Of Strangers in Space and at Shores
How do we honor making room for others?
This year, two of the three movies I’ve gone to see in theaters made a strong impression on me: Project Hail Mary and, more recently, The Odyssey, as envisioned by Christopher Nolan. (The disappointing exception was Supergirl.)
What struck me about both movies was the role of hospitality: what obligation, responsibility, and opportunity do we have toward the strangers, visitors, and guests around us?
In Project Hail Mary, two strangers from different worlds find themselves intertwined in a shared fate, needing to rely on one another.
“Need word. To risk self? To help another?” — Rocky
Nolan’s take on The Odyssey seems to explore of what happens when a foundational principle of social bonds is betrayed: the obligation to treat others as we would want to be treated.
“The clearest view of men is from below.” — Odysseus
I found it interesting that both movies seem to treat hospitality as a virtue. Making room for someone unfamiliar says something morally about the kind of people and communities who practice it.
I may be particularly primed to be sensitive to this. As someone who has lived in multiple places throughout my life, few of which I claim as my own, I have often been conscious of my own “strangeness”. Sometimes that feeling is connected to facets of my identity or experiences that aren’t easy to explain without significant relational trust.
Other times, it comes from having tried to become part of spaces that didn’t work out well. I’ve left some of those spaces with a particular kind of void because there wasn’t much room beyond the relationships and bonds that were already established.
We know our friends, families, colleagues, and others with whom we already share a history. But what happens to the stranger who arrives after?
I think hospitality as a virtue is undervalued often today in the culture and time I live in. We seem to have narrowed it into something utilitarian: we welcome someone because they might become part of an organization or social in-group, contributing to its success or adding to the quantitative numbers of an existing community.
But is hospitality worth practicing when we don’t know what will come of it – or if nothing comes of it at all? Is welcoming someone itself a worthwhile end? Are we better as individuals and as a society when we make room others, or worse off when we don’t? That is part of what I found moving about Project Hail Mary and The Odyssey.
In very different ways, both stories place people in circumstances where they have to decide what making room for another person is worth to them. In both, the answer ultimately moves beyond utility. Another person’s life begins to matter because we have encountered them in a profound way.
I mourn the loss of a broader kind of hospitality that makes deeper social bonds possible in the first place. Reflecting on these films, I’m reminded that we have some agency over the kind of world we want to help create. As much as I can, I want to offer genuine hospitality for its own sake.
I hope those who watch (and rewatch) these stories will consider some of the themes beneath them and ask what role we play in reflecting hospitality toward the strangers among us – and who we become in the practice of doing so. We should also pay attention to what erodes this virtue: our tendency to retreat into established relationships and our instinct to evaluate people primarily according to their current or future usefulness.
The world we create for strangers will eventually be the world we inhabit ourselves. All of us, at some point, will be the person who doesn’t know all the rules, the right people, or the full history of a place, and who may not have much to offer. I hope we can become the kind of people who remember what that feels like.
We might do well to consider how our convictions and actions can point toward deeper truths: that every person has dignity, that people are worthy of care and respect even when we don’t know them well, and that sometimes we may be called to risk something of ourselves for the sake of a stranger.
Full disclosure: I’ve not (yet) read the original works these are adapted from: Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary and Homer’s The Odyssey.