Gravitas in Gravity

Perusing the Saipan multiplex schedule shows that the movie Gravity was able to swing by the lagoon last month. It is a blockbuster of a movie that has broken box office records, premiering with favorable reviews at the Venice International Film Festival. 

I was in Honolulu to visit mother at a hospital during its U.S. release on Oct. 4 and given the gravity of my island presence as well as my tight schedule, I decided on a “break” to watch the movie, or attend an INHS60 High School reunion happily scheduled at the same time. As written about earlier, I chose my high school mates, some of whom I had not seen for more than 50 years!

On the Saturday of the last Thanks-Hanukkah weekend, I joined a birthday celebration sensible enough not to end with a post-dinner drink and karaoke singing at a pub but with a viewing of the George Clooney-Sandra Bullock riveting 3D space fiction drama, Gravity. From the first clip of the stunning outer space opening scene, I was airborne and existentially floated for 90 minutes, getting off the padded cinema chairs with unsteady knees like the Bullock character at the end before the film credits appeared. Stratosphere stuck for 90 minutes, I was finally earthbound and grounded.

I did not study Latin in school so my hanging gravitas onto this article’s title is not to feign an erudition I do not have (though I remember it to be one of four Roman virtues) but to underscore the seriousness that the word conjures when dealing with a well-written, incredibly directed, and superbly-acted film! In short, the film has balls! To the squeamish, I mean that in a deeply religious sense.

We are now into Christmas that starts the Roman liturgical year of a messianic story. The survival of the story of a manger child’s journey from birth to the ignominy of Golgotha and the glory of an empty tomb has got to be one of the most resilient human stories in the repertoire of foretelling our species’ survival. Used by the British Empire through the metaphors of the King James holy writ, we got B.C. to refer to “before Christ” to tell time as Rome earlier decreed the planet’s 365.25 days solar revolution as Anno Domini, “the year of our Lord.”

But first, a disclaimer: the movie Gravity is nowhere close to being a religious film, though some zealous clerics have been quick to make it appear as such, pitting religious symbolism versus technology, with the film allegedly proving the reality of God as raw reality dismantling human technology. My religiosity rises only slightly above the punch lines delivered by irreverent late night show hosts in their monologues so I will avoid the theological discourse.

My reference earlier to my religious sense of having balls (female colleagues will pardon the machismo of the chosen metaphor) has to do with the story of the Christ as chronicled by those who took the paradigmatic story Jesus of Nazareth and spun it into the cosmic realm in the medium of its time, the books, later to be called the Biblos or the Bible.

Joseph Wesley Matthews of our acquaintance once said, quoted in John P. Cock’s daily reflection/blog: “In literary flesh and blood, the gospel hero is…cosmic and historical. …[H]e walks freely out across the anxious, uncertain, ambiguous waters of life. At the same time, he beckons others to do likewise. …With utter intentionality, the hero lives as the free person. …He is liberated to be thankful for life; to love this world of neighbors; to be directed toward the future. …And while he is busy living, he simultaneously declares to those about…that they too can live in [such] freedom…. (printed in Bending History: Talks of Joseph W. Mathews, Vol. I, ‘The Christ of History,’ John Epps, editor).

The movie Gravity tells of the story of a seasoned astronaut (Clooney) bantering with a neophyte medical engineer (Bullock) on a spacewalk on a Shuttle Explorer mission to repair the Hubble Telescope when the mission needed to abort; floating debris careened at disastrous speed, a catastrophic consequence of an attempt to disable a satellite. The astronaut ended up releasing himself from tether when holding on meant burdening the timid and guilt-ridden engineer’s prospects of survival. Through his influence (Christ-like in my metaphor), the despairing engineer is liberated from her fears and suicidal bent, challenged to overcome her perceived inadequacies, and she got herself moving to elect life.

I was surprised at the crowd in the audience, recognizing even two of my students, until the film (Di xin yin li) moved from the shuttle to the International Space Station where a Soyuz module failed to get the heroine to the Tiangong (China’s spacelab). It just so happens that part of one of our class lyrics to the tune of Brahms’ Lullaby, goes:

In the Tiangong, you are all alone.
Back in Zhongguo is your home.
Voom, Voom, Cosmonaut, 
are you having fun,
with the moon and the stars
and the very large sun?

Though a variation of the song has been in our songbook for 40 years, I felt walking out of the theatre serendipitously contemporaneous to the film. I was ready, with the heroine’s awakened wiles to get on the capsule and head “home.”

Once I was puny, but now I can freely be.