The Martian · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man sits down in front of a camera and explains, very calmly, that he is going to die here. Then he makes a joke about disco. That is nearly the first thing The Martian does after stranding Mark Watney on Mars, and it tells you what kind of film this is going to be.

The video log is the engine of the movie, and it runs by refusing something. A face held this close, this alone, is normally where a film stops to feel. Deleuze called that the affection-image: an emotion gathers on a face but hasn't yet spent itself in action — the moment cinema holds its breath. Watney's face keeps declining the invitation. Every time despair could pool there, he reaches for the joke, and the joke turns out to be a plan. I'm going to have to science the shit out of this. The feeling never arrests him; it converts straight back into doing. (It's also what Deleuze called a dicisign — we feel the camera he's addressing, a man filming himself in the act of thinking.)

Why make a fuss about a close-up? Because by 2015 most serious cinema had spent fifty years walking away from exactly this kind of hero. Deleuze divided film into two regimes. In the movement-image, someone perceives a situation and acts to change it; perception flows into action, action resolves the situation, and the cuts serve that chain. After the war the chain snapped. Characters began to find that no action they could take fit what they saw — Deleuze's crisis of the action-image — and a new cinema of watchers and wanderers took over, people who could only look and endure while time pressed on them. The seer replaced the agent, and prestige film has mostly lived on that side ever since.

The Martian is built, almost stubbornly, on the old side. It is a nearly pure action-image: the sensory-motor circuit running in perfect health. Problem seen, solution acted, situation changed, next problem. Watney never curdles into a seer. Mars never opens into dead time. The film's famous optimism isn't a mood pasted on top — in these terms it's structural. The whole picture is the refusal of the crisis.

Deleuze split the action-image further, into two shapes, and The Martian uses both. The large form goes situation → action → new situation: a milieu bears down until one decisive act transforms the whole. The small form runs the other way, action → situation → action — someone acts, and the act discloses a hidden piece of the situation, which demands the next act. Sol by sol, the texture here is pure small form. Watney grows potatoes and so uncovers a water problem; he drives out to dig up Pathfinder and so uncovers a way to talk to Earth. Each solved problem reveals the planet's next face. That "sol" counter on screen is the small form made literal.

His opponent is Mars itself — the encompasser, what Deleuze called the synsign, a milieu so total it calls action out of a body. Man against world, the oldest binomial there is. Dariusz Wolski shoots it exactly that way: one suited figure, low angle, dwarfed against featureless red geology. And Wolski's systematic split between those vast exteriors and the tight, close, workbench lensing inside the Hab is precisely the respiration-space of the large form — the film breathing between the immensity of the milieu and the taut narrow line where the action actually gets done. The surface is the lungs; the Hab is the held breath. That low-angle grammar of a human lost in functional vastness is Kubrick's, lifted whole from 2001.

The three strands — Mars, Houston, the Hermes — cross-cut and converge toward a last-minute rescue. This is organic montage in its most classical, American form, Griffith's parallel-action chase that ends in salvation, and the film takes it directly from Apollo 13, which built the template of a mission-control ensemble intercut with an isolated crew. The orbital catch at the end is the large form arriving right on cue: the single decisive act that transforms the whole situation.

What keeps all of this from feeling like a regression to 1940 is a realism contract that runs underneath. The functional practical sets descend straight from Scott's own Alien; the effects are built to recede rather than announce themselves; the orbital mechanics are played straight; the one real cheat, the opening storm, is openly acknowledged as a cheat. It's Bazinian faith in the image — we learn the space the way Watney does, by using it. The solo confessional bond comes from Cast Away, where Wilson did what the log camera does here; the resource-inventory dramaturgy from Robinson Crusoe on Mars; the institutional ensemble as emotional ballast from The Right Stuff.

The significance is quietly contrarian. The Martian argues that the movement-image was never used up, only abandoned — that the old machine can still sing if you drain the dread out of it. Watney's wit is the actual mechanism: the device that stops the affection-image from ever tipping over into a time-image. Watch the close-ups on your next viewing, and count how often the film cuts away from a feeling and toward a task. That ratio is the whole movie.