The Gravity of Melancholia : a critique of speculative realism

Gravity and Melancholia both direct our attention toward the nonhuman things that inhabit our world. Reading these films in terms of how they call into question the privileged position from which the human judges the relative significance of things, this essay considers the recent theoretical emergence of speculative realism and object oriented ontology, both of which endorse an utterly non-relational conception of human/object interaction. Exploring how the experience of loss attracts both buoyancy (Gravity) and ponderance (Melancholia), I argue that Speculative Realism's defiance of gravity cannot be sustained; we cannot do without the human as the basis for our oblique contact with alterity.