On Gravity and the Role of Movies

Movies have long been our most important popular cultural artifact—the unifying element between people, the thing that we can most readily point to as representing our shared taste. Bringing up a line or a scene connects us instantly to another person, and someone without any such points of reference will be at a significant remove from us.

Still, despite the obvious importance of movies, there is something oddly dismissible about them. Try to think about the most important, formative, touchstone movies of the past twenty years or so—what comes to mind? The Departed? The Dark Knight? Pulp Fiction? None of these shed real light on who or what we are, and none of them remain with us in a meaningful way. The recent film Gravity has captured the public mind in a more dramatic way than any film in recent memory, and it is interesting to look at it deeply as a way to find out what exactly it is we get from movies.
            Gravity is a remarkably simple story, sort of like The Old Man and the Sea in space (and with a rather hot woman instead of than an old man, obviously). It is purely a depiction of the various and maddeningly minor tasks necessary to secure basic existence in an unforgivingly harsh climate. It is a straightforward representation of how the human spirit can triumph against forbidding odds and circumstances. A fire extinguisher is perhaps the central plot device in the film.

This is all to say that there may not be even a single real idea in the film—it is the ideal of self-evidence, of there being nothing under the surface, beyond the easy metaphor of transplanting Sandra Bullock’s atmospheric struggle onto terra firma. The fact that it has been hailed as a “near perfect movie” by critics is telling—movies aren’t really supposed to have ideas in them. The ideal movie can be totally devoid of ideas.

So what then does a movie do? It communicates physical reality in a heightened, distilled way. And this is supposed to be the most important means of transferring cultural information. It is a natural extension of the importance of realism in all art—presenting ourselves with a more controlled and stylized version of ourselves, prizing fidelity to sensation and experience over intellective accomplishment. It is a surefire path toward sociocultural stasis at best, and general narcissism at worst.