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Interstellar

Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon © 2014 Warner Bros. Entertainment,

Inc. and Paramount Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Interstellar , as everyone has noted, is a stupendously ambitious

movie. It’s also pretty complicated—and not

just because of the scienceinvolved. If you’re like us, you probably

walked out of the theater with a bunch of questions. We try to answer anumber of them below.

Who are the mysterious “they” people keep referring to?

Assuming Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is right, “they” are our

descendants, who have evolved to exist in five dimensions. Because

they exist in five dimensions (time being the fourth dimension), theirexperience of time is not linear in the same way that ours is. They

create the wormhole and the tesseract that saves Cooper.

I don’t understand the ending. If “they” are descended from

humans, and Cooper saves humanity, then how could “they” exist

in the future if Cooper hasn’t saved humanity yet? Or, as Vulture putit, “you can’t travel back in time and engineer your own salvation.”

Right?

A lot of science fiction, at least, would disagree with you. The ending

of Interstellar seems to present a “bootstrap paradox.” In short, this is a

type of time paradox in which a chicken sends an egg back in time,

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which egg then becomes that chicken. A popular example is The

Terminator : In the first movie in the series, Kyle Reese is sent back in

time by John Connor to protect Sarah Connor, John Connor’s mother.The paradox is that Reese turns out to be the father of John Connor—by

sending Reese back in time, John Connor created himself. (Similarly,

by going back in time to try to kill John Connor, Skynet leaves behind

the advanced robotic parts that lead to the creation of Skynet.)

Without time travel, whether such a thing is possible remainstheoretical, but it’s something theoretical physicists do argue about.

(If you’d like to read more, theoretical physicist Kip Thorne has a whole

chapter about this in his book The Science of Interstellar .)

What’s a tesseract? Isn’t that the thingy from The Avengers ?

Yes, in the Marvel Universe, the Tesseract is an Infinity Stone—an object

of extraordinary power. In our universe, however, tesseract is the

geometric term for a four-dimensional cube. If a cube is the three-

dimensional equivalent of a square, a tesseract is the four-dimensional

equivalent of the cube. (Again, the fourth dimension being time.) You

can read more about this here, but the important thing is that thetesseract is a space built by “they” so that Cooper can communicate

with Murph.

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Why does Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) try to kill Cooper and escape?

Because it’s only a matter of time before they figure out that he’s been

lying about his planet and putting the whole future of the human race

at risk just to save himself. By killing Cooper and stealing his ship, he

can escape the planet and no one else will ever know what he’s done.

(He may also be a little deranged, and they may not have enough

resources for everyone to survive.)

Could habitable planets actually orbit a black hole, as they do in the

film?

Not as far as we know. As our colleague Phil Plait asks, “Where do the

planets get heat and light? You kinda need a star for that.” What’s

more, in order for the water planet to have such extreme time dilation(one hour there equals seven years on earth), it would, Plait writes,

“need to be just over the surface of the black hole, and I mean just over

the surface, practically skimming it.” But because of way black holes

affect space, no planet could have a stable orbit that close to one. Plait

addresses additional problems with the science in the movie in his

own piece about the film.

Update, Nov. 9. 2014: Plait has retracted some of his complaints

about the movie , noting that he had based his calculations on the

assumption that the black hole is non-rotating. Things are different with

a black hole that‘s rapidly spinning: “From what I can find, there is a

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stable orbit around a rotating black hole that can produce that kind of

time dilation, so I was wrong there,” Plait writes.

Is that really what black holes look like?

According to Kip Thorne, a renowned astrophysicist who served as a

producer of the movie, yes. In fact, Thorne told Wired that the

rendering of the black hole by the movie’s computer effects artists

taught him new things about the ways black holes behave. The effectsteam based their visualization—“the product of a year of work by 30

people and thousands of computers,” Wired reports—on Thorne’s

equations. When they did, the accretion disk, “agglomerations of

matter that orbit some black holes,” appeared all around it: “above the

black hole, below the black hole, and in front of it.” Thorne wasn’t

expecting this, but says that he now sees that this is what his equations

dictate.Wired calls it “the most accurate simulation ever of what a black

hole would look like.”

What’s up with the blight? Why is corn the only crop left on earth?

Interstellar is vague about what has rendered the Earth nearlyuninhabitable, though there is some suggestion that global warming

is the culprit. (At one point, a character blames “the excesses of the

20th century.”) Science writer Alan Weisman, author of The World

Without Us , told us that “corn might do a little better” than other crops

—particularly wheat and rice, which, along with corn, are the world’s

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most popular crops—in the conditions shown in Interstellar , but that it

wouldn’t be by much. Corn, Weisman explained, has an advantage

over rice and wheat in that it’s more efficient in processing solarenergy. Still, all grains are vulnerable, and Weisman says it’s

“extremely unlikely” that any grain would have much chance under

Interstellar ’s conditions. And, sure enough, the movie suggests that

corn, like okra, will not survive much longer.

Why does Murph (Jessica Chastain) burn the corn field?

Up to that point in the movie, Murph has tried to convince her brother

Tom (Casey Affleck) that if he and his wife and son don’t leave the farm,

they will all die. (They’ve already lost one child to an illness, apparently

due to the quickly deteriorating conditions.) Tom refuses to heed her

warnings, and, in an act of defiance, she sets fire to the crops to force

them to leave.

What’s the poem that Michael Caine is always reciting?

That’s “Do not go gentle into that good night,” by Dylan Thomas. The

popular villanelle was first published in 1951, two years before

Thomas died, and it has been featured in a number of movies and TV

shows.

Is it true that some of the best yachtsmen in the world don’t know

how to swim?

Cooper comforts a crew member who is anxious about exploring space

for the first time by saying that some of the best solo yachtsmen don’t

know how to swim. Is Cooper operating on 90 percent honesty here, or

is this 100 percent true?

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Expert yachtsman Dennis Conner, four-time winner of the America’s

Cup Race in the ’70s and ’80s, has said he never learned how to

swim. His friend, the quadriplegic racer Paul Callahan, can’t swim,either, and he still earned the title of 2012 Yachtsman of the Year

from the New York Yacht Club. For the record, though, learning how to

swim is generally encouraged for aspiring yachtsmen: F.W. Pangborn,

then vice- president of the New York Yacht Racing Association, wrote in

1890 that “one must learn to swim and to row before he graduates

into the ranks of the yachtsmen.” And William Ricketson, a

communications manager for U.S. Sailing, informed us that while

sailing clubs across the country are “free to decide whether to include

swimming as part of their courses on how to sail ... the vast majority of

professional ‘sailors’ and ‘yachtsmen’ are proficient swimmers,” at least

in his experience.

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7 Interstellar questions explained by Jonah Nolan and Kip Thorne at

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Love it or hate it, Interstellar certainly earns points for getting

mainstream audiences to attempt to wrap their heads around the

science at the core of Christopher Nolan's intergalactic epic. It's no

secret that since its release last November, nitpicking the more

confusing scientific concepts and logic gaps in the narrative became an

Internet pastime. Plus, there's that ending that many feel needsgraphs, pie charts and a slide rule to get to the bottom of.

So when Blastr was invited to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in

Pasadena to chat about the film's Blu-ray release on March 31 with

Interstellar's screenwriter Jonathan Nolan and celebrated physicist Kip

Thorne, getting answers to even a few of our stack of burning

Interstellar questions became the priority. Thus, we didn't waste our

valuable minutes wondering how Matthew McConaughey's Coop

could be drinking a beer when there's a devastating global famine

raging (are they clone hops?) or why robotic TARS didn't just hustle

Brand (Anne Hathaway), Doyle (Wes Bentley) and Coop around thescary wave planet from the start, or why Cooper's son named his son

Cooper Cooper. Instead we focused on meatier questions, which Nolan

and Thorne were game to answer.

We also gathered more answers from their joint lecture for JPL

employees. A few hundred of the finest scientific minds from Caltech

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and NASA, many responsible for the Mars Rover missions and

planning for future manned space exploration of Mars, also grilled the

pair, and it was comforting to know a lot of them were a little confusedby some of what Interstellar was throwing down. [Spoilers below!]

Revelation 1: The science was woven into the film from the very start.

Jonah Nolan: The beauty of the project is the way that it came

together. I came to the project after Kip, so the collaboration clicked

into it from the very beginning. The script sprang from the science andfrom our conversations, which meant for me that they were never at

cross purposes. It was just a question of talking with Kip, reading his

book and some of the other literature on these topics, where you

realize the universe is far stranger than anything I could dream up by

myself. For us, it was a question of curating some of those phenomena,

and we got them right, and then trying to find a human story that

threaded through the middle of it and bring it back to the emotional

level.

Kip Thorne: I think this is so different from any other film I know of in

that the science was there from the beginning. Jonah and Chris wereso wonderful about growing the story symbiotically with the science. I

never saw any significant tension between the story and the science.

Revelation 2: The death of tech in the film, like GPS and MRI machines,

is based on informational extinctions in history.

Jonah Nolan: Kip and I spent a memorable afternoon with some

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fantastic scientists that Kip pulled together to talk through all the

different ways human life could be extinguished or hobbled on our

planet. It was a very depressing afternoon. [Laughs] I remember beingstruck by the fragility of life here. Everyone who has grown up in the

West and has been fortunate enough to live through a rather peaceful

period, every year everything seems a little better. It's hard for us to

imagine periods when things go backwards, but they do very, very

frequently. Just in the last 2,000 years, we can identify at last half a

dozen periods in western culture where technologies were lost that

ancient civilizations had that we still don't fully understand exactly, so

you know that there's been knowledge lost since as early as the

Middle Ages. What we know about that period survives because of

beautifully transcribed manuscripts out on some rocky island on the

North Sea. Although it's not our experience, it's frighteningly easy toimagine technology backsliding.

Revelation 3: The incredible visuals inside the wormhole are based on

real imagery, even though Chris Nolan tinkered with it.

Kip Thorne: In the film, Romilly (David Gyasi) bends a piece of paper

and sticks a pencil through it to illustrate a wormhole. The images in

the wormhole were generated when I sat down with the team at

Double Negative in London, led by Paul Franklin, who won the

Academy Award for this film. We wrote down the mathematics of the

wormhole, which had adjustable light, adjustable size and an

adjustable opening, and we then made images of what the camera

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would see for various sizes and shapes of wormholes. Chris Nolan and

Paul Franklin looked at the images and chose what would be the shape

of the wormhole. Inside gives you this beautiful crystal-ball-like imageof the wormhole where you see gas clouds, dust clouds, stars and

nebulae on the other side of the wormhole. But then that presented a

problem because we wanted to travel through the wormhole, but ...

that shape of wormhole was wonderful to look at from the outside, but

then you've got a boring trip because it's such a short wormhole.

When Chris Nolan saw this he said, "Well, go back to the drawing

board, and when we go through the wormhole, we'll choose a different

shape." We had an artist go in and make a more interesting trip

through a wormhole that is based on trips in wormholes of various

sizes and shapes. So this was the one place where there was

compromise in the science.

Revelation 4: You thought Matt Damon was the bad guy, but it's really

time.

Jonah Nolan: The one thing we are always running out of is time, and

this film doesn't have a traditional antagonist in that time seemed to

be the antagonist. That led to long conversations that Kip and I settled,

and then were reopened when my brother did his draft. We settled on

black holes as a great persona for a way to manipulate and alter time.

Kip Thorne: The idea that, down near a black hole, time moves more

slowly than far way is an old idea that goes back to Einstein's general

relativity. Jonah and Chris wanted a much bigger time difference. Chris

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wanted one hour on Miller's planet, which is in orbit around this black

hole, to be seven years on Earth. I said to Chris, I'm quite sure that's

not possible, and you won't get more than about three hours on Earthto two hours down there. Then I went home and I thought on it and I

did the calculations for a very fast-spinning black hole, but I was sure it

wouldn't allow anything like one hour to seven years ... but, lo and

behold, it did. In principle, it was possible, as the law of physics

doesn't disallow it.

Revelation 5: The gravitational anomalies also do a cool coin trick.

Jonah Nolan: I liked the idea that gravity has certain characteristics

that suggest it's stronger than it is, and there's an aspect of it being

missing, so it started to stand out as something that had a bit of

mystery to it. What's also fantastic about it is that it's probably the

concept most familiar to us and a part of our life that's less tactile.

Kip Thorne: I remember vividly that Jonah was pushing me about

wanting something that shows up on Earth that tells us something

weird is going on in the universe. Out of this brainstorming, I was

thinking back to my years as a graduate student when I studied an

alternative series of gravity where the strength of gravity can be

altered by some kind of a field that couples to it. Gravity could

fluctuate in unexpected ways because of some field coming in that

influences from the fifth dimension, since we have five dimensions in

the film. In the film, there's a scene where Murph (Mackenzie Foy) is in

her bedroom, staring at a strange pattern of bars on the floor of her

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room, and Coop tosses a coin across the pattern. If you look at it very

carefully, that coin does not go up in a parabolic arc. It goes up, then

plunges to the floor over one of the ridges of dust as a gravitationalanomaly.

Revelation 6: The planets on the other side of the wormhole have a

secret "sun."

Kip Thorne: In this particular case, the heat and light for all of the

planets is coming from the accretion discs. If it were like the accretiondiscs that astronomers study, it would be 100 million degrees and

would emit so many intense X-rays that the crew of the Endurance

would be fried as soon as they got out of the wormhole. Thus, the

accretion disc in this film is a very cold one. It may look spectacular, but

it's just sitting there cooling down to the temperature of the sun, in

fact, a temperature of 6,000 degrees. Miller's planet is still pretty close

to the accretion disc, and it's probably closer than you'd want to be.

Revelation 7: The last few minutes of the film, in which you're left

wondering if aliens or humanity from the future actually saves our

cumulative bacon, is where science steps off, so go with it.

Jonah Nolan: In a sense, [we] knew we had to take several leaps and

flights of fancy, and the wormhole is the best example. Their existence

in the film suggests the intervention of an alien intelligence.

Realistically, the appearance of them would suggest something

outside of naturally occurring phenomena: a door, a threshold. If the

other end happens to be in a solar system, or a black hole system, with

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several viable candidates for human life, now you get a sense of why

it's there. We don't know what happens inside the event horizon of a

black hole, and one of the ideas underpinning the film is that theuniverse is so big and so hostile that our manipulation of its forces is

so primitive at this point. Our understanding of the structure of it is

incredibly incomplete. The relationship to space/time is very simple

here, but potentially very complicated as we venture out into the

unknown. With the film building steadily on good science and

observable phenomena, we ask in the closing minutes ... you have to

take that leap into the unknown and ask questions about our

existence. We wanted to pull all those ideas into one sequence with an

emotional arc pinned to it as well. The invitation to the audience is to

try to imagine that our experience in the universe, when we are

capable of understanding beyond our experience, is very strangeindeed, and we wanted to humbly hint at that.

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11 BIG QUESTIONS LEFT UNANSWERED BY CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S

‘INTERSTELLAR’

I know what you’re thinking. “Here come those movie-hating FSR jerks

to poop on Christopher Nolan‘s Interstellar with all their negativity!

No wonder they were rejected from film school!” Good one guys. But

here’s the thing — we love movies, and more than that, we know that

criticizing or asking questions of a film doesn’t negate the things a

movie gets right or the overall entertainment value we derive from the

film. Honest. Here’s my positive, spoiler-free review of Interstellar as

exhibit A. (And here’s our own Neil Miller’s even more positive

collection of words on the film as exhibit B.)

Even great movies can have questionable plot turns or head-scratching

moments, and while I don’t find Nolan’s latest to be anywhere near

great I do think it’s a good movie... with questionable plot turns and

head- scratching moments. It’s a story about nothing less than the

survival of the human race, about intergalactic travel and the bending

of space and time, about love and rockets. The film is a sensory

spectacle

with incredible visual effects and a fantastic score by Hans Zimmer, and

at its heart is an emotional journey about a father’s love for his

daughter. It’s worth seeing in theaters.

But enough of that. It’s time to poop on Interstellar . **Spoilers for the

film are below, obviously.**

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1) If food is growing scarce why does everyone drive so gleefully

through corn fields crushing the crop?

I say everyone, but really it’s Coop and his like-minded daughterMurph who go ripping through the corn fields destroying untold

number of meals beneath their wheels. (It’s worth noting that these

two events happen 23 years apart, and the corn fields in Murph’s time

look as healthy as they did in her dad’s, but whatever.) The point is

food is supposed to be valuable and important right? But they mow it

down with abandon, and no one seems to care.

2) Why *is* food so scarce anyway?

Yes yes, plants are on the way out due to the blight, but we already live

in a world where many of our consumables are man-made so wouldn’t

that be even more prevalent in the future? We’re not given a wide

glimpse of the world and its remaining population, but it can’t be as

simple as everyone with knowledge of engineering, chemistry and

manufacturing having died from starvation or dust inhalation.

Machinery still works, so food products could still be made.

3) Why are people being taught — and worse, believing — that the

Apollo moon- landing is fake?

It’s entirely possible I missed some subtle explanation once Basil

Exposition (Michael Caine) showed up to tell Coop why NASA was

hiding out in the desert, but Coop is supposed to be in his early 30s in

the beginning and had flown for NASA earlier in his life, so presumably

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the space agency was around at least partly into the past decade. So in

those ten years NASA became a scapegoat of some kind? Science

became untrustworthy and the education system decided to teach thatit was all a fraud? Maybe I’m missing it, but why are people holding a

grudge against NASA over a world clearly dying from Earth-based

problems (blight, climate change, the lack of okra)?

4) Speaking of the secret NASA base, did anyone consider allocating

some of those billions of dollars towards maybe a cure for the

blight?

We’ll assume yes, but even if they did and failed wouldn’t someone

still think it a good idea to spend some R&D funds on manufactured

foods? Maybe take some of the remaining plant-based foods that

aren’t yet contaminated and secure them away to a location where

they can’t be infected? Or spend the cash on underground bunkerswhere people can live, form communities and keep mankind alive

until they can eventually return to the surface? Or maybe share the

technology they’re using to keep their astronauts fed and oxygenated

for years in space with the people who are actually starving and

suffocating here on Earth? Nah, instead they’re sinking every last dime

into “solving gravity.” What the what?

5) Why aren’t MRI machines available anymore?

During Cooper’s chat with his kids’ teachers he makes mention of the

fact that they no longer have MRI machines, but why is that the case?

It’s not part of a blanket dismissal of all things NASA (hinted at with the

Apollo nonsense) as NASA didn’t invent the MRI, they only enhanced

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and modified it over the years. And if that was the case people would

be equally dismissive of their glasses, cordless tools and memory foam

pillows. It can’t be due to an anti-science backlash that extends to allelectronics because they still have laptops and robot farm equipment

and such. So is the problem that we no longer have people capable of

operating the MRI machines? That might be the case (but not really) if

the remaining population’s sole purpose was mandated to focus

strictly on growing food, but we know that’s not the case because there

are still teachers and smart kids going on to college. Someone says at

one point, “The world doesn’t need any more engineers. We didn’t run

out of planes and television sets. We ran out of food.” This implies stuff

like planes and televisions still work too, but it also suggests that

maybe some engineers could have come in handy with machinery like

MRI machines.

6) Why is Cooper’s son an asshole as an adult, and is it because his

father clearly doesn’t care about him?

Seriously, Coop wakes up from his deep space sleep and never even

asks about Tom — hell, he doesn’t even inquire about his own

grandchild — but more than that, is there something being said here

about farmers versus scientists? About the supposedly uneducated

versus the intellectuals? Tom seemed like a perfectly well-adjusted kid

early on and even into his first appearance as Casey Affleck, but

suddenly he’s a monstrous prick who’d rather watch his family die

from dusty lung than accept some help from someone with a PhD?

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7) This whole space station by Saturn... couldn’t they have just done

that all along without even giving the wormhole a second thought?

When Coop wakes up it’s been a total of 73 years since he left Earth,and wouldn’t you know it... the humans are fine, happy and playing

baseball on a space station near Saturn. They’re not on the new world,

they’re not even through the wormhole. They’re exactly where they

could have been 73 years ago. Again, we have space stations now, so

why couldn’t they have been building them and sending people up

over the course of the decades? Rockets still work as evident by Coop

and friends having taken one up in the first place, so there’s no reason

why space shuttles couldn’t have been turned into pubic transport

vehicles with admittedly very long routes.

8) Is travel through the “fifth dimensional bookshelf” or whatever

just random, or was Coop intentionally picking the perfectly-timed

spots to peek through?

The former seems more logical as otherwise how would Coop know

how to read this futuristic Dewy Decimal System, but there’s a bigger

question here if he was actually in control. He has windows into

Murph’s room at presumably every moment of her life, so why not go

to an earlier portal, get the message through (as often as necessary)

and avoid all of this drama? The easy answer is that Coop can only view

the exact moments that Christopher Nolan had already filmed (h/t

Chris Campbell), but there’s no logical answer. It’s time, and he has

access to all of it, so why the manufactured suspense? And before you

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say he had to hurry because the space library is collapsing in on itself I

remind you that the folks who built it have mastered time so we

should assume they also know how to build a sturdy bookshelf.

9) Why have nearly three hours of father/daughter love only to toss

it aside in final two minutes for Anne Hathaway?

All that intergalactic effort to reunite with Murph just for her to say

she’s fine and hey why not go visit the lady doctor back at camp?Amelia (Hathaway) gives one goofy speech about love being “an

artifact of higher dimension” and suddenly we’re supposed to think

she’d make a great bed/heart buddy for Coop? There’s no emotional

connection between the them, and again, we’ve spent the past two

and a half hours watching Coop ache for reunion with his daughter.

The reward for all of that? A two minute scene that sees her shoo him

away. It’s bad enough we never get to see Murph and friends solve

gravity and launch that underground bunker into space, but here we’re

also cheated out of the reunion that’s been driving the entire film.

10) If it’s been fifty years since Murph figured out the messages

why is Hathaway still only just setting up camp while everyone else

hangs out on a space station?

So Coop is found floating in space (or magically appears in space or

something), discovers it’s been half a decade or so since he left the

cosmic bookshelves and is told in no uncertain terms by his wrinkly

daughter to go help Dr. Amelia finish setting up camp. How in the hell

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is Amelia still setting up camp fifty years later? Is the problem

supposed to be that she’s a woman? I say that not because women are

inferior, but because the movie already went out of its way to have herbe the only physically incapable member of the crew back there on the

water planet resulting in the death of poor Wes Bentley. But really, has

no one gone down to help her? Are they too busy playing baseball?

11) So, did we build the wormhole? If so — and even if not — is this

movie the biggest bootstrap paradox ever?

Because seriously, the big reveal as to who “they” are is that “they” are

“us” or maybe it’s “we.” (It’s unclear as there are no English majors in

the dusty future.) Aliens didn’t send us the wormhole, we sent it to

ourselves. Aliens aren’t saving mankind, we’re saving ourselves. Aliens

aren’t peeking into a ten year-old girl’s bedroom, we’re peek–hmm,

anyway, what I’m saying is if we sent it back then we obviously

survived already and didn’t need the wormhole to do it. The message

of self-reliance and accomplishment is nice, but it’s as deflating as

saving the species only to learn your reward is to go set up camp with

Anne Hathaway.

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Time Passages

Intimate space and exterior space keep encouraging each other, as it

were, in their growth . . . It is through their “immensity” that these twokinds of space . . . blend . . . and become identical.

—Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The title of Christopher Nolan’s extraordinarily ambitious science-

fiction filmInterstellar is three-dimensionally flat and far lessdescriptive than it should be. Pointing only to exterior space and

distant stars, it obscures the film’s more urgent interest in the fourth

dimension of time and the foreshortened future of life on our own

planet. Outwardly focused only on the immensity of the cosmos, it also

ignores the film’s inward focus on the immensity of intimate space as

it is lived in intense love and irrevocable loss by an earthly—and time-

bound —human family. Finally, given its empirically neutral tone, it

conveys nothing of the film’s heart-rending affect and moral gravity,

which, “encouraging each other in their growth,” expand individual

anxieties about the future of one’s own children into collective

responsibility for the future of others. In sum, suggesting just anotherscience-fiction blockbuster set in outer space and full of special effects

rather than ideas, the title is an annunciation hardly worthy of the

complex multidimensionality of the film itself.

Interstellar , however, is full of ideas as well as wondrous imagery.

Indeed, it weaves an intricate fabric of three-dimensional space, fourth-

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dimensional time, and a cross-dimensional gravity that enfolds—and

blends —cosmic and intimate immensity to transform what, in other

hands than Nolan’s, would have likely been a comfortably predictablevariation of a long-familiar science-fiction plot about our—and our

planet’s— impending extinction. Set in the near future, Interstellar ’s

action is motivated by the exhaustion of an Earth that is rapidly turning

into a polluted dust-bowl incapable of sustaining its slowly starving

and increasingly ill population. It is then fueled by a decimated NASA’s

exploratory and obstacle-filled mission into deep space and through a

wormhole that, folding space in on itself, will, it is hoped, also become

a “time machine,” making it possible to find a habitable new home

planet in an otherwise unreachable distant galaxy. In the crew’s search,

there are, of course, increasing complications—both cosmic and

human.

Nolan, however, makes this familiar trajectory wonderfully strange and

intellectually compelling by imaginatively directing it into and

through a wormhole of his own design. Fully aware that cinema is,

itself, a time machine, he has expanded—and compounded—the

relativity of space-time and its effects by layering them in the multiple

dimensions not only of Interstellar ’s narrative but also of the film’s

overall structure and its immersive mise en scène. Simultaneously, all

three play out the tension between “intimate” and “exterior” space-

time and, in the film’s moving final third, resolve—by unifying—their

different immensities and seemingly incompatible values.

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At the narrative level, this resolution occurs in two plot threads—one

personal, the other cosmic. Immense in its intensity, the personal

thread ultimately reconciles a widowed father, Cooper (MatthewMcConaughey), the eventual leader of the interstellar mission, and his

earth-bound daughter, Murphy (played at different ages by Mackenzie

Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn), after a decades-long and

emotionally fraught separation in both space and time. Central to the

plot, with humanity’s future hanging in the balance, the cosmic thread

is also about reconciliation, and the desperate need for a unified

theory of quantum gravity. Again accomplished in the film’s last third,

this reconciliation occurs not in theory but through experience, and

resolves fundamental incompatibilities between Einstein’s

geometrical description of the relative structure of space-time and

quantum physics’ mathematical description of the particle- and wave-like behavior of both subatomic and macroscopic physical matter.

However, these are not merely parallel narratives in which one thread

is substantially unnecessary and subordinated to the other. Here, in

contrast to most science-fiction action films, the personal dramas of the

main characters do not function merely to humanize—and provide

occasional relief from—the genre’s primary emphasis on scientific

exposition; a depopulated, if spectacular, outer space; and the

technological operations of a completely unrelated mission. As

penned by Nolan and his brother Jonathan, both the intimate and the

cosmic narrative threads are absolutely essential to each other. Thus,

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spanning an extraordinary visualization of two varieties of (dare I

pun?) “relative” time, the familial reconciliation enables not only the

theoretical but also the practical resolution of interstellar space travel—and, quite literally, at the very same time, the actual unity of supposed

theoretical incompatibilities allows father and daughter to

communicate across what seem incommensurable dimensions of

space. Their cosmically distanced yet intimate reunion produces a

myriad of possible futures, in one of which they will come together

once again. In this regard, perhaps the spatiotemporal rule most

important to Interstellar ’s personal narrative is drawn from Einstein’s

work on the effects of gravity and mass on the dilation and contraction

of time. It has long been recognized that time dilates and “passes”

more slowly in the gravitational field of astronomical bodies of greater

mass than those with lesser. Thus, before he leaves for outer space,promising his 10-year-old daughter Murphy that he will come back,

Cooper tells her: “Time is going to change for us.” For him, “it’s going

to move more slowly,” so that when he returns they “may even be the

same age.” Later in the film, on a massive planet where every hour

equals seven years on Earth, we can feel Cooper’s anguish at the

botched heroics of crew member Brand (Anne Hathaway) as he tells

her she has cost them all “decades.”

Interstellar ’s cosmic narrative also draws its rules from contemporary

astrophysics, and particularly the work of theoretical physicist Kip

Thorne (credited as one of the film’s executive producers). His research

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and calculations have primarily addressed the spatiotemporal

properties of wormholes, black holes, and relativistic gravity and its

“waves,” and their likely effects on physical matter. (Each phenomenonis spectacularly visualized in the film.) Also relevant to the scientific

credibility of the narrative’s temporal trajectory and resolution,

Thorne’s work suggests that the frequently polarized behavior of

quantum fields makes “backward” time travel impossible—and thus

disallows not only the completely circular closure of space-time but

also the long-popular science-fiction conceit of traveling back in time

to alter the past and thus change a catastrophic future. He says nothing

specific, however, about whether it is possible to revisit the present—a

temporal paradox that has particular significance to both the logic and

great poignancy of the film’s final third, which keeps father and

daughter apart and yet brings them together across what seems aninfinite hall not of mirrors, but of time. However, Thorne has also

calculated that the passage of “simple” masses through a wormhole or

black hole would make the very notion of temporal paradox

meaningless since multiple permutations of time would exist

simultaneously and all would be equally possible and true.

Uncharacteristically, but appropriately, Nolan has chosen to contain

and clarify these multidimensional scientific puzzles as well as the

film’s central but spatially and temporally fractured father-daughter

relationship in a classically constructed narrative served by traditional

continuity editing. Thus, bracketed between a temporally ambiguous

prologue and a heart-breaking yet hopeful epilogue, the film has three

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acts (as they’re called in the trade). While each advances the plot

toward its resolution, all are spatially and temporally different.

The first is completely earthbound and set in the near future—although

its mise en scène clearly evokes historical associations with the dust

bowl of the Great Depression, it also points to contemporary climate

change and the looming threat of similar conditions today. From the

beginning, we are immersed in a world that is fully and concretely

realized. Nolan, bless him, has chosen once again to shoot on film,build sets rather than use green screen, and employ as little CGI as

possible—a tall order for a science-fiction narrative located, in its long

second act, in deep space. The result, however, is a rich, textured, and

lived-in realism that, by comparison, is lacking in the film’s outer space

sequences.

This grounded first act, however, primarily takes place on a deceptively

green family farm with neatly sprawling cornfields, where we meet the

Cooper family at breakfast, sit in on a parent-teacher conference about

the occupational prospects of Cooper’s teenage son and particularly

beloved young daughter, watch an azure sky obliterated by a massivedust storm, and learn, through small but surprising “futuristic” details

casually placed in an otherwise familiar mise en scène, and in passing

dialogue rather than exposition, that there are no longer any

scholarships for college or diagnostic MRIs; that NASA and the space

program are long gone and discredited, but drones are common; that

there is widespread pollution and cancer; and, most significantly; that

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Earth is running out of food (albeit not engineers and television

screens), and mass starvation is literally on the horizon, where black

clouds of smoke billow from the burning of the very last crop of okra soas to make way for more corn.

This acceptance of life as usual in the face of an increasingly hostile

environment contracts time, foreshortening and eventually foreclosing

the possibility of a terrestrial future. Indeed, once an engineer and

NASA pilot but now a much-needed farmer, Cooper decries thecollective loss of hope and can-do pioneer spirit with tag-line dialogue

that has appeared in almost all the film’s trailers: “We used to look up

at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down

and worry about our place in the dirt.” However, in a hidden NASA

facility, whose rural location has been discovered by Cooper and

Murphy under strange circumstances, the tone becomes urgent (if, as

often occurs with the genre’s scientists, increasingly didactic). A space

mission to find a new home is secretly in the works and planned by

astrophysicist Dr. Brown (Michael Caine), who tells Cooper: “We’re not

meant to save the world, we’re meant to leave it.” By the first act’s end,

to Murphy’s great despair—and anger—at her impending

abandonment, her father has been recruited as the mission’s leader.

The rich and deep texture of the first act’s world begins to flatten in the

NASA facility, where the emphasis is abstractly on the future of the

human species rather than affectively, as Cooper would have it, on the

human family. The imagery also moves from the concrete grit and dust

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of hardscrabble human existence to, well, actual concrete, and

towering and gleaming rocketry. Unfortunately, this comparative

flatness pervades the film’s second act (as well as its title), andcertainly has something to do with CGI and a lot to do with our

familiarity with narrative and visual science-fiction conventions.

Indeed, despite Nolan’s best efforts and good science, it may be easier

to find new habitable planets than new things to do in movies set in

outer space, and easier to avoid asteroids than generic clichés or

references to iconic science-fiction films. Indeed, after mission lift-off,

the second act’s first major opportunity for spectacle—the ship’s

passage through the wormhole—is thus a dazzlingly kinetic light-show

reflected on Cooper’s helmet as our only point of spatial reference,

which, not surprisingly, recalls the Star Gate sequence in

Kubrick’s2001: A Space Odyssey (reported to be number one onNolan’s top 10 list of favorite films).

Since we’ve seen it all already but for small variants (however

spectacularly big on screen), the genre’s visual and narrative novelty

has become more limited in outer space than if, as Nolan’s first act

proves, it had remained on Earth. Thus, however likely to be

Interstellar ’s biggest attraction, the film’s second act tends to substitute

obligatory generic spectacle and action for textural substance and

textual depth. However, to Nolan’s great credit, narrative attention

keeps returning to Cooper, and to his—and the film’s—awareness of

time’s irrevocable passage, whatever its relative elasticity.

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As the ship travels toward planets in a distant solar system, time slows

as gravitational forces increase. The effects on the crew as well as on

those at home are made powerfully and poignantly explicit through aseries of video communications transmitted to the crew from Earth.

Over a dilated and hence brief period of time on the ship, to a crew

that looks much as they did when they boarded, the videos from home

show what seem to be rapidly aging loved ones (a grown-up Murphy

and her older brother Tom, played here by Casey Affleck), all of whom

report on family illnesses, deaths both natural (Cooper’s father-in-law)

and cancerous (Cooper’s young grandson), and increasing terrestrial

misery.

Nolan also uses parallel editing between Murphy on Earth and Cooper

in space to compound this temporal disparity, which becomes even

greater when the crew reaches its destination and begins explorationof two potentially habitable planets. As spectacle and action accelerate,

Cooper, always thinking of home and his promise to return to Murphy,

experiences time’s extraordinary plenitude as a great and terrible loss.

Indeed, after barely escaping from an uninhabitable planet of

mammoth tidal waves, he calculates with bitter exactitude that the

“slightly” delayed stay there lasted, in Earth time, 23 years and 4

months. As the spectacle- and action-packed second act ends, the

ship’s communication systems have been severely damaged, and any

chance of returning home also seems remote. Desperate to relay their

research data and news of a significant discovery back to Earth, the

plan is to move closer to a nearby black hole and take advantage of the

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gravitational waves around it. However, now with little to lose and

possibly everything to gain from its mysteries, Cooper separates from

the ship in one of its modules and intentionally lets gravity pull it intothe black hole.

In contrast to its second act, the third act of Interstellar is strikingly

original, narratively mind-bending, and visually stunning. Here the

film reaches an emotional and intellectual climax that brings together

the disparate dimensions and incompatible temporalities of an earthlyhome and a distant cosmos. At once separating and yet conjoining

intimate space and exterior space is the wall-length bookcase in what

was once 10-year-old Murphy’s farmhouse bedroom. Standing there in

front of the books years ago, she and Cooper had pondered a set of

strange patterns made by the dust on the floor, a message from what

she had called a “ghost” that led them to the hidden NASA facility and

everything that followed to their present moment. Now a grown

woman possibly older than her astronaut father, Murphy is a scientist

still working on the unresolved problems of interstellar travel, the

solutions to which would ensure the future of her own—and the Earth’s

very last—generation.

Visiting the family farm before it is abandoned, and drawn to her old

bedroom, on the earthly interior side of the bookcase, Murphy moves

among childhood possessions. On the cosmic exterior side of the

bookcase is space-suited Cooper. He has first fallen into and now floats

in a space-time whose initially abstract geometry has slowly taken the

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form of a multilayered and infinite multiplication of Murphy’s

bookcase and bedroom. Catching himself at one bookcase and

instance, Cooper looks from behind the books on a shelf both at hisdaughter in her present and as a young child in his—or is it her?—past.

In tears at the sight of Murphy, who seems to sense the presence of

what she used to call her “ghost,” Cooper desperately tries to

communicate the data that will save her and a multitude of others, but

he cannot do so directly. Suffice it to say, that with great ingenuity (and

without “spoilers”), he eventually finds an indirect way to do so—and

one in which Murphy realizes that the “ghost” is her father. Throughout

this temporally complex and emotionally intense climax, the earthly

and cosmic remain infinitely separated yet are also intimately

connected. Indeed, there are no temporal paradoxes here because

multiple pasts, presents, and futures are all seen as both simultaneousand true.

Thus, even if astrophysics tells us it is impossible to revisit the past to

change the future, what this stunning and mind-bending sequence

reveals is something, in fact, quite simple: it is certainly possible to

alter whatever present we happen to presently occupy. Brought

together across different spatial dimensions of the same present—one,

the intimate interior of an earthly bedroom, and the other, the infinite

exteriority of the cosmos—there will now be a future for Cooper and

Murphy, as there will be for their larger human family. And so, in the

epilogue, in quite different spatial and temporal circumstances—and in

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the flesh—father and daughter will meet once again in what Nolan

renders as a fully realized, if mortal, future.

The immense urgency that fuels the temporal themes of Nolan’s

ravishingly beautiful and philosophically profound film also resonates

in lines from Dylan Thomas’s greatest poem, “Do not go gentle into

that good night,” which, spoken in dialogue and voiceover several

times, serve as both the narrative’s commentary and chorus. However,

the poem’s exhortation to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”seems directed less at the film’s characters than at its present

audience. Indeed, Interstellar ’s call to action urges all of us watching in

our own dying light to do more than passively resign ourselves to

imminent extinction.

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INTERSTELLAR WRITER JONATHAN NOLAN GIVES US THE SCOOP ON

DEEP SPOILERS!

BY ROTH CORNET Warning: All of the Interstellar spoilers follow...

Director Christopher Nolan's highly-anticipated space epic

Interstellaris now in theaters and has audiences and critics alike

talking. We were able to sit down with Jonathan Nolan - who co-wrote

the script with his brother Christopher - shortly after seeing the film to

talk about how and why the team made certain story decisions. Intruth, we likely could have spent an hour with Nolan discussing the

film, as each new answer seemed to bring with it an additional set of

queries. We had a very amiable chat with the writer, each of us

laughing at the loops and turns of both our questions and his answers.

The idea was to satiate curiosity as a viewer and provide a space for the

filmmaker to convey his intentions. As mentioned, there is still plenty

left to discuss, but we were able to touch on some major points in the

interview below.

Interstellar Review

IGN Movies: Diving right in, there are actually some interesting

things I want to talk about in terms of the film's take on technology,

but I'm going to table that for now to dig into some spoilers and

that last act in particular. Let's start with the black hole. Now, you

guys had worked closely with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne and

the goal was to adhere to science as much as possible throughout

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the film. During that final act, particularly in the black hole, did you

simply decide, "Okay, we're going to divorce ourself from what is as

we understand it and go into what could be"? Jonathan Nolan:Absolutely. When you're doing a film called Interstellar, at some point

-- the idea was to be grounded in the science as much as possible -- but

with a name like Interstellar, you had better go somewhere big and

bold. The nice thing about a black hole is, nobody actually knows

what's on the event horizon. So the idea that it might be a place and

the sequence that plays out there is a metaphor for -- and it was really

the theme of the film -- the connection between human beings, right?

The connection between us and our kids and us and our parents and

the fragility of that. It's no coincidence that it's a bookcase that is the

symbol for that sequence in the film, because there's no better symbol

for the repository of information passed down from one generation tothe next. Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest,

and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a

language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that

humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into

the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

Nolan Cont.: So that is a metaphor for our ability to communicate

some great scientific discovery, whatever the next thing is. He was

there for about a year's worth of researching, grounded space travel.

What you realize is, okay, in our lifetime, we're not f***ng going

anywhere, we're not seeing anything -- the distances and time

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involved are so vast. It was a metaphor that we never articulated

explicitly in this draft. There was one that I played with in earlier drafts

of the film, but I was fascinated, writing the film, thinking about earlypeople traveling from Indonesia, across the Pacific Ocean, in two

different directions. So you go to New Zealand, or you go to Hawaii and

they have similar language, similar cultural traditions. You think, how

the f**k did a coherent, recognizable culture spread from New Zealand

to Hawaii and every island in between? The reality is, it was spread on

the backs of people who would travel these unimaginable distances

from one place to the next -- this incredibly unlikely undertaking of

saying, "Well, we're going to get into an open-top boat and paddle in

the hopes that we find another island."

IGN: I want to hone in on that moment in the black hole where

Cooper imagines that we - as a species - evolved into fifth

dimensional beings. The film is sort of imaging what that would be

or mean, and I guess I thought, if we did evolve in this manner and

we could physicalize time in order to send a message back to an

earlier point in our evolution then it sort of creates a paradox, which

is okay, we often see paradoxes in science fiction. But if the

intention was to save the human race so that we evolve to the point

of becoming these beings -- why pick that method? Why make it

about a man, his daughter, a bookcase, and morse code...?Why not

pick a simpler, more fail-safe method to save the human race?

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Nolan: That's a good question. Well, because it provides us an

opportunity to tell a more compelling story. [Laughs] No, I think the

idea is that one of the things that we worked on from the beginningwith the film was that the idea of gravitation is odd. There's something

about it that functions a little differently from all of the other forces

that we're fluent in in the universe -- strong forces, weak forces,

electromagnetism and gravity. What's different about gravity is that it

appears to be oddly weak in our universe. It's actually very strong; it's

binding all of us to the surface of the planet -- a f***ing ball of mud

hurtling through space. But actually, versus all those other forces, it's

bizarrely weak, which suggests that it's sort of an iceberg situation. The

gravitation as we experience it in this universe actually connects our

rich and deep level, our universe, our brain, within a higher-order bulk,

to potentially other universes, which suggests -- suggested to me atleast -- the idea that, you know, you've seen a million time travel

movies. The idea that we wanted to present here was that time travel

for people: not possible. For objects, for things, for phenomena within

our universe: not possible. But the idea that information can travel

through time is entirely possible.

Nolan Con't: Like I said, the bookshelf. We've found a way to pass

ideas in the future -- not yet a way to pass ideas and information into

the past. That creates -- well, frankly, all paradoxes, if you can translate

information in the past, you can create almost as many paradoxes as

you could if you transmitted people into the past. But the idea that you

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could transmit information into the past is a lot more of a palatable

and grounded idea. But gravitation suggests itself -- to me at least, by

the time I was done studying these things -- gravitation seems to bethe mechanism by which that might be possible. The idea being,

however, that gravitation is such a slippery bastard that you would

have to -- the only way it would be possible would be within certain

regions of space, right? In 2001, the idea is the Monolith is buried on

the surface of the Moon because only a sufficiently advanced,

technologically advanced creature would be able to get to the Moon

from Earth. It becomes an acid test. If you can dig it up, then you're

sufficiently technologically advanced -- you've gotten to the Moon -- so

here's a beacon to let you know what the next step is. This is different.

This is the idea that communication or gravitation might be such an

extreme and difficult phenomenon that it would only be possible inthe most extreme reaches of space. In other words, you imagine the

letterbox in which you would be able to leave yourself a letter from the

future, but the letterbox is beyond the event horizon of a black hole.

You don't even know it's there.

IGN: Until you go through...Okay, so let me ask you this about the

next phase in that final act, which is that he comes out, he is saved

and his daughter is now Ellen Burstyn.

Nolan: [Laughs] Through the magic of space travel!

IGN: [Laughs] Yes. So, when they find Cooper they are by Saturn

again and they have these very advanced ships. So I guess I

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wondered: Did it take them many years to build the ships? If so,

where did they get the resources? Was it on a new planet or on a

dying Earth? Also, how did they survive on Earth long enough tobuild such ships? Or had they gone and colonized in the far reaches

of space? In another galaxy? Had they found Brand and very quickly

and impressively rebuilt their culture? And if they had gone and

colonized, why were they at Saturn again? Right at that exact

moment? What are they hoping to find there? If they had found

Brand, then she would now be old too, wouldn't she? Yet, Murph is

suggesting that her father go find Brand so that they can build a

colony together - which indicates that Cooper and Brand would still

be the same age and compatriots. And that they would remain so

once he found her in that small ship. Can you explain what's going

on in that scene? And just the science behind it?

Nolan: I'm happy to try -- although I feel like it's for the viewer to

enjoy and trust that we spent and awful lot of time thinking about

these things, as we did. What I was fascinated by is that -- viewed it

in a certain light - in the 50,000-year history of humans, charted

from here -- say we're roughly 2,000 years through our story;

10,000 years through recorded civilization -- so imagine 40,000

years from now, and we're charting our journey. If we're looking at

metaphor as a guide, if we're looking at the lifespan of a human

being and imagining that we're in our infancy, we haven't taken

that first step. We've taken that little tottering step to the Moon --

the Moon and back! -- canned oxygen and traveling on f****ing

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explosions, right? We've just begun. It would be the case at some

point, in our middle age as a species, that we have begun to push

out into the universe, using gravitational phenomena to getourselves there. That's when things get really f***ing weird.

Nolan Con't: One of the phenomena that we explore in the film --

we're always at any given point in human history so 100-percent

certain that we know everything, when the evidence is 100-percent

clear we don't know a f****ing thing. The next scientific discovery willset us back. I was very interested in the idea of an event horizon -- not

just the specifics of a black hole -- the idea that, whether we imagined

that it was Hubble or the gravitational observatories that Kip has built,

that we can see the entire universe and understand how it works. We

don't know have a f***ing clue! It is almost certain that there's

something very big that we're missing -- dark energy or dark matter --

and when we figure it out, it's going to be the head-slapping moment

of, "Oh my God!"

IGN: Right, and then there will be a missing piece to that as well,

eventually.

Nolan: That will also probably be wrong. You can take that to the bank.

But the idea for us was that we'll arrive at a moment in which relativity

becomes more and more the rule. Here on Earth, we don't experience

it at all. It's here -- UBS satellites are programmed to account for it --

but we don't experience it, because we all live here roughly at the

same position on a gravitational well of Planet Earth. As we begin to

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travel and push out into the galaxy in more meaningful ways, it

becomes more impactful. One of the things that was so much fun

scheming up with Kip Thorne was the idea of regions in space in whichspace-time becomes much more complicated, much more confusing.

IGN: Yeah, I loved the moment when they return to the ship and 23

years had passed.

Nolan: Yeah, and we did all the math on it. Those phenomena would

be very extreme. You'd have to have a black hole with a certain amountof spin and a planet that's in a certain position. But one thing is

certain: it's not only the distances involved, the space travel, that

becomes awe-inspiring; it's the degree to which -- things that matter to

us, the lifespan of our children, all these things -- get pushed and

pulled around in ways that are brutal. You lose time. The idea in earlier

drafts of the script was that Cooper returns to a human species that has

taken that first step out and is beginning to prepare for the next step.

But the one thing you know about wormholes is, they're not real.

Wormholes don't exist because the only way they would exist is if they

were seeded with exotic material created by an intelligence far beyond

our own. Something would have to make one. So the idea with the film

was that it was a wormhole that leads us to a place that creates an

opportunity for us and then disappears. By the end of Cooper's

journey, the wormhole is gone. It's up to us now to undertake the

massive journey of spreading out across the face of our galaxy. Brand is

still somewhere out there on the far side of the wormhole. The

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wormhole has disappeared entirely. It's gone. IGN: And he has to try

and get to Brand in this little ship?

Nolan: That's the idea.

IGN: I want to circle back to the idea of technology as a villain or

not, because it's often the foil in science fiction films, but not in this

piece. The film seems to celebrate technology and science.

Essentially, it was nature that took us out here on Earth.

Nolan: Yeah, and there are chapters in human history that are notarticulated by the film, in terms of what might have happened. But

what is articulated explicitly is that the thing that's killing us in that

moment is a blight. We sat down with a bunch of scientists at Caltech --

Kip convened them -- and it was a fun six hours trying to figure out all

the different things that could kill humanity, and there were many of

them. The one that I was most interested in was blight, because it's so

impersonal.

IGN: Right, it's an act of nature.

Nolan: Essentially, it's just an organism that's better at consuming our

food than we are. There is nothing more humbling. You know, it's not amessage film. I believe we should be good custodians of the Earth. I

think that we should be as responsible and careful as possible, but I

also believe that what will most likely wipe us out will be something

that has nothing to do with us, that it's completely impersonal --

whether it's cosmic rays or a blight or pestilence or plague. You see

how terrified people are of Ebola these days. It's probably going to be

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something that we have nothing to do with.

IGN: On that cheerful thought! [Laughs] You said this is not a

message film, but I'm sure there are themes that you were playingwith. I thought there was an interesting idea of legacy in the film -

both in terms of procreation and our personal legacy, the mark we

leave on the world. What are some things that you'd like audiences

to take away from the film?

Nolan: Hopefully an entertaining yarn! But I'm interested in this

paradoxical aspect of human beings. We love with such an intensity:

our children, our parents, our families -- and yet all of us, to different

degrees, make choices that take us away from those people, because

of our curiosity or our ambition; all these warring, paradoxical desires.

I don't have an answer for that. I don't think anyone has an answer for

that. What's more important: your career, your kids -- we all strugglewith that every day, and that paradox is at the center of this film.

Human organisms are forged by natural selection to want to continue

to explore, even in the most unlikely ways -- standing on the shores of

a tiny island and imagining that there might be another island a

thousand miles hence over the ocean, and then going and looking for

it. Human beings are incredible survivors on that level, but we're also

very connected to our children and our loved ones. Those things are so

often in conflict with each other

Untangling Interstellar

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record" both his passage through the wormhole as well as his journey

into the black hole. The deliberately repetitive dialogue is thus

thematically significant, linking Murph to her father while contrastingboth with Donald, a man whose fear of death inclines him to

superstition. This framing of scientific inquiry as a positive virtue

permeates the film and . When Murph accuses her brother that "Dad

didn't raise you to be this dumb," Tom replies that "Dad didn't raise

me, grandpa did," thematically re-aligning him with the father figure

he more closely resembles.

The flying drone sequence offers another example of Nolan using plot

for character commentary. After Cooper's son establishes his passivity

in almost driving their truck off a cliff (a metaphor for human

passivity), Cooper seeks to transform the fighter pilot into a farmer like

himself, prioritizing "social responsibility" over intellectual

exploration. I am not sure if the film is criticizing Cooper on this point,

as the theme of "social utility" will resurface later in the film during

Cooper's discussion of love with Amelia Brand, but while it is hard to

say that Nolan is critical of Cooper at this point, the scene is again quite

positive about Murph, who protests that the drone is "not hurting

anyone" and should be let free to continue exploring, establishing her

as a scientist in whom the quest for knowledge needs no outside

justification. This same point is also made by Nolan's positioning of the

symbolic library in Murph's room (it also resurfaces at NASA), the girl's

scholastic excellence, as well as her very name, which stresses that it is

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in Murph's nature is to achieve everything that humanity can

accomplish.

The fact that Murph is the redemptive character makes Interstellar

clearly a pro-science film. In contrast to Kubrick's 2001, in which David

Bowman's spiritual journey is assisted by benevolent aliens, in

Interstellar there is no God to answer prayers, and mankind must

rescue itself through science. The film's allusions to the Wizard of Oz

serve this point, as does the time-travel paradox at the heart of thenarrative twist: the journey into the cosmos is a metaphorical quest for

God, but also one that will reveal nothing more than man himself

behind the Wizard's curtain. And so Nolan criticizes characters who

expect rescue from without and who do not struggle for their own

salvation. Donald ends up buried in the garden, Murph's trust in

Professor Brand costs her precious time, and Cooper and Brand's trust

of Mann almost destroys their mission, with the Endurance only saved

through the opposing force of science, as TARS disables Mann's

docking permissions with the telling comment that his trust settings

are "lower than" theirs.

These failures by individuals are mirrored by parallel social failures.

According to the story, the causes of earth's collapse seem to be the

rise of war among nations (a failure of love), but more deeply the

abandonment of the scientific quest for knowledge as a tool to uplift

mankind. Perverted by militarism, science has failed in its quest for

knowledge: NASA may end Interstellar as a healing hospital, but its

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malevolence at the start of the film is evident through its complicity in

the "stratospheric bombing" and "killing" of state enemies. The

education system is similarly "degraded" from a pure science mission,teaching the Apollo moon landings as a fiction of Cold War geopolitics

rather than an accomplishment of aspirational science, and

transforming its students into not engineers but rather "caretakers", a

word which perhaps not insignificantly describes those who maintain

cemeteries and serve the burial of the dead.

And yet Interstellar is not simply cheerleading for NASA, for the idea

that science can be a destructive as well as constructive force is one of

the underlying themes of the film, something that comes to the

forefront not only with the duel nature of NASA, but also very clearly

with the robot characters. In sharp contrast to his peaceful and

obedient nature when TARS travels into the black hole with Cooper, for

instance, the script emphasizes that the robot is "unpredictable" and

dangerous when he makes his first appearance as a gun- wielding

marine on loan from the Army. The same duality is present in the

scenes of the Indian military drone (a former weapon which is now

"not hurting anyone") as well as with the robot KIPP. And the

ambiguous relationship that exists between man and science (which

will end up serving which?) is also the thematic point behind TARS' off-

the-cuff joke that the Endurance mission's real purpose might very

well be to found a "robot colony" with "human slaves".

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Even more interestingly, while the robots seem to represent science

and its dual potential for good and evil, they may also be getting used

to comment on the nature of the various human characters with whomthey are associated. Although the evidence for this is weakest with

Brand, it is hypothetically possible to interpret KIPP, CASE and TARS as

commenting on Mann, Brand and Cooper. KIPP certainly seems to

mirror Mann (a destructive psychopath who also "blows up" and who is

also deliberately associated with homicidal science through his HAL-

like blowing of the airlock). Yet TARS makes the same transcendent

journey as Cooper, and ends the film seemingly more human than

before, with his humour settings apparently independent of Cooper's

attempts to control them. CASE is the weak-link in this reading,

although the robot does seem to be associated with Brand in the sense

that it serves her on Miller and Edmunds' planets.

Regardless of whether the robots are intended to mirror their human

counterparts, the explanation Interstellar seems to offer for the

dualism of science is the idea that I believe lies at the heart of the film:

the message that any behavior is only redemptive to the extent it is

guided by love. Speaking to Cooper about his desire to join the

Endurance mission, Donald makes this theme explicit, explaining that

the "why" of any action is more important than the "how". Professor

Brand's lies may serve the interests of peace (producing rivets not

bullets) but his actions are thus negative because they are not driven

by a desire to rescue his fellow man from death. Nor is lying

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necessarily a fault since it is sometimes the best way of dealing with

emotional beings, and in its positive form is even referred to by the

script as "discretion" rather than deceit. Likewise, Mann is a destructivepsychopath in part because his very experience of love is rooted in

selfish egoism as an evolutionary survival strategy, and while his

transmission of false data is thus considered an act of cowardice,

Cooper's deceit of his children is acceptable in the eyes of the film

because he does it for their own good, just as his lying to Brand about

the fuel reserves is also driven by a self-sacrificial act of love for her

and the future of mankind she then represents.

Beyond love and science, there is one more necessary ingredient for

success: struggle over time ("endurance"). This is the significance of

the script's repeated invocation to "rage against the dying of the light"

as in the Dylan Thomas poem. It is also this characteristic that sets

Cooper apart from Professor Brand, and is the thematic reason Cooper

repeatedly struggles against the odds since doing so is "necessary"

even when it seems objectively "impossible". Cross-cutting editing

that compares the Cooper/Mann and Murph/ Tom fight scene (both

start the same time) also suggests that this virtue is shared by both

father and daughter, with Murph's decision to struggle and rescue her

family happening at exactly the same moment Cooper begins to

struggle for the transmission earpiece.

More subtle symbolism also reinforces these virtues and vices, and

helps communicate which actions are destructive (leading to death)

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and which are redemptive (carrying man through it). The idea that the

mission into space is a voyage towards death that parallels the earth

plot is implicit in the Dylan Thomas poem that equates death withnight, making it no accident the poem is first read as the Endurance

leaves earth for the black beyond. The literary association between

water and death - prevalent in other Nolan films - also stresses this

point, whether in the sleep caskets which fill with water and sink into

the earth like coffins, or in Cooper's comparison of their mission to a

journey across the seas and unto death itself. This theme of maritime

exploration, Brand's comments about being "marooned" by Mann, or

her concern about humanity being "adrift" carry much more

significance than their casual delivery would attest. Likewise, it is

surely no accident that both worlds visited by the mission are water-

saturated death worlds unfit for human habitation, or that in the caseof Mann's planet, which has floating clouds hiding a core of ice, the

imagery is of a superficial paradise that is fundamentally unfit for

human habitation.

So how does mankind transcend death? What are the precise actions

which trigger social redemption? As stated above, the general

ingredients seem to be the ongoing struggle to lift mankind beyond

death, which is accomplished by the pursuit of scientific progress as

long as science is properly guided by man's love for his fellow man.

Beyond the shifting dualism of the robots and NASA, the idea that love

is key to keeping this journey from becoming destructive is also found

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in the film's juxtaposition of pure scientific theory with the same

theory grounded in emotional understanding. Amelia Brand's surprise

at the effects of relativity on Romilly are meant to indicate that shelacks this emotional grounding, and her failure here is an interesting

parallel to Mann's similar comments that he thought he understood

death until he faced it as an emotional reality.

In these scenes and others, Cooper is the positive character because

his love for his children provides him with an emotional "bridge" thatallows him to feel empathy not only for his children but for humanity

as a whole. While Plan A (rescue of the self) mirrors Mann's philosophy

and Plan B mirrors Brand's (near-fatal) selflessness, Cooper is the

character who splits the difference between the two, guided by his love

for his children (which Mann thematically lacks) but also the genuine

selflessness he feels as a parent.

And this leads us to Nolan's answer about how mankind can transcend

death. The solution, the script seems to claim, comes through a literary

version of Newton's third law: the leaving of something behind. The

journey into Gargantua fulfills its purpose as a metaphor for man's journey into death, and what is left behind by Cooper seems to be two

things: the children he loves and whose ultimate recognition of that

love is what empowers them to repeat this process down through the

aeons of time (Murph falls in love and has a family only after she stops

being "mad" and recognizes the truth that her father loved her); and

also through the books and knowledge which educate those who come

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after us and enable them to make sense of the world. Humanity makes

itself divine, in short, by creating a bridge that straddles generations

and leaves an emotional and intellectual legacy that drives mankind totake its place among the stars. Or more succinctly, as TARS puts it, "the

only way humans have ever figured out how to get anywhere is to

leave something behind."

And this seems to be why, as the central character who accomplishes

this, Cooper becomes a symbolic a force of divinity, associated with theChrist figure who represents God incarnate as man. As the "good

father" who has promised to return and now does, Cooper fulfills his

Christlike portrayal as the father who hears the prayers of his children

from the darkness and saves them through a love which transcends

time. His awakening of Mann thus echoes Christ's raising of Lazarus

from the dead, while his self-sacrificial journey into the "gentle" black

hole transforms him into a "ghost" who moves beyond the realm of

the living to the strains of Hans Zimmer's cathedral-like organ music,

and is finally resurrected in the white light of God as mankind is lifted

up into the metaphorical heavens.

With all of that said, there are some ambiguities in this reading and it

would be dishonest not to mention them. For one, I am unclear of

exactly how positively we should view Amelia. Her speech about evil

existing within man seems to be part of the philosophical message of

the film (the film's comparison of Gargantua to a "heart of darkness" is

also an allusion to Conrad's novel that sets up their journey as a

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voyage into the nature of man himself), but at other times she is naive

(in her judgment of Mann) and perhaps fatally idealistic. Her name

also signals a certain degree of negativity in the sense that it isapparently a reference to doomed explorer Amelia Earhart. And when

Brand is stranded on Edmunds' planet at the end, the message is

complicated. As with earth, her new home is a dusty wasteland that

will take love, struggle and scientific persistence to transform into a

garden planet. And yet that negativity is also somewhat offset by the

symbolism of a resurgent America, in the implied and redeeming love

that seems to pull Cooper across the galaxy towards her, and the sense

that this new home is moving forward rather than serving as an

ossified museum: outer space becomes the place of both hope and the

struggle for a better future.

Also, the film uses so much loaded Christian imagery that it seems

difficult to imagine that there is not a redemptive message about faith

lurking somewhere inside. Thomas may be a "Doubting Thomas"

because of his lack of faith in the spiritual and physical healing powers

of NASA, but he is clearly one because of his lack of faith in his father,

who doubles for God. So when is the film talking about Cooper as an

uplifted man and when is it talking about him as representative of a

God who exists beyond the bounds of science and knowledge, a pearl

in the oyster far beyond the observable universe, and known only in

death? When Cooper achieves the "impossible" in docking the

spaceship, it possible that he transcends the limits of science and we

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thus have faith - in addition to love - as a guiding and moderating force

that shapes human action and helps us uplift ourselves.

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