Republished in full on the official website: 8 October 2026. Source edition: the Chinese manuscript dated 8 October 2026.
Editorial introduction
The Moon, the control tower, and the science-fiction grammar of Shoot Self with You
Abstract: Beginning with dialogue in Shoot Self with You about returning to Earth, going to the Moon, calls from a control tower, and the impromptu introduction of aliens, this essay examines how science fiction reorganizes an interior scene through words of direction, vocal relationships, and narrative proposals without relying on fully realized extraterrestrial landscapes. Drawing on Darko Suvin's cognitive estrangement and a limited comparison with Godard's Alphaville, it argues that science fiction does more than show another world: it can deprive the world before us of its self-evident place. The film's Moon and Earth are not fixed symbols awaiting decoding. Their uses change through leaving, returning, accelerating, falling, and calling. When aliens are proposed on the spot as a way to restore dramatic conflict, the film also exposes the production of enemies, goals, and endings in genre narrative as a process open to discussion. The essay consequently shifts world-building from the scale of scenery to the generation of spatial rules, examining how a science fiction not yet stabilized into form can make being together cease to mean sharing the same map.
- Shoot Self with You: project page: background and related historical articles.
- Public screening edition / Shoot Self with You: the complete screening edition, distinguished from derivative archival edits.
Earth Became a Distant Place
The Moon, the control tower, and the science-fiction grammar of Shoot Self with You
Relational Image Theory · Essay Five
Abstract: Beginning with dialogue in Shoot Self with You about returning to Earth, going to the Moon, calls from a control tower, and the impromptu introduction of aliens, this essay examines how science fiction reorganizes an interior scene through words of direction, vocal relationships, and narrative proposals without relying on fully realized extraterrestrial landscapes. Drawing on Darko Suvin's cognitive estrangement and a limited comparison with Godard's Alphaville, it argues that science fiction does more than show another world: it can deprive the world before us of its self-evident place. The film's Moon and Earth are not fixed symbols awaiting decoding. Their uses change through leaving, returning, accelerating, falling, and calling. When aliens are proposed on the spot as a way to restore dramatic conflict, the film also exposes the production of enemies, goals, and endings in genre narrative as a process open to discussion. The essay consequently shifts world-building from the scale of scenery to the generation of spatial rules, examining how a science fiction not yet stabilized into form can make being together cease to mean sharing the same map.
1. What interests me is less how to get to the Moon than why anyone needs to return to Earth
If someone standing right in front of you says they are preparing to return to Earth, transportation is not your first problem.
The sentence has quietly withdrawn a premise that ordinarily needs no explanation: are we not already on Earth?
It does not immediately supply another landscape, yet changes how you understand the space before you. The same room can suddenly no longer establish its location through tables, chairs, walls, and doors alone. The person a few steps away may also be orienting your relationship through another set of coordinates.
I think this change is what most deserves study in the science-fiction dimension of Shoot Self with You. It need not transport bodies to a distant world before shifting the world. A sentence is enough to turn the most familiar place into a destination not yet reached.
This essay therefore does not immediately translate the Moon into the ideal, or Earth into reality. Those answers arrive too quickly. They tell us what every departure and return should mean before we have listened to how the people use the words.
I would rather ask: why must the same Earth sometimes be returned to and sometimes gone to? Why can the same Moon mean acceleration, yet also become a place to wait for another person? Why is an alien, scarcely described, suddenly needed?
Science fiction need not begin with something appearing far away. It can begin when here can no longer be taken for granted as here.
2. Science fiction is not an interpretation added afterward
The introduction to The Last Rehearsal, published on 14 August 2023, already established a war between humanity and an alien race, unequal forces, a negotiation that would decide their fate, and a rehearsal before that negotiation. Immediately after this genre narrative, the text shifted from civilizational conflict to loneliness, lovers, and the Moon. The science-fiction premise and private desire were juxtaposed in a contemporaneous text, not merely associated by critics afterward.[1]
This juxtaposition matters. It means that two not entirely identical scales were present from the outset.
One takes humanity, alien races, war, and the future as its units. It requires the identification of sides, conflicts, and objectives.
The other takes a particular person as its unit: why can he not be loved, why does he want to leave, and why does he need to imagine a different destination?
If we simply treat the second scale as the metaphorical content of the first, we arrive at a familiar account: cosmic war is really an inner war. Science fiction then becomes a shell that can be removed once understood. Once the psychological content has been explained, the Moon and the aliens are no longer necessary.
I do not think the strongest science fiction works that way.
It does more than find an extravagant backdrop for ready-made emotions. It may change how emotions can be organized. Losing contact is not quite the same as not speaking. A return flight is not quite the same as leaving someone. The relation between a control tower and an astronaut is not quite the same as persuasion between two acquaintances.
Once these words enter a scene, they bring new identities, actions, and temporal expectations. They connect a private predicament to a larger imaginative system, which in turn begins to change that predicament.
The question is therefore not whether the film packages a love story as science fiction, but whether the language of science fiction actually changes how the story acts.
3. Suvin's insight: estrangement does more than make things strange
Darko Suvin locates science fiction's core in the interaction of cognition and estrangement. Through an imaginative framework different from the author's empirical environment, a work turns the existing world's norms into questions that can be examined anew. His account does not restrict science fiction to technological prediction. What matters is whether new conditions can produce grounded understanding, rather than spectacle alone.[3]
This helps us step away from a checklist of spaceships, robots, and special effects. The absence of enormous extraterrestrial sets need not mean the absence of science fiction; the presence of many futuristic devices does not guarantee that they have changed how a work thinks.
Yet Suvin also places a demanding requirement on P4.
Casually saying that one has gone to the Moon is certainly not enough. Whether a word changes a world depends on its consequences: how do people reposition themselves? Which actions become reasonable? Which demands acquire new identities? What does the previous reality reveal as a result?
Applying this demand to Shoot Self with You is not an attempt to prove that it fully satisfies a genre definition. On the contrary, its universe does not appear as a clear and consistent setting from beginning to end.
What merits study is whether the instability itself has a structure. Science-fiction words may be merely lyrical at one moment and begin organizing action at the next. A fantasy that initially helps someone leave an immediate relationship may subsequently connect them to another order of calls and reports.
Estrangement truly occurs not when we cannot recognize what is before us, but when we can recognize it and can no longer understand it in the old way.
4. “Returning to Earth” and “going to Earth”: one word changes the point of origin
The official dialogue index locates an expression about preparing to return to Earth at approximately 1:33:22. At around 1:41:32, the related exchange uses the expression “going to Earth.” The timecodes below locate dialogue in that public index; they are not presented as shot records remeasured frame by frame.[2]
“Returning” and “going” can certainly be used loosely in everyday speech. We cannot announce a complete ontological transformation on the basis of one changed word.
Yet hearing them together still lets us identify two distinct spatial premises.
Returning ordinarily presupposes a place already connected with the subject. It suggests that here is not everything: there is another location I can call my original place.
Going does not have to promise that the destination previously belonged to me. It may be unfamiliar, not yet attained, or even a destination that exists only in its articulation.
Earth's status becomes unstable. It first appears as somewhere one can return to, then as somewhere one has yet to reach. No map firmly fixes the point of origin; it moves between utterances.
I am especially interested in this shift because it deprives reality of its automatic interpretive advantage.
If Earth is somewhere one needs to return to, or even go to, then “reality” is no longer simply an unquestioned fact immediately present. It becomes a belonging not yet accomplished: I know the place exists, but can I actually live there in the same way as before?
We cannot leap from this to a diagnosis of anyone's mental state. A person using different directions within a performance may be working through a role, imagination, provisional narration, or verbal experimentation. This essay examines how such utterances change cinematic space, not which planet the speaker actually believes they inhabit.
What is most interesting is not that someone imagines the Moon as a second home, but that Earth loses its certainty as the first.
5. The control tower is more than a location not filmed
At approximately 1:33:49, the index records a call from the tower to Astronaut No. 7. It interweaves with questions about whether the other person comes from fantasy, and then introduces lost contact and a demand to submit a psychological monitoring report.[2]
These words do not merely extend the story's geography. They also establish a set of relationships.
Someone can call; someone must answer. A person receives a number; a silence becomes loss of contact. Body and emotion can be organized into a report, and returning is no longer only an individual's movement, but may belong to a system of operations.
In other words, science fiction brings more than distance. It also brings a specification of how the distant should connect with here.
Two spatial functions of sound can be distinguished.
One voice comes from somewhere temporarily outside the frame. Someone speaks beyond a door; although the camera does not turn toward them, we still place them within a continuous space.
Another voice establishes, through naming and role relations, a space the scene did not previously need to possess. The tower's effect depends not only on whether it is physically elsewhere, but also on whether a voice is issued as a call and someone receives it from the position of an astronaut.
The first makes unfilmed space perceptible; the second participates in defining what the space is.
These functions can intertwine in cinema. A voice has an actual position of utterance while carrying a fictional function inconsistent with that position. The listener hears someone speaking while also beginning to build another map within what is said.
We need not actually leave the room for a set of communication relations already to have divided it anew.
6. Space has not abolished everyday forms of organization; it has magnified them
The Moon readily appears as a distant place of freedom. It is light, far away, and seems able to remove someone from an existing predicament.
The tower, numbering, lost contact, and reports complicate this. Spaceflight means not only escaping relationships but entering a situation highly dependent on connection: where are you, are you online, can you account for your state?
In this reading, leaving does not mean withdrawing from every structure. It changes how one is connected.
Within a private scene, someone may be asked why they remain silent. Within a spaceflight context, silence can become a communications failure. The former may still be understood as an emotional question; the latter acquires the urgency of missions and procedures.
This does not make the two situations identical. Precisely the change of genre makes an ordinary demand reveal a new structure. Numbers make people identifiable; reports make states communicable; calls can mean rescue and support. But these capacities also require people to be locatable, classifiable, and able to explain themselves in a particular way.
Science fiction is thus no pristine zone of escape from reality. Reality's organizational habits accompany people into the cosmos, and may become clearer there.
I think this is a stronger contradiction in Shoot Self with You than “wanting to escape to the Moon.” A person imagines distance from the immediate world, yet the language used to imagine that distance already contains the immediate world's demands for communication, tasks, and accounts of the self.
The distant need not lie outside the existing order. It can be the place where that order, magnified, first reveals its outline.
7. A destination becomes a speed
The dialogue following approximately 1:41:33 describes going to the Moon as continued acceleration, returning to Earth as slowing down, and then introduces falling. This is not a technical account to be tested against aerospace physics. It is turning direction into a way of experiencing time.[2]
The Moon is no longer defined primarily by surface features, distance, or conditions for habitation, but by increasingly rapid movement. Earth likewise does not first appear as familiar ground, but as the direction in which deceleration and gravity take effect again.
Space becomes more than a container for action. Places begin to carry rhythms.
Notably, return does not automatically restore stability here. We ordinarily expect coming home to stop movement and restore the subject to the ground. In these words, however, downward can mean falling rather than landing safely.
I do not immediately interpret this as a binary of ideal and reality. Acceleration itself can be exciting and dangerous; slowing down can mean relief or loss of support. Neither direction is permanently assigned good or evil.
More precisely, speed and gravity are being used to establish perceptible coordinates for a situation difficult to describe directly.
Instead of asking what the Moon ultimately symbolizes, we can observe how it connects with acceleration, which verbs accompany it, and whether it subsequently acquires different uses. Spatial meaning then comes from movement among words, not a dictionary of symbols written in advance.
At this moment, science fiction does not paint emotion a backdrop. It proposes a way for emotion to move.
This also explains how an apparently implausible sentence can have formal force. Its job is not to report an actual flight, but to change the speeds and directions through which viewers imagine someone's situation.
8. Godard's Alphaville: the future can emerge from the city before us
Alphaville offers an important comparison, though not one to apply mechanically. The Centre Pompidou's preserved screening description presents a city governed by a computer, where emotions are suppressed. It also quotes Godard's 1965 comparison of the film with Breton's Nadja: one walks in Paris, and the surreal appears out of Paris.[4]
What I borrow is not a shared subject between the films, but a formal question: the reality before us need not first be entirely replaced in order to become another world.
A place can be estranged through how it is named, how sound gives it an order, and how people act within it. Cinema can preserve recognizable material surfaces while changing the coordinates through which we understand them.
But this does not make P4 a “miniature Alphaville.” Godard's film organizes detective action, computer domination, and the problem of words within a world with a definite direction. The spaceflight vocabulary of Shoot Self with You, by contrast, continually interweaves with present-tense arguments, explanations of roles, and provisional proposals for the plot.[2][4]
In the former structure, we chiefly follow someone into a strange city that already has its institutions. In the latter, we also hear people temporarily establishing, contesting, or replacing the strange world.
P4's emphasis thus concerns not only what happens inside a world, but how a world is proposed and whether it can be sustained.
The comparison's value lies in difference rather than stylistic resemblance: one work organizes everyday space into another world; another may leave the process of organizing that other world itself openly on display.
9. The alien as a tool for repairing the plot
A group of lines beginning around 1:50:02 imagines an alien appearing, arranges a fight with it, and finally proposes defeating it. This material changes my question: rather than only pursuing where the alien might be hiding, why not first ask why the scene needs an alien now?[2]
An enemy can supply several things at once.
It gives a problem an identifiable external source, gives action an object, makes victory and defeat recognizable results, and lets someone temporarily at an impasse become a fighter again.
Difficulties previously entangled in several directions become a line that can advance: an enemy appears, the subject takes up the fight, and an ending is confirmed.
This is not a general dismissal of science-fiction combat plots. Antagonistic structures can certainly carry complex understanding. What matters here is how the structure is proposed on the spot, as if a scene that has not found its shape needs to retrieve from a genre repertoire a means of restoring momentum.
I understand this moment as the film displaying “plot repair.” Instead of quietly arranging an enemy for its people, the work lets us hear how an enemy becomes necessary.
A very specific irony results: the alien has not yet acquired a personality, but the battle has already acquired a use. We do not know who it is, yet already know what it is meant to help the story accomplish.
The people seem to want not only to leave a predicament, but to turn it into a genre whose problems they finally know how to solve.
In this sense, the most interesting alien is not a hidden ultimate symbol. It is the visible shape of a narrative need.
10. I do not want to announce too soon that the alien is really the camera
P4's later article “The Aliens Never Appeared” proposes a powerful reading. Rather than wait for the alien race to appear, it understands the camera and people's need to be recorded as the film's nonhuman force.[5]
This reading can connect the science-fiction premise to the question of the medium. But I do not want to turn it into a universal key.
Once the alien is identified with the camera, other uses can readily seem like detours. The tower, lost contact, an improvised battle, returning to Earth, and accelerating toward the Moon all converge on a single answer about the control exercised by images.
Yet these words may do more than one kind of work in the film.
An alien can be an opponent, but also someone for a meeting that has not yet occurred. The Moon can supply distance, direction, and an imagined rendezvous. Earth can change between a place of return and a destination. The tower organizes connections between near and far.
Instead of reducing each word to a fixed referent, I would rather study how the words form different uses, and how changes of use direct a scene anew.
This does not invite the arbitrariness of “any interpretation will do.” On the contrary, interpretation must become more specific: it must explain why a word appears here, why it connects to this sentence, and why it later returns differently.
The richness of science-fiction language lies not in a word's capacity to symbolize infinitely, but in a film's capacity to change that same word's use concretely.
If an interpretation makes every occurrence merely prove the same thing again, the loss of difference may belong to the interpretation rather than the film.
11. A low budget need not mean the absence of a world; it can mean another way to build one
Not showing extraterrestrial landscapes does not automatically mean that a creator deliberately chose a sophisticated use of absence. Missing images can result from limited resources, or simply from unfinished form. We cannot praise everything unfilmed as freedom for the viewer's imagination.
Conversely, world-building does not mean turning every planet and device into a visible object.
In the passages analyzed here, a smaller unit can be proposed: a character's identifying number, a calling procedure, a place to which someone must return, or a set of directions involving acceleration and falling. These do not provide a complete universe, but may provide spatial rules sufficient to change the scene.
Whether those rules become cinema depends further on sound, body, image, and time. If someone speaks a cosmic fantasy while the image merely registers it from the side, science fiction may remain primarily within the dialogue's content. But if words reposition the same face within a role, give a pause the double possibility of hesitation and lost contact, or give a nearby voice the structure of a distant connection, the film does more than tell of faraway places. It makes distance participate in organizing the immediate scene.
At that point, a low-budget film need not be understood as industrial cinema on a smaller scale. It can shift resources from representing extraterrestrial surfaces to making spatial rules perceptible.
But this is a capacity that must be realized, not an aesthetic entitlement automatically awarded by scarcity.
Language can open a universe within a room. Cinema must still decide how that universe enters our hearing and our looking.
12. Can science fiction's not-yet-stable form itself become form?
Returning to Suvin, the difficulty remains. He emphasizes more than surprise at an anomalous word: imaginative conditions must unfold into relations within a world that can be thought through.[3]
Are the constantly changing spatial expressions in Shoot Self with You merely arbitrary associations? If the Moon can become anything at any moment, the tower disappear, and an enemy be inserted at will, does the film still have a recognizable form?
This objection must exert genuine pressure. It cannot be dismissed with “generation means uncertainty.”
My answer is that consistency need not reside entirely inside the fictional world. It can reside in how different proposals for worlds collide.
Someone speaks of a return flight as a way of leaving a relationship; someone else calls through the communications of a mission; another tries to insert an enemy to restore conflict. What we hear may be more than disconnected fantasies. It may be a group of people using different narrative methods to determine what should happen next in the same scene.[2]
The work need not thereby complete a stable science-fiction story. It can record and organize the process of “science fiction being made.”
Process, however, grants no exemption either. It must make differences among proposals legible, so that the arrival of a particular language actually changes the scene's direction. Otherwise, incompatible premises remain unprocessed material.
This essay therefore does not call every break profound. It offers a more specific criterion: do these incompatible coordinates let viewers feel that the people are pursuing different endings, and may not even yet securely inhabit the same story?
Conclusion: Earth is no longer the common ground beneath every story
I think this science-fiction material gives Relational Image Theory a dimension not previously developed sufficiently: relationships occur not only between people, but also in how people determine a world together.
Occupying the same room means that bodies share some of an environment. It need not mean everyone understands in the same way where they are, why they remain, or where they can go next.
The Moon, Earth, the tower, and aliens supply concrete language for this difference. They give a scene not only different opinions but different systems of direction. Leaving can be heard as a return flight; silence can be rewritten as lost contact; stagnation can be required to turn into battle; and a place long inhabited may suddenly need to be reached anew.
The power of these words does not come only from their enormous scale. What they really change is the point of origin.
When someone needs to return to Earth, reality is no longer the stable floor on which every fantasy stands. Reality itself becomes a place at a distance, requiring orientation and perhaps with no known route of arrival yet.
The science-fiction dimension of Shoot Self with You may therefore lie less fully in how distant a universe it imagines than in how it deprives the group's shared position before us of its apparent naturalness.
They do not necessarily possess a common world first and then disagree within it. Their disagreement may arise while they are trying to say which world they inhabit at all.
I would call this a serious, unspectacular form of world-building within the film. The universe has not fully unfolded visually, yet has already entered instructions, directions, and grammar, changing the room's dimensions.
The Moon can be an imagined destination.
What truly unsettles me is that Earth, too, begins to need imagining.
Notes and references
[1] P4 Theater, “Last Rehearsal | The Last Rehearsal of Shoot Self with You,” 14 August 2023. Used as a contemporaneous public narrative premise, not equated with a fixed script for every passage of the finished film. https://p4theater.cn/articles/2023/2023-08-14-Last-Rehearsal-%E4%BA%BA%E7%B1%BB%E6%8A%95%E9%99%8D%E6%B4%BE%E4%B9%8B-%E6%9C%80%E5%90%8E%E7%9A%84%E6%8E%92%E7%BB%83-fd7409a2e5/
[2] P4's Shoot Self with You dialogue search and visual timeline, and the search-index.json loaded by its webpage. This essay read the index's dialogue, start and end times in seconds, and source fields. It did not adopt the accompanying concept tags as argumentative conclusions or treat the mapping of names as independent speaker verification. Its principal comparisons concern approximately 1:33:22–1:34:30 (Earth, fantasy, tower, monitoring reports); 1:41:21–1:41:50 (returning/going to Earth, acceleration/deceleration, falling); and 1:50:02–1:50:24 (the improvised alien and proposed battle). These timecodes locate index entries, not frame-by-frame measurements newly made for the essay. Interface: https://sswy.p4theater.top/index.php Data address read for this study: https://sswy.p4theater.cn/search-index.json
[3] Darko Suvin, “Estrangement and Cognition,” in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale University Press, 1979); author-authorized republication in Strange Horizons, November 24, 2014, with a 2014 postscript. This essay principally refers to Sections 1.3, 2.2, and 2.4–2.5 on estrangement, cognition, and the distinction from popular science. It does not adopt all Suvin's normative assessments of fantasy literature, nor classify this film as fully satisfying his genre definition. https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/articles/estrangement-and-cognition/
[4] Centre Pompidou, “Alphaville,” screening record, May 29, 2006. The page preserves a synopsis and quotes Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 remarks in Télérama on the relation between Alphaville and André Breton's Nadja. This essay uses the quotation and film information preserved in that institutional screening record; it does not claim to have consulted the full 1965 interview. Its comparison of P4 and Godard is a limited formal comparison, not a judgment of historical influence. https://www.centrepompidou.fr/fr/programme/agenda/evenement/cBEX7A Additional cross-check: La Cinémathèque française, “Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution.” https://www.cinematheque.fr/film/48840.html
[5] “The Aliens Never Appeared,” P4 Theater article archive, 27 June 2026. This essay treats it only as a later interpretation published on P4's website, debating it concerning the alien's multiple functions within scenes. It does not invoke its attributed author's biography as independent scholarly authority. https://p4theater.cn/articles/2026/2026-06-27-%E5%A4%96%E6%98%9F%E4%BA%BA%E4%BB%8E%E6%9C%AA%E5%87%BA%E7%8E%B0-64c9f3e1dd/
Webpages and data checked: 8 October 2026.
Website supplement: chapter material navigation
Materials and original sources
- Shoot Self with You — P4 Theater, project entry
This series follows the complete Chinese manuscripts dated 8 October 2026. The text retains the original scope of its sources and the limits placed on its accounts of theory. The editorial series navigation is not part of the original manuscript.
Webpage: https://p4theater.cn/knowledge/relational-image-earth/