Issue #96: Rejection Letters 📨

Let’s get right to it. This week we’ve got Cate on the unseen, radical political messaging of Project Hail Mary, and Zosha on the world according to Dr. Robby on The Pitt.

The Martian is a movie that makes me cry. I saw it in theaters when it was first released, and every single time I rewatch it I am plagued by one thought: how lonely must he have been? 

Project Hail Mary, the second adaption of an Andy Weir space odyssey revisits that very question and poses another: how beautiful is it that they don’t have to be alone?

I was lucky enough to see Project Hail Mary in 70mm IMAX on two occasions. Once, seated close to the screen, in a last-minute straggler’s seat. And again at a more respectable distance. Despite the endless neck strain, I preferred sitting close up; feeling myself dissolve into the truly awesome (in the traditional sense) world directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had created for their audience. 

As it turns out, the IMAX format was made for movies set in space. Lord and Miller use the scale as a character in the film, incorporating the aspect ratio into the way the story represents Rylan Grace’s (Ryan Gosling) shifting state of mind. Every single shot set in space is presented at an overwhelming scale. Stars and galaxies twinkle in the distance, their staggering vastness nearly impossible to metabolize. 

But the film would be nothing without Gosling’s towering performance as Ryland Grace. For most of the film, he interacts with only a puppet available to balance his work against. The premise of this film is that the Sun is dying, and the Earth, in turn, is following suit. It is bleak in a deeply existential way, and it’s happening on a global scale. These characters are faced with the very real possibility that they have very little time left to figure out what to do if the Earth just… stops “working.” When Grace awakens without his memory onboard the Hail Mary, he’s forced to contemplate those terrors a second traumatic time as they come back. But this time he’s utterly alone in all the known universe. 

Gosling plays that bone-deep, terror-sprinkled rage with chilling accuracy. The way his face immediately shifts ever so subtly after he calculates that he will never get back to Earth, will give you the worst case of piloerection you’ve ever suffered. He portrays the visceral psychological shift happening in that moment with the combination of articulate physicality and disassociated panic. This is a situation in which most people would either waste away in despair, or choose to end their lives. He’s been left to mourn colleagues he cannot even remember. But in spite of that, he resolves to soldier on and refuses to accept defeat. That’s a rare psychological headspace to inhabit, and imagining how the mind of the human animal would react in that moment is one of the single best performances of his career.

And then there is Rocky. 

While a lot got lost in the page to screen adaptation, the film leads hard into its themes, making sure to give our alien neighbor clear, narratively-related motivations that influence and explain his own choice to form a relationship with Grace. Before their encounter, Rocky had already been unfathomably alone for decades, living the very existence Grace originally thought he’d be facing. He was drowning in a melancholy so deep it’s upsetting to consider. Rocky might not be human, but he is a sentient person of a differently evolved species. It’s not a coincidence that so many alien movies enmesh themselves with questions about the “threat” of immigration. Aliens aren’t from here, and we can’t imagine a reality outside of colonialism. 

One of the things the film tells us is that what makes the character of Grace such an intrinsically good person is the fact that he doesn’t assume that a person who is alien to us must also necessarily be hostile to us. In the current political climate, where fascism and nationalism are on the rise, it is a profoundly significant thing that one of the highest-grossing movies of the year is telling audiences to embrace each other in our differences rather than giving in to antagonism. By giving Rocky so much emotional, relatable depth, Project Hail Mary reinforced that other people are people even if they might look different from us. It might be an elementary lesson, but it’s one that most of the world is currently failing. 

There’s still a little room to fiddle with the script however. The original novel takes great pains to reinforce the fact that Rocky is many orders of magnitude more intellectually evolved than Grace. But the film frames them as being of fairly equal cognition — perhaps with an advantage to Rocky. But by not hammering Rocky’s smarts home, the story loses the opportunity to model a gracious attitude as an appropriate response should you find yourself forced into humility by someone unalike you. The persistent depiction of the armed forces in contemporary “alien invasion” films suggests that the dominant alternative solution is a show of force. But Grace represents the boundless realities we could create by embracing curiosity and leading with empathy instead. It would have been a real triumph to see that articulated onscreen.

The film also exquisitely brings the world Grace is inhabiting to life — in ways both visual and moral. From the cannibalistic inevitabilities of space to the easy camaraderie of voluntary community, Project Hail Mary exists on a plane where the very specific “sense” of a place is as carefully curated as a physical set. It can feel claustrophobic in scale at some points however. Faced with the looming extinction of the human race, the movie isn’t particularly interested in how anyone but a group of fatalistic scientists feels about the situation. But the subtle ways Grace’s affections are developed, and the changes in his immediate physical environment sketch the contours of a man who is very much alive and will not be distracted from the project of remaining so. 

Though the author Andy Weir doesn’t quite seem to to fully understand the true nature of the social engine he’s created here, Project Hail Mary pre-imagines a world where we choose to get along and work together; where we commit ourselves to truly treating each other as fellow human beings who are entitled to the same level of autonomy and self-regard we expect for ourselves.

In a lot of ways Project Hail Mary is a clever repeat of The Lego Movie. Grace is this story’s “Special,” and once again, he is called on to do something impossible and extraordinary. But the stylistic references go beyond mere theme — this movie has that film’s success with tonal shifts, successfully obscuring that the film’s plot is less staring at the abyss than climbing into the abyss. The film’s soundtrack also invokes their former success with its plucky, upbeat score — primary-colored building blocks for toddlers, transmogrified to inhabit a sonic dimension. Its gutsy intrusiveness is a feature not a bug — do the words “Everything Is Awesome” mean anything to you?

I’d be remiss not to mention the film’s stunning cinematography and special and visual effects. Greg Fraser’s stunning, galactic landscapes show a further evolution in his skill and technique since his staggering work in Dune: Parts One and Two. His camera nudges this new world to swallow you whole and forcibly capture your undivided attention. The final effect is a film that presents a staggering invitation to bet against empathy — and wins the pot every time.

When The Pitt season 1 hit airwaves two weeks before the inauguration of Trump’s second term like a blast of cool air on a hot day: Finally, there was still goodness in this cold world. The emergency room experience might be chaotic and brutal, but its moral arc bent towards justice. Now, in season 2, the refrain I most often hear from those around me keeping up with the show is that you have to wade through its polemics; there’s gold in them there hills, and the price of entry is letting the show pontificate a bit so you can get to the more polished stuff. 

This was enough to get me, a “Pitt season 1 is fine” truther, interested. One of the things I struggled with most in its first season was the way the politics of the show made for a bit too much of a frictionless environment. All the doctors knew the proper vocabulary; endeavored to treat patients with compassionate respect; and understood that the cost of medical care could be prohibitive enough to prevent treatment, even going the extra mile to help come up with alternate forms of payment, or even treatment! I like my doctors like I like my politics (kind and politically correct) as much as the next person. But there was too little texture to the character dynamics when the people felt built up from issues, rather than the other way around. The result was these characters existed in a vacuum, lacking in the depth and nuance in favor of archetypes that could bounce off each other like spinning tops. (If The Pitt really wants to make its bones, it can try to capture what could compel a doctor to do any of the handful of casually atrocious choices made by the average PCP almost everyone I know has a war story of.) 

So color me shocked to find that The Pitt season 2 was almost instantly much more interesting to me. At the same time that Pitt Twitter (Pitter) was imploding because of how fans suddenly found it too hard to barnacle attach themselves to the show’s characters as pure do-gooders, I was getting sucked in by a show that seemed to be really interested in building on its first season. The tide turned on the show a little bit—but season 2 proves it’s trying to build itself to last. 

It helps that The Pitt’s second season lost the singular incident, or “bad guy” (such that the first one did). While season 1 pivoted around a mass shooting event and the fallout of an abnormal day, season 2 was a more or less normal day. Sure, threats of a cyberattack had shut down the board and forced everyone to go analog, and it was the 4th of July so everyone was already a little stretched thin. 

This feels like a key decision for the strength of season 2: In a show that’s sure to have a long life, The Pitt is letting us know early that it’s not going to be all-in on wild trauma. Anybody being in the ER is a bad enough day already! And it lets the season settle into deeper questions.

These moments are not without some spotlight—McKay still has to pointedly tell a newbie to cool it with the fatphobia (an accusation she herself had to field in season 1), and ICE does spend some time being the worst as they lurk around and disrupt the ER—but they’re far less “very special episode” than these moments felt in the first season. 

Instead, the show makes room for the characters, letting them lead the events rather than the other way around. As Langdon returns to the ER, Santos gets to be standoffish and rude and he gets to be a bit bitter and hurt by that. It’s the sort of beautiful conflict The Pitt had the tendency to short shift in season 1: Langdon does deserve a second chance, but Santos is sure that his return comes at the expense of her own reputation. That neither of them can recognize how their own behavior is driving people nuts isn’t a bug—it’s a feature. These are knotty problems, and The Pitt is doing less easy solutions in season 2. 

Moving away from its tone made Robby’s seasonal breaking point feel more earned as well. In season 1, Dr. Robby as a character often felt overloaded, burdened with being the ever-calm voice of reason, always there to say the right thing at the right time. This, of course, feeds into his total breakdown later in the season—check on your strong friends!—but never wholly gelled into a character so much as a story type. He was always more fair than he was gruff, and as maybe the central character (and only real “safe” character in the pitt) he always felt a bit too polished. 

Across the second season, facing so much turmoil within himself, Robby has edges: He’s brusque with his doctors and nurses, more clipped with patients, openly feuding with his replacement. He feels imperfect, banishing ICE not because of their great evil to society but because they are getting in the way. This is not something that could be mistaken for a stance of the show; basically the whole rest of the ER department is openly unnerved by their presence, and spends the rest of the season worried about the nurse they took into custody. Instead, it’s evidence of a man finally written to be a human, rather than an ideal. 

These are not the choices it feels like we’re seeing as often on television these days. While “streaming” might not be a genre, it’s certainly a type of show that feels riddled with tropes unto itself, often shortchanging its characters and stories by cutting corners and always attempting to go bigger. The Pitt (as, it must be said, it has been doing the whole time) is more interested in an old-school television production mode: New seasons every year, flexing the boundaries of what a show is by smartly thinking through what the show needs. 

As confirmed by showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, The Pitt has a clear vision of what it wants to be: the ups and downs of the emergency department as helmed by Dr. Robby. Like The Wire or Chernobyl, it wants to be a show about the institutional decline looming over a public service, the way that wears on the people who pass through it—who need it. But unlike those shows, The Pitt was released to a version of the internet more grossed in comfort characters and headcanons and shaking your head to indicate you disagree with the content. To that kind of (an admittedly not unfindable strawman) fan, it might be hard to understand Robby as a character who is great at giving advice, bad at taking it, and a multifaceted, flawed human just like the rest of them. 

The truth of the matter is The Pitt, like every viral show before it, has shooters who are enjoying a different type of experience. Technically every show has them, but a show’s notoriety tends to be the X factor that brings them to prominence. Think of Breaking Bad’s Skyler haters, or all the people who saw a T-shirt on Megan in the sixth season of Mad Men, totally forgot what show they were watching and asserted with real genuine confidence that she was going to get killed by the Manson family. Call it bad fans, call it first-timers, call it a massive byproduct of the way algorithms have changed the way we converse about art—it’s not that distinct to The Pitt, even if the prominence on social media makes its pitch feel more exaggerated. 

As the evolution of media has driven fan communities to more publicly think of themselves as stakeholders rather than viewers (critics even!), there’s a hunger to ferret out some larger, deeper, secret narrative behind the choices on The Pitt. So it’s important what choices The Pitt made in season 2: To exist more as an extension and evolution of season 1, building out a world of bad days that weren’t the worst days and knotty, unresolved conflicts without a clear moral right. This is a show about adults working a single shift at their tiring job. Don’t expect the same dynamics as your standard workplace comedy. 

Robby’s still got a bit too much focus for my taste; I’ve never really taken to infallible protagonists, even those whose struggles are as clearly (and competently) telegraphed as Robby. He gets to be an asshole and the world still gets to—has to, even—revolve around him. Counter to his showboat-y righteousness, I preferred the quiet resilience of Dr. Al-Hashimi and Nurse Dana, frayed and stoic in equal measure as they, too, weather the shitstorm of the ER and do their best to bring a little grace to it. 

But season 2 recognizing that Robby could be a force for foulness shows me that the show is more interested in building itself for the long-term than passing some self-imposed purity test. In doing so, it shortshifted some characters, writing off Mohan in a way that leaves her story feeling unsatisfied. Her second season thins out her character, an extension of where her attendings slot her more than her own skills (or even arc). The Pitt’s still got a tricky relationship to its balance between realism and narrative: on another show, Mohan’s arc might feel more like character assassination. Here, The Pitt wants to stake it as a person failed to be fully seen by her attendings. Her bosses neglected to see what she could offer, and shunted her off until she had not choice but to leave. (Complicated further by the “drama” fans are picking at behind the scenes.) 

Arguably it’s a “get out of jail free” card the show can play whenever they want to realign something. Indeed, Mohan’s arc feels messy and exactly as Gemmill says he developed it: as he went along, written into a more two-dimensional mirror for Robby. In doing so, The Pitt has staked its claim for what it wants the show to be moving forward: We’re meant to know that the pitt’s turnover is exacting, and some people will be failed by it. It’s old-school TV writing. It’s a harsh world—as anyone trying to read about The Pitt on Twitter can tell you.

The internet’s most powerful archiving tool is in peril. The best! free! restaurant bread! in America. Emerald Fennell is going moor-to-moor to shock people. How a puppeteer made PHM’s Rocky come to life. Revisiting Jay-Z’s hustler masterpiece in his billionaire era. Amanda Peet on getting cancer while your parents are dying. The righteous EV owners who won’t let their cars die.

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Zosha + Cate <3