By Anonymous
***This post contains SPOILERS for the movie Passengers.***
***This post contains SPOILERS for the movie Passengers.***
There
has been a massive hype around Passengers
in the months leading up to its release. With an all-star cast consisting of
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence doing interviews together left, right and
centre to promote the film, they described the plot each time as two people on
a spaceship, who mysteriously wake up early from a 120-year journey…
Seems
alright, good actors? Let’s give it a go, I thought.
Okay so
let’s run through my initial thoughts: The first twenty minutes of the film is
just Chris Pratt going solo. This is the first sign where the plot summary
stated in interviews differed from the actual film… they both don’t
mysteriously wake up as some weird twist of fate! Secondly, throughout this
whole section I was thinking why is it the man that wakes up first? Why
couldn’t it be Jennifer Lawrence’s character that has to wander around the ship
on her own, who reads the instruction manuals of the ship and tries to figure
out what has gone wrong? If this plot sounds familiar, that’s because it is.
Last year The Martian, featuring a lone Matt Damon to fend for himself on Mars,
while the female characters were relegated to worriers. The Martian, of course,
reached critical acclaim. This re-occurrence, reiterates to me something which
is ever present in Hollywood—and in patriarchal society—male is primary, female
is secondary.
After a
year on the ship by himself, Jim is losing all hope. I will give him that, it’s
a very depressing situation, he is literally going to grow old by himself and
die on this ship, if he doesn’t go mad beforehand. What happens next really
boiled my blood: In a bleak period of his depression, Jim lays eyes on Jennifer
Lawrence’s character, Aurora (and I’ll be dammed if that is not a reference to
Sleeping Beauty, the princess who needs the love of a man to wake her from her slumber
to live happily ever after, they even call her ‘the sleeping girl’ at one
point). So, Aurora is in her hibernation pod and Jim is depressed. He sees a
good-looking gal and bam! He is infatuated. Jim then goes full stalker mode and
finds out everything about her, becoming obsessed. After a period of
deliberation, in consultation with his robot friend Author, his only form of
interaction and connection, he decides to wake Aurora up. Through this act, Jim
exerts his power over Aurora, and the consequences of this are that Aurora
lives a lie, while Jim takes advantage of her unaware state. And this is just
for the remainder of their journey. He has also taken away from her a life she
envisioned and planned for herself on a new planet.
I’m
going to label this situation as a weird outer-space combination of Stockholm
syndrome and murder. He knows the severity of his actions, taking away Aurora’s
life on the new planet, but proceeds to do it anyway. Now I know that these are
dramatic and fantasy circumstances—poor Jim he’s going to be alone on this ship
all his life—but if we consider film as an extension of our reality, this act
is nothing more than another man seeing what he wants, and taking control of a
woman’s body for his own benefit. She does not get a say in what has happened
to her, and ultimately it is Aurora who must live with the consequences of his
actions.
I will admit,
they made Aurora a strong and determined woman. She goes through the same
intense emotions and depressions about the situation she was in as Jim
initially did. However, when the pair inevitable start to “date”, it is
unsettling watching their interactions, especially sexual, as an audience
member who knows the truth about their situation, whilst Aurora is being lied
to and manipulated. We will also give credit where it’s due and commend that
Aurora is infuriated when she finds out. She stops interacting with Jim and
even physically expresses her anger, which is a rare sight to see a victim
stand up to their abuser.
Unfortunately,
all this anger is lost when the action picks back up. The weird dynamic is put
on hold and they start to suss out what’s happening with the ship. After Jim
gets all heroic and decides to sacrifice himself to save the ship, Aurora decides
she cannot live without him, that love has overridden her rage. She instead
forgives Jim for taking away her life on the new planet and lying to her on
multiple occasions for his own benefit. In the end, they find a way where one
can go back into hibernation, but she opts for a life on a ship in solidarity
with him.
In
typical Hollywood form, love prevails and romance saves the day. I’d just like
to mention that there is some great feminist theory about the harms of the
romance genre and how it goes unquestioned because it is so dominate in
mainstream film and TV. Things in movies are taken as unproblematic because we
just see them over and over again. In Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Firestone
contends, “romanticism
is a cultural tool of male power to keep women from knowing their condition”
(166). The condition being, “women [as] the only “love” objects in our society
… This functions to preserve direct sex pleasure for the male, reinforcing
female dependence” (Firestone 148, 1970). Due to this pre-existing condition of
woman as love object, Aurora eventually finds herself forgiving the man who has
ruined her chances at life, because she has fulfilled woman’s purpose of
gaining affection from a man.
What is the
most frustrating when I think about this scenario is that this is a film. It is not real, fictitious. The creators of films
have so much power to create amazing and empowering stories that differ from
our current world, projecting an idea of what our world could be. This is especially true for the sci-fi genre, as writers
can think of an entirely new world, yet exhibit no progress. This film merely reiterates an acceptance of
violence against women, by perpetrators and bystanders, and a harmful
brainwashing ideology that love conquers all.
Cause a Cine do not own any of the images used in this post.
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