The Homely Sublime in Space Science Documentary Films: Domesticating the Feeling of Homelessness in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and its Sequel

Abstract

The paper discusses the ways of domesticating the feeling of sublime homelessness when contemplating the realm of outer space in Carl Sagan’s revolutionary television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) and its present-day sequel Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014) hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. Following World War II, a novel trend emerged in the science documentary film fueled by “popular science boom” or the “post-war bonanza” (Gregory and Miller, 37) and characterized by a gradual tendency to move toward more complicated representational extremes. Its form, best exemplified by the late 1970s and 1980s space science documentaries, relied on the scientist-hosted and stunningly realist format as well as a mediated experience of the astronomical and dynamic sublime. Partly contrary to this conception, the new ways of deriving spectator’s pleasure also involved both domesticating and trivializing the productions’ content, observable in references to domestic surroundings as well as familiar cultural and historical conventions, such as the frontier myth or urban sublime of New York City. The paper argues that examined documentaries, seen as multimedia spectacles, tend to domesticate outer space through reconciling the cosmic sublime with the notion of a homely, lived-in place.