An outer space idyll, sunny (meaning proximal to the sun), a breeze from passing spaceships, the languid anti-nature of a gravity-less life, concealed violence, an intentional ignorance of earthen politics—this is the cosmic pastoral, and the field of High Life (2018), directed by Claire Denis. In this near-future movie, prisoners sentenced to death opt into a government experiment to harness energy from a black hole while also conducting trials of artificial insemination among the crew. The animating details of this mission and its participants are ambiguous. In leaving motivations opaque, Denis takes the gravity out of the crime narrative, our need for a reason Why, and instead focuses on the aftermath and its aesthetics. For example, when he was a boy, the prisoner Monte (played by Robert Pattison) killed, inexplicably, his friend as they played in the woods, stumbling down ravines and sprinting through woodland groves. I think the friend may have killed his dog. Or at least, hadn’t been watching it in the river where they played carefully enough. Earth-bound Boyse (Mia Goth) is introduced as a train-hopping teen. She’s filthy, her hair matted with trash. She looks happy. But she leaves earthside. Though the prisoners are offered a choice, it is barely a choice, given that whoever was in charge of this mission targeted young life-sentence servers. And so, through quick flashbacks, we skyrocket from pasture to the cosmic, an attempt at recreating that which once was—the natural ability for humans to be fruitful and multiply.
"The languor here is galactic despondency."
After great effort, a child is born—hope for another generation! Who the father is of the spaceship-born child Willow1 is nebulous. However, her connection with Monte is made obvious through eye contact, which the reproduction doctor, Dr. Dibs (played by Denis's muse Juliette Binoche), notices. She later rapes Monte in his sleep, steals his sperm, inserts it into a syringe, and inserts this syringe of the stolen sperm into a drugged Boyse’s uterus (they’re all drugged). The implication is that Willow spawns from this moment, but again, to Denis, the origin stories are inconsequential. What is of consequence is the future implications: a sperm successfully found an egg once and so, logically, the process could happen again.
The dialogue is just as spare as in other Denis movies, with impressionist montages of unforgettable images and choreography comprising a measured film. The director also references herself—the space inmates crawl in an army technique along the corridor, mimicking the scene in Beau Travail (1999) when the legionnaires spider race on hands and knees to prepare for crawling under low-lying wires. But, whereas in Beau Travail the villain was the repression of desire, an incoming black hole undergirds protracted time in High Life, a hole that spaghettifies (a horizontal compression and stretching, in brief) all living things.
So, like everything picturesque, things aren’t always as idyllic as they seem and it takes great effort to make it appear so. Not that High Life is idyllic; quite the opposite. The languor here is galactic despondency. On board the spaceship, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s saturated colour scheme is as ersatz as a Photoshopped garden. Instead of Agnès Godard’s cool blue motif in Beau Travail, neon red and luminous greens, like the inside of a lava lamp, populate High Life’s mood board. A morning mist creeps along the floor of the ship; people lounge in the kale garden receiving spritzes of water from above like they’re vegetables in a grocery store vegetable aisle. When Monte fights with Boyse over her graffiti, she stabs him in the forearm with a shard of glass (her tool). He punches her in the nose. Their vivid blood mixes in their held hands, symbolic of the violent bond they share.
Says Denis, "Beauty pisses me off.” Beauty pisses her off, most likely, because it’s distracting. In High Life, most of the action takes place in Robert Pattinson’s square, pulsating temples—beauty on the surface, brutality below. Denis again, "I am trying to float on the impression of what a story could be.” This is the pastoral, an impression of what could be but also what is not and never could be. Here, she has placed hope in space, the ultra-sublime, the ultra-heavenly, but the natural landscape, an Elysian space yet again colonized by humans. The film suggests that even in escaping to post-climate disaster environments, our human errors spaghettify.
On the spaceship High Life, the prisoners are forced to watch footage from Earth, innocuous things such as children playing on the beach. Monte says, "These fucking images from Earth, I can’t believe they still make it here after all this time. Just like viruses chasing after us, parasites… on a loop. Programmed to keep us on a leash, make us believe a return is possible." Images we look at place us further from what we want to be closer to, arriving too late and just on time. While Denis eschews reasons, she embraces reverberations. Much is written on Reddit about the appearance of dogs in a spaceship that Monte and the teenage Willow find: his past has come back to haunt him.2 Dibs, who killed her children, can’t fulfill her mission to reproduce life; and Boyse, whose crime I suppose was not caring for her body, can’t escape her body’s needs and processes and shows us that the things we do on earth generate universal ramifications. As Willow prays while watching old footage of Scottish bagpipe players, Monte asks, "You know a god to pray to? What god are you praying to?” She says, "I saw it in some random images from earth.”
"This is the pastoral, an impression of what could be but also what is not and never could be."
I’m reminded of images from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), in which the unnamed narrator reads from her muse Krasna, "In the plane, I’m a machine… but once on ground, I’m a human being with passions.”3 But reverse this, and you can better feel the weight of human existence, "On the ground, I’m a machine… but in the plane, I’m a human being with passions." The same logic can be applied to a rocket ship. Humans go to the sky to escape the realities and limitations of their lives—we have two feet, appetites, we live on a planet with gravity and capitalism and racism, we trod. Thus, the cosmos promises a pastoral place and site for abeyance just as any field, meadow, beachside, lakeside, castle grounds, or backyard garden. The continuum conflates Earth with the heavens: it’s all the same. Decades earlier, in 1956, Marker collaborated with the Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk on a collaged animation called Les Astronautes. In this short, a man rockets into space. From his window, he sees very earthly things: a slug crawling on green grass, an owl flying in the heavens. In the end, he releases himself from his machine. At last, he is free to float in the sky without obligations or responsibilities, to lounge on his side with his head propped in his hand on a piece of a rocky planet—returned to his visions from Earth.
What might be the landscape of a black hole?4 In High Life, it sparkles red and orange, and looks, as Willow says, "like a dragon’s eye.” As father and daughter head into the eye of the monster toward an uncertain fate, an unlikely homecoming and more likely atomic dispersal, toward the state of utmost isolation, the beauty of the brilliant red and unknowable cosmos mitigate the bleak dread of death by enslavement. More probable is that a black hole landscape shepherds us, as do Denis’s films and many great works of Pastoral art, onward toward a reprieve of mysterious, promising visualization.
1A nature name. I wonder if the trees of Monte’s childhood homicide were willows. Note too, Hans Christian Andersen’s fable "Under the Willow Tree,” in which two childhood best friends spend a glorious summer day under a willow tree. The willow tree is named Willow Father. Hans Christian Andersen writes, "They were allowed to play there, though, indeed, the tree stood close beside the stream, and they might easily have fallen into the water. But the eye of God watches over the little ones; if it did not, they would be badly off.”
2Hobb1t:
did anyone else catch the fact that the sexdungeonthing turned into some kind of dog-like, hairy creature with a tail?
ShiddyShiddyBangBang:
I think it’s completely open ended. Willow seems so certain of things ("I have everything I need on this ship”//"I have a good feeling about this”) and she’s so tending towards expansiveness and open mindedness (attempting prayer and feeling the ethical dilemma of abandoning the dogs)
DrosophilaMelanogang:
…his last hope, another ship, turns out to be full of dogs (metaphorically equating the inmates to society's discarded animals)
Amida 0616:
If i recall no dog dies in front of you, but you do see dead dogs.
One in a flashback there is a dog dead in a river. And then there is a spaceship of dogs where some are dead and some are alive.
3Says Hegel, "The abstraction of production causes work to be continually more mechanical, until it is at last possible for man to step out and let the machine take his place."
4In High Life, we see a single band of colour stretching across a black screen. The band stretches up and down to fill the dark with vibrant sunflower yellow.
An outer space idyll, sunny (meaning proximal to the sun), a breeze from passing spaceships, the languid anti-nature of a gravity-less life, concealed violence, an intentional ignorance of earthen politics—this is the cosmic pastoral, and the field of High Life (2018), directed by Claire Denis. In this near-future movie, prisoners sentenced to death opt into a government experiment to harness energy from a black hole while also conducting trials of artificial insemination among the crew. The animating details of this mission and its participants are ambiguous. In leaving motivations opaque, Denis takes the gravity out of the crime narrative, our need for a reason Why, and instead focuses on the aftermath and its aesthetics. For example, when he was a boy, the prisoner Monte (played by Robert Pattison) killed, inexplicably, his friend as they played in the woods, stumbling down ravines and sprinting through woodland groves. I think the friend may have killed his dog. Or at least, hadn’t been watching it in the river where they played carefully enough. Earth-bound Boyse (Mia Goth) is introduced as a train-hopping teen. She’s filthy, her hair matted with trash. She looks happy. But she leaves earthside. Though the prisoners are offered a choice, it is barely a choice, given that whoever was in charge of this mission targeted young life-sentence servers. And so, through quick flashbacks, we skyrocket from pasture to the cosmic, an attempt at recreating that which once was—the natural ability for humans to be fruitful and multiply.
"The languor here is galactic despondency."
After great effort, a child is born—hope for another generation! Who the father is of the spaceship-born child Willow1 is nebulous. However, her connection with Monte is made obvious through eye contact, which the reproduction doctor, Dr. Dibs (played by Denis's muse Juliette Binoche), notices. She later rapes Monte in his sleep, steals his sperm, inserts it into a syringe, and inserts this syringe of the stolen sperm into a drugged Boyse’s uterus (they’re all drugged). The implication is that Willow spawns from this moment, but again, to Denis, the origin stories are inconsequential. What is of consequence is the future implications: a sperm successfully found an egg once and so, logically, the process could happen again.
The dialogue is just as spare as in other Denis movies, with impressionist montages of unforgettable images and choreography comprising a measured film. The director also references herself—the space inmates crawl in an army technique along the corridor, mimicking the scene in Beau Travail (1999) when the legionnaires spider race on hands and knees to prepare for crawling under low-lying wires. But, whereas in Beau Travail the villain was the repression of desire, an incoming black hole undergirds protracted time in High Life, a hole that spaghettifies (a horizontal compression and stretching, in brief) all living things.
So, like everything picturesque, things aren’t always as idyllic as they seem and it takes great effort to make it appear so. Not that High Life is idyllic; quite the opposite. The languor here is galactic despondency. On board the spaceship, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s saturated colour scheme is as ersatz as a Photoshopped garden. Instead of Agnès Godard’s cool blue motif in Beau Travail, neon red and luminous greens, like the inside of a lava lamp, populate High Life’s mood board. A morning mist creeps along the floor of the ship; people lounge in the kale garden receiving spritzes of water from above like they’re vegetables in a grocery store vegetable aisle. When Monte fights with Boyse over her graffiti, she stabs him in the forearm with a shard of glass (her tool). He punches her in the nose. Their vivid blood mixes in their held hands, symbolic of the violent bond they share.
Says Denis, "Beauty pisses me off.” Beauty pisses her off, most likely, because it’s distracting. In High Life, most of the action takes place in Robert Pattinson’s square, pulsating temples—beauty on the surface, brutality below. Denis again, "I am trying to float on the impression of what a story could be.” This is the pastoral, an impression of what could be but also what is not and never could be. Here, she has placed hope in space, the ultra-sublime, the ultra-heavenly, but the natural landscape, an Elysian space yet again colonized by humans. The film suggests that even in escaping to post-climate disaster environments, our human errors spaghettify.
On the spaceship High Life, the prisoners are forced to watch footage from Earth, innocuous things such as children playing on the beach. Monte says, "These fucking images from Earth, I can’t believe they still make it here after all this time. Just like viruses chasing after us, parasites… on a loop. Programmed to keep us on a leash, make us believe a return is possible." Images we look at place us further from what we want to be closer to, arriving too late and just on time. While Denis eschews reasons, she embraces reverberations. Much is written on Reddit about the appearance of dogs in a spaceship that Monte and the teenage Willow find: his past has come back to haunt him.2 Dibs, who killed her children, can’t fulfill her mission to reproduce life; and Boyse, whose crime I suppose was not caring for her body, can’t escape her body’s needs and processes and shows us that the things we do on earth generate universal ramifications. As Willow prays while watching old footage of Scottish bagpipe players, Monte asks, "You know a god to pray to? What god are you praying to?” She says, "I saw it in some random images from earth.”
"This is the pastoral, an impression of what could be but also what is not and never could be."
I’m reminded of images from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), in which the unnamed narrator reads from her muse Krasna, "In the plane, I’m a machine… but once on ground, I’m a human being with passions.”3 But reverse this, and you can better feel the weight of human existence, "On the ground, I’m a machine… but in the plane, I’m a human being with passions." The same logic can be applied to a rocket ship. Humans go to the sky to escape the realities and limitations of their lives—we have two feet, appetites, we live on a planet with gravity and capitalism and racism, we trod. Thus, the cosmos promises a pastoral place and site for abeyance just as any field, meadow, beachside, lakeside, castle grounds, or backyard garden. The continuum conflates Earth with the heavens: it’s all the same. Decades earlier, in 1956, Marker collaborated with the Polish filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk on a collaged animation called Les Astronautes. In this short, a man rockets into space. From his window, he sees very earthly things: a slug crawling on green grass, an owl flying in the heavens. In the end, he releases himself from his machine. At last, he is free to float in the sky without obligations or responsibilities, to lounge on his side with his head propped in his hand on a piece of a rocky planet—returned to his visions from Earth.
What might be the landscape of a black hole?4 In High Life, it sparkles red and orange, and looks, as Willow says, "like a dragon’s eye.” As father and daughter head into the eye of the monster toward an uncertain fate, an unlikely homecoming and more likely atomic dispersal, toward the state of utmost isolation, the beauty of the brilliant red and unknowable cosmos mitigate the bleak dread of death by enslavement. More probable is that a black hole landscape shepherds us, as do Denis’s films and many great works of Pastoral art, onward toward a reprieve of mysterious, promising visualization.
1A nature name. I wonder if the trees of Monte’s childhood homicide were willows. Note too, Hans Christian Andersen’s fable "Under the Willow Tree,” in which two childhood best friends spend a glorious summer day under a willow tree. The willow tree is named Willow Father. Hans Christian Andersen writes, "They were allowed to play there, though, indeed, the tree stood close beside the stream, and they might easily have fallen into the water. But the eye of God watches over the little ones; if it did not, they would be badly off.”
2Hobb1t:
did anyone else catch the fact that the sexdungeonthing turned into some kind of dog-like, hairy creature with a tail?
ShiddyShiddyBangBang:
I think it’s completely open ended. Willow seems so certain of things ("I have everything I need on this ship”//"I have a good feeling about this”) and she’s so tending towards expansiveness and open mindedness (attempting prayer and feeling the ethical dilemma of abandoning the dogs)
DrosophilaMelanogang:
…his last hope, another ship, turns out to be full of dogs (metaphorically equating the inmates to society's discarded animals)
Amida 0616:
If i recall no dog dies in front of you, but you do see dead dogs.
One in a flashback there is a dog dead in a river. And then there is a spaceship of dogs where some are dead and some are alive.
3Says Hegel, "The abstraction of production causes work to be continually more mechanical, until it is at last possible for man to step out and let the machine take his place."
4In High Life, we see a single band of colour stretching across a black screen. The band stretches up and down to fill the dark with vibrant sunflower yellow.