Sex, Death, and Black Holes: Remarks on Claire Denis's "High Life."

[This review contains spoilers]

            The most out-of-place scene in Claire Denis’s recently released High Life isn’t set in space, but takes place on a regular-looking train on Earth.  A young woman interviews an older man who appears to be an academic of some sort, and who discusses the ethics of sending death-row inmates out into the vastness of space under false pretenses.  The academic bemoans that (despite being told they’re collecting data for science) these poor souls will never return to earth, that their messages to home aren’t being read by anyone, and that all their indentured labor is for naught.  Their imprisonment in the void liberates space on earth.  They will die in darkness, circling the gravitational singularity of a black hole.  This scene is not gifted to the audience as revelation or climax.  It comes relatively early in the film, placed abruptly between scenes of Monte (Robert Pattinson) tenderly caring for a child on a bleak and very non-futuristic-looking spaceship.  Those are world-building moments, glimpses of the environment that Denis is soon to sink her audience into relentlessly—moments that are oddly pushed aside for an anomalous scene on an earthly train.  We never see the young woman or older professor again.  The exchange is a moment of dramatic irony, staged purely to inform viewers that the crew of Denis’s spaceship has no planned return voyage.  We watch them knowing that they will die adrift among the stars.

            Despite its setting and subject matter, High Life is less science fiction than it is a Gothic narrative set in space.  I was reminded of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and Djuna Barnes’s inimitable Nightwood.  I also use the term “narrative” loosely; there’s very little plot to speak of, and multiple false starts.  It’s mostly a series of weird vignettes set on a crumbling spaceship.  Daily reports have to be logged in order to keep life support systems running.  Routine becomes an undifferentiated blur.  Monte bangs on an air conditioning unit to get it to work.  Pipes leak.  Computer monitors look like they’ve been imported from the 1990s.  Even the ship itself (nameless except for a number 7 stamped on its exterior) looks like a boxcar with external engines glued to one end.  Inside the ship are at least two reconnaissance shuttles reminiscent of Doc Brown’s DeLorean if it was built for an eighth grade science fair.  Back to the future my ass; nothing about this film is futuristic.  As the humans on 7 increase their proximity to the black hole, they lapse into primeval inhumanity.  Deep future and deep past converge in the impenetrable sinkholes of deep space.

            Eventually, viewers learn that Monte and the child are the last remaining members of this suicide mission of convicted felons, that the child—named Willow—is actually Monte’s daughter, and that her conception was hardly consensual.  One of the inmates on board 7, a medic named Dibs, conducts experiments on the crew that include harvesting semen from the men and artificially inseminating the women.  The purposes of this are never made entirely clear, although we know that Dibs repeatedly fails to keep newborns alive due to Hawking radiation.  Inferring that Monte and Willow’s mother—an inmate named Boyse—are the strongest of those aboard 7, Dibs sedates the crew, rapes Monte, collects his seed, and inseminates Boyse with it.  She gives birth to Willow before committing suicide by black hole, leaving Monte to his eventually solitary existence caring for the child.  Many of the film’s ostensibly significant plot elements play out as, if not entirely meaningless, then at least irrational.  High Life is an exercise in cruelty at the horrific limits of human existence.

            And yet, much of this feels appropriate when considered within the context of the film’s conceptual framework.  In what is certainly one of the film’s strangest scenes, Dibs enters an undefined space in the bowels of the ship known as “the Box”—a mechanism for autoerotic stimulation and masturbation, replete with all the tools and toys of the trade (one cannot help but wonder what conversations were had on Earth among bureaucrats of the correctional system regarding the inclusion of this contraption on 7).  Anthony Lane’s description in the New Yorker captures the simultaneous surrealism and sensuality of the scene: “We see [Dibs] mostly from behind, sitting up, naked and flailing, and the result reminds you less of a Hollywood love scene, with its bleating raptures, than of a cinquecento drawing: one of those pages, say, on which Michelangelo worries away at a torso in an effort to catch its sinewy twist.”  As Lane implies, Denis’s shots alight upon Dibs’s musculature and physicality, the cascade of her hair along her skin.  There’s no judgment in the editorial structure or cinematographic perspective; the emphasis isn’t any evaluation of hedonism.  Rather, the emphasis is the weirdness of the body itself, its uncanny quality.  We identify with it and we’re repulsed by it.

            After this discomfiting sequence, Denis’s camera lingers on a shot of the Box’s interior: the central apparatus sits vacant and appears to ooze some kind of dark substance.  At other times, the Box secretes a white liquid that might either be semen or breast milk.  Both options are distinct possibilities, but the latter aligns powerfully with an image later in the film: Boyse, after giving birth to Willow, her body covered in breast milk.  The insinuation is that the body is a machine, or little more than a machine.  “My body obeys me,” Boyse claims earlier in the film, after having resisted sexual assault from another inmate.  Her eventual pregnancy is presented almost as a rebuke of this sentiment, orchestrated by the monomaniacal Dibs.  These human bodies, High Life insists, are technologies on par with the decrepit mechanics of the ship that carries them.  They cannot will away their hunger or desires, cannot stamp out the need to shit.  These bodily functions converge in one of the film’s central themes: “Don’t drink your own piss, Willow,” Monte tells his daughter while she’s still a baby; “Don’t eat your own shit. Even if it’s recycled. Even if it doesn’t look like piss or shit anymore. It’s called a taboo.”  Our repulsions toward the body emerge in instances of taboo, or what the philosopher Julia Kristeva calls the abject—the experience of being intimate with what should be kept at a distance.

            It’s always risky to impose too much theory onto artistic pursuits, but in the case of High Life it’s difficult to imagine that Denis isn’t familiar with Kristeva’s work, specifically her seminal book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, released in 1980.  I don’t want to dwell on the connections for too long, but it suffices to say that High Life’s crucial familial relationship—that between Monte and Willow—is rife with the dangers of taboo and abjection.  The two words that we see Monte trying to teach Willow are “dada” and “taboo,” while she adorably mumbles the incoherent sounds of prelinguistic childhood.  Even these moments are strewn with the frustration of bodily containment, as infants and toddlers struggle to mimic the sounds they hear spoken to them, to realize themselves in the image of their parents.  Once again, the body doesn’t obey.  Willow babbles.  She falls as Monte teaches her to walk.  Later in the film, once Willow has grown into a teenager, viewers are presented with an uncomfortable scene in which she has climbed into bed with Monte.  He pushes her away playfully, as a father would a child, calling her a silly girl, but the threat of transgression haunts their lonely lives on 7.  How do human bodies resist their impulses when they’re just machines?  This is the perpetual question that courses through High Life’s plumbing.

            As she grows into a young woman, Willow emerges as the most alien character in the film.  Her dialogue is often stilted and unconvincing.  At times she slides into an accent that seems to lie somewhere between American, British, Irish, and French.  Despite these inconsistencies that serve to alienate viewers, I find them oddly appropriate for a character born in space and raised on archival recordings from Earth.  Willow has no determinate accent because she grew up in a perpetual Pentecost, a rush of languages from Earth being spoken to her through video screens while Monte left her to do repairs to the ship.  As she comes into her own as a speaking woman, she behaves less like a character (in the typical American sense of a character actor) and more like an automaton miming the words and behaviors of others.  When she and Monte discover a second spaceship in the vicinity of theirs that’s filled with dogs (many of which have died), she begs her father for one; but her pleas come across as vapid, not only to Monte (who says no) but to viewers, especially given the odd accent shift that occurs in the span of a single sentence.  Never does she grow into someone who seems comfortably human, but as someone staring up at us from the ascending slope of the uncanny valley.  And in fact, this feels right because she was never really human, at least in Hannah Arendt’s sense of being tied to the earth, of being constituted by our earthbound quality.  Willow was born in space, educated by recordings, bound by rickety mechanics slowly being pulled apart by vacuum, and nurtured by a death-row inmate.

            Ultimately, Monte and Willow maintain the tenderness of their familial relationship.  “I have everything I need,” she tells him, which carries a sense of contentment.  As he watches her climb one of the ship’s ladders, the film invites us to view the shot as a sexualized fixation; but it’s also important to remember an earlier scene with Willow as a baby, and Monte climbing the ladder with her, coaxing her to place her hands on the rails.  These tendencies fluctuate ambiguously, eliciting our unease even as the film rejects what would be the ultimate taboo.  Instead, father and daughter opt for the only exit left to them: a final ride on one of 7’s shuttles straight into the black hole.  As I mention above, I’m reminded of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” whose titular house (which refers both to the last surviving members of the Usher family and their decaying mansion) collapses into the tarn on which it’s built.  Speculations of incest linger over the Usher twins, Roderick and Madeline, manifesting the impossibility of procreation.  All that’s left is for their house to be consumed.  High Life extends Poe’s Gothic genealogy to the depths of space, presenting the collapse of humanity back into the cosmic material whence it emerged.  If there is darkness and danger hovering over every moment in High Life, there is also this promise of secular salvation.  Having arisen from so much chaos, it’s a miracle that we can even experience these dangers in the first place.