“Of all the troubles Bullock faces, her own body is rarely one of them. Like most action heroes, she’s immune to the baser functions that plague the rest of us.”
“In the postfeminist idiom of magazine journalism, it apparently reads as progressive to lavish praise on the physique of an accomplished 49-year-old woman. Better her than Her; at least Bullock has a body. “Her body was sick,” Juli Weiner wrote in Vanity Fair.”
“Film critics are perfectly capable of posing the standard, well-worn questions about the female body and the male gaze. The summer blockbuster Star Trek Into Darkness drew flack for its (far more ridiculous) underwear scene, as did Blue Is the Warmest Color for its pornified lesbian sex. But in both of these cases, the bodies we see onscreen are clearly meant to titillate. Bullock claims that this was not her or Cuarón’s intention.”
“Her intense, pre-Gravity workout regimen was a means of getting into character, she argues: “I wanted to remove what she looked like as a woman, what reminded her of being feminine and motherly, just so that the body was a machine.””
“Indeed, the critics who praise her body don’t seem to lust after it so much as wish they possessed it. It is the achievement of a woman at the top of her career. Through a combination of hard work and the most up-to-date technology, Bullock appears to have beaten age.”
“But it’s hard to find her body sexy, because one can’t imagine touching her: She doesn’t look pliable, or even tangible.”
“Bullock’s body appears invulnerable. But she is anything but cool-headed. Her anxiety doesn’t seem to come from the threat of physical pain. Rather, she is overwhelmed with the amount of information she must process: coordinates, shuttle manuals, ornate procedures. Like a junior law associate trying to keep up with an ever increasing workload, Bullock remains physically safe as she grows ever more spiritually shaken.”
“More than any recent Hollywood film, Gravity presents the body as mere operational device, a cursor, an avatar who performs a set of actions. It is workflow cinema.”
“everywhere that Gravity is clean, Alien is gross, material, full of blood and sweat and splattered guts.”
“But the differences between the two are instructive — as is the fact that the near nudity in Alien was the cause of a brief but vibrant academic controversy.”
“Alien happens to be one of the most cited and most discussed films in the history of Anglophone feminist film theory. Film scholars love Alien so passionately that even Slate has pondered why we are so obsessed with it.”
“Australian feminist Barbara Creed argued that Alien ends by comforting its male viewers with this palatable sort of femininity. “Ripley’s body,” she argues, “is pleasurable and reassuring to look at” — nothing like the “uncontrollable, generative, cannibalistic mother” the alien represents.”
“Nor is her body anything like the traitorous onboard operating system, Mother. Those figures might threaten patriarchy. An autonomous woman in her panties does not.”
“Persuasive as Creed’s argument is, few viewers of Alien will admit to feeling comfortable or comforted during the film’s conclusion. As soon as Ripley undresses, she discovers that her alien foe has stowed away on her escape craft. Undressed and unarmed, she quickly has to devise a strategy. She climbs into her spacesuit, straps herself into a seat, and opens up the airlock so that the alien is sucked out into space. (The scene is the inverse of Gravity’s climax, in which the ghost of George Clooney boards Bullock’s escape craft in order to cheer the heroine — and bore the audience — with a few folksy platitudes.) This is Alien’s tensest moment, the moment in which Ripley’s fear is the most catching: As she shakes, we shake too.”
“Does that mean that Ripley is still subject, that we identify with her? These seem like the wrong words. Instead, we enter into a kind of mutual responsiveness with the body we see onscreen.”
“Film theorist Linda Williams has famously called horror one of cinema’s “body genres,” because it displays bodies in extremis, and in doing so forces the audience to experience the same extremes.”
“Horror makes us scream; porn arouses us; melodrama has us choke back tears. Williams argued that when it comes to certain “low” cinematic genres, film is a kind of contagion.”
“Viewers who lust after Weaver’s body, then, may enjoy something much more complicated than the power of the objectifying “male gaze.” We are aware that Weaver’s flesh is vulnerable to both the alien’s claws and our devouring eyes. But the feeling that our onscreen companion is about to be ravaged might excite us because we share it. With her, we prepare to be ravaged too. Cinema and sex share at least one substantive feature: Both can leave us confused as to who is subject and who is object. Sometimes this confusion is dangerous; sometimes it is bliss.”
“In Gravity, Cuarón discards many of the formal rules that have guided classical Hollywood cinema for about a century. The 180-degree rule, the axis of action, the eyeline match — all are gone. The world of outer space obviates the terms up, down, left, and right; space lacks even the horizon line that normally serves as the central axis for such terms. And so the cinematic frame — our view onto events — is free to move more wildly in Gravity than it typically does in a narrative film.”
“The scene is what J. Hoberman, in a review of the film, called an exercise in “spatial disorientation — or better, reorientation.””
“Several critics compare this aspect of the film to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which critic Annette Michelson famously celebrated for illustrating the “pleasures and problems” of bodies in space: “Viewing becomes, as always but as never before, the discovery, through the acknowledgment of disorientation, of what it is to see, to learn, to know, and of what it is to be, seeing.””
“The very plotlessness of Kubrick’s masterwork gives the film its sensuality — its air of “erotic liberation,” as Michelson called it. Viewers had the time to luxuriate in their own disorientation and reorientation.”
“Gravity moves far too quickly and formulaically for any of that. We don’t have time to linger in sensation — we have a job to do. In Cuarón’s hands, the immersive point-of-view shot doesn’t signal identification so much as an alliance between viewer, camera, and character. We solve the same problems that Bullock solves. We’re urged to find our orientation, to look for familiar shapes, to figure out how to get from point a to point b. Watching Gravity is, more than anything, like playing a video game, and its impossibly long POV shots mimic the video-game style.”
“Gravity does not demand from its heroine or its audience the typical range of video-game tasks. Unlike the action-movie or war-game hero, Bullock has nothing to shoot and no one to kill. Her task, like ours, is simply to organize the overwhelming flow of visual data she receives through her visor. Her eyes and mind just happen to reside in a body.”
“Such workflow cinema is the perfect use of 3-D. As viewers and players, we can navigate a world of hollow bodies more strategically than a world full of tactile sensation.”
“If Gravity’s lens showed Bullock’s skin as fleshy and irritable, we might sense the chafe of her spacesuit or the intense heat and cold of her spacewalk. These sensations might distract us from our task. But 3-D animation cannot render such textures very well yet. In this era of drone pilots and the quantified self, perhaps it does not need to. The kind of work we do watching Gravity resembles the work many of us do at our desks every day: We devour and analyze images, at the expense of our bodies. Many of us sink so eagerly into the slow pace and rich textures of Belá Tarr to escape just the experience that Gravity provides.”
“Bullock’s body thus offers a different problem than does Weaver’s in Alien. We no longer wonder whether the heroine is an object of lust or a subject of identification: She is neither.”
“Nor is her movement through space occasion for the aesthetic free-play we see in 2001. Instead, Bullock is a device, custom-built to accomplish various goals.”
“Even the film’s transparent attempt to humanize her character (using a hastily tacked-on backstory about a dead child) serves a clear purpose: It allows Bullock to meet the minimum conditions for an Oscar nomination.”
“Her body enthralls not because of its fleshy sensuality, but because of her mastery over it — and her willingness to let the powerful apparatus of contemporary film production direct her immense competence. We, as viewers, adopt this mastery and subjugation with her.”
“Thirty-five years have passed since Alien. In 1979, many feminist critics saw the onscreen sex object as the perfect image of patriarchal oppression. Contemporary film critics have absorbed some of these lessons, and continue to debate the criteria by which they will ultimately judge a film as sexist or progressive. In doing so, they forget the central lesson of feminist film theory: that Hollywood cinema will always try to reproduce its own patriarchal, white-supremacist, capitalist system.”
“The thing that makes this cinema interesting, worth examining and even loving, is that it does so using machines and people it can’t always control.”
“Hollywood offers us stark and telling images of the forces that constrain and construct us. And, sometimes, its quirks and flaws suggest escape routes and unimagined alternatives.”
“By allying us with its protagonist, Gravity universalizes its image of exploited female labor, sells it back to its entire audience, men and women alike.”
“Gravity shows a contemporary ideal of femininity still more sinister than the pinup. It presents woman as an intricate machine, strapped to dozens of wires, working her ass off with the goal of appearing weightless.”