‘Passengers’ and the Subtle Sexism of Hollywood
An Essay, May 12, 2017
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The movie ‘Passengers’ was one of those year-end Holiday movies that came and went, making little in the way of a lasting impression. Repeat viewings were non-existent, so, within a few weeks, it was gone from the theatres, destined for a weak video release. There was more than enough publicity and ‘eye candy’ to get people into the seats, but, once there, it seemed a large portion of these people didn’t like what they saw. Fair enough. People’s moods are very hard to predict and a large portion of movies released in any given year are expected to fail. ‘Passengers’ was one of those failures that Hollywood endures because it seems too complicated to understand why it failed.(1) I certainly don’t believe this is the case. In fact, the reason seems only too obvious.
“Jim, these are not robot questions.”
— Michael Sheen (Arthur), Passengers
It’s been said (by Terry Gilliam, I believe) that when you factor in all the things that can go wrong making a film, it’s amazing that anything good ever gets made. And it seems the longer a film is in development, the more chances that something will get screwed up. For ‘Passengers’, there was an usually long gestation period, evident by its top billing on the Black List(2) in 2007. The story seems to have suffered from revision after endless revision in the ten years from the time the screenplay was originally optioned (for Keanu Reeves) until the movie’s release in December of 2016.
Having been involved in a number of productions that have underperformed despite everyone’s best efforts, I can speak somewhat to the complexity of making a film like this, and the enormous amount of energy and money it takes to get such an elaborate film into theatres. Though I did not work on ‘Passengers’, I chose to talk about this film because of a rather odd indirect connection I have to it. I have a friend who is a Production Designer and he was sent an early draft of the script long before any major stars were attached. He turned it down thinking (correctly) that the $35 million budget at the time was nowhere near enough money to do the story justice. Obviously that changed once big names were attached. I remember him telling me about this script, that he thought it could be a fantastic movie if it was given the resources the story needed. (You can read the original screenplay *here*.) Now the question arises as to why, in the end, with so much money and so many brilliantly talented people involved, the finished product ended up being so uninteresting?
I guess the obvious answer is that too much money and talent was involved and the clash of wills doomed the project. But that seems like a trite answer and doesn’t really address the question. It is true that, with less on the line, these kind of films could be far more honest in their approach and less risky for the film companies that make them. In the endless effort to make a very expensive film appeal to everyone, you usually end up with a mediocre film that appeals to no one.
On the surface, ‘Passengers’ didn’t suffer in the least from the injection of money. The Production Designer, Guy Hendrix Dyas, is immensely talented, creative and focused on making sure the studio gets its money’s worth on screen. (I know people who have worked in his Art Department and they have endless praise for the man.) His elaborate sets provided endless possibilities for the Director, Morten Tyldum, to set up his scenes.
And yet the design seems so wrong for this story. An intimate story of survival, forced to play itself out on a stage that had all the intimacy of a Mega-shopping Mall after closing time. I understand it was meant to evoke an empty cruise ship, devoid of people, but the sense of agoraphobia such an empty space should have evoked was completely absent. It’s hard to imagine this is the fault of the Cinematographer (the brilliant Rodrigo Prieto). I suppose it’s possible it could be the result of an inexperienced director paying too much homage to the production illustrations.
I can only assume the harsh lighting was so the audience could repeatedly admire the ‘luxury’ of the faux-architecture, which, as anyone who has spent any time on a cruise ship knows, is as thin and two dimensional as a movie set. Personally, I can’t think of anything more uninteresting than an empty cruise ship, regardless of the money and human capital put toward its design. I find it hard to believe that all the lights on the ship would remain in their on-off cycle for the full century the ship was in flight. (The ship’s computer doesn’t know the passengers are awake, remember?) Would it not have been better to have the lights come on as needed for those moving around, producing a more emotionally evocative lighting scheme? Instead of lighting that reflected the mood, you were left with full illumination where every corner is perfectly clear and visible, with hardly a scary corner to be seen. It’s an odd choice for a cinematographer not to allow the environment to reflect the mood or tone of the scene.
But this kind of thing is common in film, where slight misjudgements can be amplified beyond the intent of the filmmakers. There are always lapses in common sense that seem to plague every movie, even the good ones, and Science Fiction films in particular are usually rife with them. The most obvious one in ‘Passengers’ is, of course, who the hell designs a trillion dollar spaceship with no contingency to wake up the crew if something goes wrong? And there are many others, like who forgot to turn off Arthur, the robot bartender (Michael Sheen), when the ship left Earth? Or who forgot to drain the pool before the 100 year journey? And why does Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) have a swimsuit that looks like something she had left over from the wardrobe of ‘American Hustle’. Or, how come Jim (Chris Pratt) can steal an expensive suit but he can’t figure out how to have a decent meal at the cafeteria? Or how did the plants survive the thirty odd years of darkness after Jim and Aurora died? Lapses like this are usually forgiven for the sake of the premise, to make the plot work as a story. In any case, if the story is really engaging, these kind of quibbles are overlooked in the name of ‘suspension of disbelief.’
“Bite me.”
— Chris Pratt (Jim Preston), Passengers
So, I guess by now you might be wondering (possibly with some hostility) what I think went wrong with Passengers?
On the surface, there was nothing unusual about ‘Passengers’ that would indicate that it wouldn’t succeed and yet the filmmakers missed something that is so fundamental to what they do that it seems painfully obvious to point it out: It’s a badly told story. The story is not bad. The writing, on a line by line, scene by scene basis, is more than adequate. The premise itself is fantastic. But a film is a story and the basics of storytelling have to be adhered to for the audience to stay engaged. All of Hollywood’s lip service to film being a ‘visual medium’ are bogus. If the story is badly told, no amount of ‘directorial vision’ (ie: gymnastics) will make the audience give a damn. There have been many bad films made from very good scripts, but there has never been a good movie made from a badly written script, not in the more than 100 years of motion pictures. In basic story structure, someone has to be the protagonist and someone has to be the antagonist. It makes no sense to try to get the audience to cheer equally for both the principal actors in the film, especially if there is only two of them on camera for most of the film. There couldn’t be any sort of conflict unless there are opposing goals.
Ms. Lawrence’s slightly confusing portrayal of Aurora, who is supposed to be a journalist and a writer, has all the intellectual curiosity of a horny teenager when it comes to the depths of Jim’s personality. Over the course of this half-hour ‘romance’, there were strange tonal shifts that crossed the entire range of emotions from despair, to happy dancing, to despair, to romantic dinner, to despair, to sex in the cafeteria. If I understand it, the idea is that her character would never get involved with someone like Jim if she was still in New York. (This is blatantly stated in one of the deleted scenes on the Blu-ray disc.) I mean, seriously? I suspect the superficiality of her physical attraction to (an admittedly buff) Jim is exactly the kind of relationship she would have gone for in New York, and then immediately dismissed him for the next buff guy. The writer’s decision to compress the time frame of the romance came across as if there was no real consistency to Aurora’s reaction to her situation.
And then there’s the rather fuzzy character of Jim himself. We see and hear a lot of Jim in this movie, but we don’t really learn anything about him, at least not enough to tell us that his reprehensible act was an aberration. Watching an extrovert like Mr. Pratt be alone with himself in a big empty room is both painful and embarrassing. Without his audience, I would say he’s hardly interesting. The process of making Mr. Pratt likable robbed the story of every bit of tension it should have had. I couldn’t help but think what an edgy actor like Sam Rockwell would have brought to this role, playing on the ambiguity of whether and why he chose to awaken Aurora, out of all the passengers. In the final cut of the film, Jim did little to give Aurora any reason to think he was interested or interesting, seeming to make the assumption she would find him attractive literally because he was the only man there. I’m guessing that not every woman in the world finds Mr. Pratt’s annoyingly chirpy personality instantly attractive, and odds are certainly not 100% that Aurora would be one of those women.
As I watched ‘Passengers’, I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of masterpiece this would have been with different actors in the lead roles. (As you might have guessed, neither Chris Pratt nor Jennifer Lawrence hold my attention for very long, but I am aware that many people find them interesting.) It seems pretty clear that there wasn’t enough of a contrast between the character’s personalities to make the ‘romance’ work on screen. That being said, the actors who do spend the vast majority of time on screen are certainly not without talent and ability, not to mention attraction and charm. Both these actors had more than enough experience and talent to pull this off, and yet they were spectacularly uninteresting together.
“Space. The one thing I don’t need more of.”
— Jennifer Lawrence (Aurora), Passengers
But the most glaringly obvious thing that came to me when watching this film was that Ms. Lawrence got star billing (and a much larger salary), and yet she doesn’t appear in the movie until almost twenty-five minutes in, and then remains asleep for a full ten minutes after that. She has demonstrated that she has at least as much of a box office draw as Mr. Pratt (if not more), and yet we are following Mr. Pratt’s character through almost all the film. This makes no sense, since, in the end, it turns out that she is telling us the story through her memoir.
And then there are the repeated scenes, redundantly showing us the same things in the second half hour that we have already seen in the first half hour. Why did we need to see Jim argue with the coffee machine? Or mope around the ship? Or try to get back in the pod? Or try to break into the crew compartment? Why would we need to see Jim space walk by himself? Or watch him grow a beard? Would these things not have been better addressed in the similar scenes with Aurora, giving us the opportunity to discover Jim’s story at the same time she does, allowing us to be with her emotionally as she begins to fall for him. Listening to Jim tell Aurora the haunted story of his suicidal year alone on the ship would have elicited a lot more sympathy than actually watching Chris Pratt moping around an otherwise empty movie set pretending to be suicidally depressed. In the movie ‘Castaway’ (directed by Robert Zemeckus, written by William Broyles Jr.), Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) hints at his suicide attempt in a far more powerful way than Jim was able to in ‘Passengers’ simply by refusing to talk about it, even to ‘Wilson’ the volley ball. Instead, in the second half hour, we’re subjected to the same eye candy we saw in the first half hour. And as any kid knows, the second helping of candy is never as good as the first.
Any basic screenwriting book will tell you that most of the scenes in the first half hour of ‘Passengers’ are backstory and should be cut out in favour of using the information during interaction between the characters. Another of these screenwriting basics is that you should not reveal your big secret before the beginning of the third act. In the case of Passengers, that big secret was the fact that Jim deliberately woke Aurora up from hibernation and their entire relationship is based on her ignorance of that fact. And if that bit of information had been withheld from the audience until the third act, then it would have been a perfect amplifier for that ‘all-is-lost’ moment when the ship appears to be doomed.
The ‘all-is-lost’ moment is a theatrical staple that has existed even before the Hollywood movie system existed, even before Shakespeare perfected it. This moment sets up the reckoning for which each of these characters were created, and allows the movie to bring itself to a close. In a classic ‘all-is-lost’ moment, at the end of the second act, Jim must be forced to admit that everything he has done up to that point was based on a deception, and only something big will absolve him of his sins. In other words, the only chance he has to redeem himself is to save the entire ship. Instead, we are subjected to this awkward half hour in the middle of the film where his despicable act of selfishness is amplified beyond redemption, where Aurora is trapped alone on this enormous ship with a man she loathes. Hardly the romance that was advertised.
“He woke me up! He took away my life!”
–Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence), Passengers
By far the most problematic thing about ‘Passengers’ had to do with this troubling ‘romance’ between Aurora and Jim. The promotional material of such big films have a tendency to draw audiences in by any means necessary, and in some cases even resorting to deception and trickery, though that isn’t always the case, certainly. In the case of ‘Passengers’, some critics blamed the publicity campaign, which promised a romance between Aurora Lane and Jim Preston. To say that this wasn’t exactly what you got after paying your twelve bucks would be an understatement. When the audience finally got to see the nature of that romance, it was definitely a turn-off, especially for the female members of the audience who would only see the circumstances as some form of assault.
We are meant to feel sympathy for Jim, but we are never given a real chance, when only thirty minutes into the film he commits a reproachful act that the audience is now involuntarily a party to. Under these circumstances, watching the ‘romance’ play out is disturbing, but at the same time, you are somehow meant to empathize with Jim. Why? He’s loathsome and creepy. And yet we are meant to be complicit in his dishonesty by cheering for him to ‘get the girl’. You can’t escape the fact that this film is about a loser who stalks and imprisons a woman who would normally be out of his reach, holding her against her will and taking advantage of her vulnerability. Every effort, from beginning to end, was made toward reducing the implications of that fact. The only thing that could have redeemed this film would have been if this uncomfortable situation had been embraced. Hiding the obvious only made it worse. Calling this a ‘romance’ is horrifying to any woman (or man) who has ever endured the torture of a stalker and justifying every abuse of power men have used over women since time began.
“But the drowning man will always try and drag someone down with him. It ain’t right. But the man’s drowning.”
— Lawrence Fishburn (Gus), Passengers
I’m reminded of the brilliant ending of ‘The Graduate’ (dir. Mike Nichols, wr. Calder Willingham And Buck Henry) where the camera lingers on the actor’s faces for long minutes after their ‘happy ending’, revealing the character’s discomfort in what they had just done. I wonder what Aurora was thinking a few days after the danger has passed and their long isolated future stretched before them? To me, that would have been a true Science Fiction’ ending. But that question is never asked in ‘Passengers’ because of the Hollywood insistence on a happy ending. But a happy ending for who? For Jim? The question would have required the almost exclusively male(3) filmmakers to recognize the fact that the principal protagonist in this film was Aurora, not Jim. Try to imagine what this movie would have been like if it had been told consistently from Aurora’s point of view. If only the audience had been allowed to feel her sympathy for Jim and his plight after being alone for a year. If only we could have been allowed to experience what she was feeling when she finds out about Jim’s betrayal. The only way to do that would have been to withhold that information from the audience until Aurora finds out. But by the time she finds out what he did, we’re only an hour into the film and still a half hour before the crisis strikes. That half hour seemed interminable and awkward, giving the audience way too much time to sit and contemplate just how much of a scum bag Jim really is. How much more powerful would it have been for the audience to make this discovery with Aurora? Instead, because we’re seeing this from Jim’s point of view, we are spectators in her grief, helpless as we watch her absorb something we have had more than half an hour to process. We should be feeling these emotions with her.
“I think most of us, faced with the same choice, would have done the same thing.”
— Morten Tyldum, Director of ‘Passengers’
There is always an easy way to clarify whether something smacks of sexism, and that is to reverse the roles. If Aurora had been the ‘frumpy’ one who had spent a year alone on the ship living like a slob, could she be forgiven for waking up the most sexually attractive man on the ship, rather than someone who could actually help her? Would the audience be expected to forgive her? Would Jim be expected to accept what she did in order to manufacture a ‘happy’ ending? It doesn’t seem likely. It’s a Hollywood truism that no one deliberately sets out to make a bad movie and it’s certain that the producers, director and writer of ‘Passengers’ did not deliberately set out to make a sexist one. In fact, it would be a safe bet they would be horrified at the accusation. But most of the movie producers I’ve met are fairly pragmatic, and they understand that the film they made may not always live up to the one they intended to make.
The plot of ‘Passengers’ is a classic Science Fiction setup, with huge potential. Science Fiction projects into the future to create scenarios that allow us to ponder the big questions that plague us today. As a metaphor, the Avalon is planet Earth, a ‘ship’ in space, its ‘passengers’ now completely dependent on technology that very few can control, and even fewer understand. Those who ‘awaken’ to this are helpless to do anything about it. But the biggest question here, at least the one with the most relevance today, is whether Aurora could or should ever forgive Jim for what he did. The only way to do that would be to put Aurora in the same position and put that question to her, and the audience.
But despite its great premise, and the importance of these questions, the message got mangled in the process of making a popcorn film. The inherent sexism in trying to make Passengers a ‘love story in space’ was self-defeating, a pathetic attempt to entice viewers with eye candy when what they were really craving was a good, mentally nutritious meal.(4) It’s hardly a surprise, then, when the audience left feeling queasy, reeling from the sugar crash.
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(1) Understand, I am not talking about a financial failure. If you include international ticket sales, ‘Passengers’ made back more than three times it’s budget, not including digital video sales.
(2) The Black List is an annual survey of film executives on their favorite scripts they have read that have not been produced. See the list *here*.
(3) Seven Executive Producers, five producers, the director, the writer, the director of photography, the principal camera operator, the production designer, the supervising art director, the set decorator, the two first assistant directors, the props master, the SPFX coordinator, the visual effects producer, the stunt coordinator, and the locations manager were all male. Only the editor, the script supervisor, the casting director, hair and makeup, the costume designer and one of the production managers were women, most of whom are not on set during filming.
Full cast and crew can be seen *here*.
(4) If any producers out there believe this couldn’t possibly be profitable, then you could be easily proven wrong by watching virtually any Christopher Nolan film.
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‘Passengers’
(dir. Morten Tyldum, wr. Jon Spaihts. )
(Sony Pictures Entertainment)
(Theatrical Release December 21, 2016)
(Digital Release March 1, 2017)
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