Gravity

Joseph C. Goodson has provided an incisive and poignant critique of my meditation on the Crucifixion. His critique is all the more searing by its deep authenticity, anchored as it is, in experience. I do not have the words of response to such a profound experience of this world, yet I would offer my presence and witness to this experience. I cannot physically stand by Joseph, but I can provide a poor surrogate to stand next to his critique, clearly nothing of a point by point response, but perhaps a response of...solidarity...



If anyone needs proof that brevity is the soul of wit, then I would recommend the 90 minute film Gravity. I am strangely attracted to this work, and rarely miss an oportunity to watch it again on any occasion of its cableTV reprises. The setting is orbital space and the routine interface of humans and technology. Ordinariness, though, is quickly overcome by the impossible. When stripped of a cooperating technology, the human becomes very human.

The film focuses its interrogations on the person of Ryan Stone, a mission specialist, biomedical engineer and mother who has lost her 4 year-old daughter, Sarah, to a senseless death. The disaster that befalls her in space reflects the profound loss she still very much experiences. Indeed, the disaster is a metaphor of the failure of everything (and anything) to make sense. To restore any sense, Ryan must rebuild the technology from scratch by revitalizing what was dormant.

Rather than re-present my earlier thoughts on the film, I am now looking it at through the lens of the crucifixion, my reflections on it, and Joseph's critique. So, I am now seeing in Gravity Ryan Stone's crucifixion. She hangs on the Cross, abandoned by everything she has taken for granted in its grand betrayal. Though she perseveres, she eventually despairs in her abandonment, and chooses death by asphyxiation. Then something else impossible happens: in her hypoxic stupor, her wits sharpen through an encounter with a most unexpected visitor, her dead co-worker, Matt Kowalski, who reminds her of her knowledge and skills, which she then puts to work forthwith.

Now things get interesting. Through a series of impossible events, Ryan is hurtling back to earth as a mob of wreckage and other flotsam chase her, bent on her destruction. She emerges from her harrowing of hell as atmospheric light flashes through the window. The capsule's parachute deploys, and she descends into the watery womb of some nondescript body of water. The treachery of the waters also tries to kill her, so she must now divest herself of all the technology holding her down into the water; she must break free to be born. The scene is primordial as she struggles to live, to become. She comes face to face with ontogeny, a freely swimming frog, as she finally breaks through the surface of the water.

Here is resurrection, entangled as it is with death. She has crossed into the Cross and out the other side into reshith, from tehom, the deep. She reifies the feminine beginning. In stunning visuals, she recapitulates genesis, humanity's emergence from the praemeval waters. We witness the first human thought: gratitude. We know not its object, but we are made present to the thought. Etching a hieroglyph into the ground with her fingers, she whispers, "thank you." The moment suspends the direction of the utterance. She slithers from the water,  becomes a quadra-ped,  then struggles to stand as the first bi-ped; and we hear a faint laugh, perhaps Sarah's laugh (for nothing is impossible with God).  

Gratitude is a problem. Ryan has lost so much: her daughter, her co-workers, her faith (in everything). After such knowledge, what forgiveness? If Zizek were to have had a hand in the film, I imagine a final scene in which the camera pans the calmest surface of the water and finally rests under the surface---on Ryan, face down, still in her murderous spacesuit, quite dead with a quizzical expression on her face, perhaps a smile in final recognition that she had freed herself of the Big Other.

But of course that is not the final scene, and we are left with the mystery of gratitude. Impossible gratitude.

Other films come to mind here, Ray Kinsella's epiphany that Iowa is heaven (Field of Dreams), Ellie Arroway's (Contact) conviction that her experience was real and filled with hope, non-abandonment, and the preciousness of the rarity of life, even Edward Jessup's (Altered States) assertion that the 'first thought' was the violence of eating. Each of these films depicts some evocation of gratitude.

Who would ever think that gratitude could be the response to the real?