I finally got to see Gravity last night. Going to the cinema for us is not a quick pop down town on the bus but a forty minute drive on rural roads braving startled badgers and badly illuminated tractors. Though now that I think of it when I was living in town I quite often waited for longer than forty minutes for the bus; freezing and alone, wondering if I will ever get anywhere, spinning between despair and hope – just like Dr. Ryan Stone in Gravity. The drive to Bantry Cinema is always terminated with the exciting process of parking the car in a narrow cobble stone quay that has no barriers between yourself and the drop into the sea. It is a docking that Lieutenant Matt Kowalski (from Gravity, obviously) would find challenging. Once at the cinema we mortgaged our souls in order to afford far too much popcorn, icecream, Rolos and coke. We were also given our 3D glasses which were a huge improvement on the cardboard red eye green eye ones that I remember. I have actually been to one 3D film in the last decade, Avatar, but the 3D didn’t work terribly well for me and so I was surrounded by people oohing and ahhing, jumping in their seats and flapping their arms in front of themselves while I watched blurs not doing much with little plot. I did not hold out much more hope for Gravity, and it seemed that another night of visual alienation was ahead of me when in the first moments the rest of the audience jumped at a bolt that flew out of the screen. Well, it flew for them, for me it was just a bolt. But then, as if my eyes had miraculously adjusted due to the magic of gorgeous George, I suddenly saw a piece of satellite whizz past me. It was fun. Bodies loomed out of the screen, some braces floated towards us, and then Marvin the Martian spun away. The film is awe-inspiring visually, and in the first thirty minutes or so you suffer claustrophobia, motion sickness, and agoraphobia. There is not much plot but that’s not the point, the point is to go ohhhh and ahhhh. In perhaps some small attempt to give the film nuance there are a couple of intertextual moments. When Sandra Bullock makes it in through an air lock and slowly removes her space suit it is, of course, referencing a classic cult moment of Jane Fonda revealing herself in Barbarella. The frequent pens that revolve slowly through the gravity free space are a nod towards the flung bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Most prettily, and technically subtle, the reflection of Dr. Ryan in her own teardrop brings to mind the snow globe of Citizen Kane. The final moments made me think that someone was going to burst into Hakuna Matata from the Lion King but that may just be me. All in all, though, it was 90 minutes of glorious immersive silliness and I’m so glad that it wasn’t an adaptation of Tess Gerritsen’s book Gravity, for then the only thing spinning towards your 3D glasses would be lumps of glutinous flesh and blobs of diseased brain; which is slightly how we felt after all our munchies.
If you want to find out about some more obscure intertextual moments in film why not sign up for our History of Irish Cinema class in which I may connect The Quiet Man to In Bruges, or The Dawn to The Guard.