#GRAVITY 2013 SERIES#

However, a Russian missile strike on a decommissioned satellite inadvertently releases a shower of debris into orbit which eventually engulfs and destroys the American’s space shuttle hurtling Stone and Kowalski into space and leaving them stranded without a means to return home. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) helps veteran astronaut Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) on what is supposed to be a routine space mission. Within the film’s field of meaning, nothing could be worse than such an escape, for it would be nothing more than a ceaseless, oscillating trajectory into the inhuman Outside, into infinite darkness.Experiencing her very first shuttle mission, medical engineer Dr. In Gravity, gravity always wins: either return to the terrestrial center as part of your journey of reconciliation – with the Earth, with life, loss, the past, the trauma of finite selfhood – or else be destroyed by your attempt to escape it.

#GRAVITY 2013 SERIES#

Contrast this in turn with the Guild Navigators in Frank Herbert’s Dune series (1965-1985), who exist as drugged-out worm-like posthumans confined to spice-saturated tanks, where they dream safe passage for spaceships, or even the astropaths of Warhammer 40,000, who perform a similar function: in all cases, the baseform human is maladapted to space travel.) There is a humanism here, then, but one which rejects the transformative paternalism of 2001 and Contact. (It would be intriguing to compare elements of Gravity with Cordwainer Smith’s famous short story “ Scanners Live in Vain”, in which the “First Effect” of human space travel consists in what Smith calls the “Great Pain of Space,” necessitating that spacefaring crews have their brains damaged so as to expunge all human feeling. We are earthly creatures first and foremost, and while the Outside may tolerate brief incursions, it does not welcome them. For the film, the human condition is resolutely tellurian or terrestrial. Much of the film entails Stone’s frantic attempts to make contact with other human beings: with Kowalski, with Houston, with anyone who might be listening down below.Īs with all of the films I’ve assembled here, Gravity poses an argument within the domain of astronoetics. I could get used to it.” Of course, underlying Stone’s emotional isolation is a desperate need to reconnect with the human condition. When Kowalski asks her what she likes best about being in space, Stone replies, “The silence. I wake up, I go to work, and I just drive.” The fact of her flight from this trauma is so fundamental that it separates her from the terrestrial altogether. “I was driving when I got the call,” Stone says. She is unable to grieve because her response to the death of her daughter is to flee from the trauma – thereby paradoxically holding the trauma in suspended animation – rather than to confront or process it. During the first two thirds of the film, Stone exists in a state of literal and symbolic detachment, lost both in her inability to grieve and in space. The principal architectonic of the film is the almost overbearing parallel between Stone’s emotional and physical journeys. She then marshals her efforts to enter the Chinese station and uses its escape pod to return to Earth’s surface. On the way, she nearly gives up on returning to Earth while speaking with an Eskimo-Aleutian ham radio operator, but a dream of Kowalski’s return forces her to confront her despair. After a catastrophic fire, Stone makes her way in a Soyuz module toward a Chinese space station in the distance. When they reach the ISS, Kowalski is also lost. On the way, the film reveals that Stone once had a daughter, who died in an abrupt accident. Kowalski rescues Stone after they both become detached, and they spacewalk to the International Space Station (ISS). After an orbital satellite is destroyed, the debris initiates a chain reaction of additional debris that promptly destroys the Explorer, killing everyone except for Stone and Kowalski. Ryan Stone is aboard the Explorer for her first space mission, accompanied by veteran astronaut Matthew Kowalski.

Gravity 2013