The Big Other

Rating: 8/10 (2 November 2015)

At first look, I dismissed The Martian as a boring, repetitive,and overfilled with blah blah and clichés film that could be classified as average the most.At second thought-and view-I discovered that there was a certain logic, and a certain attitude and pace underneath the surface of the movie, a certain way of becoming entertaining in its own way. After reading the book, I return with some remarks regarding what I consider The Martian to be.I believe that the adaptation on the screen is a very faithful one, and despite the arguments about not being explicit enough(or at all) regarding the solutions the main character finds out to the problems he encounters, I think that it captures the essence of the book perfectly. Yet I have to add that in my opinion this essence is not survival, or even science(these are obvious themes, and, of course, targets of the story), but rather Communication, and, as Jacques Lacan would put it, Communication is always a matter of speaking with the Big Other.So, what I first thought of as repetitive-the continuous talking of Mark-turns out to be a means of showing(not necessarily on purpose)the mechanisms of language and the nature of being human. The whole movie and the whole book are a series of distant communications-Mark's discourse at the centre of them-and the main invention of the writer-putting Mark in the place of an evertalking subject-is a brilliant one that does not only enable a narration that would otherwise be impossible(all these actions and events while alone on Mars), but also stresses the need to be tuned to Someone(from the point of view of Mark, it is his need not to feel alone;from our point of view it is the need to be his constant listeners, his others).Being human is being translated through the Big Other, one could say, and that's what the movie and book show, using technology as the mirror through which this translation occurs. So, despite the simplicity of the look-sorry, this is no match to 2001-there is some complex form here that works well, becomes more obvious in the movie, is more powerful in the book, and is perfectly stressed in the ending of the film, when the whole crew of the mission-and the film-are on stage, one by one:the actors in a joyful play that's called Life.There's a starman up there indeed!