Gender, Identification, and Misguided ‘Passengers’
Spoilers Ahead!
At a time when narratives, and films in particular, are more aware than ever of the gender dynamics between characters, Passengers (Tyldum, 2016) is a throwback in the worst way possible. The film serves as a male fantasy for both protagonist Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) and the presumptively male viewer.
When stripped of narrative influence, the relationship between Jim and Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) unfolds thusly: he finds and becomes infatuated with her, manifests a situation in which he is the only romantic option, and forces her to choose between a relationship with him or a life of complete isolation and loneliness. A romance with a sci-fi sheen, Passengers takes a distinctly masculine point of view and uses narrative strategies to encourage identification with Jim at the expense of Aurora’s agency and value as a person.
The film follows a commercial spaceship as it travels 120 years to continue an ongoing colonization effort on a distant planet. Thirty years into the trip, a malfunction jolts Jim — one of the 5,000 passengers onboard — out of hibernation. After spending more than a year exploring the ship alone, he decides to wake Aurora, a sleeping passenger with whom he becomes infatuated, and stages her awakening to look like a subsequent malfunction.
Together, the pair gallivants around the ship, falling in love in the process. Although the revelation that Jim is responsible for Aurora’s awakening causes a rift between the couple, the film treats it more as a relationship speed bump than an irreconcilable breach of trust. In doing so, Passengers condones Jim’s actions and sticks to a predictable story stemming from tired gender and genre tropes.
Though the first act of the film plays out like a standard science fiction narrative, focusing of world building and exposition, romance becomes the dominant genre for the remaining two-thirds. In essence, the film follows a familiar romance framework: the couple gets to know each other, flirts, comes together, faces a crisis that may be too much for the relationship to overcome, and approaches this crisis by either separating or staying together. While the Passengers script is more romance than science fiction, the dire sci-fi aspects should amplify the weight of the characters’ actions and decisions, but the film treats the relationship (and, really, Jim’s feelings) as paramount.
Jim doesn’t cheat on Aurora or take a job in another state, which might serve as a typical rom-com crisis. Rather, he forces her to live the rest of her life on a spaceship. Despite being a complete stranger, he uses her to end his loneliness, with no regard for her as anything more than a potential source of love, affection, and entertainment. However, the film approaches this conflict as though it were something for the relationship to overcome, as opposed to the life-altering decision it is.
This decision, while despicable, is not a problem in and of itself; plenty of characters make selfish choices to get what they want. The problem lies in the film’s approach to these two characters, particularly as it urges the viewer to identify with Jim. To the film’s credit, it makes a half-hearted attempt to challenge the male gaze, a topic discussed in Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey argues that Hollywood films offer three positions, all of them masculine, from which to view a film — that of the spectator, the camera, and the film’s male characters. Passengers seemingly confronts the idea that the camera’s gaze defaults to male before abandoning that position altogether.
The film begins by following Jim around the ship as it slowly dawns on him that something is wrong. Because Jim has to discover what the audience already knows, the viewer does not identify with him; these first few scenes are simply observational in nature. Passengers even includes a gratuitous shot of Pratt’s naked body showering, offering a chance for the viewer to objectify him the way films far-more-often objectify female characters. As the film progresses, however, this inclusion comes across as justification or permission to show Jennifer Lawrence’s body in revealing athletic wear, formal dresses, and bathing suits.
The viewer’s identification changes as Jim’s knowledge of the situation catches up to that of the audience. After Jim comes to the sobering conclusion that no one else is awake and communication is impossible, he realizes that he has access to all of the ship’s amenities: fine dining, video games, a basketball court, and much more. His mood shifts as he genuinely enjoys everything at his disposal. This montage lets the viewer live vicariously through Jim and shifts the viewer’s observational position to one in which they are meant to identify with Jim. This shift is problematic for myriad reasons too numerous to fully unpack here. Essentially, the film needs the viewer to identify with Jim in order to pardon his awakening of Aurora, thus allowing him, and by proxy the viewer, to continue living his male fantasy.
As if this is not enough, several other factors aid in excusing Jim’s selfish decision. When a third passenger (Laurence Fishburne) awakens and hears the details of the situation, he tells Aurora “a drowning man will always try to drag you down with him.” The implication in this statement is that the situation, not the action, is to blame. As such, Aurora should forgive Jim for permanently altering her life for his benefit.
Additionally, the science fiction elements of the story intersect with the romance elements in such a way as to offer Jim a path to redemption in Aurora’s eyes. I won’t go into the details, but he risks his life and uses his skills as an engineer to save the ship. During this sequence, the film mirrors his confident bravery with Aurora’s shaky need to be reassured. His heroic actions not only cements Aurora’s feelings for Jim, but also the film’s commitment to dated gender roles.
Science fiction films generally fall into one of two categories — pessimistic and optimistic. Romance films end with the couple separating or remaining together. Were Passengers to take any of the darker intersections therein, it would have offered a more nuanced narrative that may have required a departure from the problematic gender dynamics present. However, in defaulting to the least interesting path, the film relies on safe, predictable beats that match its uninspired take on sci-fi romance.
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