“We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face-to-face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints” – Arthur C Clarke, ‘We’ll Never Conquer Space’
In 1960, 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C Clarke wrote the essay ‘We’ll Never Conquer Space’. At once pragmatic and poetic, Clarke envisages a future where travel to the most distant stars is a certainty. However, he also envisages a future of disconnection, where communication and information lags exist and persist, the end result of the light years separating the outposts of humanity. Even in a world of advanced space travel, we’ll never be able to bend space to our will. Bluntly, it’s too big for that.
Gravity isn't especially concerned with communication – of the handful of characters with speaking roles, only five exist after the opening debris shower, three of them are only heard through radio and one of them is a dog. But Gravity is intensely focused on Clarke's wider thesis, the ‘grandeur and terror’ of space. Alfonso Cuarón frames space in such a way that it dwarfs matinee idols Bullock and Clooney, the biggest stars on a big planet. Earth is a passive bystander, an indifferent orb of green and blue. It's profoundly beautiful, but also profoundly empty and unfeeling, capturing how insignificant our individual existences are in the face of ‘immensity’. Gravity is awe of ‘inspiring possibilities’, fear of ‘dreadful restraints’.
In other words, it’s peerless spectacle. Gravity uses its grand scale and authenticity (it has a science advisor didn’t you know) to convey its humanity, to tap into our awe at the night sky and our fear of how damn small that sky makes us feel. That much is reflected in Bullock’s Ryan Stone, a medical doctor torn between the need to have control over her circumstances and the knowledge that she can’t, won’t have it. It’s also reflected in Clooney’s Matt Kowalsky, an astronaut whose immense confidence only really manifests when explaining the human, space stations and physiology and that girl he tried to get into back in New Orleans.
So why do Kowalsky and Stone continually reinforce gender norms – Kowalsky the unflappable mentor, Stone the flustered and emotional rookie? Why does Stone require Kowalsky’s constant guidance, even in situations where she, a medical doctor, should have superior knowledge? And why is their dialogue so blunt, up to and including a speech drowning in empty idioms?
Gravity repeats the verses Homer once sang, obsessing over the grand, terrifying immensity of space. And there's so much to connect with in those verses, so much that resonates. But it’s not the best singer in the world and – we come back to it – it’s not concerned with communication. The most interesting characters are the Earth, the stars, and whatever we project onto Stone. The last thing we need is to be told that gender stereotypes and bad idioms are a template for the proxy we confront the stars through.
