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." 

The internet's verdict came down swift and hard. There wasn't really any time to parse out not just the controversy at the film's center but whether it was handled gracefully. People just kind of dropkicked the film, and moved on. 

          Now that we're a few years out, perhaps it's time we give the movie its due reconsideration. Dissecting the plot and filmmaking reveals not a celebration of male predation, but a close examination of the need for human interaction. 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 insightful and meaningful.

 

COUNTERPOINT 1: Jim Does Not Treat Aurora Like an Object
   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, both detractors and fans, who have expressed some sentiment that there was some disagreement between the movie that was made and the movie that was marketed. The most bitter of critics even insinuated that the evil marketing masterminds deliberately ommited 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 as seen 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. The film doesn't excuse what he's doing, but it does dismiss the notion of him being a lazy freeloader who gets some kink out of lying to his family. 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. It quickly becomes clear that the tension of this film isn't about the audience wanting him to get away with what he's doing, but rather the audience hoping he'll climb out of this spiral before he's sunk too deep. 

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, which distorts both the characters actions and motivations. 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.

        Foundational to this discussion, and often 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 censored descriptions overlooked 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.

These critics were not much kinder to Jim when he finally did come across Aurora. Such critics were particularly unforgiving of Jim for watching Aurora sleeping in her pod. While it’s not hard to see where the concern comes from, popular criticism assigned slanted motivations onto Jim that paint his actions as predatory or possessive. It would be one thing if his visitations with her began and ended with him staring at her lifeless body, but they didn’t. 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.

           Jim’s interactions with Aurora when she is awake dismiss notions of possession or ownership. 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. On their first date, Aurora even remarks “Took you long enough to ask.” To which he replies, “I was giving you space.” He may have needed Aurora’s company, but he always let Aurora set the terms of their relationship.

            Jim maintains this code even after Aurora ends her relationship with Jim when she learns that he woke her up. 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. Any attempt Jim does make to mend the relationship, like apologizing over the intercom, he makes without forcing her hand.

     Tangent: I've heard this film described as "Toxic Masculinity: The Movie," but Jim isn't exactly awash in burning testosterone. 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.

            It’s in this chapter of the film that the claim of the movie being a “Stockholm Syndrome fantasy” deteriorates the most. 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. 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, then? 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 and that she will be alone. 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.” This line draws the focus back to the idea of loneliness and reveals the fear behind Aurora’s plea: the fear that she will be alone. 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 and a signal for the audience to see the two actions the same. Note the visual similarities between Aurora emerging from her pod and Jim awakening from his. Uniting the two moments like this 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. One easy way to disparage the film is to separate the film’s controversy from its context. 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 we certainly don’t see it at work in how the film treats Aurora 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. Eve herself has said, "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 shot of Aurora in the movie, but keying in on a few significant frames will still reveal a 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, and the film is cognizant of that. 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. The scene isn’t interested in displaying her sexuality. Whatever it is that’s so magical about this character, it isn’t her sexual appeal.

            Of course, other shots won’t be so afraid of Aurora’s 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. Even so, I would still challenge this as an example of demeaning Aurora. After all, Jim himself is also dressed up to be visually pleasing to Aurora—they are on a date. Context matters. 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. How a viewer reacts to these scenes will largely depend on the place this viewer thinks movies have for featuring sexual content. Still, if this film surpasses a person’s threshold for gratuitous female framing, that person probably takes exception to a great many films aside from Passengers.

            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. This interaction is quite short and does nothing to steer the plot in any direction. So what’s the point of it? My guess, because it clarifies Jim’s attitude toward Aurora and the movie’s attitude toward the male gaze i.e. Jim does not see Aurora as an object specially designed for his viewing pleasure.
            That's not to say the scene doesn't have sexual undertones, 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 really it's the presence of that electricity that makes Jim's behavior here more significant. 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. Jim does not reduce Aurora to a trophy because he has respect for her. Given the restraint and consideration for Aurora modeled by both Jim and the camera, what are we to assume except that Jim views her as a human being deserving of respect?

            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 onto something here. People became angry at this film for making them live in Jim's head, even if not necessarily for the reasons typically broadcast.

COUNTERPOINT 3: The Universality of Human Failing

I remember 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 by this video 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: in short, focus on the victim instead of the instigator and you have a better movie, right? 

Psycho (1960)

Many of the video’s followers who espoused this essay’s perspective were spiteful toward Jim, and they adopted this video 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 disdain thrown to a character thrown into an impossible situation is unfair to not only the film but to us as audience members.

            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? If I can understand why he did what he did, does that mean I might do the same thing in his position? If I might do the same thing, am I a bad person? The chain can be challenging. It’s much easier to chalk it all up to poor storytelling and move on. However, it assumes that writing imperfect characters is bad for the audience when the exact opposite is true.

            We can look to cinema's most iconic characters for this. Vivien Leigh’s standard performance and the movie’s opulence aside, the appeal of someone like Scarlett in Gone with the Wind lies in the complexity of her character. 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. This in turn makes her transformation over the course of the movie that much more gratifying.

This is where the complexity that makes a character so compelling come in. There’s something healing about watching characters who rub up against the obstacles of life or their own imperfections and not always finding the right admixture. 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. We are human, after all. Perhaps many of us would have awoken Aurora had we known Jim’s desperation. Maybe we’re not terrible people for it, and maybe it's okay to have films that speak to this truth as well.

    This is also why Aurora's choice to stay with Jim at the end is significant, beyond just the A-listers finally getting together. 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 in the first section about why Aurora ultimately forgives Jim for what he did. She is fulfilling the audience function here, seeing him in his weakness and granting him grace.

And that is part of the paradox of this film, and of empathy in film generally. Jim is the main point of view character, to the chagrin of some, but it is through Aurora that the story finds resolution, closure, and meaning. Yes, she's the one who gets to push the button that saves the ship, but she's also the one who delivers the film's ultimate thesis on connection, failing, and empathy. This not only gives her character equal weight to Jim, it also puts into focus the film's ultimate statement of human connection transcending circumstance and condition. As this film proves, empathy is one of the most powerful players in this conversation.

            When we move past the stage where we’re scolding characters for their struggles and come to see ourselves in them, something special happens. We start to see that maybe we in our own imperfections are still deserving of happy endings. Stories with imperfect characters provide a stage through which we rehearse wrestling with our own character flaws and shortcomings. In this case, we explore the frustrations and turns that come with searching for human relationships. 
           So while Aurora’s plot sounds more comfortable to viewers, Jim is the character who has the greater capacity to inspire both reflection and empathy from the audience, and we shouldn’t punish the film for acknowledging that. Jim is not beyond our sympathies. He is, as Tyldum put it, a "good person put into an impossible circumstance." Welcome to the club, Jim.

What Should we be Talking about Instead?

All this to say that dragging the film through the mud maybe wasn’t as much a strike against male predators as it was against ourselves. I guess I don’t blame the masses for examining the film through the lens they did because society, but viewing the film strictly through that lens is limiting, and overextending that reading is misrepresentation. Aurora is never reduced to an object, not by the plot, not by the camera, not by Jim. Her function in the film is not decorative, she’s an active explorer alongside Jim in what it means to find human connection in a mechanical world. 

     To me, 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? 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?

            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. I love to participate in this scene as a viewer. It brings me gratification. Not the male-gazey kind that Rottentomatoes was raising pitchforks over, but the kind that reminds me how great it feels when you’ve found someone to share time with, the kind that makes me want to connect more with the people in my life. I have a feeling that this is the voyeuristic experience the filmmakers were going for with this film.

 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 a little more emotionally intelligent. While we may not have understood the film at first, the film clearly understands us. 
                        -The Professor