Rage Against the Dying
by Andrew Collins
“For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled,” writes Carl Sagan in his book The Pale Blue Dot. “Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, spoke for wanderers in all epochs and meridians: ‘I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas . . .’ Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds — promising untold opportunities — beckon. Silently, they orbit the sun, waiting.”
Into Sagan’s cosmic longing comes Interstellar. In true Christopher Nolan fashion, it delivers a story not quite like anything we have seen before, turning the mysterious far reaches of the universe into a philosophical playground and the canvas for a deeply personal story of love, loss, deceit, betrayal, and hope. The drama swings between the personal struggle of four astronauts who have left Earth behind – possibly for life – and the epic quest to find a new world and save the human race from a planet that can no longer sustain it.
The film follows certain cinematic tropes, of course, finding a comfortable place in the sci-fi genre beside films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Contact, and Sunshine. Yet even after last year’s space-hit Gravity, and given the cultural ubiquity of Star Wars and Star Trek, Interstellar charts its own course. Though not as groundbreaking a piece of cinema as Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, Interstellar parallels the classic in that it meditates upon man’s destiny in the universe by sending him into space. It refuses to believe that the human story ends here on Earth – in the dirt.
Among Nolan’s film portfolio, Interstellar compares most naturally to Inception. Both are full of dreamlike worlds, mind-bending physics, and remarkable imagination. Interstellar takes us through universe-jumping wormholes, into the new dimensions of black holes, and onto the surface of new worlds full of giant waves and frozen clouds. The dreams of Inception, though whimsical, had a technological aspect (within the film world) in that they could be engineered. The new worlds of Interstellar likewise feel ethereal and unreal, yet compellingly plausible.
The film begins on a climate-fatigued Earth, where giant sandstorms rise in the distance like an ancient biblical plague. Our heroes then journey through wormholes to a planet full of nothing but giant waves, where an hour equals seven years of normal time. They encounter an ice planet where frozen clouds hover in the air. And in the end humanity survives inside a cylindrical space station full of corn fields and houses and baseball stadiums, that conjures images from Inception when Ariadne bends the blocks of Paris up and over upon themselves.
Nolan’s affinity for puzzles and games comes out here. As James Verini described it, his films “are contests with rules and phrases, gambits and defenses, many losers and the occasional victor.” In the case of the best games and stories, “when we fail, we labor to better understand the constraints, to figure out creative ways to live within them.” Laying the groundwork for these stories, however, requires extensive exposition. Interstellar and Inception leave the audience confused at first viewing, but nonetheless satisfied by the story as a whole and eager to play again.
Such confusion is understandable, because the plot depends on string theory – a term sufficient in itself to cause most eyes to glaze over. The story was crafted with the assistance of Kip Thorne, a leading scientist in quantum physics who served as a producer for the film. In fact, their work to create scientifically accurate visual effects led the creation of groundbreaking computer models that Thorne plans to use in a series of scholarly papers.
Few directors have the audacity to make a film with a plot contingent on theoretical physics, and, unsurprisingly, this is the point of the film most subject to criticism. It requires the greatest suspension of disbelief to go along when (SPOILER) Cooper (the film’s protagonist played brilliantly by Matthew McConaughey) makes his final plunge into the corridors of the 5th dimension inside a black hole.
No matter how much you try to explain it, this part of the film on which the conclusion rests doesn’t make sense — try as we might to embrace the possibility of humans evolving into “bulk beings”. At the end of the film Cooper finds himself in a library of moments pulled out of the space-time continuum that just happen to show him the day he said goodbye to his daughter and left earth. Such a place was constructed by a future incarnation of humanity that found a way to enter a fifth dimension and travel at will through time. This is how a wormhole appeared near earth leading to other habitable planets. It was put there by people from the future so that people in the past could discover a new world and ensure that the human race lived on.
Many critics felt that these generous gaps in reasoning push the bounds of probability and necessity too far. Common logic understandably rushes to shoot down the film’s constructs. How can people from the future provide the means of survival to those in the past?
Gravity is the one thing that isn’t bound by time, we are told in the film. To most people, that line means absolutely nothing, but it works to make the plot seem just plausible enough to help the audience suspend disbelief. The raw ingenuity of the plot device overrides the absurdity of it. And when you start talking about new dimensions, all bets are off, anyway.
To dismiss Interstellar for its astrophysical leaps would be to miss the point that this is, in fact, a movie. As with Inception, we aren’t supposed to quite understand how it all works. (How can we when the theoretical science that informs the film falls far short of actual comprehension? Thorne has himself said that, “we are several decades away from a definitive understanding [of the possibility of time travel], 20 or 30 years, but it could be sooner than that.”)
Rather, Interstellar should be applauded for its originality – for daring to be smart, for trusting its audience to stick with a plot that invokes advanced theoretical science. Frankly, it’s likely a bit too smart for the average American filmgoer, but it is profoundly stimulating for viewers who like to have their minds challenged. Rather than diluting itself to the intellectual common denominator of the mass audience, it makes its broad appeal through the human heart – namely, the unbreakable bonds of the father-daughter relationship.
As Nolan said himself, “What we’ve learned in the journey of making the film is it’s really about human beings . . . what our place is in the universe. . . . The further you travel out in the universe, the more you realize it’s all about what’s in (the heart).”
Interstellar’s dual engagement of the mind and heart keeps the film afloat in spite of its peculiar premise.
The story works because Nolan has mastered the masking of plot holes (perhaps we should generously call them “absurdities”) with carefully crafted characters and meditations on human nature. The how and why of Cooper’s peering into his daughter’s bedroom from the center of a black hole is overwhelmed by his heart-wrenching, muted pleading with his past self. “Stay, you idiot!” he yells as watches himself walk out of his daughter’s bedroom, never to return. “Stay!”
Interstellar explores the emotional consequences of its characters’ decisions and pushes them to their human limits. Cooper does not merely leave humanity behind to adventure through wormholes in an attempt to save the human race. He grapples constantly with his decision to leave his daughter and son on Earth with a slim chance of ever seeing them again. Similarly, his fellow astronaut, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), isn’t merely out to find humanity a new home, she’s out in space clinging to the slimmest of chances that she’ll reunite with the man she loves.
As in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (where the mission is to detonate a nuclear device inside the sun to keep it from dying out), Interstellar’s cast struggles with the tension between what is good for humanity as a species and what is good for themselves as individuals.
And even as the film contemplates the impending extinction of the human race, it captures the sense of destiny inherent in our existence. Dylan Thomas’ famous poem is quoted several times as a mantra, almost to the point of excess:
“Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
This is used in reference both to the individual and the human race as a whole, which faces an earth increasingly incapable of sustaining it.
“Man was born on earth,” says Cooper. “He wasn’t meant to die here.”
The line hearkens back to Kubrick’s opening sequence of ape-men discovering the first tools, and it looks out to space as the next step in evolution. But where Space Odyssey taps into fears over technology surpassing and ultimately destroying our humanity, Interstellar uses its robots for comic relief, fearing instead the most fundamental enemy of all: ourselves. Its honest, almost cynical portrayal of the dark side of human nature stands in tension with Cooper’s optimism that we will find a way to keep going. Most of us can relate to that tension in our current world.
The film strikes another familiar chord with its take on technology. Nolan imagines a near-future semi-dystopia where the world is experiencing a global dust bowl. Humanity has achieved some sort of cooperative organization. Militaries have been disbanded, and the world’s resources bent to food production. Meanwhile, NASA has fallen out of favor in the public eye and is relegated to a top-secret station. Schools teach that the lunar landings were propaganda meant to bankrupt the Soviets, much to Cooper’s chagrin. Space travel and the spirit of adventure are out of vogue in his world, just like in our own.
The so-called “golden quarter” — that period from 1945 to about 1971 that brought us electronics, nuclear power, television, and space travel — has come and gone. Today, with our GPS navigation systems and capacity for mining big data, we still live in an era of mind-boggling innovation, but not in the same way. Technologist Peter Thiel put it this way: “We wanted flying cars, we got 140 characters.”
“I grew up in a time when to be an astronaut was the highest ambition of any child,” Nolan told The Wall Street Journal. “I felt that had fallen off greatly over the last couple of decades. It has been a period of great technological change — very much related to what’s in your pocket and what’s in your living room.”
Cooper’s father channels this sentiment at one point early in the film as he reminisces about a time when it seemed like something new and wonderful was invented every day. “We used to look up and wonder at our place in the stars,” he says, sitting on the porch looking up at the night sky. “Now we just look down at our place in the dirt.”
Today we still live with a mix of hope and disillusion, but that hope no longer takes the form of adventure. Zeal for the sort of new-world adventures like those of Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus, or today’s Jacques Cousteau has dimmed. What happened to that drive to explore that final frontier? Have we become content with this world?
Let us hope that we have not lost this raw desire for adventure.
Perhaps Interstellar can help rekindle the lost imagination of our generation, showing us what might actually be within human grasp someday. It taps the hope for new life in the heavens – the incessant human quest to become more than we are – that animates our stories and strivings. It carries dark reminders that our nature goes with us from one galaxy to another. Yet it proclaims the transcendence of love, which runs deeper in our hearts than any survival instinct, lasts through an eternity of time, and spans the farthest reaches of the universe.
