Sunshine, An essay on Destiny

In the rather lengthy list of films that I’ve had the pleasure or sometimes ‘displeasure’, of watching over the years, and especially in the rather ‘oversaturated’ genera of ‘space exploration’, only one managed to stand out to the degree that Sunshine had. Here you’ll find a mixture of all the common themes known to this genre, but what you’ll not find is a story that combines them in the way that Danny Boyle's 2007 'sci-fi' thriller does. You’ll find a sense of urgency that you’ll not find in others, not even in interstellar. The plot is simple enough, or rather, as simple as it needs to be to give the experience that it gave. In my experience, It raises questions regarding the sun that not even the Copernican Revolution that, so to speak, put the sun where we see it today, succeeded in answering. 

Why the centre? What is the centre?

To put anything at the centre is to put everything else around it, and in a sense, to remove anything from the centre is to throw all that which orbits it out of balance, to this brief maxim, we owe the lion’s share of this film’s philosophical weight. The common view of extinction events often assigns the cause to the devastating action of an external agent; asteroids; natural disasters, floods, crop failure, war, but hardly is the cause the paradoxical absence of something. This, I believe is what it means for something to be truly at the centre, that its mere absence is as disastrous, or, more disastrous than anything that can be called disastrous. 

I find it eerily significant that it’s more the implications of things, the subtleties and nuances of language, of words, the shades of meaning that layer themselves below the words that impact us the most. ‘Taste’ and aesthetics’ belong to this class. They are, in some sense, a protest against the encroachments of scientism; but at the same time, no sharp distinction really exists between science and sensibility, as anyone who’s watched a movie like this or some of the recent ones like Midnight sky, Ad Astra, Stowaway, can attest. It’s not exactly the mechanics of space travel, the accuracy of the equations and concepts of differential calculus or analytic geometry so laden in those films that we show up for, in fact; they’re so expedient that, where lacking, we’re willing to invent whole scientific systems and concepts, infrastructures and worlds, for the expressed purpose of ‘telling the perfect story’. 

As human beings, what we yearn for is the why, more so than the how, I suppose because the ‘why’ is infinitely closer to sensibility than the rather 'instructional ‘how’ could ever hope to be; that is to say, reason, in the realm of meaning, of symbolism, and ontology does not reign as unequivocally as does it the realm of measure, utility; we’re shown that it’s possible for things to be meaningful and not ‘reasonable’; the meaningful seems to shy away from the obvious, preferring twilight zones, shadowy spots, ellipses, allusions, so much so, one would think, that the main point, that which is being said or shown is the part that truly obscures (and more than a clever play on words, it’s often the obvious that obfuscates), and like the sun, it’s only truly valued in the visibility which it lends to the world, yet the same object that gives sight, we promptly shield our eyes from when directly exposed to. 

‘And yet it moves’--- Galileo Galilei

This speaks to the symbolic side of the sun; in some sense, to have placed the sun at the centre and decentralized the earth goes beyond what’s agreed to be a scientific commonplace. It speaks to an actual historical phase in the development of human consciousness, it suggests a reversal of roles. The film excels in exaggerating, or bringing into dazzling clarity an aspect of our relation to the sun that, under normal circumstances, would be somewhat difficult to spot; making the apocalyptic setting of the film an almost everyday occurrence.

The phenomenon of heliotropism, shows the natural tendency of life forms, particularly plant forms towards the light of the sun, which in some sense, is rooted in the tendency of life forms to express themselves to the highest degree possible is clearly reflected in the phenomenon of self-preservation; where I believe the association is strongest. This inner strife that sees the plant soar through the mud, to grow slowly and initially crookedly on its course to an upright state, is told in the film through the crew and the challenges which they found themselves dealing with as the journey progressed. If it can be said that the sun symbolizes something, surely it’s to be found in here, not in an obscure ideogram found in some ancient Egyptian temple, but here in the ‘dialectic’ of strife, the risk of death, and the urgency that such a likelihood exerts upon us, that the sun appears to have its true significance. This is shown in the precariousness of the journey, the seeming impossibility of the task, and the sacrifice that took to deliver the payload to the heart of the sun, where the film as well as the concept truly shines. 

Perhaps, the symbolic meaning of the sun consists in nothing else but the way it animates us, in making something more of itself, to be radiant or radioactive. in how the earth which appears to symbolize us, grew colder, icer the dimmer the light of the sun grew. The disagreement, the infighting, the oscillations between cowardice and courage, of selfishness and sacrifice, of pride and selflessness which intensified the closer the crew approached the star are somewhat subtle indications of an underlying affinity that we share with the star. This affinity could not be shown had Earth remained at the centre of the universe. It also makes us question if the meaning and true significance of something isn’t found in the way in which it orients us, in how we tend to it, in how it animates us; and if so, what does the film tell us?. What’s more human than those things that had so plainly transpired throughout the crew’s journey?

The film, in this respect, shows a common, everyday phenomenon. The apocalyptic setting is also all too real. Everyday, we’re engaged in this act, our will to live, fear of death, desire, impulses, needs are the cast which this situation features. But since it’s the way we are oriented towards things, and that our orientation is determined by the nature of our being, as human beings, it’s only right that it’s those facets of our person that should manifest themselves in so dangerous and yet so effusive a manner. The sun radiates the light, metaphorically speaking, that distinguishes us from things, and things from one another, and in our own reciprocal determination of the sun, we do so by means of those very facets which it distinguishes in us, that enables us to see what’s important, and what’s expedient, what’s precious and what’s expendable. The precarious nature of the mission, that the stakes could not be any higher, shows to what extent we’re willing to exert ourselves. In the movie, we learn how much went into the making of the bomb, that the ingredients for it were pooled in from all over the world, and that it’s humanity’s last-ditch effort at reigniting the star.

The sun, it seems here, is more than a star; more than a big ball of hot gas; or rather, if it is, so are we but slabs of meat, and the earth a big rock. If we confine ourselves to this view, then, appropriately so, all we’ll know of the sun is its heat and the purely physical sensations it deposits onto our skin. However, the true being of the sun lives elsewhere; not in the sun per se but in those who look upon it. It takes a bit of solipsism to truly relate to the sun, and perceive it; the notion that the self is all that can be known to exist; the self here is its world’s only true luminary; inasmuch as the sun our world’s sole source of light, I mean the kind of light that enables us to see other things than the source of light itself, and we say this with a certain emphasis on the term ‘luminary’. Shaupenhauer has an interesting say here,

“The world is my idea:”—this is a truth which holds good

for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring

it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does

this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes

clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an

earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth"

A. Schopenhauer'The World As Will & Representation'

What’s interesting here is how the opening syllable of the word ‘solipsism’ is a clear reference to the sun. 

“The greatest use of life is to spend it for something that will outlast it.”

William James 'Pragmatism'

The abundance of solar metaphors here is another way of showing where the sun’s true being lies. As a matter of fact, this applies to the being of anything; think of people whose accomplishments we still benefit from, though they’re no longer with us; think of the notion of meaning, how words and ideas illuminate in as self-less a manner as the sun, and it’ll be made clear that true being is though extramundane, is more concrete than what we think of as concrete, look no further than the sentence for the proof. 

“Is a thing beautiful because I attribute beauty to it? It is well known that great minds have wrestled with the question whether it is the glorious sun that illumines the worlds, or whether it is the human eye by virtue of its relation to the sun”

(p166) C.G Jung Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Having said this, more seems to be at stake when we hear Mace, a crew member say (clip). Everything dies with its death; those words run much deeper than language alone can help us probe; everything that we are is a solar projection. If the value of things, lies not in themselves, but in us who find them valuable, then no more proof is needed. Our very organs, which sustain us every passing moment, conform to this principle, the breeze that you feel caressing your skin at a calm night, the arresting beauty of the rose that you gaze upon as you pass by a garden, the water you drink when thirsty, the breath you gasp for when exhausted, show the other means by which the light of the sun gets to us. What other notion does this bring to mind more radiantly than that of ‘purpose’, namely, that the purpose of something is the most essential thing to which another thing stands in need, that this particular situation required none other than that thing; William James weighs in here in a way that no other philosopher does. 

Pragmatism…asks its usual question. ‘Grant an idea or belief to be true,’ it says, ‘what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone’s actual life?

It seems this is the only ‘good question’ there is, perhaps the question God would have asked in response to the plea that we imagine everything that has ever come into existence would have made before the creation of the world. This serves a brilliant contrast with the idea, expressed by Neizcha, that fear of death arises from the recognition that death represents the ultimate negation of one's power and agency in the world. It is the cessation of existence and the annihilation of the individual will to power.". This so-called power is a more daring way of saying purpose, and the ‘will to live’, though may seem contradictory considering what we’ve said so far, is only contradictory because it’s cut short, the full expression of this phrase is rather, ‘the will to live beyond one’s self, like the sun.