The Gravity of Thinking

“What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing”

 —Hannah Arendt, “Prologue”, The Human Condition

The final scene of Alfonso Cuarón’s new film, Gravity, shows us Sandra Bullock trapped underwater in a satellite escape pod that she has just crashed into earth. Breaking loose from the straps and the heavy door of the pod, her body shoots up, slender and nymph like, to the surface of the unnamed body of water in which she almost drowned. She crawls out to the sand, in the footsteps of some primordial amphibian and within a few seconds she has struggled her way to uprightness, readjusting to gravity and completing the entire process of evolution. With Bullock, we feel relief and gratitude for the force that pulls us all down and makes us earth-bound creatures. In the 90 minutes leading up to this moment, we have seen her float in space, escaping one disaster or explosion after another and keeping herself precariously tethered to a bunch of satellite debris, until she finally manages to launch herself back to earth and to gravity.

I thought of this last scene – that final bit of action and irony thrown in before we are allowed to leave the movie theater: “You think she has made it back to earth? Oh no! She is about to drown!” – as I watched Margarethe von Trotta’s Hannah Arendt. The earth, and the fact that we are earth-bound creatures, our life with gravity, was a matter of great interest to Arendt. She discusses the launch of the Sputnik, that forefather of the satellites that crowd the sky in Gravity, in the forward of her book, The Human Condition, and worries that we might all find ourselves in the intellectual corollary of Sandra Bullock’s hovering in space, loosing our earthly orientation. The earth, Arendt writes, “is the very quintessence of the human condition.” (You can read an essay and watch a talk on Arendt’s discussion of earth alienation).

Unlike Cuarón, von Trotta has not produced an action movie in the conventional sense of the term, a fact that she seems to mark explicitly in the first scene of her film, which depicts the abduction of Adolf Eichmann by Mossad agents in Argentina. That moment could be the focal point of an action movie, but von Trotta wants to show us not action, but thinking, a contrast that she draws from Arendt’s writings, of course.

The movie is rich with details of Arendt’s life in the world: her love relationships and friendships, her body and the domestic setting that housed it, her public life. But what it attempts to capture are the moments in which Arendt withdraws from all of that to do what she suggests in the forward to The Human Condition: “to think what we are doing.” Barbara Sukowa depicts the thinking Arendt as she lies down on her recliner, eyes closed, slowly sucking on her cigarette. In fact, what she does is not thinking, but – as we are made to notice by Mary McCarthy’s chiding imitation of her friend’s heavy German accent in one of the party scenes that takes place in the Arendt-Blücher home on the Upper West Side – she is “sinking”.  This is not a minor detail. Arendt’s political thought and her controversial analysis of the Eichmann trial, which is at the center of the movie, were formed by her own experience of statelessness and exile; the book about Eichmann, which she wrote in English, speaks with that German accent.

From the moment that McCarthy has imitated it, whenever Arendt speaks passionately about “the responsibility to sink” and “Eichmann’s inability to sink”, the viewer can’t help but note with amusement. A second immigrant’s slip of the tongue, caught by McCarthy and highlighted by its significant recurrence in the movie, also belongs to the same underwater sphere where Bullock spends the final dramatic moments of Gravity. In a discussion of the upcoming American elections, Arendt predicts that what will matter “when the ships are down” is Kennedy’s youth and charisma. When McCarthy corrects her, Arendt waves her hands impatiently. But as von Trotta’s film winds its way toward its ending, in the dramatic scene in which Arendt finally decides to lecture in public and provide a passionate defense of her book, she corrects herself and states that radical evil occurs when people fail to act “when the chips are down,” emphasizing the affricate sound of her acquired American idiom.

Though it could not be more different from Cuarón’s last bid to pump his viewers’ adrenaline by throwing Bullock into the sea, this too is an action scene. Arendt is performing precisely the type of action championed in her Human Condition, stepping out to the Agora, engaging in debate and defending her position. What von Trotta has shown is that Arendt’s terms are useful also for thinking about current cinema and the ways in which it shows us what it means to be human, what it means to act and to think about what we are doing.

-Na’ama Rokem

University of Chicago