Space is the place

In 1950, the George Pal Technicolor production Destination Moon set a new standard of realism in depicting the mechanics of getting Americans to the moon. They hired Robert Heinlein to co-write the script, the former naval engineer who took science fiction from the pre-war pulps to the post-war slicks and bestseller lists. Heinlein knew his stuff because he was hanging out with rocket pioneer Jack Parsons (who was also into ritual sex magic and partying with L. Ron Hubbard, as it happens). The film laboriously explained the physics of rocketry and lectured on the virtues of rockets being built by private industry, not the state. At the end of the 1950s, Heinlein, ­arguing for the militarisation of space to counter threats, wrote Starship Troopers – later turned by Paul Verhoeven into a queasy satire about a perpetual war against bugs.

The sublime alien landscapes of Destination Moon were created on a vast set painted by Chesley Bonestell, who had just published an art book, The Conquest of Space, full of majestic swathes of otherworldly landscapes, which had a huge influence on advocates of space exploration like Arthur C. Clarke and Carl Sagan. Bonestell, who had done matte paintings for Citizen Kane, helped Destination Moon win an Oscar for its design. He went on to work with the genius of Nazi rocketry, Wernher von Braun, who had been spirited to America to head their rocket research in 1945 (the murderous regime of slave labour used to build the V2 rockets was conveniently forgotten, except by Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow). Together, Bonestell and von Braun produced a famous magazine series called ‘Man Will Conquer Space Soon’. Soon enough, von Braun was fronting space propaganda films for Disney.

Significantly, the latter half of Destination Moon is about mission crisis, the threat that the four astronauts will not be able to return to earth. Our heroes nobly offer themselves up for sacrifice before a technical fix is found. Even before NASA was invented, American science fiction was imagining the kind of cataclysm in space that is the subject of Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity.

America only properly joined the space race with the traumatic shock of the launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957: NASA was founded six months later. At the United Nations, a Soviet spokesman declared Sputnik proof positive of the scientific superiority of Marxist-Leninism. In America, there were genuine fears that the Soviets were intent on staining the moon a Communist red to symbolise their world domination. All those B-movie paranoid fantasies in the 50s, from Invasion of the Body Snatchers to I Married a Monster from Outer Space, merely provided the framework for these hysterical responses.

There has always been a strange interplay between the American military-industrial complex and science-fiction cinema. One historian calls the whole space programme an “elaborate remake of Destination Moon”. The Apollo launches in the 1960s were television spectaculars with vast audiences, avowedly designed as ideological exercises to pull a profoundly disunited America together. This was the apotheosis of America as the Rocket State. Even historical remakes, like Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (1995), seem to hark back to a lost coherence of national purpose fostered by the space race.

Ever since that moon walk footage from 1969, conspiracy theorists have argued that the event was faked on Hollywood sound stages. Peter Hyams’s film Capricorn One (1977), inspired by those conspiracy theories, involved a fake landing of O. J. Simpson on Mars. The film only fuelled more cracked theories. It was Stanley Kubrick who directed the whole Apollo moon thing about the time of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The secret confession is there in the knitted Apollo XI on Danny Torrance’s jumper in The Shining, made ten years after the hoax. Obviously.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan announced his backing for the Strategic Defence Initiative (‘Star Wars’) after reading a report written by a bunch of right-wing science-fiction writers, headed by Robert Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle, formerly an engineer in the space programme. They argued the militarisation of space was the only motor for innovations in space exploration. Reagan, who just wanted his own Death Star, promptly signed up to what proved to be a very expensive science-fiction dream.

In the digital era, the interchange between military and cinematic virtual technologies has accelerated. Famously, some of the future tech created by Spielberg for Minority Report went on to be developed in the real world, the synergies of the computing and cinema SFX industries steadily blurring. James Cameron, always one to blend these hardwares, made Avatar seem like a trailer for one possible militarisation of space in the near future. As the saying goes, movies about the future tend to be about the future of the movies.

Gravity belongs to this tradition of stretching cinema technologies to aim for absolute verisimilitude of the experience of humans in space. The plot is a rigorous exploration of the so-called Kessler Syndrome, a hypothesis first propounded by a NASA scientist in 1978, that space junk in low orbit around the Earth might reach a sufficient density to cause a cataclysmic cascade of collisions that would knock out satellite communications and endanger all space travel. The spectacular CGI backdrops have been generated from thousands of images provided by NASA. The creative team studied thousands of hours of NASA footage taken by astronauts. The Explorer Shuttle and the International Space Station are perfect simulacra, although they cheated a little with the interior of the Soyuz spacecraft for dramatic effect.

The production notes provided by Warners go into geek overload about the technical innovations of the film. They invented a whole new lighting rig to match live actors with CGI backdrops. The two actors, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, were suspended inside an innovative wire rig and animated by puppeteers to simulate weightlessness. Alfonso Cuarón’s preference for long, fluid takes meant cameras programmed on robot arms were adapted from automated car factories. It results in a film that, although in a classic three-act structure, abandons scenes for a kind of continuous flow allowed by digital manipulation, the tension shifting up and down with the pulsing soundtrack. The 3D aims to further immerse the viewer in what proves to be a thoroughly kinetic experience of the hostility of outer space.

At this end of American adventure in space, however, after years of budget cuts, the film feels curiously nostalgic, from Clooney’s space-jock wisecracking onwards. That is a retired space shuttle that they emerge from, an ancient Hubble telescope they are repairing, a dilapidated International Space Station to which they must retreat. The storm of space junk is precipitated by a Russian attempt to destroy an old satellite, as if the old Star Wars scenario was still live. Everything feels in the past, and Gravity, after all, is about reconnecting to the pull that will bring beleaguered astronauts back to Earth. It looks back and down, not out and up.

It is striking how rapidly the utopian thrust of Apollo 11’s successful landing on the moon was left behind. Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 is about the ‘successful failure’ of a near fatal mission, the ingenuity that brings the three astronauts back to Earth. Live TV transmission of Apollo missions had already been abandoned, just a few months after Armstrong’s moon walk, and the channels only began paying attention once the Apollo 13 astronauts got into trouble. Almost from the start of manned missions, the English science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard was imagining the ruined and rusting gantries of Cape Canaveral haunted by forgotten astronauts, the puerile delights of outer space abandoned for the trippy psychic worlds of inner space. Ballard was hated by gung-ho Americans for that, but seems to have the edge on imagining the near future. In Moon, likewise, Sam Rockwell’s greatest threat is his own psychic splitting under the duress of intense solitude in outer space.

In science-fiction cinema, what endures from the 60s and 70s is not the convenient fiction of warp drive from Star Trek or the World War II dogfights upgraded for the bomb run on the Death Star in Star Wars, but the irritation and boredom of interminable spaceflight in Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1971) or John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974). “Don’t give me any of that intelligent life bullshit, just find me something to blow up,” the lieutenant snaps in Carpenter’s mordant comedy. An explosion has jettisoned the crew’s entire supply of toilet paper and they sleep on the floor in an improvised dorm. After tetchy Bomb Number 20 has decided to blow up, the fate of the surviving astronauts, spinning in space, is rather different from Gravity. Talby sails off to circle the universe eternally with the Phoenix Asteroids; Doolittle joyously surfs into the atmosphere of a planet and to certain death on a piece of debris from his own ship.

This is the low-rent malfunctioning world that writer Dan O’Bannon then applied to Alien, where ‘Right Stuff’ heroics are replaced by blue-collar workers kvetching over bonus shares as they divert to an SOS beacon on an unknown planet. Alien concentrates the inhuman environment of outer space into the creature that is brought into the Nostromo through the howling gale on the planet surface. The film aligns the vulnerable orifices of the human body with the portals of a spaceship: neither proves to be safe from invasion.

Although Gravity is presented as a great technological marvel, it is also a film saturated in mourning and loss, and not just for a vanished era of big NASA budgets and regular shuttle flights. The exterior drama of Sandra Bullock’s survival of hurtling space junk is paralleled by an interior journey in which she must confront and overcome deep personal loss. This is the first time I can recall having to dodge 3D tears flying out of the screen: Cuarón moves from scenes of epic destruction to these tiny gestures with impressive skill.

As science officer Ryan Stone, Sandra Bullock’s vulnerable female body, shut down behind her technical expertise, left psychologically fragile by loss, is continually associated with the Mother Earth hanging above her. The personal trajectory of the film is about Stone being shifted by the crisis that she faces from melancholic denial into healthy mourning. A film so intent on being as literally true to spaceflight as possible also wants to be a giant metaphor of loss.

In an odd way, this aspect of Gravity feels like an implicit riposte to Lars von Trier’s extraordinary hymn to the depressive state, Melancholia. In that film, the naive enthusiasm for awe and wonder for space exemplified by Kiefer Sutherland is bested by Kirsten Dunst’s melancholic embrace of annihilation when worlds collide. The film is a vindication of the right to be apocalyptically miserable. The negative sublime of von Trier’s obliteration of his characters in the final scenes of Melancholia is exactly rebutted by Stone’s critical refusal to give in to her losses. Against European art-house depression, Cuarón embraces the engineer paradigm that drives Amercian can-do science fiction. Who better to talk you out of certain death than the silky-voiced George Clooney? There is some irony in the thought that the star is now rich enough to buy satellite time to keep a spying eye on human rights violations in Somalia: that sure is a can-do attitude.

We have come a long way from the fusion of cinema and space technology in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although Kubrick undercut the human dimension in his vast technological ensembles of space travel, there was an absolute investment in a cinema of the future and the future of cinema. Where the Stargate hurls us away from our solar system towards a new stage of human evolution, Gravity longs only to fall back to Earth. Perhaps this is what austerity science fiction looks like.