I'll kick off the discussion by inviting you to read a 7-part series I did going through the 'small story' in Gravity, in effect the psychological journey of Stone's character against the backdrop of the big story, i.e., surviving in outer space. I go into great detail on Stone's metamorphosis, basically sequence by sequence. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 In a nutshell: From a meta-psychological perspective, this story HAD to happen to Stone to compel her to deal with her grief about her daughter's death and her guilt about not having saved her daughter, irrational as that guilt might be. From that point of view, everything that happens in the plot supports Stone's metamorphosis in this regard. The larger lesson from this is we can take a similar perspective to ALL stories, both in analyzing them and writing them. Events are not random. They occur in conjunction with the primary characters' narrative destiny, what I call the Narrative Imperative. Thoughts?

My spin, Part#1: "Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."-- Samuel Johnson. Dr. Ryan Stone doesn't have the luxury of a fortnight (two weeks) to concentrate her mind, undergo a journey of psychologlical transformation. She has 90 minutes (The film plays out in real time.) Consequently, its seems to me, her journey is a marathon she must run as a sprint, full-bore, full-throttle, with precious few moments to pause and reflect. What is Ryan's psychological problem? She's still grieving the loss of her daughter. (Who died in an accident, just as Ryan may now die as the result of an accident -- this movie is loaded with allegorical parallelism, a topic for a separate post.) How long ago? We don't know. We can surmise that she hasn't successfully navigated the 4 stages of mourning and grief mapped out by Elisabeth KüblerRoss in her best-selling 1969 book “On Death and Dying.” 1] Denial and Isolation; 2] Anger; 3] Bargaining; 4] Depression; 5] Acceptance. What stage is Ryan stuck in? I don't think we have enough information to say with certainty; it doesn't seem to be on the agenda of the screenwriters. But if I had to choose, I'd tentatively pick 4] Depression. How does she deal with her unresolved grief? Her coping strategy, her defense mechanism is deflection & distraction. She throws herself into her work. Ryan (p31): "I was driving when I got the call, so... ever since, then, that's what I do. I wake up. I go to work, and I just drive." Indeed, her mission in outer space may be viewed as part of her coping strategy; her flight in space is a flight from the unresolved problem on earth. What she needs to do is (p38) Matt :" Ryan, you're gonna have to learn to let go." (Of her lost daughter -- more allegorical parallelism) In the specific context of that scene, she needs to let go of the tether to Matt to save her own life. She can't let go. So Matt does. Now she's adrift, completely on her own. No allies, no mentor. She can only call upon her own will and wits. And she does. After many complications and obstacles, she finally makes it to the ISS. Only to find out that the Soyuz she needs to get over to the Chinese space station is out of fuel. She's managed to struggle her way into a death-trap, the "abyss". She's doomed to die. All seems lost. And then... (To be continued. I'm still working out my take on what happens next because I'm not quite satisfied with how the script works out the resolution of Ryan's psychological predicament, how she completes her inner journey.)

Part #2: To recap: Ryan is in serious psychological disunity. She needs to deconstruct,jettison her coping strategies -- which are catastrophic failing, threatening her own emotional survival --and take a perilous leap (no safety net!) to something else. As she shivers in the cold, she makes voice contact with an Intuit in Greenland (p52). Talk about allegorical symbolism and parallelism -- this scene is crammed with it, almost(imho) to the point of egregious contrivance. Anyway, neither person understands the other. The full allegorical import of this scene is revealed in the short released with the movie where the Inuit's side of the dialogue is translated (by captions). At one point, he says he's going to have to "put down" a faithful, beloved, but old and ailing sled dog. The allegorical parallel seems to be that Ryan must finally "put down" -- complete the emotional burial her daughter. But this is not in the shooting script. We are left to guess what the Intuit is say, what the scene means. And then a miracle! Or rather a hallucination. Ryan imagines that Matt has survived (p53). (This doesn't entirely work for me. But who am I to argue with George Clooney -- and the box-office gross? ) The hallucinated Matt, in the role of mentor, gives her subjective and objective "magic elixirs" she needs to escape the "abyss". The subjective elixir is a pep talk: accept her daughter's death, save her own life, "plant both your feet on the ground and start livin' life." The objective, practical "elixir" is to use the soft landing jets to propel the vehicle over to the Chinese space station (p55): "landing is launching". And she does. She gets over to the Chinese station, uses it to get back to earth in a journey loaded with more allegorical symbolism. Like baptism in water. Which is the deeply meaningful Christian ritual of symbolic death and rebirth. The old person of the flesh is buried in water, emerges to a new life in the spirit. She has made it back to earth and in the process completed a psychological journey of transformation, arrived at a new unity. Anyway, that's my rough take. More could be said about the allegorical aspects and the psychological milestones, but enough for now.

Wow, Paul, that's some strong analysis. Your take traffics in much the same territory as mine as evidenced in that 7 part series I linked to above. I think you are right: Per Kübler Ross, Stone is depressed. She definitely acknowledges the death of her daughter. She may have some more anger to deal with, perhaps as exhibited in part through her outburst when she discovers the Chinese space pod doesn't have any thruster power left. But mostly, she is in a state of depression. And the implication is that is where she'll stay unless she confronts the past. That's where I think guilt plays a role. She is not in denial of her daughter's death. So why does she avoid going home, just driving around? Both you and I have zeroed in on the 'space' that exists in her home created by the absence of her daughter's physical presence. That void is in and of itself painful. However I keep going back to her supplication to 'Matt' to tell Sarah (her daughter) she found Sarah's favorite red shoes. Of everything she could think of as she is dying (supposedly), it's THIS she conveys to Matt to communicate to her daughter (in Heaven). My take why that is: Stone feels guilty about her daughter's death. Above all else, a parent's responsibility is the safety and security of their children. I believe the guilt feelings Stone has relative to her daughter's death -- as illogical as those feelings are -- focus on Sarah's favorite shoes because that is a tangible evidence of Stone's 'failure' as a parent: On that fateful day Sarah died, she had wanted to go to school wearing those red shoes, her favorites. Stone had been unable to meet her daughter's needs. So those red shoes becomes a Dark Talisman, a physical object with emotional / symbolic meaning. The fact Stone eventually DID find her missing red shoe is something CRITICAL Stone wanted 'Matt' to communicate to the deceased spirit of Sarah: I found your shoe. I was responsible. I know how important those shoes were to you. The lost shoe was under your bed. But I found it. There is something so specific, so tangible about the red shoes. Anybody who is a parent knows how important physical items can be to a child. A security blanket. A favorite toy. A doll. As a parent of two sons, this moment totally rang true to me. Is Gravity a perfect movie? No. If you read my series of posts, you will have seen how the daughter evolved from a dog. That's right, in a 2009 draft, Stone talks about having a dog. No daughter. A dog. So the whole mother-daughter dynamic was not present until well into the development of the story. To some, it feels contrived: "Want sympathy? Give her a dead kid!" However there is enough going on to suggest the filmmakers fully embraced that backstory for Stone and used it as a lens to interpret the entire plot of the story. Paul, as per Matt? When he reappears, I don't see him as Matt, but rather an expression of Stone's own inner wisdom, that aspect of her psyche telling her to move on. Finally, and this could be because of my theological training, I see this as a resurrection story. An apt comparison is the Pixar movie Up. Stone = Carl. Both essentially stringing out the days of their lives due to the death of a loved one. The universe propels them into their respective adventures to reawaken them. Life! New possibilities! Get over your guilt! Hence the power of Stone's emergence from the baptismal 'font' of the lake in which she lands. She is 'born again' as a new person. To people who decry the whole dead daughter dynamic, put yourself in the filmmakers shoes: What would YOU have as Stone's backstory? It can't just be about the External World (survival in space). There has to be a personal component to the story. What other personal history can you come up with that would work for the Stone character to provide meaning to all the stuff that goes down in the Plotline?

Scott, The modern dramatic rule is that the protagonist has gotta have a psychic wound, a potentially fatal flaw. It must be confronted before the protagonist can confront the antagonistic character and/or circumstances and achieve the objective goal. Successfully winning the Outer Struggle is contingent on winning the Inner One. But every rule was made to be broken. As the Latin saying goes, "pecca fortiter": "sin bravely". And I think "Gravity" could have sinned bravely and been just as successful without Ryan's Inner Struggle because the Outer Struggle is so strong, so compelling, so desperate. What's the character flaw, the psychic wound of Ripley in "Alien"? ["Aliens" is a different story!] In both "Gravity" and "Alien", whatever unresolved psychological business there is in their pasts pales in insignifigance to the desperate struggle they confront NOW to merely survive. I submit that there is plenty of other character material for the audience to invest in, to induce them to root for these women: to wit, their character strengths. They are intelligent women with a strong sense of responsibility and healthy moral centers. Ripley may come off the blocks with more demonstrable fortitude and self-confidence, but Ryan has the "right stuff", too, just not as fully developed. The plot forces her to fast track the development of her inner fortitude and self-confidence. The exchange with the Intuit made no logical sense to me when I saw the movie. It did, however, make some emotional sense: Ryan is desparate for human contact, to not die alone in space. As would anyone in the same circumstances. But I failed to see (switching back to my logical mode) how it advanced the story. But I thought at the time that it was a small quibble. I "bought" the character and Inner Conflict because it was emotionally true even if "logically" flawed. Which was my major takeaway, btw, from this script (maybe I should repeat this in today's topic):

The audience will forgive errors of fact and logic as long as the story rings true emotionally. Conversely, the audience will never, never, never forgive a story that is emotionally untrue. You can "pecca fortiter" with facts -- but you must never do that with feelings.

Only when I became aware of the film clip, did I finally get a handle on the scene, an allegorical meaning: Ryan gets in touch with the primitive instincts for survival embedded deep within the human psyche. However, the communication is garbled -- they don't speak the same language -- so she doesn't get the message. That's the cue for Matt to re-enter as (we come to find out) an hallucination, to give her the key piece of technical information and pep talk she needs to survive. (In that order: until she realizes there is one last trick to try she can have no hope to rally her spirits.) The choice was made to tell the story from Ryan's POV from FADE IN: to FADE OUT: so intercutting to Greenland was excluded. That makes sense in terms of the films's aesthetics. But, imho, it renders the Intuit scene as imcomprehensible -- as garbled to the viewer as it is to the protagonist. >>When he reappears, I don’t see him as Matt, but rather an expression of Stone’s own inner wisdom, that aspect of her psyche telling her to move on. I agree. In Jungian psychology, one might say the scene was an expression of her inner contrasexual archetype, her animus.

Paul, thanks for your further thoughts. A few additional points: * Re her conversation with the Inuit dude: I thought it worked, even before seeing the version from dude's perspective, for two reasons: (1) From a writing standpoint, it gave Stone someone to share her inner thoughts to and with. Same reason why Wilson existed in Cast Away. (2) Within the context of the story universe, it felt like Stone was using the conversation to process her choice to die, the guy acting as a sort of Angel of Death, or more appropriately a Therapist of Death. * I suppose it's possible Gravity could have worked without giving Stone a psychological need to work out, however when her feet hit the ground, at least in this version, we have some sense of where she's heading, a context in which to put her, a reconfigured life. Without that, what would we feel about Stone moving into her future? Sure, she survived. Great! Now what? You mention Ripley from Alien. While she doesn't have a grievous wound that we know about (of course, Cameron gives her one in Aliens), there is at least some sense of Disunity at work: sexism. If the crew had followed her logic and the way things were supposed to operate, the Alien would never have made it onto the ship. Her arguments denied. That happens a few times, all turned back by men (and as it turns out an android). Indeed during the fight she has with Ash, there is that creepy moment where he rolls up a magazine, then tries to stuff it down her throat. Freud would have a field day with that, clearly symbolic of attempting to reinforce masculine domination. So in my view, she has an arc: She gets in touch with her inner warrior and rises up to defeat the 'dragon'. No inner wound per se, but something of a metamorphosis nonetheless. * By "modern dramatic rule," may I assume you mean the last 100 years or so, not just recent decades? Because as a fan of silent films, we see similar Disunity aspects at work even then. Then movies from the 30s such as It Happened One Night and The Wizard of Oz, to note two classic films, have Disunity dynamics at work in key characters. If you do mean recent decades, where I could agree with there is this idea of a Protagonist having a 'flaw'. I don't know how that started, but I find that approach - pun intended - flawed. I've been in countless meetings where the issue was how to make a character more compelling or sympathetic, and the immediate response is to give them a flaw. That represents outside-in character work, slapping something onto a character. More fruitful is an inside-out approach, where we dig into the character and determine not some surface level flaw, but the nature of their psychological state of being. That can provide a foundation for crafting a more resonant story on all levels. * Final point, something I like to bring up with some frequency: It's all scalable. If I'm writing a slapstick comedy, I don't necessarily need a Protagonist with a ginormous psychological wound or whatever, just enough to provide something going on in the character's inner world. Moreover this applies to reading a script or watching a movie. I tend to think psychologically when I interpret stories, so I'm more likely to find dynamics at work. Hence my take on Stone's metamorphosis in Gravity. Yet her story can work with a viewer who simply gets this: She's depressed about her dead kid and works that out, yeah... BUT WOW, WHAT ABOUT ALL THOSE COOL-ASS VISUALS!!! That's likely what a vast majority of moviegoers came away with from seeing the film. And that is as legitimate an experience as the next guy or gal's. I guess the bottom line point as far as I'm concerned is that stories have multiple layers of meaning. And that applies to stories where the filmmakers intended them or not. That is part of the magic of creativity. To some people who saw Gravity, the thing about the red shoe is just that: An odd memory by Stone about a red shoe. To me, it has a deeper meaning, reflecting my own experience as a parent. Both are equally valid, no matter what Cuaron intended consciously. This is one of the reasons I love writing and teaching writing so much: If we are open to it, there are layers and layers of stuff going on in the stories we create. Each character has a personal history 24/7/365 for years before FADE IN. Each represents a gold mine of story 'stuff' we can mine. The first step is to actually mine it. The next step is to figure out what to use and how to use it. So I hope people reading this 'deep' analysis of Gravity won't be bowed by it, thinking, "Holy crap. I've got to think about my stories to this degree of comprehension?" No, you don't. If you're writing an action or thriller genre piece, you may not need all that much depth on the page. However you do want to do due diligence so that you know your characters really well and can draw from that knowledge the essential material you need to make them compelling, fully-formed characters.

>>there is at least some sense of Disunity at work: sexism. If the crew... That's how I see "Alien". I agree that there has to be some fundamental disunity in the story. If it isn't within the protagonist, then it has to be without, in the protagonist's relationship with the group -- in a dramatic context where group unity is imperative to survive and succeed. >> BUT WOW, WHAT ABOUT ALL THOSE COOL-ASS VISUALS!!! Yeah, that aspect to, the SOP for how (too many) movies these days cover up plot holes and character shallowness. On most points, I think that we are on the same page, Scott, if not always same paragraph. I am an OCD Obsessive Compulsive) when it comes to building a tight structure and a credible character arc. But there are times when, as character Matt says, "...you're going to have to let go." And this is one movie, where I did. No doubt, as Matt also said, I could sure use a rescue mission. :-)