[SPOILERS if you haven’t watched it yet and don’t want to be spoiled, go watch it n o w and then maybe return 🙂‍↕️]

Project Hail Mary is joyful and beautiful and uplifting but for me, primarily, it was a movie about climate change. And what mainly got to me, was the idea that even people who refuse to jump over their shadow and act selflessly can learn empathy. And that life, ultimately, is the thing to combats climate change.

Grace, as the protagonist, is a white American man which I’ve seen criticised before but in this instance it felt very fitting. It’s no coincidence that he’s from capitalism central. Capitalism and privileged white men are the driving force of climate change. So forcefully sending him to to space and having him grow and improve through meaningful connections felt very poignant!

The movie felt like an antithesis to both „humanity is awful and should be eradicated to save the word” AND to human exceptionalism. It acknowledges that humans suck sometimes and that we are a major part of the problem but humans are also part of the solution! Because once we start empathising with things we don’t quite understand like, say, a non water-based life form, we have the ability to try and improve things.

I have a lot of emotions about post-humanism and non-anthropocentric approaches to climate change and Project Hail Mary manages to pretty much perfectly embody my feelings on the matter. Humanity needs to stop centring itself and start to move past anthropocentrism. Considering the vastness of the universe and all the beauty that lies in BOTH human and non-human existence allows us to perhaps put the environment before our own comfort sometimes.

Left behind

Overgrown

stane jagodič, assemblage 01: horizon, 1980 02: profile, 1999 03: new horizon, 2003 - 07

New music coming in 2026!!!!!

''The discussion of politics is, of course, always itself political. As Jacques Rancière suggests, what is at stake is the definition of politics: “Disagreement” and “dissensus” do not imply that politics is a struggle between camps; they imply that it is a struggle about what politics is, a struggle that is waged about such original issues as: “where are we?,” “who are we?,” “What makes us a we,” “what do we see and what can we say about it that makes us a we, having a world in common?” Those paradoxical, unthinkable objects of thinking mark. . .the places where the question “How is this thinkable at all?” points to the question: “who is qualified for thinking at all?” (116)

Again, we are part of a common world, but a changed one, and one that is still changing rapidly for the immediate benefit of some at the expense of a great many others. In this context, to ask who is qualified for politics, what counts as political, is to ask who counts full stop. In Western cultures the questions of who counts is intimately bound up with the question of what counts as culture.''

-HELENA FEDER

Reading this I couldn't help but think that a huge part of the dehumanization the media preforms upon Palestinians now is part of the same performance it does upon Arab and many rich-non-white-male groups, simply because they don't have financial power to keep their cultures relevant... And so we fall into a circle of media literacy and financial/political favouritism... aka 'the rich like to hear the sound of their own voice.'