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
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