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Wittgensteinian Film-as-Philosophy Exemplified: Exploring the Exploration of Point-of-view in Cuaron’s Space-Exploration Film Gravity
Abstract
I argue that the form of the shooting of Alphonso Cuaron’s film Gravity manifests the idea present in the opening of Arendt’s The human condition. That form, which literally mirrors the arc of an object subject to gravity, and of a subject undertaking (or subject to) ‘the hero’s journey’, can in turn be better understood by reference to section 527 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which suggests how art sometimes demands to be understood by analogy with the form of logic. Thus Gravity is a space odyssey, with an important meaning for a planet in ecological crisis. The proposed response to that crisis in Gravity is diametrically opposed to that found in Christopher Nolan’s film, Interstellar.
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‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward ? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. (In fact, survival would be a good start…)
Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.
Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it.
Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving.
This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress . Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.’
The Gravity of Melancholia: A Critique of Speculative Realism
- C Peterson
Selected Writings: The
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- A Cuarón