Affective World Connections in the Contemporary Survival Film

Don’t Let Go: Affective World Connections in the Contemporary Survival Film

Simon Reinders 10357491 [email protected]

30 August 2018 Research Master Thesis Departement of Media Studies University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Abe Geil Second Reader: Patricia Pisters

Table of Contents

1. Introducing Embodied Connections: Surviving the Precarious Present…….….....5 1.1) From the Group to the Self: Politics of Survival………….…….……….….….5 1.2) Methodology: Two Modes of Survival…...………………………….……..…12

2. Entrapped and Existential Embodiment…..…………….……………...…...... …..15 2.1) Inscribed vs. Living Embodiment………………………………….………….15 2.2) Modern Perception and the Existential Life- World……………….…...……...17 2.3) Classic Perception and the Capitalistic Life- world………………....…...….…19 2.4) Aesthetic Cinematic Worlds………………………………………….…..…...20 2.5) Embodied Reactions to Aesthetics Cinematic Worlds……………….….……23

3. ‘Bring Him Back’: The Ideological Survival Film………….………...... …….….25 3.1) Narrative: Imagining the World……………………………………...….…….26 3.2) Style: Perceiving the World…………..………………………...…….…...... 29 3.3) Attunement: Feeling the World…………………...……………...……...... 33

4. ‘Never Give Up’: Modern Perception in the Existential Survival Film………...... 37 4.1) Narrative: Imagining the World Anew…………………………………….…..39 4.2) Space: Proprioceiving the World………………………………………..….…42

4.3) Connection: The Life-world of Impressions…………………………….…….47

5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...……50

6. Works Cited……………………………………………………………………….....52

1. Introducing Embodied Connections: Surviving the Precarious Present “As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception, 87).

1.1. From the Group to the Self: Politics of Survival Cinematic representations of survival have changed over time. This is striking, since most survival films have a remarkably straightforward narrative. Survival films often centre on protagonists who are cut-off from the civilized world and have to survive the perilous environment that lies beyond society. The way these uncultivated lands are survived, however, is subject to constant change. Survivors rarely rely on biological (and thus constant) qualities: they do not survive because of their fears and strengths. Instead, they hang onto their lives because they are driven by historical and cultural values, like family and nationalism. Survival films are therefore: “not so much about clinging onto dear life as making your way, out of the rubble, towards a life with renewed perspective” (Keane, 26). With life stripped to bare minimum, survivors (re)discover what is “really good for you” (ibid.): attachment to the ‘good’ things in the (Western) world, connection to the ideological values that organize the empty world. In the survival film, we come across the historical and cultural norms we imagine make the world an inhabitable place and create a world in which we can be truly alive.

Today, survival films are primarily concerned with the image of the disconnected and lone body. In contemporary survival films, an individual body needs to remain visible and connected or otherwise is cast into an empty world that can only be survived. Formulated positively: the films mediate that bodily visibility and connectivity is ‘good-for-you’. Oppositely, the survival film shows the threats of isolation (127 Hours, Boyle, 2010), abandonment (The Revenant, G. Iñárritu, 2015), and being lost (Lone Survivor, Berg, 2013) to always loom. Either way, the contemporary survival films show how the position of the body determines whether we are alive in an inhabitable world or surviving an empty one. Through the contemporary phenomenon of the lone survivor, we can start to think about the cultural norms which we imagine connect our bodies to an inhabitable world. In this study, I argue that the survival film mediates a perception on value. Survival films bring to the fore the cultural values we believe create a safe and stable world. Simultaneously, the survival film shows how disconnection from these values degrades our lives to a non-normative and precarious existence: we cannot belong in a world without these cultural norms, it is empty – we can only survive it. The survival film ‘educates’ the viewer a response to this precarious experience. The films teach us a way to perceive value in an empty world. Here, I draw upon the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who argues that art can ‘educate’ our perception. For Merleau-Ponty, perception determines the manner in which we experience value in the world and, consequently, how we belong in it. This piece of research studies what connection is perceived as ‘good’ for the lone body and how this perception is ‘educated’ to the spectator. In the following chapters, I argue that the contemporary survival film mediates a neoliberal perception on value. In the films, the body experiences precarity because it is disconnected from capital. Under neoliberal rationale, the individual is cast into an empty world if he is not productive. However, I would argue that the rediscovery of the ‘good’ (or: value in the world) can occur in two different ways. Firstly, the disconnected body often perceives value within neoliberal discourse. Here, the protagonist connects to a stable world through productive positioning. The survivors (re)discover how neoliberal logic makes the world inhabitable and our lives meaningful. This means that the spectator is ‘educated’ to desire a productive and neoliberal life. Another way for the disconnected body to overcome precarity however, is to rediscover its existential link with the world. Here, the spectator ‘learns’ to connect with the world through embodied affect. The neoliberal perception of value that I will introduce in this chapter is problematic; there is not enough ‘neoliberal value’ in today’s world. Therefore, the experience of precarity

always looms. After the economic crisis of 2008, it has become explicitly hard to be productive all the time. Since many contemporary survival films present connection to neoliberal value as ‘good-for-you’ (the disconnected and surviving body – in order to overcome precarity – should again become productive), the films present something of a ‘false solution’: the spectator is educated to desire a form of life that caused the experience of precarity in the first place. Upholding this contradictory neoliberal perception is therefore ‘cruel’: a meaningful life can never be stable if we believe that ‘meaning’ and ‘value’ can only exist within a neoliberal framework. We will always only survive this form of life. To completely bypass precarity, cinema should educate a perception on value beyond this neoliberal rationale. I will argue that the contemporary focus on the body makes this possible. In film studies, the mediation of a normative rationale ‘educating’ and ‘guiding’ our desires has gained more attention after its affective turn. Once we start to think about the image of the disconnected body in relation to the contemporary neoliberal organization of the world, the politics of emotion is a good place to start. Here, I draw upon Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2013). Unfortunately, Berlant reads different kinds of ‘survival films’; her films centre on ‘survivors’ in the lower classes of the Western world who struggle to generate an income through which they can support themselves. Although their physical lives are never in imminent danger, they survive the world (rather than belong in it) because their desired way-of-life does not materialize. They believe their lives will only be ‘good’ or ‘meaningful’ once they have generated a sufficient income for themselves. The world is empty if they cannot do so. Berlant questions why these survivors never imagine another way of belonging in the world. Why do they choose to entrap themselves in a framework that makes them feel lonely and worthless? So, Berlant’s work similarly questions the survivor’s perception of value. Moreover, she researches what happens when ‘valuable’ experiences in this perception are non-existent. Following Berlant’s methodology, we can start to think about the ways in which normative rationales hold back the ability to experience value. The survival film can be seen as a response to a lack of ‘valuable’ experiences. Survivors are cut-off from a meaningful life because they are disconnected from what are imagined to be the ‘good’ things in the world. In Berlant’s words: the films track what happens when the “fantasy” of the “good-life” does not materialize. Fantasy for Berlant, is “the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world “add up to something”” (2); fantasy allows us to imagine a meaningful life. It transforms experiences into valuable events. However, in everyday-life, experiences often do not fit into our fantasy: they cannot to be transformed into valuable ones. This mismatch is

affectively felt: “the present is perceived, first, affectively” (4). We feel we should behave and live our lives in a certain way, while we simultaneously experience that we simply cannot live this way-of-life all the time. According to Berlant, we lack the tools to communicate this affect, as it goes against the dominant rationale through which we make sense of the world. Therefore, this affect is not yet mediated as an object but as an aesthetic “temporal genre”. Fer her, alterations in the form of genre hint at broader changes in our descriptive discourses: contemporary cultural products show the disruption of our collective fantasy through which personal experiences are translated into ‘a meaningful life’. They record changes in our fantasy once experiences in the ‘now’ no longer ‘add-up to something’: “cinema and other recording forms not only archive what is being lost but track what happens in the time that we inhabit before new forms make it possible to relocate within conventions the fantasy of sovereign life unfolding from actions” (7). Following on from Berlant, the fantasy of our contemporary surviving body can be made explicit by examining alterations in genre. The survival film is not a new phenomenon. Cinema has always been intrigued by disaster and has always anticipated impending social crises in what more broadly can be identified as the ‘Disaster Film’ (Keane, 8). The survival film (as a specific subdivision of this genre) already flourished in the seventies. During this decade, the ‘good-for-you’ was imagined through a connection to a group or to a community. It was an ‘one-for-all’ mentality that made us belong in the world. Thomas Sobchack – writing in the eighties – argued: "most of the time in a survival film is spent depicting the process whereby the group, cut off from the securities and certainties of the ordinary support networks of civilized life, forms itself into a functioning, effective unit” (14, 1988). In films such as The Towering Inferno (Guillermin, 1974), The Poseidon Adventure (Neame, 1972), and Airport (Seaton, 1970), survival is a group affair rather than an individual endeavour. This idea of the ‘the group’ as normatively ‘good-for-you’ can be placed in a broader social and cultural context. In his narrative study “The Bug in the Rug: Notes on the Disaster Genre” (1977), Maurice Yacowar argues that the significance of group-morality can be seen as the result of the America’s instable economic situation in the seventies. The United States, thanks to an all-encompassing oil crisis, experienced one of its worst economic recessions. Consequently, the seventies survival film mediated ‘the ideal state of mind’ of the American worker. To beat the economic peril, the ‘true’ American should be concerned with the well- being of others. To belong again, Americans must feel responsible for ‘the greater good’. In

the seventies, the American way-of-life was a communal way-of-life: the group saves us from a precarious existence in an empty world. The “good’ and the means to it have changed since the seventies. Cultural products of our contemporary neoliberal society – roughly incited after the seventies – mediate a different normative fantasy. Today, survival is an individual endeavour. It is no longer a communal life that makes the world an inhabitable place. Instead, individual productivity gives human lives meaning. The contemporary western subject can only experience value in terms of economic importance. In order for the body to be of worth, it should be positioned, regulated, and profitable. Under neoliberal rationale: “every fragment and every cell of the biological, affective, linguistic spheres have to be turned into profit machines” (Bifo, 149). The body has to link itself to capital flows: “hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship – have been remade into commodified or financialized forms” (Crary, 10). We can identify these changes already within the opening minutes of many contemporary survival films. The contemporary survival film often starts with a modern technology going haywire, the result of which throws the protagonist’s body into an uncultivated and empty world. Strikingly, the disorganized objects are often originally organized by capital. For example, Gravity starts as a satellite storm disorganizes the diegetic world by smashing into the home- base of the protagonist. The satellite was mapping earth (“half of North America just lost their Facebook”). All is Lost starts when an unhinged container smashes into the ship of the nameless protagonist. The container was filled with new shoes on the way to the market where they would be sold. Passengers starts when a broken hibernation-pod wakes the protagonist too early. He was on his way – together with thousands of labourers – to a new and productive life on a recently colonialized planet. In the contemporary survival film, objects (the body of the protagonist included) are ordered in a fixed line of productivity. The films visualize how – in the current status-quo – humans no longer belong in a world of the commune but in a world of productive positioning. The disruptions that take place in the opening of the films show what happens when the capitalistic order of the world breaks down. There is no value outside of this neoliberal framework. Disconnected and invisible, objects have to align or survive an empty world. In the contemporary survival film, bodily visibility and connectivity allow us to be alive in the productive fantasy of neoliberal logic. The individual needs to stay connected to a line of productivity in order to belong in the world. Disconnection and invisibility lead to mere survival. These affects, I would argue, mirror the desires and anxieties of the

contemporary market. Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos (2015) lucidly lays bare how neoliberal rationale has translated all value into economic terms: value is value only as long as it represents capital. Consequently, everything has been turned into a market – including individuals: “both persons and states are construed on the model of the contemporary firm (…) persons are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value, and (…) persons do so through practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors” (22). The neoliberal subject requires a connected and visible attitude. He needs to promote and expose his own private market to capital flows in order to feel of value. If he is disconnected and invisible, a meaningful life is impossible. These desires are characteristic for the ‘homo-oeconomicus’, defined by Brown as: “an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital tasked with improving and leveraging its competitive positioning and with enhancing its (…) portfolio value across all of its endeavours” (10). The homo-oeconomicus is concerned, more than ever, with remaining visible and connected. Exposition is required to keep his personal market working – to enlarge his portfolio and confirm his Being: it keeps him alive in the world of capital.

Belonging in the world through neoliberal logic is precarious and exhausting, yet there is no alternative. Neoliberalism foregrounds individual resourcefulness and deregulates social security: “as the liberal capitalist state is reconfigured into a network of public-private partnerships, and social services from education to medical care are outsourced to commercial firms, citizens are also called upon to play an active role in caring for and governing themselves” (Ouelette & Hay, 472). Therefore, neoliberalism completely destroys the collective mentality of the seventies, eliminating: “the very idea of a people, a Demos asserting its collective political sovereignty” (Brown, 39). This individualization has become more troublesome in the wake of the economic crisis of 2008, since it has made employers seek to: “both download the risks inherent in a volatile economy and offload the responsibilities that, historically, have been associated with the standard employment relationship” (Peck and Theodore, 741/42). In the post-2008 neoliberal market, there is no social security nor stability at work. The popularity of flex-work, deregulation, outsourcing, and automatization all contribute to the fragility of our connection to the market. In other words, maintaining a neoliberal way-of-life is nearly impossible while valuable alternatives – normally provided by social security – are lost. More often than not, the homo-oeconomicus will feel like he is surviving rather than belonging in his world.

Collective perception on value has changed, and so have our fears. While a neoliberal fantasy is valued, the ties that bind people to one are easily cut. We desire visibility for capital flows but are hardly paid attention to. This process resembles what Berlant has termed a ‘cruel optimistic’ connection to the world. Optimism, as defined by Berlant, is an affective outward attachment to an ‘object’ in the world. She defines it as: “the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world in order to bring it closer” (1). The object of our optimism can be anything. Elsewhere, she argues that: “when we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea – whatever” (33, 2007). Objects of desire attach us to the world and promise us a sense of belonging. Optimism becomes ‘cruel’, when “the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” (Berlant, 1). Cruel connections take hold of our optimism and block other forms of belonging: “What’s cruel about these attachments (…) is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because (…) the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on an to look forward to being in the world” (33, 2007). While optimism should bring the world closer, certain objects promise to do so yet remain a fantasy. They become an obstacle for human flourishing; we cannot belong in the world through them.

Neoliberal logic incites ‘cruel optimistic’ relations. The objects of neoliberalism: “ignite a sense of possibility [while it] actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving” (Berlant, 2). In neoliberalism, we can have valuable experiences as long as we are visible and connected to capital. Productivity stands between a meaningful life and a life of emptiness and survival. However, the neoliberal world easily renders us invisible. We are often disconnected from our desired world of productivity while other forms of belonging have evaporated: “disintegrating the social into entrepreneurial and self-investing bits removes umbrellas of protection provided by belonging, whether to a pension plan or to a citizenry (…) we have no guarantee of security, protection, or even survival (...) the [homo-oeconomicus] is at persistent risk of failure, redundancy and abandonment through no doing of its own” (Brown, 37). Our fantasy of productivity cannot materialize but is presented as the only way to belong.

Many contemporary survival films rely on an emotional arc that presents a ‘cruel optimistic’ connection to the world as ultimate emotional relief. In the end, the lone protagonist is again safe after (re-)connecting to the market, even though the logic of the market caused his precarity in the first place. Why, then, is the incitement of a cruel optimistic relation to the world still satisfying? This is even more striking once we consider, as I will in chapter three, the self-centred ‘ugly emotions’ that are needed to make this connection. We desire this meaningful life only from an egocentric perspective. Individualization has become the enabling condition for our way-of-life. Is there no other way to connect to the world while providing narrative closure? Can cinema educate us a connection beyond our dominant discourse? Here, I return to the work of French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and his distinction between ‘Modern’ and ‘Classic’ perception as introduced in The World of Perception (1948). Merleau-Ponty argues that cinema often upholds a way to perceive the world ‘classily’, which means: already interpreted. He argues that proper cinematic expression makes the spectator feel the world rather than understand it. However, cinematic works that ask to be perceived ‘classily’ make us think the world. I would argue that it is through this ‘classic’ form of cinema that cruel optimistic connections become satisfactory: there was no other world to see, no other form of value to experience. Cinema’s potential, however, does not end here. In Gravity (Cuarón, 2013), Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) speeds down to earth after days surviving alone in space. Narrowly avoiding crashing into earth, she has something of an epiphany: “either I make it down there in one piece and I have one hell of a story to tell. Or I burn up in the next ten minutes. Either way, whichever way, no harm no foul. Cos either way, it'll be one hell of a ride. I'm ready”. In Gravity, the protagonist does not imagine a connection to the market as that which can save her from precarity. Instead, she stumbles upon her affective potential to organize the world by feeling it. This rediscovery is not merely represented: we do not do it justice simply by describing what is seen or heard. As Ryan Stone’s journey unfolds, the spectator shares her world feeling. The unstable and non- ideological ending of Gravity therefore changes the spectator as well. We walk out of the cinema slightly changed, as if the world has become a little smaller and our possibilities a little larger. How can this non-representative conclusion be affective? How can the spectator be touched by an ending that is still in development? According to Merleau-Ponty, cinema can re-educate our senses to perceive the world through Modern Perception, it can make us “rediscover the world we are prone to forget”

(39). This world is not organized by collective cultural fantasies but by our embodiment. Survival films like Gravity present a way to be-in-the-world that is informed by the sensing body. Barely surviving, we no longer have to search for meaning and value in a neoliberal world. Instead, we experience how meaning and value are always already in the world: the world is inhabitable because we can feel it. Cinema, here, can learn the neoliberal to break through walls, to beat precarity, and to be alive.

1.2. Methodology: Two Modes of Survival Merleau-Ponty argues: “the perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (Merleau-Ponty, 13, 1964). Cinema has the ability to ‘educate’ how we perceive the world: film can “re-educate us in how to see this world which we touch at every point of our being” (ibid, 53). It can do so through a specific ‘rhythm’:

What matters is the selection of episodes to be represented and, in each one, the choice of shots that will be featured in the film, the length of time allotted to these elements, the order in which they are to be presented, the sound or words with which they are or are not to be accompanied. Taken together, all these factors contribute to form a particular overall cinematographical rhythm (…) the viewer will experience the unity and necessity of the temporal progression in a work of beauty without ever forming a clear idea of it [and] will

be left not with a store of recipes but a radiant image, a particular rhythm. (98, 1948).

The survival film presents the viewer a rhythm that can ‘educate’ the way value is perceived in the world. Aesthetics is not the only element that educates our perception: “form and content (…) cannot exist separately from one another” (97). Diegetic elements like narrative and sound, together with the ‘objects’ in the world that are left out of the image, also influence the spectator’s experience of the image. The manner in which rhythm makes the spectator experience the world, determines what ‘rational existence’ is perceived as ‘good’ in it. In other words, the framework with which the protagonist transforms experience into meaning is mirrored at the formal level of the film. Merleau-Ponty argues that the rhythm of film often closes down what can be experienced. Cinema ‘educates’ a limited connection to the world: “cinema has yet to provide

us with many films that are works of art from start to finish: its infatuation with (…) the twists and turns of plot and the intrusion of pretty pictures and witty dialogue, are all tempting pitfalls for films (…) and, in so doing, eschew properly cinematic means of expression” (97). Here, cinema teaches us to desire a ‘cruel optimistic’ connection. However, the survival film has the potential to educate a new (or: primal) experience of value. It can present a connection that bypasses precarity and neoliberal rationale. The protagonist connects to a subjective life- world. The spectator is educated to connect in an existential manner. The next chapter focuses on Merleau-Ponty’s dualistic understanding of cinema and its ability to alter our perception. I will argue that it has consequences on the notion of the ‘embodied spectator’. I argue that the cinematic apparatus does not automatically call the spectator’s embodiment into action. Instead, the rhythm of the film plays an important role in the experience of cinematic worlds. Merleau-Ponty argues that cinematic rhythm can present the world open and ‘naïve’. The spectator’s body organizes this world. Oppositely, cinema can present us a world that is closed-off and distant. Here, the spectator relies on cognitive abilities in order to make sense of the world. Value in a closed-off world is fixed. In order to have narrative closure, the disconnected body has to reconnect to a predetermined and cultural framework. In an open world, however, the spectator can feel and experience the disorganization of the world. The protagonist’s precarious experience of disconnection is shared by the spectator. Here, the spectator has to find embodied stability again. The direct and impulsive relation between the body and its world are experienced as ‘good-for-you’. Following this line of thought, there are, I would argue, two forms of contemporary survival films, which means: two ways connection to the world is ‘educated’. I will call them the ‘Ideological’ and the ‘Existential’ survival film. In the former, the spectator remains entrapped in the world hidden “beneath all the sediment of knowledge and social living” (ibid.). He experiences a world capitalised by neoliberalism and in which the disconnected body can only connect in a ‘cruel optimistic’ way. In the latter, the spectator is thrust into “the presence of the world of lived experience” (Merleau-Ponty, 93, 1948). The body experiences an open world and connects to it ‘existentially’. The last two chapters dive into the two different forms of the contemporary survival film. In the third chapter, I focus on The Martian (Scott, 2015) and Passengers (Tyldum, 2016), films that, I would argue, are Ideological Survival Films. Both films present the spectator with a world already interpreted and with a body that needs to align to this world. Even though the body desires a precarious connection to the world, this ‘cruel optimistic’

attachment is still the only real meaningful connection possible. Home is imagined in culture. One has to return to social structures in order to feel alive. The rhythm in both films does not allow the spectator to perceive value beyond the world already in place. In the last chapter, I focus on Existential Survival Films; namely All is Lost (Chandor, 2013) and Gravity. In the films, affective confusion incites a new organization of the world. This connection is the rediscovered embodied potential to ‘Be-in-the-world’. It bypasses culture and thus precarity. This connection cannot be represented, it can only be felt. For both protagonists, the fantasy of the productive body no longer works. Meaning is found at its incitement and not its destination. Home is presented through ‘being-home-in-the-world’. Here, the embodied individual is fundamentally free to attune the body beyond neoliberal logic. We can consciously choose to pay attention to the world differently; to feel the world rather than be positioned in it. Cinematic rhythm presents the world as open and new. The spectator can experience his/her embodied capacities within it and perceive value in the ‘impressive’ world that underlies the world of capitalism.

2. Entrapped and Existential Embodiment “The body is our general medium for having a world.” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 146)

2.1. Inscribed vs Living Embodiment The contemporary survival film centres on lone individuals who need to reconnect to their desired world. In this chapter, I will argue that the protagonist’s perception on value influences the formal level of the film. Consequently, the spectator is ‘educated’ to perceive value in the diegetic world like the protagonist. Adopting this perception, we desire similar connection to the world: we attune to it just like the protagonist. To embed these claims in theory, film phenomenology is the best place to start. The relation between the cinematic screen and viewer’s response has gained more academic interest after the Affective Turn in

humanities. Phenomenology colours the discussion. As a philosophy, phenomenology questions the relation between the act of knowledge and the knowable object, aiming: “to explore the abilities that any subject (…) has to be in possession of if it is to be capable of knowledge” (Zahavi, 12). Film phenomenology has a similar logic and questions the relation between a cinematic world (the object of knowledge) and the experience of the spectator (the act of knowledge). It often engages with this question through embodiment. Both Vivian Sobchack in The Address of the Eye (1992) and Jennifer Barker in The Tactile Eye (2009) research the relation between the viewer’s body and the cinematic body. Jennifer Barker describes the filmic body as an autonomous ‘lived’ body that connects with the viewer’s body through tactility. Barker follows in the footsteps of Vivian Sobchack, who foregrounds the similarity between cinematic- and human perception. For Sobchack, the camera is an embodied filmic consciousness that has “visible intentions” (5) towards objects in the diegetic world. Following Merleau-Ponty, both Sobchack and Barker argue that the body always already organizes the world; the body feels the world before consciousness interprets it. Moreover, they argue that the camera relies on a similar embodiment as humans and therefore structures the diegetic world in an interchangeable way. The cinematic apparatus feels the world just like we do. Humans instinctively organize their worlds just as the camera organizes his. With film phenomenology, we can start to think about the ways in which spectators experience the diegesis. The “immediate sensory and expressive features of films [that are] pre-aesthetic, even pre-formal as well as pre-sematic” (Yacavone, 159-65, 2016) are similar to the human sensorium. Here, the spectator becomes an ‘embodied spectator’: the viewer who actively and pre-aesthetically engages with the film through direct embodied impulses. The spectator no longer sits silently in the cinema, overflown by the narrative and relying on cognitive capacitates to understand the diegesis. Instead, we think about the spectator as directly connecting to the diegetic world through embodied affects. What gets lost in this phenomenological approach? As I argued in the previous chapter, the relationship between an ‘I’ and the world is dictated by neoliberalism in the contemporary survival film. The productive fantasy of neoliberalism determines how protagonists perceive value in the world and, consequently, how the spectator experiences value in the diegesis. Film phenomenology overlooks these political and historical concerns. It seeks to find an explanation for our affection with a diegetic world in pre-historical and pre- cultural qualities. However, historical and cultural desires in the survival film confuse and disturb direct embodied attunement. Why then, can we still be affected by the represented

world? I would argue that this is thanks to the formal level of the film. Cinematic rhythm limits what the body is able to perceive and feel. Consequently, our notion of the body should be broadened: it is not only an opening to the world but also subjected to the politics of a regulated world. As introduced, the survival film presents two ways in which the body reconnects with the world. The filmic rhythm ‘learns’ the embodied spectator perceive value in two different ways. His body relates to its world in two different manners. A similar distinction is made in social sciences. Nick Crossley in “Boy-Subject/Body-Power” (1996) analyses the relationship between a body and its world and identifies two prominent rationales. Broadly speaking, the body can be thought of as a “‘lived’ and active or as acted upon, as historically ‘inscribed’ from without” (99). We can think of the body as organizing its world – creating its own subjective life-world, or as organized by the world – made useful through the external organization of its environment. Film phenomenology solely focusses on the ‘living’ body. It is because the spectator has a ‘living’ human body that (s)he is capable of experiencing the filmic world. However, we can also connect through ‘inscribed’ embodiment. The work of Merleau-Ponty pays attention to this controlled understanding of the world. The relation between the viewer and the film can be guided and historical. Merleau-Ponty complicates the notion of the ‘embodied spectator’ by critically assessing the relationship between form and perception. His thoughts connect to his broader social and cultural concerns. Merleau-Ponty argues that in modernity, the body no longer organizes its world. Consequently, our embodied existential link with the world is disturbed. Art and cinema are affected by these developments. In film, form already organizes the world. It interprets the diegesis and limits what can be experienced. Cinematic form makes the embodied spectator not so much ‘embodied’ at all:

It is not simply the case that owing to the technological and perceptual conditions of the medium (…) that cinema is automatically able to embody or represent processes of “lived perception” that constitute the life world of an individual (…) this phenomenological meaning or expression is instead an aesthetic potential of cinema, which certain features of the medium and its technology certainly may aid but (…) neither determine nor guarantee (Yacavone, 172, 2016).

Contemporary film phenomenology solely focusses on ontological claims about universal embodiment. It highlights the existential link between the perceiving body and the perceiving

camera. Following Merleau-Ponty, however, we could argue that this embodied relation is not cinema’s ontology: “cinema has yet to provide us with many films that are works of art from start to finish” (Merleau-Ponty, 97). It is only a potential of cinema. Cinema, however, can address the embodied spectator thoroughly. Artistic worlds sometimes allow the spectator to experience “the joy which lies in showing how something takes on meaning” (Yacovone, 167, 2016). This experience, however, requires a specific rhythm that incites a specific perception on the world. Here, I return to Merleau-Ponty’s critical distinction between ‘Classic’ and ‘Modern’ perception as introduced in The World of Perception. I argue that cinematic worlds can ‘thematise’ perception and show how the body always already attunes to the world in a meaningful manner. In the Existential Survival Film, the embodied spectator is invited to perceive ‘Modern’ and to: “discover the world in which we live, yet which we are always prone to forget” (39). The Ideological Survival Film, however, focusses on a protagonist who desires connection to a cultural and historical world. The rhythm of the film makes the spectator also desire a connection to an interpreted world. It asks the embodied spectator to perceive ‘Classically’.

2.2. Modern Perception and the Existential Life-World Through Modern Perception, we see the world open and new (or: primal but forgotten). Here, we construct a world based on: “what our senses tell us when we consult them naïvely” (M-P, 40). This does not happen automatically. Merleau-Ponty argues that ‘basic’ perception is not what it appears to be; we do not necessarily see the ‘Real’ world after opening our eyes. More often than not, our: “‘natural attitude’ of common sense” disturbs our perception on “the phenomenon of the perceived world” (12). What we see when we look at the world is often directly interpreted by the mind. Consciousness deciphers our naïvely perceived impression before we can even realize it. Consequently, the world we see and act in is often the world of the mind rather than the ‘world of perception’. Merleau-Ponty argues that the world holding the closest relation to the individual is the world we see once we strip perception from any cognitive interpretation. This world is filled with impressions and shapes rather than with objects. For example, when I look at a table, I do not automatically see it as a social tool in the living room. Before anything else, I see the intensity of the table. I see its colours, its lines, and the relation it has to other impressions: “when I give a dictionary definition of a table (…) I may feel that I have got, as it were, to the essence of the table (…) In this example, however, I am not perceiving but rather defining. By contrast, when I perceive a table, I do not withdraw my interest from the

particular way it has of performing its function as a table” (94). Naïve perception – stripped down from conscious interpretation – perceives things as impressions rather than as objects. These impressions relate to others in a ‘world of impressions’. We constantly forget this world. In daily-life, we interact with objects and rely on ‘common sense’. We define the function of the things around us. Modern Perception, however, unveils the impressive nature underlying the things in the world. Modern Perception is organized by the body. The world of impressions is completely open but not unbound. There are limits to what the body can experience. The body, therefore, always already organizes the world. The cadres and limits of what the body can feel form the cadres and limits of what we can perceive. Merleau-Ponty argues that this sensing body allows us to experience the world of impressions: “It is our ‘bodily’ intentionality which brings the possibility of meaning into our experience” (Baldwin, 10). Our bodily architecture: “orients us toward the world in a particular way (…) prior to cognition and consciousness” (Loren & Dietrich, 352). The world that we see before our consciousness makes sense of it is therefore already organized and meaningful: “although the world may take on additional significance as a result of learning, cognition, and the social milieu, these are not added to a neutral world devoid of significance but to an already meaningful world” (ibid.). It is ‘embodied perception’ that allows humans to attune to the world in the first place. The body impulsively forms a ‘life-world’ out of the impression in the world: “the way in which the world appears to an organism is structured by the architecture of that organism” (Lewis & Dietrich, 352). Consequently, Merleau-Ponty follows Heidegger in arguing that beings are always already situated in-the-world (Dasein). We cannot understand our Being by stripping conscious to its most basic form. We are instead always already part of our environment: we shape and are shaped by the world. Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the- world is already intrinsically embodied (Gallagher, 10). For Merleau-Ponty, however, the body is our a-priori condition for meaning. Modern perception allows the body, instinctively and reflexively, to construct its own life-world in the world of impressive phenomenon: “through the loosening the intentional chords tying us to the world, by approaching it with “wonder” (…) the non-cognitive relationships with the lived-world are brought more fully to our notice” (Quinn, 11). Through Modern Perception, we recognize how “bodily cognition and expression” creates “a structure to the chaos of the world” (ibid., 23). It is Modern Perception that reminds us that it is in fact our feeling and organizing body that is the fundamental condition for meaning. The body is existential link between an ‘I’ and the world.

2.3. Classic Perception and the Capitalistic Life-world Modernity disturbs perception. We hardly perceive the world naïvely. Instead, we often look at the world through Classic Perception. Classic Perception brings the world into consciousness. It blocks an embodied organization of the world and hides our existential connection to it. Merleau-Ponty argues that Classic Perception is the result of modern science and math. Classical sciences try to understand the world by measuring and calculating consciously graspable ‘objects’ in the world: providing “a picture of the world which is complete, self-sufficient and somehow closed in upon itself, such that there could no longer be any meaningful questions outside this picture” (43). In Classic Perception, the world is not an inhabitable place thanks to our embodied organization of naïvely perceived impressions. The world, instead, is organized by ‘objective’ (meaning: calculated and measured) rules. Classical Perception is disembodied. Here, Merleau-Ponty again follows Martin Heidegger. Classic Perception, I would argue, can be paralleled with Heidegger’s argument in “The Age of the World Picture” (1938). In this essay, Heidegger argues that sciences are “objectifying whatever is” (126). Similar to Merleau-Ponty, he describes how ‘Dasein’ is disturbed by modernity. Heidegger blames academic practices. He argues that academics, since they are occupied with research, require a “circumscribed object-sphere” (123). In order to do research, academics need a world that can be defined by ‘objective’ rules and laws. Here, the ‘true nature’ of an object can be found through calculation: math and science can expose the reality of an object without the intervention of our untrustworthy senses. Research brings us the ‘true’ nature of phenomena rather than its impression. What can be measured is what is: “the objectifying of whatever is, is accomplished in a setting before, a presenting, that aims at bringing each particular being before it in such a way that man who calculates can be sure, and that means be certain, of that being” (127). The world is no longer organized by our body but becomes a distant picture for men: “what is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth” (129). All impressions are brought into consciousness. We see the world as an organized an inhabitable place because it is supported by ‘objective’ laws. The world is closed in on itself. Its rules exist apart from us. Phenomenology’s critique on modernity has, I would argue, a similar starting point as Critical Theory described in the previous chapter and performed by Wendy brown and Lauren Berlant. Both Phenomenology and Critical Theory criticize the ‘objectified’ world and the

disembodied subject; they target the interpreted world and the way it controls what the body can feel. For Brown and Berlant, our ‘world picture’ is not necessarily organized by scientific rules. Instead, the world is organized by algorithms that determine the value of objects through their monetary value: the world of objects can be translated into a Capitalistic world of objects. Today, the neoliberal subject perceives the world as distant and structured by capital. The objects brought into consciousness are only valuable as long as they represent money: their ‘true’ nature is what they are worth. Consequently, the homo-oeconomicus can only attune or connect to this world by accumulating capital.

2.4. Aesthetics Cinematic Worlds The distinction between ‘Classic Perception’ and ‘Modern Perception’ has consequences on the theorization of embodied spectatorship. Cinematic rhythm engages the spectator in different ways: we join our object of knowledge through different acts – namely interpretation and experience. Film phenomenology of Sobchack and Barker argues how all films have tactile elements and therefore how all films incite existential organizing capacities of the spectator’s body. However, cinematic techniques in this theory already limit the experience of the spectator; the camera already spells out what the embodied spectator can experience. Sobchack’ and Barker’s focus on perceptual resonance and mirrored bodily functions of the camera describes a: “subjectively mediated re-presentation of the world” (Richmond, 68), in which: “cinema’s representational function captures, organizes, or determines its spectators’ experience” (ibid., 70). Merleau-Ponty, however, argues that cinematic rhythm can educate the spectator to perceive Modern, which means: to see the world completely open and anew. Here, the embodied spectator can move ‘under’ the image and feel the diegetic world before the manifestation of represented objects in it. But what exactly is an aesthetics ‘world’? What is at stake on the formal level of the film is the manner in which the diegesis is experienced as ‘whole’ by the spectator. To experience an artwork as ‘whole’ is to perceive it as coherent: the spectator can understand its meaning and completeness. Wholeness for Heidegger would be the notion of a “world”. A world for Heidegger, works as “a name for beings in their entirety” (67): a phenomenon comes before us together with what belongs to it as a system (ibid.). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty defines a world as “an open and indefinite multiplicity where relations are reciprocally implicated” (73, 1945). It is a place where impressions always already relate to one another. How the spectator fathoms this ‘system’ – whether the diegetic world is made ‘whole’

through Modern or Classic Perception – is determined in cinematic form. The spectator either renders the world whole by interpreting its objects or by experiencing its impressions. There are, arguably, two aesthetics worlds: a ‘represented’ world – theorized in diegetic terms – and an ‘expressive’ world (Yacavone, 85, 2008). This expressive world is analysed in Mikel Dufrenne’s The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953). Like Berlant, Dufrenne argues that a present moment is always comprehended, first, through immediate feeling. The ‘meaning’ of an aesthetic expression is therefore always primarily felt: “expression immediately presents us with a meaning without the mediation of reason (…) the expressive significance of the aesthetic object is given to us immediately” (Feezell, 23). For Dufrenne, the truly ‘aesthetic’ world is a world that is a ‘unity’ or ‘system’ because it is a “felt unity” (ibid, 25). This felt unity is not ‘whole’ thanks to elements in the diegetic world that need interpretation (for example: narrative), but because of the direct but coherent feelings it incites in the spectator. In other words: a true artistic world asks to be perceived Modern rather than Classic: it is a unity because we can feel its coherence. This definition of a ‘felt unity’ connects to Merleau-Ponty’s argument in The World of Perception. Here, Merleau-Ponty argues how a ‘good’ or truly ‘artistic’ artwork always holds a distance from the real world: “painting does not intimate the world but is a world of its own. This means that, in our encounter with a painting, at no stage are we sent back to the neutral object; similarly, when we experience a portrait aesthetically, its ‘resemblance’ to the model is of no importance” (96). Modern art, by giving us a world of impressions rather than a coherent representation of the world (what he calls: defamiliarization), allows the spectator to see the world through Modern Perception. It allows the spectator to experience how – operating beneath the level representation and signification – the world can always already be experience as ‘whole’:

In the presence of a painting, it is not a question of my making ever more references to the subject (….) Rather, as in the perception of things themselves, it is a matter of contemplating, of perceiving the painting by way of the silent signals which come at me from its every part (…) until such time as all, in the absence of reason and discourse, come to form a tightly structured arrangement in which one has the distinct feeling that nothing is arbitrary, even if one is unable to give a rational explanation of this. (96).

The truly artistic aesthetic world is a world that has not passed into materiality yet and that therefore cannot be interpreted by the spectator. It can only be felt. It’s rhythm and form make the spectator experience how we can always already form a clear idea of a world without ever relying on our cognitive and interpretative qualities. In chapter four, I will clarify how film can ‘thematise’ embodied perception and how the spectator’s body can organize the world of impressions. By roughening our embodied involvement with the diegetic world, we experience how an illusionary world can feel just as real as the empirical one. Here, film makes us aware that it is embodied feeling that gives us a world to which we can connect, they: “highlight the dynamic ways in which the natural environment is pre-rationally perceptually and bodily experienced, and thus comes to be known (in human terms) at all” (Yacavone, 176, 2016). The artistic world here: “allows to return its viewers in virtual fashion to the world of lived appearances itself” (Yacavone, 176, 2016). The cinematic world can bring to memory how subjective embodied perception always already is a meaningful connection with the world or, more importantly, a requirement for meaning in the first place – it can highlight: “the relation between a perceiving body and a sensible and not perspectival world” (Somers-Hall, 216). Art can make us rediscover how a sensing body “testifies to the human capacity to wrestle significance from the world” (Singer, 155). However, this is only a potential of cinema. Not all aesthetic worlds are rendered ‘whole’ through the feeling body: “some arts, the so-called representational ones, present us with an image of the real world (…) where the objective qualities of the real world are transferred to the represent elements” (Feezell, 24). Mainstream cinema often presents a closed-down and already interpreted world. The spectator here, cannot ‘enter’ the work of art: “many conventional films (…) offer a highly rationalized and idealized two-dimensional semblance or replica of three-dimensional reality as already familiar and known” (Yacavone, 176, 2016). The experience of the artistic world here: “consist in tracking signs or representations through the associative networks that give them meaning”, requiring a “distance of vision that separates subject from object” (Cox, 146-8). The body does not enter the world. In this sense, cinematic worlds are “constituted by different conceptual/symbolic systems that construct world (or world versions) according to the functioning of the categories and frames of reference particular to them” (Yacavone, 86/8, 2008). Represented film worlds incite Classic Perception. They are a distant ‘picture’ that we can understand through interpretation.

2.5. Embodied Reactions to Aesthetics Cinematic Worlds Cinematic form presents different worlds. Form, therefore, ‘educates’ different ways of perception. The embodied spectator can be thought of as both a biological and feeling individual and as a thinking and time-specific ‘inscribed’ subject. Gabriel Ignatow in “Culture and Embodied Cognition” (2009) argues that: “findings of cognitive neuroscience suggest that culture’s effects on social life can be more readily identified if cognitive schemas (…) are understood to be embodied and when discourses are seen as containing bodily information that interacts with the habitus” (643). Culture and ideology can influence habitual bodily impulses and thus the direct way the body understands the world. Proposing to describe the relation between a body and its world as a two-stage process can clarify this:

The first stage is characterized by universality (…) because all humans have essentially the same bodily constitution, this stage is unavoidably common to all human beings, in spite of their socio-cultural background. By contrast, in the second stage the notion of universality is contested. Here, the bodily-grounded experiences, as selected in the first stage, are purged, adapted, and modified by the cultural information available, and therefore, the result is not universal, but cultural-specific (Coegnarts & Kravanja, 25).

For humans, the body that dwells in the world of impressions is often more or less the same. Perception, pre-cognitive and pre-lingual, never collapses into chaos because humans are programmed to perceive the world within a biological determined framework. This is universal. Classic Perception, however, purges, adapts and modifies bodily experiences. Encountering the world, the body attunes to ideology. This is cultural. The question concerning the embodied crisis visualized in the contemporary survival film becomes the following: what ‘belonging’ in what ‘world’ is the ‘embodied’ spectator ‘educated’ to ‘perceive’? To answer this question, we can look at the affects the films incite. What are we allowed to feel: the world or its representation? We can either feel tension in narrative or in the disorganization of our own world. What can these feelings do: awake bodily capacities or justify exhaustive bodily practices? We can experience how the body organizes the world or long for a predetermined position of the body in a cultural framework. In the Ideological Survival Film, feeling is channelled. The spectator and the protagonist both belong in a world of objects. They perceive the world Classic: it is organized by capital. Belonging can only be experienced through productivity. The films advocate a

neoliberal ideology since the disconnected body desires to be positioned again in an organized world. In the Existential Survival Film, belonging occurs through perception of the world in a Modern sense. The world is open, and the body can connect through intentional affect. Like the protagonist, we experience that the impulsive creation of a life-world always already is meaningful.

3. ‘Bring Him Back1’: The Ideological Survival Film “At some point, everything's gonna go south on you... everything's going to go south and you're going to say, this is it. This is how I end. Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work. That's all it is. You just begin. You do the math. You solve one problem and you solve the next one... and then the next. And If you solve enough problems, you get to come home…” (The Martian. Ridley Scott, 2015).

“I'm not gonna die here”. Mark, NASA botanist, refuses to come to terms with his situation. He is left for death on Mars by his colleges, who hastily evacuated the planet after a storm hit

1 Tagline of The Martian. Ridley Scott. 20th Century Fox: 2015.

their mission site. Mark – still alive but alone – stumbles to his home-base and starts to record a video-dairy. Through this camera, Mark updates the audience on his injuries, hunger and despair. He feels completely unproductive and fears his end has come. His world, disconnected from his employers, has turned into a dangerous void. There is no safety without work. Yet he will not let this precarious experience change his perception on the world. Mark firmly holds on to his believes. He just wants to be a good employee. Consequently, he searches a ‘good’ in the object-sphere that incited his precarious experience in the first place. Left behind by his employers, he only wishes to reconnect with them. Mark, in order to belong again, does the only thing he can think of: he gets to work. Mark (Matt Damon) proves to be a true homo-oeconomicus. In The Martian (Scott, 2015), Mark only perceives economic value: only through work can his disconnected body rediscover a place in an inhabitable world. He never pursues a new object of desire. Mark’s normative reign is limited: “there are no motivations, drives, or aspirations apart from economic ones” (Brown, 44). This is characteristic of what I call the Ideological Survival Film: the contemporary survival film that educates a neoliberal perception on value and that therefore encourages a restricted embodied attunement to an already organized world. In this chapter, I look at the white-male protagonists of The Martian and Passengers (Tyldum, 2016), who are both unable to challenge the normative forces that have reduced their disconnected lives to worthlessness. Their horizon of possibility is already fixed: they can only imagine belonging in a world of commodities and feel human through a connection with capital. In Ideological Survival Film, the experience of bodily precarity does not alter perception on the world. Even when experiences are far removed from valuable ones, another way to perceive meaning cannot materialize. What we imagine makes the world inhabitable never changes. Neoliberal logic prevails. For both protagonists, precarious experiences are the result of a fantasy that cannot become reality but is not questioned either. The crisis is in themselves and not in the world. In other words, they feel they can reconnect with this world as long as they adhere to its values. The survival film, here, presents the fear of disconnection as an enabling condition for belonging in the neoliberal world. As the quote of The Martian – with which I opened this chapter – illustrates, uselessness and worthlessness are part of the neoliberal experience. These self-centred and ‘ugly emotions’ drive the homo-oeconomicus to, self-sufficiently, enhance its position in the world. The films show that – as long as we try to remain visible and connected – belonging in the neoliberal world can always be achieved.

All of this radiates through in the rhythm of the films and influences the experience of the spectator. The manner in which Mark and Jim perceive meaning in the world is mirrored at the formal level of the film. We experience the world just as they do. The Ideological Survival Film’s rhythm brings the embodied spectator in line with the Classic Perception of the protagonist: it incites (or: educates) a similar way to construct meaning. The protagonists desperately uphold a neoliberal perception on the world, and so do we. The spectator is not called into action – pre-aesthetically and impulsively – to construct a life-world, but instead addressed as positioned and ‘inscribed’ subject in the neoliberal world of objects. This cinematic rhythm already starts in narrative.

3.1. Narrative: Imagining the World Passengers tells the story of Jim (Chris Pratt). The film takes place in the not too distant future, in which a company called ‘Homestead’ colonializes new planets. They transport paying customers on huge spaceships towards these new colonies. Jim has boarded such a spaceship – the ‘Avalon’ – and is, together with thousands of others, on his way to the planet Homestead II, a journey that will take approximately 120 years. While the rest of the passengers and the crew are still in hibernation, Jim suddenly wakes up. Unfortunately for Jim, there is no new hibernation-pod available. He cannot get back to sleep. Even worse, his journey has only just started: Jim has awakened 90 years too early and is, as the only wake person on the ship, destined for a lone and lost life adrift in space (even more so, considering that communication to earth will take about 60 years). Jim is isolated. His life is wasted, he cannot perceive a goal on this immense but empty ship. He waltzes around but is unable to find an object that will bind him to a meaningful life. Bored and indifferent, he contemplates suicide. Failing to press through, however, he finds an alternative. Jim stumbles upon a sleeping Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence) and falls in love with her. Jim now faces a devilish dilemma: he can either wake her up and condemn her life to a similar fate as his, or he can let her sleep and sit out the rest of his life alone. Mark Watney in The Martian similarly experiences the emptiness of a life lived disconnected and invisible. In the year 2035, Mark is part of a NASA crew that explores the Acidalia Planitia on Mars. The team is under command of Melissa Lewis (Jessica Chastain). Mark is their botanist. A dust storm, however, forces the crew to abort their mission. In the chaos of the evacuation, Mark is hit by a satellite (their communication antenna, making it again nearly impossible for the protagonist to communicate with ‘home’). His crew cannot find him and leaves him behind. However, Mark is still alive. He wakes up to the sound of a

bleeping spacesuit – indicating his lowered oxygen level – and hurries to their home base. Here, he patches himself up and assesses his situation. He needs to find a way to communicate with earth. More importantly, considering that his rescue might take years, he needs to grow food on a planet that does not support life. Luckily, this was Mark’s mission all along. Ingeniously, he finds a way to grow potatoes. Moreover, he re-installs a communication satellite of a previous mission. He is again able to communicate with earth. From here on out, the film starts to shift back and forth between Mark’s struggles on Mars and his employers on earth. Here, NASA desperately tries to develop a plan to bring Mark back. Fearing that his diminishing food stock will eventually run-out, a rescue mission is set- up: Melissa’s evacuated ship will have to turn around and pick Mark up in mid-space. In both The Martian and Passengers, a safe and valuable (or: ‘good-for-you’) connection to the world can only be imagined through productive positioning. The individual needs to remain connected to capital flows or otherwise fear for existence. There is no other way to bind oneself to meaningful life. There is only neoliberal logic. In the Ideological Survival Film, the experience of the uninhabitable world remains bounded in a stable story: there is only one form of Being, one way to feel, one way to survive. This terrible lack of imagination characterizes the opening thirty minutes of Passengers. After a couple of days on the ship, Jim slowly starts to realize that his body will never be visible and connected (and thus valuable) again. His life on the new planet – which promised consumption, productivity and connectivity – will completely pass him by through the intervention of time. Strikingly, this planet can be called ‘home’ only because it generates money. Later in the film, an impressed Aurora tells Jim: “Do you know how much Homestead Company made off its first planet? Eight quadrillion dollars! That's eight million billion. Colony planets are the biggest business going”. Jim’s desired world is literally organized by capital: it can only be reached because it is so profitable and is only brought into being because it accumulates capital. However, without connection this planet there is no belonging at all. In the logic of the world, Jim’s life on the ship – unperceived, unacknowledged and unproductive – is completely wasted. For Jim, life is useless without the possibility of visibility and connection. For Lauren Berlant, a precarious experience – when hardly any object of desire allows the protagonist to imagine life as ‘adding-up to something’ – makes us: “stuck in what we might call survival time, the time of struggling, drowning, holding onto the ledge, treading water – the time of non-stopping” (169). Jim, however, completely lacks an object of desire. There is no object through which he can imagine a productive and functional life on the empty ship. So, there is

no reason not-to-stop. Jim, therefore, stumbles through the ship: lost, bored, done. He gets drunk, neglects himself, and indifferently contemplates suicide: he almost stops. Even all the luxury tools and games on the ship cannot satisfy him anymore. They are empty promises if they cannot be entertained after a hard work day. Slowly but surely, Jim loses all energy. He grows an untidy beard and waltzes around naked. In his empty world, it is simply impossible to be productive and feel alive. There is no object that makes him able to imagine a meaningful experience. Without neoliberal objects to desire, there is no desire at all. There is, quite simply, no plot, no narrative, no action. There is nothing to survive for. The film moves towards a dead-end. The incapability to perceive value outside a capitalistic framework is even more evident in The Martian. The film is partly focalized from earth and occasionally focusses on the comings and goings of Mark’s employer. In Passengers, the incapability to imagine life outside of a capitalistic organization is expressed through the lack of narrative progress. Jim will never be visible again and stagnates. Mark, however, always remains able to imagine a connection to a line of productivity. He more or less remains visible and connected to a market – even though this market is 200 million miles away. In the film, the incapability to imagine life outside a neoliberal framework comes to the fore through the specific role of his employer. Mark survives for and through his colleges. Work is his only object of desire. NASA is presented as Mark’s only connection to the world. There is no other way to belong. The film, therefore, partly becomes a ‘rescue-mission film’: Mark has to be brought back. Mark desires a feeling of productivity even though the means to this feeling are far out of reach. For Berlant, limited possibilities to imagine belonging incite a desire for the “bad life”, in which: “if you’re lucky you get to be exploited, and if you’re lucky you can avoid one more day being the focus of a scene that hails and ejects you when it is your time to again become worthless” (171). In The Martian, Mark reproduces this ‘bad-life’. He dedicates his life to his employer while other attachments are left in the dark. For all we know, Mark’s only connection to the outside world is NASA. The film never shows a lover waiting on earth, nor a group of friends cheering for him in a bar or a family nervously watching the television. Only his colleges care for his life. What is left out of the story here, influences what the spectator can experience. His work is depicted as the only way to reconnect to a valuable life. Consequently, Mark’s employer is the only object of desire for the spectator as well. There is no alternative for emotional relief: only connection to the working environment will give narrative closure.

So, Mark tries to uphold his competitive positioning by placing himself on the map again. Quite literally; Mark and his employers dedicate a considerable amount of time discovering his position and deciding what his next move is going to be. Moreover, he stays valuable. In the process of saving himself, Mark colonizes Mars. He gathers samples for his employee and puts valuable science to the test. In his actions, Mark helps his employer organize the unknown planet. Relying on calculation and mathematics, he ‘objectifies’ his world in order to survive it. He does not experience Mars but forms a distant ‘picture’ of it. All Mark’s actions are explained, step by step, in his video-diary. For films that are about lone bodies lost in space, both The Martian and Passengers are remarkably chatty. Every action is placed in narrative. Everything that happens serves a goal. There is hardly confusion or inconsistency: things the spectator might expect in stories that deal with difficult science, long stretches of time, and delusionary men trapped in isolation. In both films, narrative is driven by the question: ‘will he make it?’. Value in the worlds is already fixed while the protagonists have to align to it again. In order to arrive at a satisfying conclusion, narrative presents a goal – an object that needs to be fixed – most prominently the unproductive and invisible body. This goal is only a valuable goal once the world is perceived as a capitalistic world of objects. For the spectator, there is only ‘educated’ tension as long as she confirms the represented organization of the world. The spectator will feel for Mark and Jim, not with them. In The Martian, there is a goal – a way to move on – and this mission provides enough action to keep the story bound in narrative conventions. In Passengers, the incapability to imagine a goal is a reason to indeed stop. Jim wants to reproduce the bad-life or nothing at all. The films, in short, do not present a new organization of the world. The world already in place is the only option. This world determines the style of the film as well.

3.2. Style: Perceiving the World In the Ideological Survival Film, the framework through which the protagonists perceive value is never challenged. This containment of the world not only occurs in narrative but also in style. The experience of precarity never destabilizes the organization of the represented world. Instead, the diegetic world remains rock solid. In the ‘closed down’ style of both The Martian and Passengers, the spectator’s body is guided towards an understanding of the protagonist’s position in the world and doesn’t have to act. the world is already made sense of. We are invited to perceive the world through Classic Perception. According to Merleau-Ponty, Classic Perception makes us experience space as something stable. It forms boundaries in which objects can be positioned:

Space is the uniform medium in which things are arranged in three dimensions and in which they remain the same regardless of the position they occupy. In many cases, the properties of an object are seen to change when the object is moved. If an object is moved from the pole to the equator, its weight and perhaps even its shape will change (…) Yet neither of these changes – of weight and shape – can be attributed to the movement as such: space is the same at the pole as at the equator (Merleau-Ponty, 51, 1948).

In Classic Perception, our impression of space always remains the same. Objects in space cannot alter their world. We can translate these ideas into aesthetic terms as well. In the Ideological Survival Film, perception is contained by a non-negotiable fixation of the camera on a stable point of departure. The camera focusses on a fixed horizon from which the spectator can position the displaced objects in space. Form and content remain strictly separated. The world is visualized just like the ‘classic painter’ would, who:

Arranges things such that what he represents is no more than a compromise between (...) various different visual impressions: he strives to find a common denominator to all these perceptions by rendering each object not with the size, colours and aspect it presents when the painter fixes it in his gaze but rather with the conventional size and aspect that it would present in a gaze directed at a particular vanishing point on the horizon, a point in relation to which the landscape is then arranged along lines running from the painter to the horizon. Landscapes painted in this way (...) remain at a distance and do not involve the viewer (Merleau-Ponty, 53, 1948).

In Classis Perception, bodily precarity only appears in content. Our experience of the unorganized world remains bounded by a stable form. As in narrative, the body never experiences a new world but instead perceives the stable boundaries that organize the objects in the world. This Classic Perception comes to the fore in the confrontation with ‘the void’: the empty world completely derived of stable points upon which we can fix our gaze. Thirty minutes into Passengers, Jim contemplates suicide. Giving up, he puts on his spacesuit and gets outside – a trip designed for paying passengers who would like to enjoy a little spacewalking shortly before arrival. Strikingly, this space-walk remains ‘bounded’ in a stable

form. The spaceship from which Jim jumps always remains visible. The body, consequently, can always be positioned. Jim can always be brought into relation with this colossal surface in the background. Immersed in darkness, his luminous suit distances him from the rest of the ship (pic. 1). Jumping of, a cable on his back keeps him connected to the ship. It is this cable the camera holds onto. It doesn’t dive into the void like Jim but holds its ground while the man floats out of perception (pic. 2). Picking him up again, the camera has moved 180 degrees and now pictures Jim’s face with the spaceship behind him (pic. 3). The camera’s movement mirrors the movement of the tightly pulled cable. A close-up illuminates a tear rolling from his eye (pic. 4). Zooming out again, Jim disappears. The Avalon moves in front of him and its immense size diminishes him into tiny and useless dot in space.

Pic. 1 to 4: Jim’s ‘contained’ spacewalk

In Passengers, the confrontation with an empty world does not lead to an experience of bodily instability or disorientation. The embodied spectator is guided towards an understanding of the world by a stable and coherent style. Similarly, in The Martian, bodily precarity does not disorganize the world of the protagonist. In the opening of the film – when Mark is still in a group – a classic shot-reverse shot organizes the world. The position of our protagonist’s body is immediately clear: all members of the crew are introduced through their own shot and with their own witty dialogue. We can immediately identify Mark’s body as part of a crew. He is positioned as a subject in relation to other bodies. His character is

defined in a network of significance. Without further backstory, Mark’s being-in-the-world is made clear through his connection to work.

Pic. 5 & 8: Mark’s ‘mapped’ movement

Once this being-in-the-world is disorganized, Mark’s position in the world is never unclear. Like Jim, we can always position Mark in a larger and stable world. Moving through the uncultivated lands of Mars, Mark always has a goal to which he is heading: he always has an object to fix his gaze upon. And so do we. For example, when Mark travels longer than any man on Mars has ever done in order to retrieve the Pathfinder probe (with which he can communicate with earth), this world can never be felt by the spectator. The spectator never experiences the world with Mark but only witnesses him move through it. The camera, here, never looks over his shoulder or from his perspective (pic. 5). It only represents Mark’s position in the world (even in godlike perspective: pic. 6). When the NASA crew on earth finds out that Mark is on the move, they immediately start to map his movements (pic. 6 & 7). Mars, in short, is not visualized as a vast emptiness – as a dangerous world without coordinates as naïve perception would have us experience it. Instead, it is always presented as a world with worthwhile objects one can consciously move towards. So, the world in Passengers and The Martian never changes. The spectator cannot move beyond the films closed-down rhythm. Narrative and style contain what can be felt. To feel like one belongs in these worlds, one has to be repositioned in it. There are no feelings

hinting at a new world but only discontent with the one’s current position in the neoliberal one. In other words: one has to go home. In the end, we root for a cruel-optimistic connection.

3.3. Attunement: Feeling the World Following Merleau-Ponty, the way the world is perceived by the individual determines what belonging in the world he desires. Similarly, the way the cinematic rhythm makes the spectator perceive the world determines what he believes to be ‘good’ for the disconnected body. The rhythm of the film steers our affection. In Passengers and The Martian, disconnection and invisibility lead to channelled forms of affect, namely ‘emotions’, since they are the logic result of a world already interpreted. In the films, belonging is already fixed. This is striking. When Berlant says that the present is first and foremost felt affectively, she means that the mismatch between a fantasy and a reality incites disorganizing affects. Affect, here, means “the outcome of an encounter between entities” and the “new possibilities and worlds” this encounter creates (Ash, 84). Affect, therefore, can question the way we have organized the world. It makes us experience new ways of belonging in a world not properly defined. In the Ideological Survival Film, however, both reality and fantasy are not questioned but confirmed. There is nothing wrong with the world. The experience of precarity is caused by the individual. Consequently, there are no affects hinting at a new world but only emotions about the protagonist’s position in the current one. A short note on emotion – as opposed to affect – can clear this up. Brian Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) is fundamental in Affect Studies. In this text, Massumi argues that images have a distinctively affective (e.g. ‘felt’) quality and a representative (e.g. ‘content’) quality. Emotion is a specific quality of the affective/intensive image:

An emotion is a subjective content, the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning (88).

Seen is this way, emotion is the channelled version of affect. Emotions are time and space specific: they are a historical reaction to our experience of the present. Affect, defined elsewhere as an: “intensity (…) embodied in purely atomic reactions most directly manifested

in the skin – at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (25, 2002), changes the organization of the world and our relation to it. Emotion doesn’t. Affects in the present can transform our world but also be channelled into specific ‘action-emotions’, for example: the desire to be visible and connected again. Emotions are personal interpretations of the individual’s time and space specific experience. Emotions depend on a framework. They incite action in a closed down narrative and are cognitively recognizable. Emotions can be political. In the Ideological Survival Film, the protagonist cannot belong in the world. They are dissatisfied with the way they function in it. Their emotions, therefore, are ‘ugly’. Sianne Ngai’s book Ugly Feeling (2005) focusses on these negative emotions. She defines them as “unusually knotted or condensed “interpretations of predicament”” (3). Her emotions are the result of a world in which the individual cannot belong. Emotions are specifically ‘ugly’, once the: “negative affects read the predicaments posed by general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such” (3). Ugly feelings target an ‘Other’ that – in the eyes of the subject – obstructs his agency and throws him into a state of passivity. Ugly emotions in the Ideological Survival Film are, I would argue, similarly the result of obstructed agency. Both Jim and Mark are in a state of predicament. However, the ‘Other’ in the films is the Self. In both The Martian and Passengers, there is a form of self- obsessiveness and self-hatred that eventually allows both men to move beyond their passive state. Both Jim and Mike are enraged by the way they function in the world and desire to be more self-sufficient. These ugly emotions drive them to become better neoliberal workers. The films thereby show how: “insecurity about one’s place during periodic innovation, fear of losing recently gained privileges, and anxiety over being ‘left behind’ translate into flexibility, adaptability, and a readiness to reconfigure oneself” (Virno in Ngai, 4). Capitalism fuels a self-loathing that makes us improve our productivity in order to belong in the world again: it has become an operational requirement in the neoliberal market – a special tool of trade. In Passengers, Jim’s ugly feelings produce a fertile ground from which he can go on. Jim, roughly half an hour into the film (representing a year in the diegesis), stumbles upon the hibernation-pod of Aurora Lane. In Aurora, Jim has seemingly found his soulmate. He wants to wake her up but realizes that this will ruin her life. However, it would also mean that he can live a worthwhile life again: shared, perceived, and connected. After some deliberation, Jim does wake her up. He is too scared to commit suicide and too lonely to let her sleep. Jim, through this act, confirms that he can only imagine a life worth living through visibility and connectivity. Moreover, he confirms that he should do anything to function again. His only

possible reaction to his crisis is to be of value again. He disregards the happiness of others. His ugly emotions make him act immoral and self-centred. It is all about Jim: he needs to participate again. His self-obsessed fears of missing out and a life lived unproductive make him act for his own good: group morality is completely destroyed. Jim has found his goal in the world of objects. After some casual flirting, Jim and Aurora become involved. Together with Aurora and a randomly awoken captain – Gus Mancuso (Lawrence Fishburne) – Jim discovers that the ship is on crash-course. Their lives are now dedicated to saving the ship, which means saving the future productivity of the new colony. Even though Jim’s lies are illuminated, and Aurora breaks up with him, they eventually manage to save the ship together. In the process, they fall in love all over again while Gus dies.

Pic. 9: ‘Invisible’ utopian habitat in Passengers

In the end, Jim’s self-centred emotions made him act in a creative and flexible manner. He made himself productive again. His ugly feelings, that incited him to do something, have made him the hero of the new neoliberal world. Moreover, Aurora provides Jim with a fantasy of value. Alone but together, they create a utopian habitat in which they spent the rest of their lives (pic. 9). Through Aurora, Jim’s body can be imagined as valuable object. He has become a self-sufficient individual that saved the entire line of productivity he so desperately built his life around. Creating a productive nuclear family with Aurora, he functions in its logic again. In The Martian as well, Mark stumbles through all kinds of ugly emotions. Constantly, he asses his situation in a cynical manner. He questions himself and his decisions. After one of his attempts to grow potato’s fails, he tells his video-dairy: “yeah, I blew myself up. Best

guess, I forgot to account for the excess oxygen that I've been exhaling when I did my calculations because I'm stupid”. Cynicism about his situation and anger about his functioning in the world drive Mark to be productive again. He refuses to die meaningless. His fears and self-loathsome emotions drive him to get to work and eventually attune him to a neoliberal world again. Mark stays connected to his employer and, in the end, they save him. His crew turns around and picks him up. Mark gets to go home. This heavily mediated return to earth is presented as the ideal emotional relief. An enormous crowd on Time Square (the economic capital of the West) roots for him. His rescue has turned into one big spectacle. Mark is home and rightly deserves to be. Here, we have the ultimate neoliberal worker, who fought, survived, and managed on his own. We cheer for him – he belongs home – since he has shown he owns the qualities needed here: individual resourcefulness, creativity, flexibility. In the Ideological Survival Film, the ‘good-for-you’ is a visible and connected body. In times of precarity, one can reach this ‘good’ by relying on ‘ugly-emotions’ that drive the neoliberal subject to be flexible and creative. The ‘ugly’ emotions do not change the perception on the world. The world is still objectified by capital and its picture is not shattered. This ‘world picture’ radiates through in style. Therefore, the spectator recognizes how the subject is trained to position itself better and more creatively – more flexible – living through ugly emotions in order to truly belonging in the contained and interpreted world of American neoliberal culture again. The world orbits, but never turns.

4. ‘Never Give Up’2: Modern Perception in the Existential Survival Film “I mean, what's the point of going on? What's the point of living? Your kid died. Doesn't get any rougher than that. But still, it's a matter of what you do now. If you decide to go, then you

2 Tagline of All is Lost. J. C. Chandor. Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions, 2013.

gotta just get on with it. Sit back, enjoy the ride. You gotta plant both your feet on the ground and start livin' life…” (Gravity, Cuarón, 2013).

Morning has broken. The darkness of the screen is suddenly filled with shadows. A contour passes by. Its distinguishable shape fills the image, but we are unable to form a clear idea of what it is. Foreground and background are indistinguishable: everything seems to move through a fog. There are just silhouettes: object and environment mingle. The world is lost and substituted for mere impressions – it has become a gestalt. There is nothing to make sense of here. We can only experience this world: we can feel it without forming a clear idea of it. The world is de-familiarized, its phenomena have not passed into materiality yet. We can only surrender to its rhythm. The sound of the contour on water, driven forward by the wind, gives a rippling impression: our senses float through this world – unbound and free. So opens All Is Lost (Chandor, 2013: pic. 10). The scene pictures the abandoned sailboat of our protagonist after it has crashed, floating around without purpose and almost sinking. I would argue, however, that this scene is not meant to represent anything at all. The scene is not concerned with narrative and it does not push the story forward. Nor is the scene concerned with a ‘true’ representation of the recognizable world. There are no objects to make sense of. The scene sets a mood that is not directly transferable into consciousness. Instead, it is meant to be felt. Form, here, presents a world to the senses that can only be rendered whole through the feeling it incites in the spectator’s body. The world is stripped down in order to become a ‘felt unity’. This last chapter focusses on this embodied affect that cinematic rhythm can produce in the spectator. I will focus on what Merleau-Ponty would call ‘artistic’ survival films: films that make the embodied spectator experience the World of Impressions. These films educate Modern Perception and turn our attention to our intrinsic existential link with the world: they encourage “pre-reflective sensory-perceptual engagements with the concrete life-world [in order to] return our conscious awareness to it” (Yacavone, 181, 2016). I will call them Existential Survival Films: contemporary survival films in which the neoliberal world is not ‘good’ enough anymore. Here, the experience of precarity indeed alters perception on the world. Both Gravity (Cuarón, 2013) and All is Lost reveal a valuable attunement to the world beyond a neoliberal framework. The films remind the spectator that the body, before the intervention of culture, always already attunes to the world in a meaningful manner. We can be alive in an inhabitable world simply by feeling it.

Pic. 10: opening All is Lost

The rhythm of the Existential Survival Film never guides the spectator to an ideological interpretation of the world. Rather, the spectator is free to feel the world and, consequently, rediscovers her potential to have a world in the first place. The films can be said to utilize “proprioceptive aesthetics”: they allow the embodied spectator to unitize the world by feeling it. The Existential Survival Film’s rhythm ‘thematises’ embodied perception: it reminds us that the world is always already organized by the body. We are always already ‘free’ to attune to the world within the limits of our bodies. This connection to the world bypasses neoliberal desires and precarious feelings. The world orbits and turns. We are again educated to perceive naïvely. This process of ‘worlding’ already starts in narrative. In both Gravity and All is Lost, the world is presented open and anew. We can enter these worlds without the distraction of narrative. The films never present ideological forces that make the world inhabitable. There is no predetermined value.

4.1. Narrative: Imagining the World Anew The story of All is Lost is rather thin. A nameless man (Robert Redford) has sailed away on his luxury yacht. We don’t know why or from where, there is hardly any backstory. Deep into his journey on the Indian ocean, he hits a dissipated shipping container. As a result, his ship slowly but surely starts to sink. The rest of the film revolves around our man’s efforts to keep his boat floating. A storm, however, denies him to do so. His boat sinks and he is forced to

jump on his lifeboat. Completely lost, he guides this boat into a shipping lane. Silent and alone, his only hope of rescue is a container ship. Gravity tells the story of Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock). She is on a NASA mission orbiting earth and under command of Matt Kowalski (George Clooney). A satellite storm strikes their mission site. It damages their home base, the ‘Explorer’, and kills the rest of the crew. In the chaos of the storm, Ryan is orbited into space but brought back by Matt. After things settle down, they find themselves completely alone. Communication with earth is lost and their spaceship is broken. Together, they try to reach a Chinese spaceship operating a couple of miles away – hoping this one can bring them back to earth. However, this spaceship also got damaged in the storm. While trying to enter it, another storm hits them. In the chaos, they get tangled up in the spaceship’s cords. Stone is released but Matt has to sacrifice himself. He disconnects and floats away into space. Stone, on the ship, is now completely alone. She cannot communicate with earth nor get the ship working again. The rest of the film centres on her attempts to reach other spaceships that she hopes can bring her back to earth. Meanwhile, the silence and the emptiness of her surrounding slowly starts to stun her. From the outset, both All is Lost and Gravity differ substantially from their ideological counterparts. Both protagonists never desire to return to a productive position. Both, instead, are broken by the world. They have nothing left in the neoliberal world of commodities. They are stuck, but not so much like our protagonist in Passengers and The Martian. They do not search an object in the neoliberal world. For Ryan and our man, neoliberal objects no longer make life worth living. Instead, they try to perceive value in a world that is yet to be interpreted. Consider the opening (and sole) monologue of the nameless protagonist (Robert Redford) in All is Lost:

13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you knew this. In each of your ways. And I am sorry. All is lost here, except for soul and body, that is, what's left of them, and a half day's ration. It's inexcusable really, I know that now. How it could have taken this long to admit that I'm not sure, but it did. I fought till the end. I'm not sure what that is worth but know that I did. I have always hoped for more for you all. I will miss you. I'm sorry.

These are – apart from an SOS call and a scream of despair – the only words spoken. There is no other justification for the story. The words illuminate our man’s guilt and his regret. They point at his losses and his disappointments. He speaks of personal values that could not be uphold in the outside world. He speaks of a life unworthy in his eyes. Without more backstory, these words do not make much sense. However, this monologue is the only justification for our protagonist’s apparent desire to disappear and sail away in silence. Without any implication of time and space, nor of our man’s motives, All is Lost has no narrative tension apart from mere ‘biological’ tension. We cannot identify with the man apart from our shared desire to survive. Moreover, the most salient feature of the film is its dialogue – or rather the lack of one. Similarly, there are hardly any non-diegetic sounds. In narrative, bodily precarity is presented as a given: an ‘event’. There is no context to embed this event or imply an ideological solution to it. There are no social norms that divide the world from an uninhabitable one. There is no desire to be productive again, since there is nothing in the story that would imply that economic worth is indeed valuable. Without any backstory, the world in All is Lost is stripped from predetermined value. It is empty. The true goal in the film, therefore, becomes the search for meaning. The film is not about alignment to structured value but about the reasons why we can’t let go of the world. What value is always already in the world? There is a similar lack of value in Gravity’s world. As in All is Lost, the protagonist in Gravity never desires to return to a productive environment. Instead, she searches for a reason to stay alive and not give up. Unlike All is Lost, however, Ryan has a well-articulated reason to be adrift. She has lost her daughter. So, the social world did not secure value in her life: what we imagine is ‘good’ in the world could not protect what was really important to her. Ryan, therefore, hovers over emptiness. She no longer can perceive meaning in the framework that we imagine make life worthwhile. It did not protect meaning in her life. However, like All is Lost, survival in Gravity becomes a struggle in silence. Hardly any dialogue accompanies action. Consequently, the spectator is most of the time not really sure what is going on. We see protagonists act but are never told how these actions fit into narrative: we don’t know what goal these actions serve. The spectator is, as it were, one step behind: the protagonist knows more about the progress of the story than the audience. In All is Lost, our man constantly uses ingenious techniques in order to stay alive. The desired results of these actions are never explained. For example, our man – floating around in his lifeboat – suddenly cuts into a plastic bucket. He places a transparent foil over it and carefully positioned mirror on it. All of this takes a couple of minutes. However, his reason to create

this construction only becomes clear after he drinks some water from it: he tried to evaporate the salt in the seawater. In Gravity, Ryan Stone often herself doesn’t really know what she is doing. She acts impulsively and uncontrolled. All her actions eventually work, but the spectator is constantly thrown off guard. More often than not, we are unable to make sense of what is going on. The spectator only understands the purpose of her actions after their effects surface. In both films, the pleasure of a completed action is suspended. It is often noticed that Gravity is ‘episodic’ (Richmond, 124). However, narrative in both All is Lost and Gravity, however, might be better explained by what Lauren Berlant has called the “approximate feeling of belonging to a world that doesn’t yet exists reliably” (166), or what Sianne Ngai calls being “lost on one’s own cognitive map of available affects” (14). The instability and unpredictability of narrative creates an environment that we cannot understand directly. It articulates a world that has not yet fully materialized. Brian Massumi argues that intensity of the image is ‘dampened’ when: “linguistic expression (…) doubles a sequence of movements in order to add something t it in the way of meaningful progression” (86). In Gravity and All is Lost there is, one could argue, a high intensity. Action in both films is never hampered by embeddedness in narrative. We cannot directly perceive ‘meaningful progression’ in the story: action is not automatically linked to meaning. By suspending emotional relief, the narrative opens what Mark Hansen – following Merleau-Ponty – calls: “the imperceptible in-between of emotional states” (589). In the films, the protagonists search for a meaning that they cannot fully articulated yet. It is outside culture and therefore undefined. They move in a world that’s about to be. Like the protagonist, the rhythm of the narrative invites the spectator to feel an intense anticipation: an affect that hints at a change in the world but cannot be made sense of yet. The narrative in Gravity and All is Lost communicates an experience rather than an idea. In the films, the spectator tends to feel with the character, not for the character. They are at the edge of their world but have to find meaning in order to go on. The expansion and suspension of narrative opens the world up for new experiences. The body organizes this open world. This embodied organization comes to the fore in aesthetics.

4.2. Space: Proprioceiving the World Perhaps the clearest distinction between the Ideological and Existential Survival Film is their aesthetic visualization of the empty and uninhabitable world. These different voids –

completely derived of predetermined meaning – clearly differentiate what the protagonist feels and thus what the embodied spectator is ‘educated’ to perceive and experience. What condenses the world? What makes it inhabitable? In the Ideological Survival Film, we feel the world in a limited way. We understand our position in it. In the Existential Survival Film, we experience the world. We organize it subjectively. In the Existential Survival Film, illusion guides the embodied spectator into the work of art. To illustrate, let’s recall the opening of The Martian. This opening has the same goal as the opening of Gravity: to introduce the diegetic environment and the main protagonist. In The Martian, we understand Mark’s relation to the world through a shot/reverse shot. Our experience of the world is guided: other experiences are left out of the image. Gravity opens completely different. The film starts with a famous and technically ingenious long-take that gives us a different understanding of the position of the protagonist in the world. Like in The Martian, the three bodies in the opening shot form a group. They talk and instruct each other. However, it is hard to define which voice belongs to who – nor is it clear what they are actually talking about. It is therefore impossible to relate the protagonist to her world through her function in a group. Instead, she is identified as part of her environment. The body in Gravity is not part of a group but part of the environment. This role of the body is enhanced by the use of a long-take: “one-take’s aesthetic efficacy (..) draws much of its suspense from this apparent capacity for perfect integration (…) an uninterrupted shot activates the viewer because it encourages her to freely roam the image surface and in depth as well as to focus on elements that speak to her own interest” (Pape, 10-13). In the film, the body of the protagonist is freely floating around in space. Likewise, the long-shot invites the spectator to enter the world and float around in the diegesis without a fixed position or function. Where the shot/reverse shot in The Martian guides the spectator towards a predetermined understanding of the world, allows the long-take in Gravity us to enter the diegetic world on our own terms. We do not relate to it through a group but can experience the world freely. Gravity’s cinematic world organizes space differently than The Martian and Passengers. It is perceived through Modern Perception. Modern Perception never ‘fixes’ or stabilizes space. Unlike Classic Perception, space is here not populated by objects nor bound by a specific horizon. Form and content are mixed. In the words of Merleau-Ponty:

Instead of a world in which the distinction between identity and change is clearly defined, with each being attributed to a different principle, we have a world in which objects cannot be considered to be entirely self-identical, one in which it seems as though form and content

are mixed, the boundary between them blurred. Such a world lacks the rigid framework once provided by the uniform space of Euclid. We can no longer draw an absolute distinction between space and the things which occupy it, nor indeed between the pure idea of space and the concrete spectacle it presents to our senses (51).

This space, as argued in chapter two, is organized by the body. In the Existential Survival Film, the world needs to be organized without an ideological framework. Ideology has lost all value. Instead, the world is organized because we can feel it again. The world comes to us open and unbound. All meaning is stripped from it. Consequently, we experience how the body organizes this world. This embodied organization of the world can be addressed through the thematization of embodied perception. The embodied spectator here, experiences – together with the character – how he is always already able to attune to the world thanks to the body. The thematization of embodied perception – alluded to in chapter two – is characteristic of ‘proprioceptive aesthetics’. Scott C. Richmond in Cinema’s Bodily Illusions (2016) defines proprioception as “the name for the set of perceptual processes whereby we orient ourselves in and coordinate ourselves with the world” (6). It is an important aspect of Modern Perception, since in Modern Perception: “I do not so much perceive objects as reckon with an environment; I seek support in my tools, and am at my task rather than confronting it” (Merleau-Ponty, 416, 1945). Proprioception allows for immediate and unconscious attunement to the world. It is an impulsive and direct perception that sees how the world affords a connection to the body. Cinema, Richmond lays bare, relies on proprioceptive aesthetics: aesthetics that modulate our sense of space and thus call upon the proprioception of the spectator: “the modulation of (…) embodied perception of space is a fundamental aesthetic affordance of cinema” (4). In cinema, we come across a different world that affords a different connection. For Richmond, the fact that we can still connect to this world highlights the proprioceptive capacities of the embodied spectator. The body will always find a way to connect with a world. This specifically comes to the fore in illusion. For Richmond, illusion is not a confusing mismatch between the stable perception of the spectator and a visual trick on the screen. Instead, it elucidates how the body is always able to perceive and have a world. It shows how it is enough to “attune myself to the cinema (…) with an inarticulate and

embodied competence” (34). In one of cinema’s predecessors, for example, Richmond argues how:

Illusions arise not only from the way I orient my body to a device but also from the way I continually attune my ongoing attention and perception to the device and its illusion. For as long as I am enmeshed in illusions, I am resonating perceptually with these devices. To produce their effects, these devices rely at once on the possibility – and indeed delight – of perceptual illusion, on my receptivity to their technical modulation, and on my embodied capacity to let myself be carried along by such perceptual modulation (32).

Illusion highlights proprioceptive perception, since it asks the perceiver to see and feel a movement or depth that can only be felt but that is, in fact, not there at all. In illusion: “we attune ourselves to a world unfolding before us onscreen that is neither representational nor populated by objects” (66). Per definition, illusionary proprioceptive aesthetics do not represent. Instead, they ask the body to stabilize a world that is not really there: the body produces a world for me. In an encounter with a cinematic ‘illusionary’ world (a world that depends on the feeling it creates), we also encounter the body:

In encountering a cinematic world before me onscreen, I cannot but encounter my own body; it is through the cinema’s modulation of my perception and proprioception that I find my body and my embodiment thematises. There is no embodiment without worldliness, as there is no worldliness without an embodied encounter. (…) the cinema’s perceptual modulation makes emphatic a world unfolding before me, and the fact that I am bound to and bounded in the world becomes the central interest of a proprioceptive cinema (99).

Illusion incites bodily affects that produce worlds. When an illusion breaks, I only perceive a two- or three-dimensional image. However, as long as the illusion continues, I experience a ‘whole’ world since my body – through proprioception – reacts to it. I feel like I fly through space and roll downhill, simply because my body upholds an attunement to the world that is, in fact, not there at all. In illusion, the spectator experiences the way the body allows us to have a world. It is the body that makes the world ‘whole’ for me.

Illusion, moreover, can ‘roughen’ embodied participation with the world. It can incite confusing and disorganizing reactions. By giving me a world to which my body cannot attune, I experience how my body searches a way to connect with the world again. My world and myself collapse, and I need to find a way to feel the world again. Here, cinematic experience becomes a matter of finding a new embodied stability. It is here that we recognize how a feeling body, before anything else, organizes the world: how the body allows us to, proprioceptively, have a connection to the world. Embodied perception is thematised. Here, we become aware that embodied stability is a fundamental condition for attunement to the world. In Gravity, illusion ‘roughens’ the embodied participation of the spectator. Ryan cannot find a valuable world to be alive in and we experience the absence of a world with her. We cannot attune to the cinematic screen. Another space-walk scene illustrates this. In the opening storm of the film, Ryan is catapulted into space. She spins and turns around in the dark emptiness and is unable to stabilize or position herself. Here, the camera is placed right next to her face. Consequently, the spinning and speeding away is experienced by the spectator (pic. 11 & 12). The spectator is trapped in Ryan’s helmet and unable to position Ryan in the world. Moreover, since the movement of the world is not incorporated into the movement of the camera, the spectator’s vision is not in line with the outside world: we are “rotating among multiple shifting axes and shuttling between different frames of reference” (Richmond, 1). The external rotation of the empty world around the stable camera in Ryan’s helmet makes the embodied spectator unable to ‘proprioceive’ (and thus have a connection to) the diegetic world. Perception cannot hold the world in place. The lack of gravity or a stable horizon dissociates Ryan from ‘natural’ alignment, and since the camera connects itself with the unstable body of the protagonist, aesthetics: “trigger in the viewer a sense of detachment and despair equal to that experienced by the character” (D’Aloia, 196). The diegetic world confuses the body and incites a feeling of instability: we cannot attune to the world if the body cannot feel it. The experience of disconnection is solved by the body. Ryan slowly starts to calm down and master her breath. This experience is accommodated with a new aesthetic presentation of the world. The camera slowly but surely moves inside Ryan’s helmet towards a ‘point-of-view shot’ (pic. 13 & 14). Here: “re-embodiment of perception is maximally achieved, paradoxically (as a result of) the concealment of the characters face” (D’Aloia, 197). Ryan finally becomes able to position and stabilize her environment. Through the point- of-view shot, this organization is experienced by the embodied spectator: it aligns our body

with the camera. Consequently, the spectator experiences how the calm body organizes the world again. We no longer experience the chaos and panic from our confused bodies. Instead, we now experience how a deeply breathing and calm body makes us able to attune to the world. We inhabit Ryan’s body and experience how the body allows us to stabilize and position ourselves in the world. Gravity’s rhythm here, makes the embodied spectator experience the world in a similar fashion as the protagonist. It highlights how our body guides us to a proprioception of the world.

Pic. 11 to Pic. 14.

The Existential Survival Film intensifies and roughens impressions. The diegetic world is disorganized. Consequently, the body of the spectator becomes involved in this world. Through illusion, the correlation between the feeling body and the disorganized world is thematised. There is no ‘uniform medium of space’; objects do not automatically stay bounded in the world. We experience how the stability and the concision of the world depends on our embodied capacity to distinguish a balanced life-world out of the world’s chaos. In the Existential Survival Film: “I discover the world only through my body, as a medium. Conversely, I encounter my body only through my encounters with the world, through its mediation of the world. And here, what ensures this mutual implication is precisely my movement though a world” (Richmond, 106). To feel stability is to perceive

oneself as a bounded body in the world binding the world to your limits. In the end, the Existential Survival Film provides a connection to the world that is free of ideology, precarity and exhaustion.

4.3. Connection: The Life-world of Impressions The Ideological Survival film depends on pre-established cultural framework in which the body, in order to have a satisfying ending, has to be repositioned. Both Gravity and All is Lost end with a reconnection on a deeper and more fundamental level. In both films, the body has an affective encounter with a world of impressions. Here, the mind is completely alienated and confused – there are no objects to be seen. However, the body knows how to act. It feels this world of impression and can organize it – the body makes the world inhabitable again. In the end of the Existential Survival Film, connection to the world is informed by proprioception rather than dictated by political and ideological forces. The protagonists no longer have to rely on ugly feelings in order to create elbow-room in a competitive world. Instead, their bodies impulsively feel the world again. They discover that there is always a place and meaning in the world as long as their bodies can feel one. Merleau-Ponty warned us that we are prone to forget this connection with the world. However, it is also a connection that cinema can ‘educate’ us again. We remember we can perceive Modern. The ending of Gravity makes the spectator aware of her embodied capacities to organize the world. After days surviving in space, Ryan finds a working spaceship that can bring her back to earth. Speeding down, she eventually lands in a lake and crawls back on earthly surface. Standing up, this scene presents both a well-known metaphor for the way life started and an aesthetically experienced reconnection to our basic human disposition. The world through which Ryan moves is a world of impressions. In this world, the spectator is confronted with what perception gives us before the mind starts working. This world is to be experienced rather than understood. In Ryan’s spaceship – crashing down fast – all systems shut down: it is literally impossible to map Ryan’s position in the world. Again, the camera focusses on Ryan’s face. Again, it creates a mismatch between bodily movement and movement through space. The speed of the spaceship is faster than humanly graspable: our body cannot keep hold of the world. The spaceship starts to smoke. A red, bleeping light disturbs the eye. Ryan’s journey gives the spectator a claustrophobic and terrifying experience. There is no possibility to connect to anything at all – we cannot proprioceive the world. The chaos of the world stuns us.

The spectator’s biological need to slow down and be hydrated is fulfilled when the spaceship lands in a lake. Here, only contours and vague impressions can be perceived. The world is open and not interpreted (pic. 15). However, it is not unbounded: we can proprioceive the world again. Together with Ryan, the spectator experiences how we can exist in the world as long as this world remains bounded within the limits of the body. As long as there is oxygen and gravity, we can be alive. As long as the speed of the world remains within our embodied limits, we can position ourselves in the world. All of these aspects are often taken for granted. We ignore them in our regular perception on the world. They can be scientifically explained once we consider our bodies as objects. However, they form the basic cadastres for human life to evolve in. They are the stones on which our world is built. Moreover, we can feel them if we perceive the world anew. Connecting to them, we can approach our existence with wonder.

Pic. 15: ‘Impressive’ reconnection Gravity

In All is Lost, our man similarly confronts an uninhabitable world. He (and the spectator) experiences a world that cannot be controlled and organized by the body. The boundless sea stretching in front of him provides no coordinates and no limits. It provides no possibility for Being. It cannot be felt. That is, up until a boat comes into view. In order to draw its attention, the man lights his life-boat on fire. In the process, he falls overboard and almost drowns. Here, like in Gravity, the man moves through a world of impressions: he sees the world through Modern Perception before he (impulsively) connects with it again. It is a world stripped from interpretation but that feels coherent nonetheless.

Pic. 16: ‘Impressive’ reconnection All is Lost

Our man, like Ryan, experiences how the world becomes stable and inhabitable because he can feel it again. The world is held in place by his biological boundaries. No longer lost at the sea, his world of impressions can be organized by the body. Almost drowning, he experiences that the only thing he needs in order to be alive is oxygen and a world. This rediscovery is shared by the spectator through aesthetics: we move through his world of impressions and experience the lack of oxygen (pic. 17). In the water, we feel the need to resurface. It is the only thing the embodied spectator can perceive: there are no objects but solely impressions. The world is felt rather than understood. A helping hand from the other ship emerges. The man is pulled on board of another ship. He is finally able to breathe again while the world has been perceived and organized anew. He rediscovers that he only needs to attune to his biological boundaries in order to feel alive.

Pic. 18: Embodied Belonging Gravity

The body in the Existential Survival Film experiences a dangerous and unbalanced world. We experience this world with the protagonist through illusionary aesthetics. Moreover, we experience how this open world cannot be felt and therefore not comprehended. In other words, we come across the conditions necessary for having a world. The rhythm of the film educates the spectator how meaning comes into being. It is the body

that creates a life-world out of our impressions. We only need to proprioceive the world in order to have a meaningful connection to it. We only need to feel it. The last scene of Gravity emphases the majesty of the body. It is the colossal and balanced body that stabilizes the world (pic. 17). It is the body that eventually makes Ryan able to go on, to enjoy “the hell of a ride” her life will be. The ending of Gravity catalyses our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, to move through space, and to interact with matter. Things we are prone to forget – and perhaps rightly so – but that do allow for an experience of value outside culture. A valuable experience that is intrinsically individual but that we all seem to share.

Conclusion “The unconscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back of our ‘consciousness’, but in front of us, as articulations of our field. It is ‘unconscious’ by the fact that it is not an object, but it is that through which objects are possible” (Merleau-Ponty, 180, 1968).

Over the last chapters, I explored the contemporary modulation of the survival film. These films – and therefore this research – specifically focus on the body: they question how an embodied connection to the world is actualized. I therefore looked at what perception on what world these films awaken. Perception, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, determines what we can know and desire. What connection to what world the disconnected body desires, therefore, depends on how it perceives value. Moreover, perception can be ‘educated’. I therefore argued that the spectator ‘learns’ to perceive the world just like the protagonist: their desired connection to the world is desired by the spectator as well. We are educated to perceive a world through the rhythm of the film. Rhythm presents us with different worlds that need different interpretations. An open world makes us aware of our embodied capacities to organize this world, while a representative world makes us aware of our embodied but inscribed position in it. In the above, I’ve tried to argue how the embodied connection to ‘neoliberal value’ is problematic. It is inscribed, it excludes, it causes precarity. Moreover, it is highly individualized. The world is closed-off. In this world, we are all individuals who try to find a productive position. We are afraid, unsure, sceptical. We can never by fully aware of the world: we see it only as a distant ‘picture’. Cast off into the abyss, the protagonist in the

Ideological Survival Film cannot desire a new organization of his imbalanced world. His Classic Perception limits what he can experience. Instead, he is left to desire a new and stable position in this disorganizing environment. He cannot perceive value any other way. Indeed, he belongs again, but goes through a range of ugly emotions. He exhausts his body. Inevitably, he will always feel like he is surviving the world rather than belonging in it. His connection is ‘cruel’. In order to show how reconnection to this neoliberal world is still experienced as a satisfying ending, I brought to the fore a restricted interpretation of the embodied spectator: an embodied spectator who depends on historical, political or time specific knowledge. (S)he is brought into being through a Classic Perception on the world. The rhythm of the film only lets her perceive so much. I argued that a similar spectator is already theorized in the work of Merleau-Ponty. Consequently, I would argue that a phenomenological approach can be combined with historical and ideological concerns. Phenomena are not free of politics. Our connection to the world, however, is a choice. We can choose to pay attention to the world differently. We can alter what we desire. In our divided, politicised, and sceptical times, the survival film shows how everyone with the same biology can experience meaning and find a place in the world. In these films, the disorganized world is the problem, not the displaced body. The protagonists are fed up. They feel that the cost of civilized Western life is simply too high. They rediscover existential meaning, which, following Merleau-Ponty, means rediscovering the bliss and joy of having a moving body. For them, this is enough to attune to the world in a meaningful matter. We are in the world because we feel it and not because we make sense of it. The Existential Survival Film lets us experience a valuable attunement to the world that we all share. We experience the capacity to have a world. In order to see how this connection is experienced by the protagonist, I argued for an embodied spectator who is brought into being by illusion and the thematization of embodied perception. This spectator is confronted with an open aesthetic world: its rhythm has not yet interpreted anything. This embodied spectator comes close to the embodied spectator of film phenomenology. I would argue however, that she is different from the one theorized by Barker and Sobchack. In film phenomenology, the diegetic world is organized according to a same biological embodied perception through which the spectator organizes the world. In the Existential Survival Film however, the world is not organized at all. Embodied spectatorship creates a world by feeling it: embodied perception is thematised. Here, embodied spectatorship is a political tool: it

makes us experience a ‘good-for-you’ that is not based on commodities and productivity, but always already in us, free, waiting to be discovered, surviving.

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Films

All is Lost. J. C. Chandor. Lionsgate & Roadside Attractions, 2013. Gravity. Alfonso Cuarón. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013. The Martian. Ridley Scott, 20th Century Fox, 2015.

Passengers. Morten Tyldum, Colombia Pictures, 2016.