rivers & roads

The title Project Hail Mary and the choice to name the protagonist Grace immediately invites a reading through a Christian thematic lens. Sorry Andy "my works aren't political" Weir you were the one who decided to do that. And in Christian* symbolism, the rainbow has a specific meaning: it represents God's promise to Noah after the flood that He would never again send catastrophic weather conditions to wipe out all life on Earth.

Seeing as PHM is about catastrophic weather conditions threatening to wipe out all life on Earth, that's interesting.

So constantly framing Grace in rainbows evokes to me a visual signifier that this is the guy who is a representation of, or agent of, a future that makes good on that promise. Ryland Grace framed in a halo of rainbows is the one who's going to make sure life on Earth continues. It's a visual symbol of hope, life, and the promise that humanity and every species on Earth will live, and by tying it to Grace, symbolically reinforces that he's the one who will make that happen.

This is a follow-up to "I am losing my mind over the lighting of the Hail Mary," which I wrote pretty much to set context and argue It Really Is That Deep. Going into this, I am assuming you also believe the way lighting is used in PHM is intentional.

(Note: My screencaps come from a specific leak of PHM that is shockingly HQ but does have desaturation issues. I've done a HSV Saturation run on several images but not all of them. My screencap folder is like +300 items now and there's only so many hours in the day. If I could buy this on blu-ray TODAY I would.)

Sooooo... what's up with Grace and rainbows, question?

In Grace's very first flashback/recovered memory, one of the first things we see is a ring of light, rainbow. When he finally remembers being betrayed and put onto the Hail Mary against his will, this memory is triggered by the refracting light in Rocky's ship connecting to the rainbow overhead on the day he tried to run.

Refracted light is practically Grace's thumbprint smudged onto every corner of the story, the narrative voice in prismatic form. It truly reaches drinking game levels of ubiquity.

When Stratt first meets Grace, he just happens to be draped in a cloak of rainbow light. More subtly, but still obviously once you're looking for it, when he arrives on the aircraft carrier, he brings along a small halo of colored light.

At its most subtle, it comes from glass. Every time the camera implicitly slides into Rocky's POV, settling over his shoulder to observe Grace through xenonite glass, there are coronas to be found, touching Grace at all times. In the Clock Bros scene, when Grace leans in to observe Rocky's eridian clock, a smudge of refraction just happens to pop up. I cannot emphasize enough how no frame of this movie is safe from the rainbow.

Dr. Ryland Grace adjusts a light and it looks like a dance club in the Castro, it's absurd.

So, down to basics: why? What makes cameras do That Thing?

Well, it's not unique to cameras. It's a matter of glass and white-toned light. Modern camera lenses are either treated with a diffusion layer or have specific filters meant to diffuse light-- to break it up more clearly. When you use a lens without that coating, almost any light source can make this happen.

The rainbow, the prismatic light, it comes from a lack of filter, from the removal of deliberate or accidental barriers. You need light. You need glass. Clarity.

Okay but why, narratively?

Project Hail Mary does very deliberate things with how the Mary feels and the way its shot. The directors have said as much explicitly, but you can feel how distinctive PHM is compared to most other films set in space.

I grabbed the above clip as a clear example of the Mary be set up in such a way that, divorced from the emotional cadence and symbolism of the film, honestly feels like the result of the ship being a rush job. There is so much shadow and darkness and incomplete lighting, it seems like it would interfere with the Science. As we watch Grace working on things with meticulous care, the light moves and circles and cycles and he relies sometimes on additional lamps to see.

Alternatively, it reminds me of how meticulous and thorough lighting has to be in space movies. For instance, any film you've seen where the characters are in a helmet, you may notice the helmet is aggressively lit on the inside to illuminate the actor's face. (Most prominent example is probably Ridley Scott's Prometheus.) This is because natural light is so bad inside helmets, costuming/lighting have to shove a bunch of bulbs in there for illumination or all your expensive Acting is for nothing.

(Left, Prometheus and the infamous bubble helmets. Right, PHM, which seems to have lighting inside the helmet but it always draws the color from the environment and scene.)

Compared to PHM, we have a movie that is still trying to create a clear image for the audience, but is not afraid of shadows nor of darkness. It seems to revel in them, trusting the mood of the scene to contribute as much as the acting.

Back to the clip: That specific shot after Grace catches Blip D when the light swells with the music-- it's a gaze sweeping over Grace and away again, the warm suffused light coming in and out. It's as though space is breathing around him.

This is emphasized by Daniel Pemberton's composition. Pemberton is up there with Lorne Balfe for my favorite film composers working, and he's done a lot of tremendous, experimental, interesting scores. (The Man From UNCLE is a stand-out to me, but he's also done the Spider-verse movies, Birds of Prey, the Slow Horses TV show-- tons of great shit.) As the light peaks, there is an organic sounding "oooooooooooooh" that moves with it, like it's a breath or a sigh.

Look at these side by side.

These are the same shot, seconds apart as the light changes.

So many shots go from bright to dim, vice versa then back again. As Grace paces around the lab, you can even see the space go from completely dark to the light in the foreground, then moving past a point that dims it, then bursting bright again as it passes over the lab itself.

There's an article in Variety about just how the xenonite tunnel was lit with tungsten lights all lined up and programmed to be controlled so the light move as needed. It's unclear if the same rig was used for the Mary but given how light cycles, it's likely at least a similar system.

Another instance of same shot seconds apart. It goes from illuminated to dark then back again. Which begs the question why? What purpose does all this serve to the story, beyond aesthetics?

My answers will not be yours, but here's what I think.

The flashbacks of the movie become increasingly cold. Grace's classroom is warm-toned, but each 'step' into PHM gets colder. This is partially in service to the plot, conveying the sun's dimming. but emotionally, the Mary is golden with life and love and emotional honesty.

But emotional honesty is intense and difficult to handle. Watching a character break stretched over seconds is hard to watch. So the lighting breathes, so the audience breathes, so it's still gentle. Given the emotional climax of the movie, the final flashback, it feels like the audience is being primed to deal with that. To understand that it will hurt, but there will be warmth after. Do not forget you are here. Do not forget that Grace is here. Have faith. Breathe.

Whether that read is correct or not, I think it's clear: it's an artistically deliberate choice.

... Okay now that I've finally written this post I can work on another post.

Yeah, all of this? Was just to establish "it really IS that deep" so we can now talk about Grace's recurring motifs of glass, reflections, and diffused/refracted light. More on that soon.

Under the cut are more cleaned up screenshots for anyone who just wants more pretty pictures.

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

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I like Earth.

bonus:

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

You are transported back in time and into the body of a young noblewoman in the 1400s. Your parents have married you off to an awful, abusive, rapist husband whom literally no one else would marry despite him being very high nobility because he's that terrible. You successfully produce a baby boy and then plan to murder this man for the good of everyone and yourself. Here is the question: do you think you could murder him in a way that is undetectable to the historical people around you? Note: they aren't stupid, you are the prime suspect as the battered wife AND you can't just say poison. Where are you going to buy poison? Do you know anything about poison actually? NO GOOGLING! You were sent back without a plan!

Edit: my notes are full of murder. I love you all

Edit: to clarify about the poison, you can use poison if you actually know how to identify it, I'm saying you can't just go "Poison!" with no knowledge about poison. Buying it probably means they know that poison and you're caught. Your personal knowledge when you read this post is all you have.

Another point of clarity: You went through all that trouble to have a baby without modern medicine so you could get the sweet house after your husband died. That's why you can't be caught. No disappearing.

Edit again: Air embolisms are going on a high shelf because the syringe won't be invented for 350 years. Prove to me that you could make one from scratch, lol

Here’s HSTHETE, the 24 hour comic I drew this year!  Thanks to everybody who followed along on twitter this weekend as I posted these pages <3

It's talked about like being obsessively neat or repeating pointless tasks is the main part of it, when really those are just potential symptoms.

The main thing behind OCD is not being about to turn off a thought. There's a thing where most people can just stop thinking about something. If it's over, it's not relevant, it doesn't matter anymore, people can turn their attention away. For OCD, that mechanism can get stuck. And some thought that was supposed to just temporarily pass through your head just stays there. An image of an object rotating. An anxiety about something bad happening. A wish that you made on a dandelion. These are all things that have at some point gotten stuck in my head, sometimes for years at a time.

The compulsions, the rituals, are the person trying to address the thought so it can go away. After all, if you're worried about the door not being locked you can check the lock. But for someone with OCD, that doesn't make the stuck thought go away. So they check it again. And again. And they made a ritual, maybe if I check it exactly five times, I'll know that it's locked and I can let this worry go.

It helps a little. It feels like you're doing something. But it doesn't solve the problem. Actual therapy for OCD involves not doing the compulsion. Instead, you ignore the thought, move around it, try not to give it space in your life. Your mind won't let the thought go normally, so instead you fill yourself with other thoughts. Other parts of your life.

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.