VISUAL ESSAYS
Untethered: Engaging the Senses in Post-2013 Space-Travel Films1 BY MELANIE ROBSON | University of New South Wales
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he release of Gravity (2013) launched a cycle of American films and television series concerned with space travel: Interstellar (2014), Lost in Space (2018-), The Martian (2015), and Passengers (2016). These films evidence an increased turn in American cinema towards addressing the viewer’s sensory experience of film. Laura U. Marks calls this sensual address haptic visuality, in which “… the eyes themselves function like organs of touch” (Touch 2-3). Space-travel films draw on haptic visuality in a manner distinct from films set in Earth’s terrestrial space. Rather than accentuating the sense of touch, space films show the characters deprived of tactile connection to replicate their detachment from Earth. The characters’ skin is no longer their outer protective shell, and the skin as a liminal barrier between the inside ‘human’ world and the outside ‘alien’ world is an ever-present reminder of their vulnerability. Thus, the characters’ use of other objects as protective exteriors—a space suit, or a hibernation pod—is crucial to these films’ negotiation of haptic visuality. Once inside their protective outer shells, the characters’ capacity for tactile engagement is removed. Close ups of characters shielded behind glass helmets highlight their fundamental disconnection from the world, and crucially, these close ups allow us to participate in this disconnection
too.The deprivation of touch, marked by the donning of the space suit, makes apparent the inextricable relationship between touch, emotion and memory. For Marks, the sense of touch is “… capable of storing powerful memories that are lost to the visual” (The Skin of the Film 130). The space suit itself engages the viewer’s memory and reminds us what it is like, not just to touch, but to have touch removed. The removal of tactile connection is emphasised when characters reach out with their spacesuit-covered hands to grasp objects or fellow spacemen in peril. These are some of the few moments of touch, but the characters’ loss of tactility and dexterity is made palpable through them almost always being just out of reach. “More than any other sensory deprivation,” Marks observes, “the loss of the sense of touch creates a feeling of being an orphan in the world” (The Skin of the Film 149). Thus, space-travel films engage the senses by offering the viewer an experience of disconnection and vulnerability using haptic visuality. This approach offers the image of characters at the mercy of the limitless expanse of outer space, increasingly untethered.
WORKS CITED Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Warner Bros., 2013. Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan. Paramount Pictures, 2014. Lost in Space, created by Irwin Allen, Matt Sazama, and Burk
---. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. U of Minnesota P, 2002. Passengers, directed by Morten Tyldum. Columbia Pictures, 2016. The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott. Twentieth Century Fox, 2015.
Sharpless. Legendary Television. Netflix, 2018-. Marks, Laura U. The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses. Duke UP, 2000. 1
A video essay companion to this feature can be found in the the online edition of Issue 5.1 and on our YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/u_rlcSfC8Bs.
Image from Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuaron. Warner Bros., 2013.
MISE- EN - SCÈNE
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