Turns out alcohol, guacamole, tortilla chips and ice-cream are not the cure for a fucked up stomach. Who would've guessed? I'm so bloated I look like I'm pregnant: I have a bloat-baby. By the end of last night I had so much gas that I was able to propel myself forward simply by flatulating. It was a sight to see. I was a bloat-float humming through the streets like a dirigible, tearing the ozone asunder with my anus. A woman mistook me for a disembodied spirit, and cried out with horror as I approached. By the time I was walking home, after the bar had been shutdown, I was staggering through the streets clutching my stomach as though my water were about to break. It's morning and the swelling hasn't quite subsided. I wonder if I have a shot at entering in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
At some point last night, in between drinks and location changes, we went to watch the movie Gravity. I had been interested in seeing it since viewing the trailer last month. The premise of the movie is simple enough: Sandra Bullock adrift in space after the destruction of a satellite during a routine maintenance mission. I had no idea how well executed the film would turn out to be. Aptly titled, it is a movie that pulls you in toward it, tirelessly. It's a movie so atmospheric that at times you ask yourself how Cuaron did it. The cinematography and effects were stellar - it's almost unbelievable that the film wasn't shot in space. Easily one of the most immersive 90 minutes of cinema I've seen in some time, Gravity is a spectacle to behold.
From the moment the film begins, it starts to attritvely strip away the viewer's sense of comfort, replacing it with disorientation. The camera floats hauntingly, like a phantom, seeming to breathe and undulate in space with the actors, giving the audience a sense of weightlessness one feels in water. Having torn away your equilibrium and knocked you off balance, Cuaron obliterates your sense of safety by demolishing a space station with a maelstrom of debris, hurling you out of orbit with Bullock, afraid and alone. Spinning through pitch darkness - panic and dread slowed down and stretched out by the vacuity of space - you feel there has never been a character more hopelessly lost and forlorn. It preys upon that deep loneliness lurking within the human psyche, the feeling that we aren't in control and we're running out of air. Alone.
What's beautiful about the film is that it exploits fears not limited to the confines of space; these fears float in the vastness of our minds, stinging like jellyfish: existential woes, feelings of a looming doom, helplessness, inefficacy, devastation, alienation. Cuaron does this well through his use of first-person and close-ups of Bullock's face from within the helmet - behind the glass instead of in front of it - conveying her sense of abject desolation. I've never before seen a movie more able to sustain dread and desperation, to induce anxiety. Gravity depicts a ceaseless struggle from start to finish. Just when it seems things cannot get worse, somehow, they always do. A truly terrifying piece of cinema, at the end of which, the viewer is ravaged and depleted by an out-of-this-world odyssey. An oddity, perhaps, is that the film's plot is utterly contingent. It doesn't matter whether Bullock lives or dies: it's entirely about the struggle. My only interest in her survival was that it was necessary to keep the story alive. The visuals and the vertigo, the cold breathless terror and the atmosphere (or lack thereof) are the story. Bullock's character is merely the conduit through which we experience them.
Aren't we all.
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