An Earnest Defense of Passengers

          Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. 

    Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers, a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate.

   So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, director of the film, said of this conundrum: 

"It’s not as if it’s an accidental oversight of the film, where we, through some cultural blindness, have failed to see the appalling nature of our hero’s actions. It is the subject of the film . . .What I don’t believe the movie does is endorse or exonerate anyone. The movie looks, evenhandedly, at the dilemma everybody was in. I think putting good people in impossible circumstances makes for fascinating storytelling."

    But many voices in the discourse did not choose to read it this way. Thereader.com called the movie "morally reprehensible." Cinemasight.com says the premise was "downright sexist." Multiple sites called this movie some variation of "the scariest horror film of 2016." 

It’s not that these equations don’t deserve examination. But there are double standards in how these conversations tend to take place. Like exploring the story strictly through the eyes of toxic masculinity is unshackling from the wall in Aristotle’s cave, but considering this through literally any other aspect of the human condition is some act of complicity.

And there is a lot about this film to talk about. Pratt and Lawrence are at peak charisma here, and both lightyears away from their native franchises that made them A-listers in the first place. The visual backdrops of the stylish space cruise liner and the interstellar vistas make for some stunning cinematography. Meanwhile, Thomas Newman’s “Spacewalk” theme should be discussed in the same sentence as James Horner’s “Rose” piece from Titanic.

If the text of the film spends less time rationalizing its gender dynamics than YouTube wants it to, it’s possibly because the situation more naturally connects to broader themes. Mechanical vs natural. Luxury vs fulfillment. Perfection vs humanity. 

But even that's a kind of missing the forest because ... this is a film that absolutely examines the moral dilemma at the center of its situation. The repercussions of Jim's choice to awaken Aurora are deeply explored within the text of the film, and it's an exploration that yields some profound insights.

          Now that we're a few years out, perhaps it's time we give the movie its due reconsideration. While Passengers certainly challenges its audience more than the standard commercial film, warping the film's behavior by assigning motivations that just aren't there, well, that's not only not fair to the movie, it denies the audience something meaningful.

 

"Why Would Anyone Make This Movie?"
   We'll get this out of the way up front and say that the premise of the film is very, very testing, and by design. Perhaps considerably more than many viewers were willing to entertain when they bought a ticket to go and see that new movie where Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence fall in love in space. In the wake of this film's release, I have heard a lot of people express some sentiment that there was some disagreement between the movie that was made and the movie that was marketed. The trailers make it look as though Jim and Aurora awoke simultaneously. 

    The most bitter of critics even insinuated that the evil marketing masterminds deliberately omitted the film's moral quandary from the trailer as a deliberate sleight of hand to lure audiences into seeing such a morally depraved movie. (This, of course, ignores that the film’s infamous moral dilemma was in fact part of the promotional material from the very start. It was literally in Lawrence and Pratt’s casting announcement.) And I think that initial surprise when Chris Pratt is suddenly about to strand Jennifer Lawrence onto his desert island accounts for a lot of the pushback it received upon impact. 

    Film lovers more often encounter this kind of moral dilemma outside the confines of mainstream cinema, and so Passengers becomes more comparable to a movie like Time Out, an underseen gem of French cinema. Said film follows a man who loses his job, but out of shame and insecurity does not tell his family even six months after the fact, and he crafts ever elaborate ruses to disguise his reality from his loved ones. The main character in this film is obviously acting selfishly and doing things that are morally reprehensible, including swindling money from his friends, yet the film expects you to try to understand and even sympathize with this guy. 

    But this is not to say that the film is endorsing his behavior. It shows him as a person with hopes and fears that collide with a scenario that is unforgiving, and it demonstrates how this equation spawns self-destructive behavior. Even as you're frustrated with how he's handling the situation, you do start to feel sorry for this guy, and the situation he's in starts to reveal contradictions of the world he's living in--like the way society expects men to give themselves over to the machine of the workforce without granting them the tools to understand or remedy the toll this takes on their mental health. 

M (1931)

    A lot of this essay makes the case for understanding flawed humans and flawed circumstances, but I feel like upfront we need to establish what those flaws even are in this film. The line that many critics land on was that Jim is a predator and that this film excuses and him exercising his masculine dominion over another human being, and this is a huge distortion of both the motivations and behavior of the film. Again, the story is testing, but it's not "could I show mercy to the serial killer who murdered my child because didn't society fail him too?" testing. 

    Combing through the film's storyline reveals some pressure points, but Jim's actions and mindsets are actually perfectly knowable to the audience, and I think that is largely why they were so eager to reject them.

COUNTERPOINT 1: Jim Does Not Treat Aurora Like an Object

        Foundational to this discussion, and consistently neglected by this film’s detractors, is the suffocating isolation Jim experiences before awakening Aurora. Glance through some of the film’s rotten reviews and more often than not you’ll find they jump straight from “guy wakes up” to “guy sees hot girl” to “guy wakes up hot girl.” Cautionspoiler's review of the film even reduces Jim's plight to being stuck drinking regular coffee for the rest of his life. 

    These descriptions overlook key components of the film's context. They make no mention of the segment of the film where Jim tries to put himself back to sleep, for example. They ignore Jim trying to find happiness in his solitude for a whole year, and they ignore Jim being driven to the brink of suicide as his loneliness festered. This was not a man who brought a woman out of hibernation because he was bored and horny, it was a choice of wake someone up or die. That's not just a minor nuance in the conversation, it's kind of the thing that the story hinges on, yet that plot point often gets ignored, largely because it does make it at least a little harder to rage against the film.

Such critics were also particularly unforgiving of Jim for watching Aurora sleeping in her pod. They like to make it sound like he spends a year staring at her lifeless body. But we see Jim reading her work, listening to her life story, even attempting to hold conversations with her. Jim’s feelings for Aurora were rooted in more than just her physical beauty. Jim doesn’t just see her as a pretty face or a bag of lady parts, he falls in love with her voice and her ideas. It is her personhood catches his attention. 

          His behavior toward Aurora when she is awake also bears mention. On Aurora’s first night awake, Jim offers to walk her to her cabin. When she politely declines the offer, Jim reacts like a gentleman and lets her go unaccompanied as she wishes. Throughout their entire courtship, Jim never tries to compel Aurora to advance their relationship faster than she is comfortable and allows her to experience the five stages of grief once she realizes her life is gone. Really, it's Aurora who makes the first step toward anything like a relationship with Jim. On their first date, Aurora even remarks “Took you long enough to ask.” To which he replies, “I was giving you space.” 

            Jim maintains this code even after Aurora ends her relationship with Jim. I guess the one time where Jim takes initiative where Aurora does not want him to is when he relays his story over the intercom, but the possessive stalker that internet critics described is the kind of character who in this situation would surely make a greater effort to keep her under his domination. Surely by not just letting her walk out of the bar, as Jim does, and probably by exerting some physical force over her. 

    And I get that this is the fear, that this picture of the mild-mannered leading man is basically propaganda written by the male figure to rewrite history and make himself sound like the reasonable one in this equation. But we have to ask ourselves how this plays out in execution. What is the film really saying about the male ego? What kind of guy is really going to see himself in Jim?

     Let's look at Jim as a person. Is he ever aggressive? Violent? I don't think we even see him angry once in the entire film. Is Jim, the soft-spoken mechanic who spends his free time planting trees, a natural fit against characters like Tyler Durden or Gaston? There's very little overlap between Jim and the American History X type-characters that tend to be popular with the crowd of men who like to create problems. 

    Certainly, "nice guys" can still perform gentility to mask self-serving, sinister agendas. Being "nice" wouldn't itself excuse Jim from doing something monstrous, but again, that just brings us back to the question of what Jim's intentions are and whether they actually have anything in common with the attitudes that perpetuate sexual violence. 

    It is a popular talking point that rape is an act of violence, not an act of sex. The behaviors come from totally different mindsets: no one has ever committed sexual violence because they were lonely. Yes, predators will often adopt the guise of "niceness" in order to disarm their targets, or to deflect suspicion, but the motivation there is to build up their own image--to make themselves appear desirable or even deserving. It's just a slightly remixed front for masculinity at its most toxic, and this is where we continue to see divergences between real-life offenders and the psychology of this film. 

    When your alpha boy who thinks the world belongs to him says he wants to see himself in someone like Chris Pratt, he usually wants to see himself in the Chris Pratt who rides his motorcycle through the jungle with raptors, or the Chris Pratt who shoots lasers at the space aliens. He probably doesn't want to see himself in this Chris Pratt sobbing in the fetal position on the cold, hard spaceship floor because he's just that broken. This is why the film doesn't really share custody with those problem groups. I promise your cousin who thinks that the dudes from Reservoir Dogs are role models would never admit to seeing the movie where Star Lord lets J-Law make him cry.

    I want to be clear, there is a valid question to be had here: what attitudes is the film reinforcing by putting these characters in this position? But the framing matters down to the minutiae. 

            It’s in the later chapters of the film that the claim of the movie being a “Stockholm Syndrome fantasy” really deteriorates. Calling this a “fantasy” implies that Jim is somehow free of the consequences of his actions, which he is not. Even in the midst of their honeymoon period, Jim is never free of his guilt (Arthur’s description of Aurora as an “excellent choice” makes Jim visibly uncomfortable), and that only compounds when he watches her meltdown.    

     I think it’s also essential to note that neither Jim nor the tone of the larger film behaves judgmentally toward Aurora during that period of the film where the Walls of Jericho are in place. Laurence Fishburne basically tells her at one point he can't listen to her problems right now, sure, but this also comes right on the heels of him giving Jim something to think about. At one point, Aurora even breaks into his room in the middle of the night and physically assaults him. She comes dangerously close to killing him as she holds a metal bar over his head. Not only does Jim not fight back—not only does he not react in self-defense—he spreads his arms in submission, admitting that he is deserving of whatever retribution she throws at him. 

            So why does Aurora forgive him after all? Glad you asked.

            At the film’s climax, Jim prepares to go out to save the ship from total malfunction, and it becomes clear to both Jim and Aurora that he might not come out of this alive. It is at this point that Aurora effectively frees Jim from his punishment when she tells him “Come back to me. I can’t live on this ship without you.” She suddenly understands what it would mean to live without companionship, especially without Jim. Now faced with the isolation Jim experienced, she’s in a position to understand why Jim did what he did, and he suddenly doesn’t seem like such a monster.

       The next scene, where Aurora revives Jim’s lifeless body in the medical pod, serves as a reprise of the scene where Jim awoke her from her pod. Uniting the two moments like this puts their situations in parallel and clarifies Jim’s intention. He awoke Aurora not out of lust or even curiosity, but because the prospect of living without human connection will drive anyone to desperation.

    I don't want to imply that viewers shouldn't apply a critical lens to the film's presentation (I myself can't help but wonder how different this film would read if Gus' character had maybe been written as a woman so Aurora wasn't the only female voice in this conversation), but there also lies in the viewer a responsibility to accept the movie on its own terms. Certainly, no “what if” scenario can be so interesting as to excuse the flippant objectification of women, but we don’t see that at work within the narrative of Passengers, and neither do we see it in how the film treats her visually.

COUNTERPOINT 2: Aurora is not a victim of Jim’s Male Gaze

 

           In many a blockbuster, we’ve seen the plot mandating that the female expose herself before a male character, sometimes willingly and sometimes not. During this time, the male character sneaks a peek at the exposed starlet, often without needing the woman’s consent. I think of the moment from Star Trek into Darkness, released only three years before Passengers, in which Kirk gets to glimpse Carol in her underwear, her only reprimand a mildly annoyed “turn around.” He does, of course, but not before he gets to see the female form displayed for his viewing pleasure, which is all anyone remembers from this scene anyway.

    [EDIT FROM THE FUTURE: Further complicating the scene, Alice Eve herself has recently come out in defense of her underwear scene in Star Trek, saying, "It was something I voluntarily worked with a trainer to be fit for, was very much prepared for, and very much enjoyed [doing] — filming, executing, promoting. The feeling I shouldn’t have done it, or that it was exploitation, was confusing to me." The line between exploiting and celebrating female beauty, it's not a firm boundary. Anyways ...]

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

            Here in film academia we have a name for this phenomenon. The term “male gaze,” popularized by theorist Laura Mulvey in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” describes film’s pattern of reducing female characters to objects for voyeuristic gratification for the male viewers. This can happen by having the female character display her physical form, yes, but it’s also applicable anytime a female character’s physical appeal becomes the focus of the moment. In these moments, the male viewer plays the role of what Mulvey calls “the invisible guest” and is permitted to gawk and gaze at the beautiful female without fear of repercussion from his celluloid idol.

Even when they don’t refer to Mulvey’s essay by name, decriers of Passengers are certainly using this theoretical lens to attack the film; consequently, in determining how the film sees its female lead, it becomes useful to study how the film presents Aurora’s physical beauty.

            Something to remember about the male gaze is that while we in film studies know it exists, there’s little critical consensus on where it begins and ends. How pretty are we allowed to make the female character before we’re objectifying her? Could one argue that any shot of a female character is done for the benefit of the male viewers? Should we never mention female sexuality just to be safe? We know it when we see it, but the exact boundaries are hard to pin down.

Cinderella (2015)

    Even so, we can still gleam some understanding of how this movie views women by asking certain questions. For example, does the framing present the woman's body as her most important asset? What is the in-universe context for this attention? Does the camera return to her body excessively? What control if any does the female character have over how her body is displayed in this moment? And so on. 

    I can’t account for every single shot of Aurora in the movie, but there are some key moments that I think reveal the necessary pattern.

             Let’s start with our very first shot of Aurora: the shot where Jim sees her lying in her hibernation pod. This shot has the potential to become the poster child for male gaze moments. Aurora is, after all, displayed before our male protagonist, empty of any thought or agency. She appears to exist purely as visual gratification for the male eyes. Here we can start to see the delicate balancing act that is framing your female lead. She has to be captivating to Jim, but we can’t think that Jim is lusting after her. How does one accomplish this?

            Well, one way is to be careful with what aspects of Aurora are being highlighted. Drawing attention to her face rather than her body is a good start. Notice how the reflection from the light overhead draws a circle around her face and washes nearly everything else out: our focus on Aurora is where it would be if we were having a conversation with her. The fact that she is comatose does not permit us a chance to behold her shapely form free of consequence.
             In Aurora’s first waking scene, we see her emerge from behind a curtain of water, endowing her with a sort of otherworldliness which almost exotifies her, like a real life Birth of Venus. Almost. We’re framing her mystically, yes, but not to highlight her allure or even her femininity. Aurora is weighed down by dull gray pajamas that cover most of her body right down to her ankles. It's not really her femininity that is so enchanting, but her presence in and of itself.

            Of course, other shots won’t be so afraid to display Aurora’s natural beauty. Take for example the reveal shot for Jim and Aurora’s first date where Aurora steps into the frame sporting a dazzling dress, her hair and make-up no less stunning, with a sea of stars serving as a backdrop for our female lead. Jim even remarks “wow” in approval. This is more in line with what would normally qualify as a male gaze moment. 

    But again, the context matters. Jim himself is also dressed up to be visually pleasing to Aurora—they are on a date. And it’s hard to assign too much lust to Jim’s gaze in this scene when Aurora’s dress is less revealing than 90% of all dresses worn on the red carpet.

    Even the much-hyped sex scenes between Jim and Aurora are surprisingly chaste. Glimpses of naked Aurora and Jim are limited to a single two-minute montage with no discernible nudity. Just a lot of silhouettes. We see more skin in this movie from Chris Pratt than we do from Jennifer Lawrence.

            Still, the most telling insight into how the film frames Aurora comes just before their walk in the stars. The two are about to don the spacesuits when Aurora confesses that she is not wearing anything underneath her dress and will have to strip in order to get into the suit, so Jim turns around as Aurora undresses herself. 

   I remembered watching this scene in the theater and wincing in anticipation of what I was sure was about to transpire. Surely, we were going to get a repeat of that moment in Star Trek into Darkness. But we didn’t. Jim does not turn around, and we are meant to believe he remains with his back toward Aurora until she is comfortable. Neither Jim nor the male viewers for which he is a proxy get to see Aurora bare all. 
            The scene has obvious sexual undertones, yes, but acknowledging a budding sexual charge is different than being sexually exploitative. Notice also how the character displaying the sexuality is the one in control of the sexuality. But this is where we actually see Jim's attitudes about voyeurism on display. By refusing to go where countless male viewers have gone before, Jim is making it clear to Aurora and to the male audience that he is not owed a glance at the female form just because it’s within reach or just because he is the main character of his story. 

            Is this film still voyeuristic? Well, yes. In the same way that all film is some form of voyeurism. Gaining pleasure from watching super people save the universe or a knight slay the dragon are both forms of gaining pleasure by viewing something you yourself are not a part of. Passengers is capitalizing on the audience’s appetite to go on an interstellar date with Pratt or Lawrence, but its execution isn't so base as to literally position the bodies of the players as their most important features, particularly Aurora. 

  But again, "male gaze" covers a lot more than just the way the female characters are photographed onscreen--how the male viewer is literally seeing them onscreen. It comes down to how the scenario is written and what role the players fall into--the vantage point by which audiences enter into the story. And while both Jim and Aurora are roughly equal players in this game (Lawrence actually did receive a higher sum for this movie than Pratt, $20 M to his $12 M), the story is situated from Jim's perspective. 

    This is another place where many voices take issue with the film, and I think that gets closer to what the film's original sin actually is. As we've discussed, the line about Jim being this emblem of toxic masculinity or male predation actually has little overlap with this film's behavior, but I do think that critics are almost onto something here. People became angry at this film for making them live in Jim's head, but necessarily for the reasons typically broadcast.

COUNTERPOINT 3: The Universality of Human Failing

In the months following the release of the movie, there was popular video essay making its rounds that claimed it knew how to fix problematic elements of the movie. The solution described was to have the movie told from the perspective of Aurora instead of Jim. The movie would start with her waking up and continue as she developed a relationship with Jim only to discover that he was responsible for her awakening in some third act twist.

Psycho (1960)

Many online voices adopted this argument into their tirade against the film. Some among this crowd went so far to claim that the movie would have been better still as a thriller casting Jim as a psychotic villain that Aurora had to defeat or even kill: in other words, Jim doesn’t just make a bad choice, he is a monster who cannot be sympathized with, only eliminated. And it's this thought that really reveals to me what the kerfuffle over the movie is and how it's always run deeper than a simple question of objectification. 

            The logic underscoring this way of thinking is that in order for a story to be good, the characters must follow a strict code of conduct and that leaves little room for human error. That’s why Aurora is more attractive as a protagonist to many viewers: she does nothing wrong, she’s only the victim of someone else’s shortcoming. We'd rather be the person in a position to grant forgiveness (or not) than the person who needs forgiveness. It’s easier, validating even, to sympathize with Aurora.

Sympathizing with Jim, on the other hand, asks more of us. To admit that we can see ourselves in a character such as Jim starts us down a slippery slope. If I can see myself in someone like Jim, does that mean I can understand why he did what he did? Does that mean I might do the same thing in his position? Does that make me a bad person? Nobody wants to open that box. It’s much easier to chalk it all up to poor storytelling and move on. However, it assumes that writing imperfect characters represents some failure of storytelling: the most iconic characters in all of cinema would tell us otherwise.

           One of my favorite film characters, for example, is Scarlet O'Hara of Gone with the Wind. The appeal of someone like Scarlet lies in her complexity. She’s both innocent and cunning. She’s sweet, but also intensely bitter. Even though she’s the heroine of the film, she often behaves purely out of self-interest with little regard for how her actions affect the other characters. But she's also more than that. During the course of the film, Scarlet develops the strength to drag herself and her family out of poverty in the wake of war and desolation. She's a character who is both bad and good: in other words, she’s just like many of us.

            Characters with a perfect track record sound appealing at first glance, but such characters are hollow, and deep down we recognize their falsity—none of us know what it’s like to be a perfect character. We know that Scarlet is being a bit of a brat by pursuing Ashley even though he’s married to Melanie, but we also know what it’s like to want something we’re not supposed to have. Many of us have probably also acted on that impulse one way or another, and so many of us know how it feels when Scarlet’s vices bring her frustration and pain. 

    But Scarlet's story, of course, has her gradually correcting the attitudes and behaviors that make her thorny in the first place. Jim doesn't really get that. His story isn't about trusting a character to overcome their weakness with time and practice. His story is reflective of the failure inherent in the human condition itself. Film has a lot to say about that too. 

    Noir-films that sprouted up in Hollywood around the 1940s tracked this aspect of human living quite closely as many Americans got to confront what the human spirit is capable of doing under extreme conditions, like two World Wars. One of the understated films from this era, Fred Zinneman's Act of Violence, sees a war hero being forced to reckon with how he was only able to survive the Nazi POW camp by selling out his other comrades to the prison guards. 

    Thus, the film presents us with a character who has done something unimaginable, but we are still put in a position to sympathize with him because we realize that understand that under the right circumstances ... we could become him. That is the reality of human nature. We can choose to reject it, or we can try to gain enlightenment from it.

From Here to Eternity (1953)

And there’s something healing about watching characters rub up against the contradictions of being alive, or the failures of their own system. Stories with imperfect characters or situations provide a stage through which we rehearse wrestling with our own character flaws and shortcomings. On the surface we assert our superiority above such weak characters, yet for many of us, "the right thing," even when easily identified, is not always easily executed. Seeing a lapse or shortcoming like this in someone else reminds us that we have a lot in common and still possess the capacity for empathy with one another. 

    This is also why Aurora's choice to stay with Jim at the end matters, beyond just the imperative that the A-listers get together at the end. I'll acknowledge there's a conversation to be had around film as a whole exalting of the heterosexual union as the ultimate endgame, and I think there could have been a meaningful ending where Aurora returns to the hibernation pod and Jim accepts this decision. But I also think it ties back into what we talked about with why Aurora ultimately forgives Jim. She is fulfilling the audience function here, seeing him in his weakness and granting him grace, acknowledging that she might have made that same decision if she were in his place.

For how hard people try to push this story away, it remains, ironically, very accessible. This isn't a story about burnt-out office workers, this isn't a story about ex-soldiers, this is a story about anyone who steps out of their pod and realizes that they need people. Does a film like that have an audience?

Well, I have some thoughts about that.

            

What Should we be Talking about Instead?

     The questions posed by a film like Passengers are a lot more interesting than the discourse that actually followed. To start, what exactly is the place of moral ambiguity and trying scenarios within mainstream film? Are the masses actually willing to engage with these deeper questions within their media? And moreover, what would actually drive a person to make the choice that Jim did, and does that in some roundabout way reveal something about the society that introduced this story?

        Consider today’s loneliness epidemic, common especially among men. We all have innate needs to be seen and validated by another person, yet the world just gets lonelier with each generation until it feels like a suspended piece of metal drifting through the cosmos. The only living beings on board are encased within their sleeping pods, and somehow trying to fill the space with luxury or other indulgences only leaves us feeling empty and unfulfilled. 

In a world where one in five young adults say that they don't have one close friend, are we so sure that there isn't an audience for this film? If we are going to open this film to the full range of discussion, then it ought to be the full range of discussion: if toxic masculinity is on the board, then so is deaths of despair.

            One of the scenes I always find myself coming back to is Jim and Aurora’s stroll through the pod bay. This scene happens early in their courtship and features them passing among and imagining the life stories of their fellow passengers. In doing so, Jim and Aurora reveal to each other their own world views and values. They learn about one another. They laugh together. They build connection with one another. There are a lot of scenes in this movie, especially the second quarter, the strongest segment of the movie, that serve absolutely no narrative purpose, only to display the souls of the characters involved. 

    Many of the things we learn about Jim and Aurora here never come up again in the narrative—a complete waste of setup/payoff—but the bonds they forge between us and the story in this scene are irreplaceable. Even films in we’d normally classify as “romantic movies,” how many stories center on nothing but the simple economics of human interaction? 

 Passengers took a risk by asking its audience to participate in its social experiment, but in dropping the defense mechanisms and playing the game, the audience may just come out with something like revelation. While we may not have understood the film at first, the film clearly understands us. 
                        -The Professor