We’re all tiny objects orbiting around the infinite space of possibility, on a collision course with nothingness and being.
GRAVITY (2013), unlike other thrill-seeking spectacles mostly devoid of story (I am thinking of Cameron’s AVATAR (2009) or Del Toro’s recent PACIFIC RIM), is a great story as well as a phenomenal, unlike-you’ve-ever-seen-before thrill. The 17-minute one-take opening was as jaw-dropping as Kubrick’s waltz through space in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), as fluid as Welles’s 3 minute-take in TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), as Lubezki’s 3D lenses curiously eye the stars, Earth, and our heroine, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), the scientist NASA sent to space with only six months of training. While GRAVITY is surprisingly self-aware of preceding science-fiction filmography, it is also entirely new in its technical approach—a process that took some 250 digital artists to painstakingly mull over every frame to create everything from the space suits to the condensation on Stone’s visor to the spectacular view of the Aurora Borealis. Also, the use of effective (and affective) sound editing, specifically when dealing with low frequency noises—as with Stone and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) unscrewing the spaceship’s bolts—created a muted violence; such noises (or lack thereof) and visuals become so real and frightening that the audience is immediately shocked into believing the impossibilities and dangers of space as if they themselves were drifting with Stone…
Cuarón’s 90-minute orbit around our home planet was as economical in its storytelling as it was emotionally human in its dialogue. I use dialogue, in spite of the fact that Kowalski breaks the space-walk record alone after sacrificing himself to save Stone, because Stone is in an isolated dialogue with us, the audience. Yes, at times she says things that are sentimental, overly-dramatic, but completely believable within the context of her journey back to Earth. If you have certain doubts with the believability of the dialogue, with Stone’s story about her 5-year old daughter’s death, with her “Woof! Woof!” moment with Aningaaq, with her attempt at prayer, you are not the only one. Many critics have lampooned Bullock’s performance and Cuarón’s optimism in the film’s final moments. But I believe these detractors are looking too closely. What you have to imagine is Stone’s relationship with the audience and judge her dialogue as completely natural and organic to her dire situation. GRAVITY diverges from its predecessors in that it does not deal with outside forces like aliens or artificial intelligence. Instead, it intends to repeat a very old tale on human isolation and survival much like a Jack London novel rather than the science fiction adventures we have seen regurgitated since Méliès dreamt of going to the moon.
At the surface, GRAVITY deals with a phenomenon known as the Kessler Effect, or “syndrome” a 1970s NASA scientist posited when the U.S. and other nations starting sending thousands of satellites into earth’s orbit. The fact that in our present time there are millions of objects orbiting the planet (at different orbital levels, mind you) is a kind of space-globalization where satellites become mindless representatives of shared governments and peoples. While Ryan Stone’s orbital drift is a very unlikely and unrealistic event for a true space-walker, Cuarón’s presentation seems (I cannot stress this enough) very believable. It is imagery that trumps plot for GRAVITY—imagery that begins with a nod to 2001 and Kubrick’s Star Child: Stone’s first “deep breath” after drifting through space and nearly suffocating in her space suit is her entrance into the artificial and technological womb of the Russian Space Station, where her oxygen hose quite literally resembles a fetus’s umbilical cord. One could imagine the space around Stone as the artificial water in the womb, allowing her to float in this artificial chamber, protected (for now) from the dangers of the debris orbiting Earth. The image-system in GRAVITY becomes a reoccurring juxtaposition between technology (the artificial) and humanity (the organic). The struggle, then, becomes a fight between the unconscious and the conscious.
For a moment within the chaos and flux surrounding survival in space (which the film tells us at its superimposed, OVER-BLACK opening: “Life in space is impossible”), Cuarón manages to capture the most graceful and organic process in human development amidst the contrast of black and empty and dead space: meditation. Human meditation is an art in which one finds a mediating principle between the world, all of its peoples (and objects and constructs and perspectives) and oneself—the mind that can think, and therefore exist on its own separate geometric plane. Meditation, or what I consider “artistic self-criticism,” seeks to excavate the subconscious and elevate it to the world of the “Other.” The final state, if one succeeds at meditation, would be synthesis or sublimation. When Stone curls up into a ball, she is remembering the state at which her body was at one with subject and object—birth. Birth, after all, is the purest state in which human beings can exist. Once a man can think and act out such thoughts, human vice (that is, power-relations) is the only mediator between subject and object. Thus, to quote Freud: “Conflicts of interest between man and man are resolved, in principle, by the recourse to violence.”
This star-child mediation is not wholly separate or completely isolated from the film’s theme of globalization. It refocuses our attention to the individual, to Stone, and foreshadows the film’s conclusions and Stone’s ultimate destiny. Outside of this lingering moment of mediation and peace and the presence of violence, the theme of individualism v. (an unthinking) globalization is further visualized in Stone’s intimate conversation with the Inuit man calling from Earth. The physical separation is mediated by the familiar sound of a baby crying and a dog barking. Furthermore, in every spacecraft Stone enters, there is a religious icon present—Buddha in the Chinese space station, and a Russian Orthodox image of Jesus Christ in the other. God (or, some greater deity), then, is seen as the universal symbol of hope and the unifying mediator amidst a globalized world. But Cuarón does not make it so simple. A question arises as Stone’s self-rescue mission reaches its inevitable descent to Earth: Does GRAVITY present “technology” as the new god?
Perhaps.
The technology surely allows Stone to free herself from certain death. But, as with most American film heroes, the weapons a hero equips are secondary to the hero’s capacity for will-power—to that end, a will-power that can be summoned at moments of great stress and inconceivable victory. In this analysis then, GRAVITY’s female lead is directly correspondent to Sigourney Weaver in Scott’s ALIEN (1979). Weaver possesses the capacity to will to being her own power to overcome not only the unstoppable creature but also the disapproval and doubt of her fellow crew members. Indeed, Stone is now our 21st century female hero—a possible savior resurrected in the muddy tadpole waters on Earth. She lands in her fiery vessel in a fantastical place—a place where there is no recognizable civilization. She is unable to walk at first, unable to overcome the force of gravity. Is this a dream? It is, for me, an organic fantasy. It presents a picture of the past, an unexplored and unadulterated Earth. A new beginning. Space, then, is the occupied place of the future, and Earth is the unoccupied space of freedom and rebirth. Cuarón’s ending I think should not be taken so literally. Rather, it restates visually what Howard Suber calls the “sacred drama for a secular society.” Indeed, GRAVITY, not dissimilar to its partner film ALL IS LOST (2013), fantasizes about secularized “rebirth,” but remains forever grounded in the cautionary tale of escapism. Though the world has become an unsettling and unrecognizable murky puddle of globalization, we individuals are bound to each other, society, and this planet in ways even the last frontier of space cannot alter.
FADE OUT 
This is so good. I can argue. That’s beside the point here.