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Friends In Your Head | Forums → Episodes → Best / Worst of 2013
Re: Gravity.
My reading is that she's supposed to be suffering chronic depression - the monologue about doing nothing but working and driving around aimlessly is the major indicator. I think the dialogue is also trying to imply that she wasn't a career astronaut - NASA came to her and trained her to fly because it was her technology, thus circumventing the story problem of how someone with depression has the gumption to become an astronaut in the first place. Of course, it doesn't really work that way, which is one of my beefs with the film, but that's what I think the movie was trying to do.
Wouldn't depression would be there, symptomatically, in the larger allegory of it being about grief and rebirth?
As Trey pointed out, there's a difference between being depressed (aka really sad because something sad happened) and having depression, which is something that hits for no reason at all.
I would hope there's near-universal agreement here that, when it comes to what is and is not clinical depression, there's a difference between the opinion of a qualified mental health clinician and the opinion of, well, whatever we are. A bunch of guys who saw a film. It'd be interesting to hear what an actual psychiatrist thinks about Ryan Stone.
But like Trey suggests, it's less important how we'd characterize her problem and more important that we recognize that she has this problem. She goes from sleepwalking thru life since after her kid died to getting a second shot (rebirth) at living life zealously and joyously (more like the way Kowalski and that other dude seemed to live life). If you get that, then you've gotten the film, irrespective of whether you feel Ryan is clinically depressed or not.
Friends In Your Head | Forums → Episodes → Best / Worst of 2013
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