go. “Don’t worry, everything will be all right”, the pirate captain tries to reassure his captive, but he knows it won’t, because he has already lost control of his own men, especially of the tall and brutal Somali from a neighboring village who is driven by anger. They are different men, both cogs in this formula that would seem only to auger a bitter end for all the cogs in the system. Is this not what it means to find yourself abandoned, for the average worker to be “let go”, stranded, rendered superfluous and thus expendable?

Finally, after the pirates are killed and the captain is rescued, splattered as he is in the blood of his dead captors and whimpering and howling in despair, we see him taken on board the ship in what in other jingoist films would seem to provide the perfect opportunity for a self-celebratory moment. Such was the case, after all, in the film “Airforce One” from 1997, in which the kidnapped president, played by Harrison Ford, after undergoing a similarly terrifying ordeal with Russian captors, is rescued and he salutes his new crew, as if he were somehow superhuman and unaffected by his experiences (hubris triumphant, a crowd pleasing action film with cardboard one-dimensional villains). In this case, we have no such celebratory moment. We have, instead, the most harrowing and affecting sequence of the film, one in which the captain is attended to by medical personnel and tries to come to grips with this return to a normalcy that seems, somehow, unreal.

He is asked if he can talk, if he can describe what has happened to him, while attended to in a no nonsense way by medical personnel. He is shell-shocked, he can barely answer, he can’t seem to corral his thoughts, and his delayed responses shows all the signs of the trauma he has suffered. We have no heroic superman taking immediate control once again, saluting and returning to his post as if he could shrug off his experiences, maybe even cracking jokes a la Bruce Willis in the die hard movies. What distinguishes this film from other action films is that we see the human side of this suffering, even as the pirate captain is taken into custody and arrested, knocked down as he is on the floor, and told that his friends are all dead. Captain Phillips has been traumatized by his ordeal, and his vulnerability as he whimpers and stammers and struggles to respond as he sits on the table, is a powerful, powerful sequence. One can’t imagine that we have any “winners” here. We whimper along with the captain.

We have, then, an action film that tries to go beyond the formulas that seem to hold sway. We don’t have a reluctant hero, we have a victim who manages to survive. It is a film that offers a thesis, affirming that there is a convergence in the experiences of these two worlds, and that we have workers who are afforded little options, and are forced to submit to an unjust system that is bolstered by force and the condemnation of a moral code that upholds this system. Just as the crew of the ship are unable to assert their just claim that they should not be subjected to these risks (“We didn’t sign up for this”), we have Somali pirates who have no livelihood, and who are forced by their gun-wielding bosses to venture out into the ocean, to risk their lives and bring back ships. It is the system, rather than specific groups, that is piratical, and we see the aftermath, not in a heroic sequence where order is reestablished as if nothing had happened and the characters are unchanged, but in a depressing return to normality. We see a film that end on a more reflective note, a fade to black, rather than fireworks and a heroic reunion with his wife and children.

In an economy in which workers are increasingly “Nickle and Dimed”, to refer to the title of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous work from 2001 which details the transformation of the economy into an entity which has grown more and more exploitative, more reliant on a vulnerable and subservient workforce, more easy to control and without elementary protections, and where workers are forced to accept ever more dangerous risks, can we be sure that the real pirates were defeated? Aren't they all still cogs in the system?

Copyrights 2014 (C) Oscar G. Romero

Bloated Epics: A Belated Review of "The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug"

Only one word that comes to mind as I think about the movie “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”. It is this: bloated. This movie is the second part of the trilogy that has been crafted out of the prequel to the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and it was written and directed by Peter F. Jackson, and released in 2013. It is based on the novel by J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit, but while the original was a rather slim tome that introduced the reader in a light-hearted and charming way to Middle Earth, a place populated by goblins, by elves, by wizards and dwarves, this movie transforms the material and weighs it down with a baggage that it all darkness and non-stop action, stripping it of the airy bits and most of the whimsy of the original source material. It can only be described as a movie transformed by a Hollywood spell to fashion yet another box-office hit, relying as it does on the same old formulas that, because they are no longer novel, having been used with the Lord of the Rings trilogy, strike one as exhausting. It is as if the Hobbit were to carry around the burden of the subsequent trilogy, expanded as it is in scope and utterly changed as it is in tone.

Which is not to say that in the original Tolkein novel there were no elements of darkness. There were, and we had madcap pursuits and moments of bewilderment and terror. But overall it had a lightheartedness that was charming, with a narrator who frequently spoke to the reader in asides, making practical observations that were meant to ground the whole in whimsy. We never for a moment thought that any of the band of 14 would suffer serious harm, even though we could at times catch glimpses of a disguised commentary on the political situation in Europe at the time. We had only to take note that the novel was written in the 1930s, during the age of fascist dictators, and that the work is pervaded by a sort of worldview that emphasizes the value of the west, a land of civilization and progress, in contrast to the east, the region that the band penetrate in their attempt to reclaim Thorin’s kingdom. We see it in the description of the Wood Elves, who

“….differed from the High Elves of the West, and were more dangerous and less wise. For most of them (together with their scattered relations in the hills and mountains) were descended from the ancient tribes that never went to Faerie in the West. There the Light-elves and the Deep-elves and the Sea-elves went and lived for ages, and grew fairer and wiser and more learned, and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvelous things, before come came back into the Wide World.”

Given the undercurrent of criticism directed at the kings who lived in the east, such as the Dwarf king who unwisely plundered a mountain, or the menace of the East, the disembodied spirit of Sauron, one can’t help but see in them a premonition of war.  But this came later, and did not color or dominate the whole novel the way it does in this Jackson movie adaptation, where apparently somberness of tone is necessary to achieve the sense of scale that is equated with grandeur and wonder, something which wasn’t really the case in the movie, which was more of a caper, frequently emphasizing comic notes in the charming interaction of this band of adventurers.

Here, what we have in this second movie trilogy is a story unto which has been grafted the epic scale of the trilogy that was to come, The Lord of the Rings.  The adventures described now have an epic quality, and there is a mood of seriousness, a heightening of dramatic impact, a banging as it were on the heavy drums where before we had the lightness of a charming fable told amidst the high-pitched notes of a reed flute. The movie accentuates the bombast, with plenty of brooding characters, and with a scale that doesn’t match the intimacy of what was evident in the original material. We have somber counselors, and a dwarfish Lothario who seems to fall for an Elvish maid, and a misguided Elvish king who has no compunction about torturing orcs or sneering at other races. And we have the familiar brand of villains, the anonymous hordes of orcs and goblins and evil spirits, who are always vowing to kill to the accompaniment of swirling dark music. They sneer and grimace and threaten in this accentuation of the one note of menace, while in the original novel at least the monsters (such as the trolls or the wood spiders) are seen to converse and joke amongst themselves as any old hunter might be at the capture of their prey. They have been simplified in this movie adaptation, in other words.

It seems to me that the Hobbit was not meant to assume such epic garb. It always struck me as a story to be read by a kindly old grandfather to a child on cold winter nights, a story with a lightness of character that was also, perhaps, edifying, in a way that was common for modern day fairy tales and not the brutal and scary way of old European folktales. What is fantasy but a travelogue through a metaphorical dream landscape, one that isn’t too unsettling or unrecognizable but, instead, upholds a certain comfortable moral framework? Innocent and long-suffering youth prevails, with the help of magical aides or their own luck, and their oppressors are punished suitably in a reaffirmation of our beliefs.  

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation was acclaimed by fans as true to the spirit of the original, and his storytelling was vigorous, matching the more somber note of the literary work while highlighting those deeply-felt and innocent personal notes that provided such an effective contrast in scale between the endless succession of battles (army after army of orcs and eastern hordes besieging the fair westerners) and the personal struggles of Frodo and Samwise as they trekked into Mordor on an impossible quest.This emotional resonance was not overpowered by the scale, but majestic and sweeping vistas were complemented by the personal interactions, and Peter Jackson captured them effectively in his movie trilogy. But it seems to be next to impossible to weave the same spell more than once.

One couldn’t help but be bewildered and also disappointed by the incorporation of so much filler material that has been written by Jackson and his fellow co-writers to “flesh out” this epic. We have now storylines that take liberties and transform the original work beyond all recognition, refashioning and stuffing it so that it becomes an exercise in excess. For example, we see it in the episode with Beorn, the man-bear who lives out in the wild.

As portrayed in the movie, he has become another sulking survivor, the last of a dying breed, who doesn’t smile and seems tortured by his past. He is first seen in bear form, pursuing Gandalf and the adventurers as they flee, and is at the point of snapping his jaws on them if not for a fortuitous burst of speed. It is menace that is accentuated, and this menace continues when he assumes human form and reluctantly agrees to help them. But this wasn’t the Beorn that I remembered from the book.

As I thought about it, I came to the realization that almost all the male figures in this movie fit into the mold of tortured and sulking individuals, broadcasting their self-involvement in a stylistic exercise that is repeated over and over in modern culture and the romantic elevation of the misfit and the loner. They don’t seem to laugh, they are always brooding, always making plans for revenge, always on the defensive, always with the metaphorical wall drawn up, and with none of the openness I remember from the novel. Here is his first appearance in the novel:

“Ugh! Here they are!” he said to the horses. “They don’t look dangerous. You can be off!” He laughed a great rolling laugh, put down his axe and came forward. “

He laughs, he chats with the dwarves and the wizard, he seems amiable beneath a gruff exterior. In the movie, he scowls and stars and never laughs, and he only agrees to help them because he despises them less than he despises the orcs that are hunting them. And except for Bilbo and Gandalf, all the other male leads seem to share in varying degrees with these qualities. From Beorn to Thorin to the Elf King to Legolas to the Smuggler of Lake Town, they all come from the same mold: embittered men who engage in an excess of Sturm and Drang. They are outsiders, they have been wronged and they are single minded in their relentless emoting of their anger.

The pacing of this movie also seems wrong, and draws much from Jackson’s first movie trilogy. We have peril succeeding peril in a nonstop sequence, where each escape seems more unlikely than the former, but in action sequences that are drawn out, long and frequently exhausting. The pacing is relentless, and it numbs the mind with its repetition. We see it over and over: encounters with trolls, with goblins, with orcs, with Beorn, with elves, with humans, and with the dragon Smaug. Orcs head are parted from their bodies with singular ease, as if they weren’t hardened warriors, and were instead what they are: expendable elements in a monotonous narrative sequence. We saw it in the first movie from this trilogy, and we see it over and over in this movie, a pacing that seems to be very much in line with a Hollywood action movie formulas that are calculated to appeal to adolescent male audiences, where the meal that is the movie consists not of a sequence of subtly varying courses that complement each other, but is instead a buffet of adrenaline spiced action. It is fast food for the masses, all fat and salt but with little nutritional value.

Now, in the literary source, the elves were portrayed as fey creatures, ones who had an otherworldly edge to them but who were also characterized by having a certain quality of whimsy or, if one could express it with another word, a joyous humor. In the book they are chanting fey songs, and while the lyrics were not epic poetry, they did at least suggest another side to the elves:

“Hmmm! It smells like elves!”, thought Bilbo, and he looked up at the stars. They were burning bright and blue. Just then there came a burst of song like laughter in the trees:

O! What are you doing,

And where are you going?

Your ponies need shoeing!

The river is flowing!

O! tra-la-la-lally

Here down in the valley!

Which is quite a contrast with the elves in the movie, who are all menace and pent-up energy waiting to be unleashed. How easily the elves slay orcs, without any moral compunction! Elves such as Legolas and the female Elvish warrior perform impossible physical leaps, changing direction in midair in the best tradition of Hong Kong kung-fu epics, as if they are weightless, while also able strangely enough to perform herculean feats of strength. They fight without getting tired, they never miss when they shoot their weapons, they have the visual acuity of the Hubble telescope and they can meld into the background instantaneously. And did I mention that they have no compunction about killing and torturing orcs? Where is the innocence of these elves?

They are, of course, a nightmare vision of the superman, the superior race that can kill without compunction, and who can have any compassion for orcs when they are so manifestly ugly and deformed and stunted and hardly even look like anorexic runway models the way the elves do? To hark back to the example of high school, they definitely occupy the haughty upper echelons, so self-centered, so casual in their dismissal of the lower classes, able to preen and maybe even a touch arrogant. They are not like the elves described in Tolkein’s novel, I must repeat. These elves are hard to admire, and if called upon to sum them up in a telling phrase, I would call them the stormtroopers for the west, a dark fantasy of power.

There are notes of melodrama in this adaptation by Jackson. They remind me of what I saw in Dickens or in Balzac, with characters who are scrambling in a new social and economic order, where if the realist novel of the 19^th century involved an incorporation of the conflicts of social class and the ascension of the bourgeoisie into literature, we have now a more disguised version of this same story, where the dwarves are the working classes on the move, and the elites are groups who have their own enduring cultural capital, able to set the aspirational norms for the others, the perfect taste, the perfect fashion, the perfect manners (even if underneath they are all menace), while the orcs are little more than slaves, the endless supply of soldiers and warriors or colonial subjects. Is it any wonder then that they resist this colonial order? Is not Sauron the Spartacus of Middle Earth?

The wonder quotient was also severely lacking in this film. It was present in the first Lord of the Rings, in the innocence for example of the country fair where the hobbits were allowed to roam and enjoy an honest evening, with hobbits involved in innocent shenanigans that provided a moment of respite from the serious and somber overtones of the latter half of the work. Here, everything seems so much heavier, a continual clanking noise where the lighter notes are absent. The visual landscapes are beautiful, painterly in their scope and impact, but they accentuate the note of artificial excess. They remind me of Disneyland and the concept of simulacrums. They are so purified that they seem to bear little relation to the actual thing, and have become entities in themselves, imaginary landscapes that just don’t seem to satisfy us because they are too pretty, they are too magnificent, they are too much.

One is left anticipating, of course, the point of culmination in this film, that of the encounter with Smaug. The encounter rings hallow, not for the sequence in which the Hobbit and the dragon engage in verbal foreplay, but because of what comes after:  another bloated action sequence.

The Smaug of the movie has all the bad habits of B-level movie villains, namely, he loves to blather too much.  This recurring motif, of course, is a device that is meant to prolong suspense in order to provide an opening for the eventual release of these pent-up energies. When we postpone the moment of confrontation, but without diminishing or resolving the element of danger, we have suspense, but one can’t help but think, over and over, that Smaug must surely be too clever for that plot-worn device. It is, nonetheless, refreshing in the book, a sequence to be savored, for it highlights what is improbable, but invests it with charm.  Bilbo the reluctant thief is engaging in the only form of combat he can hope to engage in when confronting a massive and dangerous dragon: verbal wordplay. We relish this turning of the scales (pun intended) as the underdog, an undersized and reluctant hero, confronts the despoiler of the kingdom of the Dwarves, the killer of legions, a dragon who for all his might is rather silly. This sequence is narrated with charm, but in the movie, we have another extended action sequence in which Bilbo struggles to get away, and in which he and the band of dwarves are involved in a Rubik’s cube sequence in which they try (unsuccessfully)to kill the dragon. One misses the narrative pleasure of the book that need not linger in such detail on these sequences.

The film ends with a cliffhanger. Gandalf is in peril, for he has been captured by the shadow, the prefiguration of Sauron. The dwarves are in the mountain, having made another miraculous escape, while Smaug bursts out and is flying like a malevolent bullet train with no brakes to smash into the small port village (Lake Town) where another hero, the smuggler, awaits to kill him with the last arrow at his disposal.  

We know what will happen. It will be drawn out, and filled with overwrought elements, and be paced in accordance with the needs and expectations of an adolescent audience that has been raised on a steady diet of vapid superhero movies and hyper-violent videogames. It will be another bloated spectacle filled with the air of inevitability, ready yet to shatter another beloved work from my childhood. 

Copyright 2014 (C) Oscar G. Romero

Adjunct faculty = marginal status

A colleague at another university recently published a powerful statement about the situation of adjunct faculty in our institutions of higher learning. Her entry describes much of what I have experienced also, with the consequent feeling of frustration but also wistfulness over what our careers could be if the system were not under such heavy stresses and we as faculty members were able to build consensus as a labor group with shared concerns and equal credentials. "There is room at the top", to quote a lyric by John Lennon from his 70s song "Working Class Hero", but this rings as hallow now as it did then.

With contingency status one comes quickly to realize that we are treated as second-class faculty members, frequently not acknowledged by tenure track members and not able to count on institutional support. We are left scrambling always to find enough work to make it through the academic year.

I'm not ready nor able to abandon the classroom the way professor Shah is planning to do, but at some point, given that adjuncts constitute 75% of the total faculty and teach many of the most essential classes with the highest enrollments, and in addition we are expected to strike and support all labor actions that are called to protect the status of tenure track colleagues but can count on no similar support from them (i.e. a willingness to strike to support our attainment of full-time status), there has to be a tipping point. Maybe when adjunct faculty constitute 85% of the total faculty pool? 95%? How high a percentage do we have to reach before we can get everyone to realize that this two-track system is not working?

Professor Priya Shah's blog entry is eloquent, and can be read HERE. Here is the first paragraph of her essay:

"Today is my (Prof. Shah's) last day of teaching as a professor. As an adjunct professor to be more specific. In my classes, we talk a lot about invisibility and its effects. Within the university system today, adjunct faculty are made invisible, thereby further reinforcing their marginalization even as their labor becomes increasingly critical to the daily activity of teaching students. Some of us are invisible in hospitals, choosing to suffer in pain because we cannot afford to see the doctor; some of us are the invisible homeless, living in our cars because we cannot afford any other shelter; some of us are invisible on campus because we don’t have an office in which to meet students; some of us are invisible on the schedule because we don’t find out if and what we are teaching until two weeks before classes begin; some of us are invisible at conferences and in the pages of scholarly journals because we cannot afford to pay out of pocket to fund our own professional development. Contingency is always already the logic by which our labor is deciphered by the university: we are presumed provisional and denied those resources and opportunities which would allow us to be anything but. However, there is one space in which we are not invisible – the classroom."

Belated review of Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, 

Do not go gentle into that good night.

(Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into the good night)

Review of "Gravity"

In a film with a title such as this one, it is hard not to reflect on the metaphorical implications. Gravity, the film by Alfonso Cuarón which opened in 2013, is a space adventure that is not so much predicated on the scientific principle of gravity and the attraction between bodies, but is instead a parable (an extended metaphor meant to teach a lesson) about finding a sense of connection. It is also an odyssey that is characterized by majestic visuals, one that depicts a place that is truly alien, outer space, with all manner of hidden and deadly dangers that assume the contours of a truly primal experience. It is an emotional journey in which the protagonist is finally able to bring her wanderings to a close and redeem herself.

When it opened in 2013, the film met with considerable critical acclaim. The director, Alfonso Cuarón, has produced a number of well-received films, and his Y tu mamá también represented a milestone in Mexican cinema, providing an affirming and nostalgic journey of self-discovery that awakens in all of us the terrible excitement of adolescence and innocence, when we are so young and vital and we are filled with such hope for the future.  Cuarón has also directed another science fiction film, the movie Children of Men that was released in 2006, depicting a scenario in which the humans of the near future were no longer able to give birth to children, and they found themselves mired in a form of cynicism and bitterness that reflected the coming end of the species. And, he directed an installment of the Harry Potter franchise, the film Prisoner of Azkaban, one grounded in fantasies of lost innocence and self-discovery. Come to think of it, many of his films reflect adolescent themes of innocence betrayed but, also, renewed.

Gravity, written and directed by Cuarón with the help of his son, had a relatively long gestation that was attributed, in part, to the technical difficulties involved in developing the technology necessary to film this movie. It is a story that takes place almost entirely in orbit, except for the last few minutes of reentry to earth. It has sweeping visuals that communicate a visceral sense of panic and disorientation, for in a dark theater and with 3-D technology, the spectator gets a sense of how truly unsettling weightlessness must be, and how much we have romanticized space as the place of dark terrors but also of our highest hopes for human transcendence.

The lack of gravity works, then, on many levels. It is of course an alien environment, but also, somehow, it takes on an emotional contour, for it comes to represent something else. It is the black hole of despair, the claustrophobic confines of tight spaces, the place of hidden terrors, and the loneliness of those who are depressed, but it is also, of course, the place without time, the eternal realm from when galaxies and stars and planets and eventually all of us emerged. For lack of a better symbol, I would call it the state of nothingness before birth.

Dr. Ryan Stone, played by Sandra Bullock, is a mission specialist who been sent with a team to help repair the Hubble Spacecraft. As the film opens, we see several astronauts performing an extended spacewalk. One of them is tethered to the craft and whoops and hollars in delight, and the other, astronaut Matt Kowalski, played by George Clooney, listens to country music and he circles round and round the ship, he having the benefit of a jet pack that provides self-propulsion. She alone seems out of place in this environment, battling what seems to be a cold or what may also be a delayed reaction to the effects of weightlessness. Her vulnerability is almost palpable in her muted voice, her sniffling, and her look of sadness.

The contrast then is set, and we see a frail individual who seems singularly unprepared for her role, one who is forced to soldier on and calling out to her companion to turn down the music. But what we also see, of course, is a woman with heavy emotional baggage, and this baggage has ejected her, for she is most definitely already lost from the company of true human society, taking refuge in her work. (We will find out later that she had a personal tragedy that involved the loss of her daughter to a senseless accident.) She is in need of rescue even before the incident that will trigger the mission abort, but she seems to be holed up in a place that is completely out of reach. It will take something that is literally earth-shattering to jar her loose. She will rely, of course, on her fellow astronaut Kowalski, but during almost the entire grueling film she will be ever on the verge of falling off the face of the cliff (a height metaphor seems appropriate).

These solitary journeys are not new, and they underscore the fact that in our culture we seem to place much more emphasis on individual rather than collective salvation. It is the individual in western culture that needs to draw from the hidden wellspring of strength, and it is inevitable that she will ultimately find herself completely isolated in a way that recalls the experience of adolescence and the many challenges that had to be overcome by all of us. (Once again, betrayed and endangered adolescence seems to be a theme in Cuarón films.)

Loneliness is a powerful theme, of course, and it resonates with us. When you no longer have family, nor friends nor a meaningful society to rely upon, this proves to be both liberating as well as frightening. The earth is literally floating next to you, a spectacular sight, so close and so visually mesmerizing, but also so very far away, and in one episode after another we see a protagonist who is forced to confront the fact of her having been abandoned. Her fellow astronauts are killed, including Matt, who heroically lets go when it becomes apparent to him that his failure to let go will also doom her, the mission control experts on the ground lapse into silence, and the other astronauts from the Space Station have already returned to earth. Even her attempt to communicate with the Chinese mission specialists, the sole line of communication open to her in the face of a global satellite communication blackout, is frustrated and she lapses into a dispiriting show of futile howling. If ever there were a dark moment this is it, and it is almost as if she had turned the famous Dylan Thomas verse, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” on its head. The wolves are circling, death is near, howl!

It is more than just an adventure story, although as such, it is effective, with a series of ever more serious obstacles. But it turns on the emotional quest, for the protagonist is quite evidently waging an internal battle. She was quite evidently damaged goods even before this space mission, and she has been circling without a center for a long time. We have, then, a psychological drama, one in which the protagonist has to battle herself in equal measure as she confronts the external dangers, and her success hinges quite frankly on this personal battle. Society cannot help her. Matt Kowalski cannot help her. The astronauts of the ISS (International Space Station) cannot help her, and mission control in Houston cannot help her. This space disaster is a graphic and sensory acknowledgement of her current predicament, in which she finds herself untethered, grasping wildly at holds, missing gravity and recognizing that it represents a sense of connection. Kowalski says it best in one of his lines homely but also laconically lines of dialogue that has the weight of a doctor’s diagnosis: “You need to learn how to let go”. Past trauma wasn’t holding her in place, and she must find her own way out of the darkness.

The sensory experience of weightlessness and desperation is very well communicated in this film. One has only to realize that when you are flying solo, without a tether, you have no leeway for mistakes. Among the more jarring scenes are those in which Dr. Stone is forced to climb what is left of the Space Station facility by hurling herself along from one rung to the next, desperately trying to catch hold of anything, a handle, a panel, a protruding joint, in order to proceed on her journey. There is a scene where the entry hatch springs open powerfully after she has turned the handle, and it is all one can do not to gasp at the sense of peril, and wonder in amazement how she managed to hold on. Just writing about it right now makes my toes and fingers tingle with the sense of peril, but it is also hypnotic, in a way, a sense that is communicated with her heavy and labored breathing, recalling the claustrophobia of other space walk scenes such as those depicted in the Stanley Kubrick classic, 2001 A Space Odyssey. And all the while there is the menace of the cloud of space debris, almost like a swarm of angry bees, but much more substantial, circling around the atmosphere at 90 minute intervals and destroying everything in their path. How do you find your way out of the maze?

It is the emotional journey in the face of desperation, one in which the prospect of imminent death hangs ever tantalizingly above her, and the fact that she continues to resist even as she is ever tempted to let go and give up is what gives it emotional weight. Running out of air, with her death having been seemingly foretold by the oracles of mission control in her failure to survive the computer landings she trained for in the simulation programs on the ground, and having said her goodbyes, to Matt, to her daughter, she implausibly survives. One would say it is so implausible that it must be a dream scenario, the product of the dying mind in the face of a lack of oxygen, and one would have to be pardoned if one keeps on expecting that the final scene will be that in which the camera will pan back from the window of one of the space vehicles only to reveal a dead Dr. Stone, perhaps with an angelic smile on her face, similar to the one seen at the end of Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. But, we are instead treated to a triumphant return to earth, one that is very like a birth sequence.

Gravity is an engaging film that offers both spectacular visual effects but also an emotionally resonant story that details a return to a sense of belonging, to a sense of place. What else is gravity but a sense of being connected to something and someone, of finding a place in the light and out of the darkness? In this case, is it a highly individualistic conception that accords with modern western cultural values. There is no connection to political projects, to narratives of social emancipation, not even to institutional affiliation. It is a personal journey, an emotional journey, one in which only the individual, in the face of abandonment, somehow is redeemed.

It is a jarring film, both exciting and discomforting and, also, optimistic and inspirational. It is a story of innocence recovered, and in the end, it is only fitting that the protagonist should return to earth by landing in a primal and lonely but, also, stunningly beautiful lake, filled with reeds and surrounded by mountains on a mild and lovely day, with the suggestion of enveloping warmth. These sensory impressions reflect in their totality, as mentioned before, powerful female tropes of the vagina and birth. The protagonist has returned to Mother Earth.

Copyright (C) 2014 Oscar G. Romero