Gravity 2013

TheLiteraryBrain

The release of Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón (2013) marked the beginning of a second golden age for space travel cinema which, through the six titles released in 2013 and 2018, contributed to the renewal of the concept of the American dream at the end of one of its worst crises. In contrast to the disaster narratives prevalent in popular action genres during the previous decade, these new productions promoted in the audience an optimistic spirit of reconstruction and refoundation, so characteristic of the American ethos. In addition to Gravity, this group includes Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014), Mars (The Martian, Ridley Scott, 2015), Tomorrowland: The World of Tomorrow (Brad Bird, 2015), Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016) and First Man (Damien Chazelle 2018). After a thirteen-year hiatus, space exploration returned to the cinema screens thanks to a film by Alfonso Cuarón, based on an original screenplay written in collaboration with his son Jonás entitled "Gravity: A Space Adventure in 3-D". The subtitle of the story, completed in 2008, revealed the initial intention to make the production in three dimensions, although the director had always been sceptical of a technique that, according to his creative taste, degraded the tonal and chromatic quality of the images. On the other hand, Cuarón also recognised that 3D filmmaking compensated for this deficiency with an extraordinary spatial depth . The latter factor would prove fundamental to the visual and narrative conception of Gravity, the action of which took place in the orbit of the Earth and 600 kilometres above sea level. 

While the former enjoys the view and tries to break a record as a 465th space walker, the latter is indifferent to the spectacular panorama. Her attitude is only startled by the sudden appearance of satellite debris, which, like gigantic shrapnel, appears at high speed to hit the shuttle and the telescope, which are reduced to technological ruins in a matter of seconds. Ryan is blasted into the depths of space and Kowalski, powered by his retro rockets, comes to her rescue. The plot of escape from a hostile scenario is, from this moment on, a desperate action full of technical and biological obstacles (three). From this approach, the film abandons any consideration of a space dream suddenly transformed into a nightmare (four). The premonitory warning, "life in space is impossible", is fulfilled as a sentence that also annuls the treatment of the earth's orbit as a frontier of human expansion. Within moments, the shrapnel in orbit has destroyed decades of aerospace development, as the space shuttle and Hubble are blown apart. When the second wave of impacts occurs ninety minutes later, the disaster will ultimately disintegrate the International Space Station and cause the Tiangong, China's space station, to de-orbit and fall, ending all traces of human presence in near space. Gravity chronicles the destruction of the space frontier and, by extension, the dream of cosmic exploration. The film went further than Apollo 13, which only recounted the failure of a lunar programme mission and the subsequent return journey. By suddenly suppressing the expansion of the national home, Cuarón shifted the focus from the space enterprise as an organised complex to Dr. Ryan Stone, the sole survivor of the disaster and also the sole representative of mankind in space, so that in the astronaut the whole space adventure is condensed as if it were the climax of a process. Elsaesser and Hagener point to this sudden reduction of the space enterprise to a single individual. The restricted narrative and the poetic exploration of zero gravity transform the film into a laboratory of the senses, giving the viewer the bodily experience of being suspended in space. It would not be a Hollywood production if Dr. Stone did not vivify her own name to fall back to Earth, demonstrating how film can symbolically re-actualise the ontogenesis of the human race, from water to land, from amphibians to mammals. Gravity seems to tell us to forget the West, as the human body remains our final frontier.

Ryan's journey home inverts the traditional space exploration narrative, which opened up the cosmos as an outpost of the future national home. Dr. Stone is a poor candidate to play the space explorer, but much less so to embody the human race in an odyssey of planetary return and recovery.
Like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity focuses on a single individual as the representative of humanity. Through astronaut Dave Bowman, the entire human race is reborn into a new and elevated species; through Dr. Ryan Stone, hope for life is reborn in the aftermath of disaster, both globally and individually. As she confesses to Kowalski on their way to the ISS, the protagonist has been wandering aimlessly through life for years after the accidental death of her young daughter. No family is waiting for her down there: "She was four years old. She was at school, playing in the playground. She slipped, hit her head and that was it. In the silliest way. I was driving when they called me, so that's what I've been doing ever since. I get up, go to work and just drive". Ryan lacks the motivation to return home, but more than ever in the face of the extreme situation she faces. For this reason, her evolution will be all the more exciting and fulfilling from a dramatic and anthropological point of view. Alfonso Cuarón acknowledged that his space film was a reflection on the idea of rebirth, something Stanley Kubrick also addressed in his sci-fi classic. Similarly, the odyssey of their respective characters ended on Earth. The director of Gravity explains Thus the final scene of the film, which symbolically synthesises the raison d'être of the whole script: For me there was only one ending, and this was it: She walks. It is the first moment we see her walking in the whole film. The film is a metaphor for rebirth. Literally, at the end, she, Ryan, has evolved from a foetal position and then, already in the water, she ascends, crawls and then stands on her two feet to walk again (Lee 2013). As Cuarón points out, the protagonist has adopted a foetal position scenes earlier, when she gains access to the International Space Station and strips off her spacesuit to float weightless in one of its modules (five). Moments before, Kowalski had sacrificed her life for his own by avoiding dragging her with him into deep space (six). As he is lost in the distance, the Explorer's commander continues to give encouragement and instructions to Ryan, who has since become a lone protagonist. 

 It is paradoxical that the protagonist must  undergo a catharsis in space in order to appreciate life on Earth again, but the idea of rebirth in Gravity is approached through adventure rather than nightmare or tragedy: the subtitle of the script itself describes the story as "a space adventure". In the beginning In the Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury opened the collection of stories with a sentence that simply expresses this paradox, and which in turn sums up Ryan's entire space and life journey, which concludes with the recovery and recognition of Earth as his own home: "It is good to renew the capacity for wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has brought us back to our childhood".

Translations: Italian - Spanish

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