Last year I wrote a short post for this blog about science fiction films that feature lonely astronauts. This year, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, I decided to revisit this work and adapt the blog into a video essay. The resulting ten minute film is a collection of clips from 14 films and one TV series.
Hopefully it is more than just a compilation, as I have tried to emphasise common themes and ideas in this kind of cinema. Beginning with a general sense of misanthropy, I then show some of the apparent pleasures of self-sufficiency (exercising, hobbies), but these soon give way to a pervasive and wretched loneliness. The essay ends by passing through a kind of ultimate solitude and into quiet relief at the merest possibility of companionship. This narrative was suggested by the texts themselves, but also by current events – indeed, the concerns drawn out of the films in the essay seem much more relevant now than last year. Isolation is on all of our minds, and I have tried to tease out some of the ways these films think about disconnection, self-care, and boredom.
But if these issues might now seem more universal, then the specific emphasis on male experience found in the essay is not. Rather than try to deconstruct the self-serving mythos of the heroically suffering man, or to highlight it even further by removing clips from Gravity (2013), I hope that the concluding seconds of exhaustion go some way toward undercutting this masculinist pathos. After all, under present conditions the thought of actually choosing such an aggressively solitary existence seems like the most outlandish kind of science fiction.
Nick Jones (@nphjones) is Lecturer in Film, Television and Digital Culture at the University of York. His next major book, Spaces Mapped and Monstrous, is forthcoming in 2020.