“Passengers” is Actually a Brilliant Critique of Modern Capitalism
This article is for the five of you who managed to watch “Passengers,” (the recent sci-fi vehicle for a minimally clothed Jennifer Lawrence) before the internet ruined it for you with hot takes. Like others who have written about this movie, I am going to completely spoil it in order to make a point, and I’m not going to feel bad about it because by now you’ve either seen the movie or you’ve decided that you’re never going to see it on principle but are the kind of person who enjoys reading hot takes about movies you have never seen.
Unlike others who have written about this movie, I’m not going to shit on it. Don’t get me wrong, the latter half of the movie (essentially from the time Laurence Fishburne appears on screen) is a screaming dumpster fire of sci-fi action tropes used to tacitly excuse what basically amounts to future-rape. But this movie is more than its problematic ending. In fact, its problematic ending — intentionally or not — perfectly illustrates how modern capitalism co-opts spirituality and romance as tools of social control.
The story of “Passengers” is, at its highest level, a story about egregious corporate malpractice. The “Homestead Corporation,” which has essentially updated indentured servitude for the year 20XX, has conned five thousand earthlings (specialists in various essential fields) into paying a “discounted rate” in order to fly one-way to a Homestead-owned colony planet and spend their lives increasing the property value, with twenty percent of their pay going to the corporation for as long as they live. The colony ship is put in full autopilot, with no human oversight, and no protocol for waking up the crew in case of catastrophic emergency, a kind of emergency that is likely because this ship has been programmed to fly through a massive asteroid field.
Predictably, the asteroid field does significant damage to the ship, with the less predictable side-effect of waking up exactly one passenger (Jim) from cryosleep — a full 90 years before the ship is supposed to reach the colony world. The ship’s automation has no idea that Jim isn’t supposed to be awake, and when he attempts to point out that fact, the AIs he interacts with refuse to believe him. They refuse to believe him — and this is important — because they have been programmed never to acknowledge that a stasis pod might fail. As far as we can see in the movie, this is the highest-level directive the ship’s AI has — Andy the robot bartender, for example, refuses to admit that a stasis pod has failed even when Jim proves it deductively. What’s more, the ship — which is large enough to house a massive cafeteria, a basketball court, and a swimming pool, among other things — is not equipped with the facilities necessary to put someone back into stasis once they’ve woken up. Contacting Earth for help in a reasonable time frame is also impossible, as no faster-than-light communication exists.
In short, the level of incompetence (and deliberate obfuscation) on display in the ship’s design is titanic. Literally, the best analogy I can think of for this wholesale hubraic flouting of common sense safety features is the actual Titanic. The Homestead Corporation has made an enormous mistake, and rather than addressing it, they have simply programmed all their machines not to acknowledge it, thus effectively executing a man in one of the most nightmarish ways possible.
The only person who seems to acknowledge any of this is Aurora, the woman who Jim — in his own tiny atrocity — wakes up from cryosleep in order to have someone to talk to/have sex with. Aurora is the reason we know about Homestead’s indentured servitude program. All the other forces in the movie — Jim, Terminally Ill Space Dad Laurence Fishburne, the Existential Vastness of Space, Arthur the Robot Bartender — conspire to tell Aurora that she’s thinking too much, that sometimes you just have to accept where you are, and make the best of it.
This is supposed to be the moral of the movie: that the secret to a good life is a buddha-like acceptance of things-as-they-are. The movie’s mantra, the refrain that gets repeated again and again, is “You can’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be, that you forget to make the most of where you are.” Even if where you are is trapped in a luxury space coffin hurtling towards a slow death from old age lightyears from anyone who might know or care, and where you’d rather be is … not there. It’s a very convenient mantra if you’re the Homestead Corporation — it ultimately leads Aurora and Jim not only to save the ship from blowing up, but to do it without a shred of ill-will towards the company that doomed them to Death by Space.
And who is the original source of this mantra? Why, Arthur the robot bartender, of course.
This is the same robot bartender that is programmed not to admit under any circumstances that a stasis pod may have failed. Arthur, it turns out, is more than a bartender. He is a fiendishly complex mechanism for corporate liability management. With a subtle combination of platitudes, McMindfulness, and out-and-out denial, he saves his wealthy masters from any shred of blame that might otherwise come from this scandal. Instead of having to answer for carelessly stranding two passengers in space, the executives at Homestead Corporation (who, we are told, made over a quadrillion dollars on their first colony planet, by the way) can say “but look, they made the best of it! They built a whole farm on that spaceship! Look at those dope trees!”
Whether or not the writers behind “Passengers” meant to include this message in their movie isn’t really important, because the movie itself is a monument to corporate manipulation. What begins as a truly interesting meditation on the ethical dilemmas inherent in interstellar flight is hijacked at its midpoint by a hackneyed chimera of romantic comedy and survival narrative specifically engineered to show more J-Law boob. You can practically put a time-stamp on the moment Hollywood takes over. And that’s what makes me think the anti-corporate message of “Passengers” just might be intentional. Because maybe, when you’ve got no choice but to cave in to your moneyed masters, the best thing you can do is make the capitulation so obvious that the audience can’t help but catch on.
