Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is a tour de force of cinematic ambition, a film of genuine wonder and vision which manages to occasion consistent moments of profundity and awe. It remains an extraordinary cinematic achievement even right up until its closing act, at which point it collapses into a tragically sentimental exposition of such insipid existential fear (apparently a fear that utter banality, rather than exceptionalism, is humanity’s true fate in the cosmos) that the film obliterates the pathos it has hitherto carefully constructed.
For quite some time the ending of Interstellar sheared my perception of the film’s otherwise impressive intellectual integrity so grievously that it almost ruined the movie for me entirely. Which would have been a colossal waste, because contemporary cinematic offerings (at least, the ones one might see at a multiplex) tend so much to the median—the relentlessly, anxiously safe—that the sense of wonder, scale and thoughtfulness which permeates Interstellar becomes a rare spectacle indeed.
Yet the attempt at contorting a finite narrative into the infinite solution the film had needlessly driven itself toward did, at first, shatter the measured fidelity so carefully crafted up until that point. It smacks of the kind of stereotypical, neatly-wrapped ending a studio might have wanted. Perhaps, too, the average viewer. Yet the film is inherently bold, its themes confronting, its visuals striking. It actually attempts to seriously contend with complex material like the nature of black holes, which are usually glossed over or ridiculously oversimplified in similar material.
Yet at the very last moment it baulks, blinks, and plucks a meek defeat from the gaping jaws of victory.
This conceptual error was so egregious to me that I couldn’t think about the film for a long time afterward without feeling distinctly bitter about it. The craft and intelligence which went into its construction felt like an extended appetiser which would inevitably be spoiled by the actual meal to follow. I’m sure Interstellar’s ending is perfectly acceptable to some—perhaps even most—but I left the cinema feeling betrayed.
That is, until I watched it again with a certain Principle in mind, and reconsidered some aspects of the final scenes of the film. To my considerable delight, I found that the film offered an alternate interpretation of the material which sat much closer to the aspects of the film—of which there are many—which make it such a unique visual and conceptual spectacle. In the process of this redux, I recognised that, like a lot of Nolan’s work, there was enough ambiguity obscured within the casual supposition of the narrative to take something more out of the basic framework. While there might be a justifiably objective reading of the material, a kind of prototypical reading, there lurks a second exegesis behind the easy, romanticised version.
One wonders, if humanity had evolved on such a planet how long it might have taken us to realise that not all stars look like singularities. Image: Warner Bros.
After all, Interstellar is courageous on many other levels. It takes a considerable risk even confronting the nature of science and complex scientific ideas (with about as much depth as a special-effects driven, celebrity-laden cosmic adventure could probably ever expect to have), because it risks audiences feeling mildly lectured or being bored by all the technobabble. That is not to say that Interstellar is some pinnacle of cutting-edge scientific thought, but it clearly takes pains to present a particular view. It remains internally consistent right up to and including the moment Rust’s—sorry, Cooper’s—pod enters Gargantua, possibly the greatest passive figurative terror in all cinema. After that… it all turns out okay in the end. The entire mission saved by his miraculous messages from the fifth dimension, interpreted dutifully by his companion robot and his now-adult daughter. What a relief.
That’s the rote reasoning. It’s the Hero’s (time-diluted) Journey, by which the plot can be boiled down to a Beastie Boys lyric:
Intergalactic, planetary, planetary, intergalactic.
That’s the plot: wormhole to another galaxy, visit a planet, visit another planet, travel back to another galaxy. I too like my sugar with coffee and cream, but on repeat viewing there’s more to this metaphysical journey than, appropriately, meets the eye.
Back to Earth
Much of the film’s early sequences illustrate an Earth in crisis. It defies a singular label but it can be safely assumed to be climate change or some version thereof. Called “blight”, other than the specifics of crops being ravaged the calamity remains ill-defined. I imagine purposefully so. The soil has turned to dust and can no longer support farming. It was once said that rain follows the plough, but this was crushingly refuted by the Dust Bowl phenomenon in the 1930s in the United States. Perhaps this is merely a planetary-scale event of a similar nature; that is, yet another analogy for—or even example of—human ignorance masquerading as confidence, or merely an unwavering belief in our own manifest destiny. This ‘blight’ is the then-pending disaster which (we discover via later exposition) decades earlier thrust humanity on its search for a barely habitable, last-minute alternative to the bespoke planet—in a bizarre combination of hubris and apathy—we have completely trashed.
The protagonist, played competently by Matthew McConaughey, is a former Air Force test-pilot called Cooper (if he has a first name I can’t recall it). Cooper discovers, quite by chance (OR IS IT?), the secret NASA station which coordinates the intended “seeding” mission. This mission involves sending a ship with human stock to visit one among a number of potentially habitable locations, which were each visited by brave scientists on a one-way journey years ago; the data they returned has flagged the best planetary candidates within the reach of a strange wormhole anomaly just past Saturn. These scientists knew full well upon their departure that there was no coming back. Interestingly, the stakes are not so high for those who follow: they already have some data in regard to which of these new planets are most likely to yield results, and are engaged in setting up a kind of forward base, whence the rest of humanity will presumably follow in good time; and, yes, I use that last phrase with all the ironic weight it deserves.
In another convenient coincidence, Cooper is now the best pilot they have, and so he inexplicably leads the mission. Or, if he doesn’t literally lead it, he certainly seems to. Much of the film’s early familial tension revolves around Cooper and his relationship with his intellectually brilliant daughter, Murph (in particular), but also his salt-of-the-earth son, Tom (whom I was delighted on my re-watch to discover is played by a young Timothée Chalamet). The drama turns on the climactic moment of Cooper’s departure, complete with a coded-from-the-imagined-future message to S-T-A-Y, even though such an act would have doomed the mission and the “happy” ending of which that very message is a part. More on that later.
The film slowly ratchets up tension with a skilled restraint, transitioning from Cooper’s family on Earth to the manifold concerns on the advanced space-faring vessel, the Endurance, magnified by the pressure that the future of the human race is depending on their success. Discussions about risk merge with those about time dilation and gravity, and somehow that only feeds the anticipation. Once through the wormhole, they face uncertainty about which planet to visit. The two they eventually choose are both doomed, and fraught with danger. This isn’t evident at first, but one of the wonders of the film is how it expresses the brutally unforgiving and utterly indifferent nature of reality outside our comfortable biosphere. The perfect one we have treated with such disregard and which the team are now seeking a hasty, and almost certainly imperfect, replacement for. This confrontation with the ontological, or perhaps existential, nature of the universe and all things (once pared down to their most fundamental essence) is one of my favourite aspects of the film.
Physics, raw matter, the vastness of space, the crushing force of Gargantua; rightly, none of these things deigns to notice the frivolous motes buzzing momentarily upon some planet in a vain hope of extending their genetic code for a few more generations. The pathetic insignificance of humanity and its nature and culture is adequately diminished by the scale of the forces surrounding these characters.
Brand Identity
It is worth noting at this juncture that there are two people called ‘Brand’ in the film: Professor Brand, portrayed by Michael Caine, and Dr Amelia Brand, his daughter, played by Anne Hathaway. I refer to both as Brand, but note that ‘Professor Brand’ refers exclusively to the senior of the two. Otherwise, assume that ‘Brand’ is Amelia.
The name itself is an interesting choice; they seem to represent different versions of the brand which defines the mission. Professor Brand seems to represent the marketing aspect; the lure, the prospectus, the end-of-quarter projections, how your unique investment or skill set synergises with the corporate whole. Or something like that. Amelia, on the other hand, is the procedural aspect of the brand; how to maintain corporate integrity and bring home the deliverables. She reeks of someone desperate to fulfil all of her key performance indicators even as she is penning a memo about an idealised future direction of the company that might do better without them. It is insightful to see how close the desperate machinations of this pre-apocalyptic NASA still tread to the well-worn capitalist ideologies which ground the Earth into literal dust in the first place.
Meta-narratives
To this point, nothing in the film suggests a universe filled with anything other than a kind of casual brutality. A universe utterly free of judgement or emotion or any other extravagant substance other than an unfeeling and unflinching absolution. There is a delicious irony in the fact that the one legitimate speech about the extra-dimensional properties of the meta-purpose, “love”, is made by the female scientist, Amelia Brand, and is at the time of its delivery rejected haughtily by Cooper as being a fanciful idea unseated from, and incompatible with, scientific “reality”. Yet, when the time comes for Cooper himself to confront the nature of his own existence, it is to this very same fanciful suggestion that he immediately turns, that fucking hypocrite. This kind of two-faced inconsistency is a hallmark of Cooper’s attitudes in several ways, and keep in mind that it speaks to several aspects of the denouement as well.
Cooper says, “mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” He refers, no doubt, to the nature of space exploration, but arrogantly overlooks not only every other species on Earth but the almost absolute certainty that what just came out of his mouth is completely inaccurate garbage. It is interesting that, for a man held up as the scientific voice of the film’s early scenes, he would think mankind was “meant” to do anything at all other than survive and procreate; implying some kind of design or imposition of higher will in regard to the fate of our species.
He does have his moments of clarity, though, when the narrative demands it. He reminds Professor Brand that “there’s not a planet in our solar system that can sustain life and the nearest star is over a thousand years away. I mean, that doesn’t even qualify as futile.”
A quick aside: McConaughey’s delivery of this particular line is symptomatic of his acting style. He places spoken emphasis on qualify, even though semantically the point of this statement is the definition of futility. It is a mark of both his ability to generate meaning despite such alteration, his knack for the flow and sound of the words he is speaking, as well as a habit of placing style over substance, that surround his persona as an actor. It sounds better, but results in verbal misdirection. This is more of an observation than a criticism; it works perfectly for the character of Cooper, in my view.
The original conceit underlying the potential solution to humanity’s destruction of its own planet is the mysterious wormhole which has directed the scientists toward potentially inhabitable planets in a distant galaxy (precisely because none are available locally, as Cooper noted). The wormhole appears by miraculous chance in the first of the film’s shaky—yet, at this point, not quite disbelief-inducing—conveniences. The ultimate source of the communication which facilitates the idea of breaching the wormhole is assumed to be Gargantua, the black hole perilously close to the portal’s exit.
The film suggests that the engineers of the wormhole (it is not a natural phenomenon) are some kind of future, fifth-dimension version of humanity so far evolved and advanced that they no longer resemble their primitive fleshly selves. This is consistent with the orthodox reading of the narrative. Yet, on reflection, it seems particularly incredulous to consider why their mechanism for speaking back to the past resides in a black hole; the one location which to all practical senses would obliterate not only any matter which approached it (including our hyper-sapient future civilisation), but also prevent the means for any kind of physical communication to escape its literally inescapable boundary. After all, black holes are black precisely because not even light is fast enough to slip such a terrifying grip. I mention this with some incredulity because it drives at an apparent inconsistency in the film which I think actually underscores the film’s more stable narrative.
The suggestion inherent in the black-hole-as-origin, as expressed by a typical reading of the film’s conclusion, is that these higher-order beings exist in a state beyond the physical, thereby allowing them to exist within a singularity which by its very definition compresses physical matter into a single point within which the laws of normal space-time cannot exist. This phrase, I suspect, is likely to be a part of the ‘solution’ offered within the conventional reading of the narrative, perhaps via a form of dexterous reasoning which allows beings to exist within a singularity precisely because standard physical laws therein do not. It is analogous to suggesting something like: because a particular tree does not, and can never, have apples hanging from it, then it is not entirely implausible that motor vehicles might grow from it instead.
Inconveniently for this theory, whatever the nature of the amorphous future-humans, Cooper and every contemporary human in existence at the time do still conform to these laws. Hence, no matter the technological leap emulated by the wormhole, while hyper-sapient humanity may possess the ability to manipulate time-space in ways humans yet cannot, it remains impossible for a human form (or consciousness, which relies on that form) to exist within a black hole. It’s an interesting idea, if implausible, but like much of the climax of the film, part a deft sleight-of-hand which distracts from a cunningly concealed alternative.
Mann For All Seasons
The original mission, which preceded the departure of the Endurance, was called Lazarus; spear-headed by the lead scientist referred to only as Dr Mann—a symbolic name if there ever was one, the significance of which should go without saying—as a means of identifying potential planets which may either harbour life already or possess the means of supporting a human colony. A not inconsiderable amount of tension in the film revolves around the likelihood of one, or any, or none, of these missions actually having succeeded. Cooper and his team are required to decide which planets are worth risking their lives and limited resources to further explore, based on data provided by the scientists from the Lazarus mission.
In the Bible, Lazarus is a man who dies but is brought back to life four days later by the miracle of Christ. For millennia, the myth of Lazarus has inspired countless literary motifs and symbolic doppelgängers along the lines of anything from literal resurrection through to the un-dead or similar metaphors involving artifice (including somewhat perverse iterations such as Frankenstein’s monster). In this instance, Lazarus is no doubt intended to represent the hope that human life, apparently on the cusp of death, might find itself resurrected via this last desperate miracle mission. Interstellar embodies this theme by having Mann—who is discovered in suspended animation—in his first appearance being literally raised from his suspension unit, a sarcophagus-looking device. There we have it: Mann—man—raised from the dead.
A Mann For All Seasons… but mainly winter. Image: Warner Bros.
He is revived by Cooper, and the moment his senses return to him he bursts into tears and reaches out to his benefactors in one of the most touching moments of the film. Intellectually brilliant though he is, nevertheless the most human of the figures in the film is still just that: human. And so his first response to the awakening from his long sleep, still wrapped in his grave-cloths just like his Biblical parallel, is ecstatic relief from the tension of a legitimate fear that, when he lay himself in his own tomb, he would never awaken.
This potential power over death is both lure and curse. It tempts: just as the idea of re-seeding some far-flung planet tempts us to continue wasting the one we spent billions of years slowly adapting to, and in the face of an extraordinary amount of information telling us that no such alternative actually exists. It also curses: because it requires the approach of imminent death to inspire the appropriate motivation to defy it. Until then, as we, ourselves, in our actual world know perfectly well, until disaster is literally wrenching our lives apart, there’s always tomorrow (and the seemingly unconquerable force of vested interests engineering new comforts for us to consume in the interim).
In one sense, the film tells us the ending long before we reach it, as though it was delivered to us while we were dilated in time. Dr Mann, “the best of us”, the most brilliant among the crew—and, despite his ethical and moral weaknesses, clearly the only true realist among them—tells Cooper, as they trek off to discuss the nature of his icy planet, that what Cooper will see in the moment of his death is the thing that is most precious to him: his children. This simple observation, which seems on first viewing to be a mere artefact, a throw-away line, is in fact of critical importance to the meta-narrative, as we shall later see.
On first viewing, it is easy to view Dr Mann as the film’s villain, raised from the dead just as humanity itself intends to be, yet floundering in the moral vacuum he has created in the absence of hope. Yet, on second viewing he becomes the lynch-pin to the entire film, the gravity nexus around which the entire thing revolves.
This is true both in regard to the narrative itself (the crew are drawn to his planet and his expertise) as well as its emotional content (his betrayal and, conversely, the truths he tells which we don’t morally want to hear, and later reject because he has been cast as “villain”). Mann is compelling precisely because he is vulnerable, and because he represents reality not merely theoretically, as he espouses, but emotionally: he suffers from a powerful desire for survival, as we all do, and ultimately fails to overcome these instinctual drives with his intellect. He knows what he is doing is wrong, that he has failed his mission, failed his own reason, and failed the crew who have come to rescue him under the pretense of his having discovered a habitable planet. This simply illustrates the nature of survival as being more powerful than any fact. Besides, the facts presented in the film are not at all reassuring. Yet his confidence—despite it being a bluff—certainly is. This isn’t ignorance masquerading as confidence any more, it’s the inevitable successor once cognitive dissonance has taken hold. It has become sheer desperation masquerading as confidence.
And that is why he is the character among all the film’s characters most worth listening to. Brand is an idealist and, as Cooper realises, compromised by too much hope. Her father, the Professor, outright deceives not only Cooper but Murph and Amelia and the rest of humanity. He makes a terrible sacrifice—of dignity and trust—in order to facilitate a counterbalance to what he (rightly) suspects will be a human response to absolute disaster: panic and violence. In order to stave off that inevitability, he nobly persists with the unsolvable equations and drags Murph along with him. Professor Brand represents the illusion of hope.
Cooper, on the other hand, remains absolutely certain of his knowledge and, on a superficial level, appears to have all the answers. In fact, he arguably doesn’t need hope at all. What we don’t immediately perceive is that he is absolutely out of his depth emotionally. His father-in-law tells him that he was born a generation too early, or late; unable to cling to the old or reach for the new. And so he remains isolated, and in being so is unable to reconcile the conflagration of feelings he is forced to confront. Not until the end of his journey is his intellect challenged by his emotions, when he must decide between the needs of the mission and a ludicrously slim chance of seeing his family again. Of course, he takes that chance.
Mann, on the other hand, is further advanced; he has genuinely suffered, has been stranded and left to fully contemplate the horrifying reality of his circumstances: complete and utter hopelessness. Mann has considered his options, recognised that his only hope of survival is deception, rejected the idea intellectually but then been led by pure instinct to follow it anyway. His submission to his most primal urges, conquering his intellectual thought, only provides further proof of both of those things being present in him simultaneously. He is, like humanity itself, the most literal of tragic figures. Mann merely represents the absence of hope, or perhaps a corruption of it—an invented hope in the face of obliteration.
So why, then, is Cooper the hero? Why is Mann cast so clearly as the villain?
Humanity, and hubris
It is fascinating to consider the different emotional responses to characters on first and second viewings. In the first, the situation is overtly and emotionally dire; the film is undeniably tense and is conspicuously crafted to squeeze that tension from viewers, interspersing it with cold and calculated views of awesome interstellar sequences which rightly give the film’s title a claim to that scope. It is a masterpiece of visual craftsmanship, the cinematography, in particular, gifted of extraordinary clarity of vision. There has been an enormous amount of attention paid by the cinematographer to the place of light in the film, how it reflects off surfaces or is devoured by the sheer depth of a void.
Sometimes, these cinematographic elements can unshackle us and become psychically disturbing by their sheer scale, and rightly so. But with the gravity of Earth’s situation and the heavy material with which the protagonists must work, the audience requires guidance. As viewers, particularly for the first time, we need a firm hand to steer the ship (literally, in this case) around the stark factual icebergs laying in humanity’s path. And so we are given Cooper, whose complete command of his own confidence acts as a counterweight to the uncertainty expressed elsewhere.
And yet, for all the scientific credentials he is given—not only being a NASA test pilot but also his insistence on teaching his daughter some of the tenets of scientific thought—he is perversely not himself a scientific thinker. He is a man with a keen intellect who views the universe largely as ‘solved’; that action and not thought needs to take over in a crisis and might in fact be the answer to all questions. In this respect he makes for an excellent protagonist, a ship-steerer par excellence, but a hopeless stand-in for the scientific method. That task falls to Mann, the living contradiction.
Science, at its foundation, is a process of doubt. While it exists to search for truth, or fact, the process both begins, and proceeds, with doubt. The questions, “why?” or “how?” feature prominently. Cooper doesn’t ask such questions during his adventure: he explains. He observes and criticises or clarifies, but does not ask these critical questions. Hence, he is fundamentally un-scientific in his processes. Even at the film’s arguably most dramatic moment, after Mann has damaged the Endurance and its berth has gone into a spin, the robot CASE says to Cooper, “it’s not possible,” to which Cooper replies, “no, it’s necessary.”
The sequence is exhilarating; it expresses so many things that are exciting about cinema; the tension of the moment, confidence in the face of terror, bravado and risk-taking that pays off, and the sweet release of the hero’s success. The swelling music (Hans Zimmer is the undisputed master of taking a film score up to 10, then somehow ratcheting it to 11, then 12), the aesthetically gorgeous exterior visuals, the connection to the characters and their nature; these elements combine to produce one of Interstellar’s most sublime moments. Even small details matter: Cooper, the trained pilot, knows to push against the g-forces; Brand goes with it and promptly loses consciousness. This is what the character of Cooper represents to us: a recklessness that seems foolish but succeeds against the odds; action above reason; simplicity before complexity.
That Cooper succeeds in his unilateral move in this sequence justifies his vanity in the face of fact, and simultaneously establishes his position outside the natural order and perhaps even outside physics itself. No doubt this reinforces the suggestion that he (alone) might be capable of travelling across time and space through some fifth dimension within the event horizon of a black hole.
On the other hand, having completely forgotten about Murphy’s Law, which he discusses with his daughter earlier in the film, we are suddenly reminded of his interpretation of that law; what can happen, will happen. This being, of course, a denial of the infinite alternative versions of what “can” happen, also overlooking what “most probably will” happen (perhaps simultaneously the supreme vulnerability of the orthodox reading of the film). In the case of the spinning Endurance, the likelihood of destruction was evident—and yet, because no other viable conditions or options were available, it became ‘necessary’ to take action regardless of the situation.
And so, rather than reflecting on the near-impossibility of what he has just achieved, Cooper instead bullocks his way through the film like a force not of nature but of providence or destiny, one who believes in the concept of science but does not follow its principles himself.
Cooper says:
We’ve always defined ourselves by the ability to overcome the impossible. And we count these moments. These moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known. We count these moments as our proudest achievements. But we lost all that. Or perhaps we’ve forgotten that we are still pioneers. And we’ve barely begun. And that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us, because our destiny lies above us.
Keep in mind the uses of the word moments. The context of this particular statement is a discussion with his father-in-law, Donald, drinking beer on a porch. Cooper is an interesting and charismatic character but he is also highly delusional, and incredibly arrogant (admittedly, he is often correct, but rarely humble in the process). His ego, for most of the film, is out of control.
Who, for example, says to their child, “don’t make me leave, Murph, not like this”? How can his ten-year-old daughter possibly make him leave? The crushing guilt he feels about that moment clearly manifests itself later during his imaginings in the black hole, when against all reason he attempts to make himself stay, perhaps forgetting that to do so would inherently challenge the very nature of his current existence, deny his own reality, and render his contemporary self void; not to mention dooming humanity to certain destruction.
That aside, Cooper’s moral failures are in a basic sense merely arrogance personified, though in his defence they are hard-coded into the narrative. He must be certain so that we, as viewers, are certain. His path is laid out and he must follow it—a very traditional hero’s journey, but absolutely not a scientific one. Yet the film takes pains to undermine that journey, to undermine Cooper himself, and the greatest expressions of that are represented both by Brand—who is willing to question orthodoxy to consider the possibility of love being a direction worth following—and also Mann, whose own intellect failed in the face of the sheer power of instinct, whose reason remained keen and plausible but was turned against what he knew to be true in service of his need to survive.
Brand says, “love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.” Like many of Christopher Nolan’s films, there is a superficially excellent idea embedded here which is protected by only the most slender veneer of intellectual armour. Love is obviously not the only such thing; all memories are the same. Hatred is the same. The point, however, is that in this film Brand offers the only realistic concept of hope. We might ourselves draw upon it to hypothesise even in the worst-case scenario that her love might indeed lead her to Wolf’s planet and, whether he is alive or dead, she might succeed at setting up a colony. On the other hand, it also provides the seed by which Cooper—despite himself—later conjures his own transcendental ideas about love being a force capable of drawing the multidimensional layers of time and space together.
And Brand’s unswerving hope in regard to Wolf is no more or less delusional than Cooper’s own desire to believe he might, through some inter-dimensional time-shifting roll of the dice, project a message into the past and save humanity from itself. One might be inclined to wonder if they’d been better off going with Brand’s hunch after all; by the end of the film it remains the most likely planet for the colony’s success, even if it was not the most logical or plausible at the time.
Brand later says, “the tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.” Of course, it doesn’t mean she’s right, either. The same goes for Cooper, who replies “honestly, Amelia, it might.” Cooper’s typically haughty reply is incorrect—just because she hopes for something or is excited about it, doesn’t make her wrong. However, narratively speaking, he undermines her point here in order that he can later learn from it, and draw from its inspiration during his meta-existential completion of his own emotional journey. However, her expression is far more convincing, and sincere, than his latter conversion.
Brand also confronts Cooper with what is, essentially, his overarching conflict in the film: “you might have to decide between seeing your children again and the future of the human race.” Inevitably, he does not have to make such a decision; he jettisons himself and leaves Brand to continue their quest. He quits. He jumps ship into a black hole, against all reason, hoping that his own self-belief will get him over the line—the physical and metaphorical event horizon—yet again.
Call it what you will: immodesty in the face of ridiculous odds, simplicity before complexity. The belief that sheer force of will equates to stability or security is at the heart of Cooper’s character, his very nature, both his fearlessness and his intellectual vanity; they are, essentially, the same. It is the heroic archetype compressed into its own singularity. But it also speaks to essential human frailty and that same fear which drives people to look to a simple kind of strength—bold confidence, which in hindsight can just as easily be construed as stupidity or arrogance—that we nevertheless feel comfortable in following when times are dire.
There are lessons here not just for the ontological meta-narrative of Interstellar but also for our political instincts as human beings.
Murphy’s Law
This desire for strength, for structure or order, for reassurance, for certainty, the turn toward confidence even if it is in fact arrogance or ignorance or both combined, is fundamentally related to control. Humans seem to expect that, with enough foresight and planning, we can reasonably control the future.
The concept of Murphy’s Law in its colloquial sense suggests that enacting control is a fallacy, and as such it is tempting to think of it somehow involving a level of cosmic spite, as though some higher power is involved in ruining our best-laid plans. That, if it can go wrong, it will. However, Murphy’s Law is itself a fallacy and in most cases is a classic example of confirmation bias. If something can go wrong it won’t necessarily go wrong, but when it does you can bet your arse people will remember it. Enough to create an adage suggesting that human control fails by design rather than because of a plethora of factors that are usually random. In nature, outside the realm of human intent, this tends to be ascribed to, say, chaos theory or even simple environmental pressures, but when we apply it to our own desire to impress our will upon what we see as the future we have designed for ourselves, it becomes malign.
A case in point involves one of the film’s occasional conceits; a series of interviews with elderly people from a past time talking about the way things were. One such commentator says, “you didn’t expect this dirt that was giving you this food to turn on you like that and destroy you.” The statement is staggeringly ignorant, giving intent to something as inanimate as dirt, which does not give food, nor does it possess intent or sentience enough to “turn on you”. Even its premise is illogical, since the dirt hasn’t destroyed humanity, the lack of food has. Never mind that it’s heavily inferred that it was in fact humanity which destroyed the dirt… then, in classic style, we began blaming the dirt for our own suffering.
This one phrase sums up neatly the human predisposition to see negative events, including those ascribed to Murphy’s Law, as akin to involving a pseudo-human intent. From which, no doubt, deism arises. Is the dirt ‘friend’, or ‘enemy’? The film makes no such direct assertion, thankfully, assigning blame quite squarely on mass production and consumption, and the destruction of Earth’s ecosystem to the point of inevitable collapse. That this outcome is merely summarised as ‘blight’ is a convenient narrative solution, but infers the same thing.
It is easy to see how the film suggests that not much is going humanity’s way, and that humans, terrified of a future beyond our control (never mind that the past was no less beyond our control), might develop something of a chip on the shoulder as a result. The Earth is dying. Encounters on both of the potentially habitable planets yield nothing of value, and even the mission’s original leader and designer has succumbed to his basic instincts, which results in ruin and near-disaster for the ship and much of its crew. On Earth, the situation decays. Absolute panic and terror are stilted only temporarily and thanks to the obfuscation of the truth and the suppression of a simple fact: that there is no solution to the problem and every human and its progeny will soon meet their inescapable end.
Murphy’s Law indeed, neatly subverted by one of the few minds in the film, that of Professor Brand, which can and does accurately assess human nature. He deceives those around him, at the cost of his dignity, simply to delay that inevitable terror. Ignorance, as the saying goes, is bliss.
Yet, on the other hand, we also have the prodigious luck of NASA’s best pilot happening to stumble on its presumably secret facility, not to mention the emergence of the wormhole itself—the very mechanism by which hope remains. So not everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Only some of it. In fact, despite the decades the crew spend on the time-dilated water-planet dealing with its cycle of tidal waves, even that legitimately unfortunate event still allows Romilly to collect data from Gargantua in order for them to hypothesise possible solutions to future problems. So, once again, not everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
A Gargantuan proposition
Dr Mann’s suggestion to Cooper that the final vision he will have before he dies will be the one most precious to him—his children—is prophetic. Naturally, on first viewing we cannot know such a thing, but that is not the case the second time around. If we return to the aphorism, represented symbolically by the blight, of human ignorance masquerading as confidence, it is clear that Cooper is the embodiment of this condition. Cooper actually believes that by being pulled into the singularity that he can somehow commune with extraterrestrial forces of unknown nature, origin, or intent, and save the day. Courageous, for sure, but an act of staggering stupidity nonetheless.
Further clues to the narcissism of this psychological denouement exist within several creations of his subconscious. First is the station around Saturn, which orbits that planet for no reason other than the fact that it was where the wormhole was and, therefore, presumably where Cooper himself might assume his own physical body might be metaphysically reincarnated after its miraculous traversal of the black hole. This begs the question as to how, even if his mind might have survived the black hole’s obliteration of his body, that same exact physical form could simply reconstitute itself—and both the space suit it arrived in as well as the machine, TARS, that accompanied him—in a completely different galaxy once his communique is complete? That’s what Cooper’s “story”—the most obvious narrative—would have us believe.
Cooper briefly checks his ego after assuming that the station, saviour as it is of all humanity, is named after himself, when one of the doctors casually reveals that it was actually named after his daughter (still pretty flattering, though). Not to worry; Cooper takes the opportunity to reassure himself during his strangely formal meeting with his daughter: when she insists that despite being trapped on a dying world and almost single-handedly designing the solution-to-everything, it was actually the brief translation of Morse code from another dimension that was truly the reason for humanity’s escape. Cooper says:
“It was me, Murph. I was your ghost.”
His poor daughter replies: “I know. People didn’t believe me, they thought I was doing it all myself, but…” she taps the watch still on her wrist, “I knew who it was.”
Don’t worry, Dad, it was all you, not me. You’re the hero! Even the first time watching the film this raised flags for me. I was suspicious, and more than a little insulted on behalf of poor Murph.
To believe or not to believe; that is the question
“Nobody believed me,” the elder Murph says. And rightly so; the audience shouldn’t believe her, either. Because Cooper isn’t even on the station and certainly hasn’t miraculously reunited with his daughter moments before her death. He is, logically speaking, nowhere near his daughter, who has almost certainly perished decades ago, given the explanation of time dilation enforced by the unimaginable gravitational forces generated by a black hole, as demonstrated earlier in the film.
He still exists, but not for long.
Just like Mann explained to him earlier, the entire scenario is quite literally what Cooper has subsequently conjured in his final moments as, we can only assume, his body is crushed within the massive force of the black hole long before he reaches any kind of bullshit sub-atomic outer realm into which he can project his astral self into the past and provide his daughter with the answers to, conveniently… everything. He is being smashed into oblivion within Gargantua; in his very last moments of life still desperately clinging to an imagined outcome which flies in the face of his own cool assessment of the nature of the universe throughout the rest of the film.
There is ample evidence to support the notion. When he reunites with his daughter on the station, his supposed family behave like automatons, figments or hollowed-out background figures, who do not interact with him at all. Murph refers to them as “my children”, and Cooper has no reaction or response to them at all, nor they to him. He is not treated like some kind of long-lost ancestor or hero (as Murph treats him), but as a stranger or interloper, to be stared at but largely ignored. One can only suppose from this that Cooper had no means of constructing, during his last brief flash of insight, an entire genealogy for himself and Murph; he recognises only that there must be relatives of some kind if humanity was to go on, a gathering of sorts, but nothing in the way of specific personal detail.
The name Cooper is itself interesting. Its origin is the Latin word cūparis, a cask or vat, itself akin to cūpa, meaning tub, from where we presumably get the modern English word ‘cup’. In this sense, Cooper represents the vessel by which the secrets of the universe are carried from the physical world to the higher realm, and back again. He is the container of the truth, or at least the solution to the world’s problems. That is his symbolic value to the film—and even in his final moments he attempts to maintain that position.
Murph is a more complicated matter. She sulkily complains to her father early in the film that her name essentially implies that “what can go wrong will go wrong”, which isn’t a particularly pleasant thought in relation to one’s own name. Cooper replies that in his (and his late wife’s) view the adage refers instead to a related idea that what can happen will happen, quite a different reading. In the context of the film, Murph represents that very idea: if it is possible to find an answer to humanity’s doom on Earth, then she will discover it. Only, she doesn’t. Cooper’s Morse code does.
This contradicts Cooper’s dream-sequence imagining of the outcome (as it obviously should). In his final moments, Cooper imagines that his higher-order communication to his daughter has saved humanity and allowed them to live on in artificial space stations, because no appropriate planet was available. However, that solution is his (imagined) doing, not hers, undermining her symbolic purpose as representing this axiom of “if it can happen, it will.”
But despite this she does in fact symbolically represent an important aspect of this conundrum; it is she who learns from Professor Brand that the equation is hopeless, and can never be solved. Murph learns that if it can happen, it will… but it won’t happen, because it’s impossible. Professor Brand, the film’s foremost conceptual expert (Mann is the expert on reality), tells us as much from his own lips. The same lips which delivered the rationale and reasoning behind the mission in the first place; a long shot, designed to draw out what little vain hope was left and allow humanity the delusions it has maintained all along: that we would live forever.
What we are left with is, one could argue, a metaphysical exploration of an ego being literally crushed within a black hole—it can invent for itself a happy ending but the reality remains unchanged. Without Cooper, what is left? We have his daughter Murph left back on Earth, heroically attempting to solve the unsolvable, still trying to save humanity on a micro level even as her father is having his delusions of grandeur on the macro scale. We also have Amelia Brand, the mission’s idealist, who has struggled against her feelings to accept reality, bearing the last fruit of Earth toward its final hope. We cannot rely on the film’s final moments as evidence because they remain a part of Cooper’s delusion.
Therefore, as with our actual reality, the future remains unknown and unknowable: we simply cannot be sure whether Brand does in fact begin a colony in the fashion of Cooper’s imagining, or whether the planet does turn out to be, as the scientists themselves surmised, a literal dead-end. In the latter case, humanity will indeed perish; we know for certain that the Earth itself can no longer support life (or human life, at least), and without a colony to re-establish human life, then it has in fact met its end.
Hesitation marks, for the psyche
Perhaps the most gut-wrenching moment of the film is the realisation of the degree to which Cooper’s self-delusion is capable of extending itself during his final moments. By his daughter’s side on the space station, she says to him, “nobody believed me, but I knew you’d come back.” He asks, “how?” She stares at him longingly, and murmurs, “because my Dad promised me.”
This one exchange sums up the subtext of Interstellar: forget reason, embrace emotion: that is what it is to be human. It is Mann’s obvious flaw, and it has more subtly become Cooper’s as well. Murph has absolutely no reason whatsoever to think he would ever return, and in fact it is somewhat cruel to consider (as only Cooper would, to salve his own conscience) that poor Murph went her entire lifetime thinking that he would never return, with all evidence to suggest that he was gone forever, only to have him turn up almost at the moment of her death for a last-minute reunion. What a torturous internal life to have lived, with only a feeble and unreasonable hope to cling to, rightly disbelieved by anyone and everyone else and planted by the words of a mortal man with precisely zero ability to ensure the completion of his promise.
But there’s worse! In any sensible reading of the film, this exercise only reinforces his emotional selfishness; if the denouement is in fact ‘real’, then he has doomed her to this fate with a reprieve only at the very last minute. But, more likely, as he is busy being crushed to death in a black hole his daughter (if by that point, time-dilated as we must assume it to be, she is still even alive) is left to hold on to that same foolish hope… only, in actuality, to no avail. After he leaves her as a child, promising to return, he never does.
It is interesting to consider Murph’s brother, whose own delusion in this sense is in service of a particular kind of survival. He insists on remaining, on staying in the house he grew up in even though it is making his family sick. Casey Affleck’s expression of a cruel kind of coldness suggests in his character an aspect of ignorance, of dull-headed stubbornness in the face of fact. Yet perhaps it is he who sees the world clearly; he knows that neither Murph nor his father will somehow, magically, save the world. They will, inevitably, die.
He seems resigned to this, and therefore wants it to take place on his terms. Control, again, but interestingly a mediated control toward a specific end: the manner in which he and his family will briefly exist before they die. He is the counter to Murph’s undying hope. For all her impressive intellect, her hope wastes her energy. And for all his simplicity—a contrast is drawn in their characterisation between his status as a farmer, and hers as an academic—he sees things fundamentally more clearly than she does.
Or, perhaps, he just accepts things as they are and refuses to allow hope to colour his vision of the future. His attitude seems less cynical than it does realist, in his acceptance of their likely fate. What we as an audience are trained to expect from this moment is that the Murphy-Cooper deus-ex-bookcase will deliver a miracle and Tom will look the simpleton fool he has been characterised as, for not believing his sister and father might be able to solve everything via a trans-dimensional communication. He has put hope aside in order to prepare for the most likely scenario, rather than trust that the best-case one—with its ludicrous odds—will eventuate.
Who is the scientist now?
Earlier in the film Murph says, in a pre-recorded message for the Endeavour, “today is my birthday, and it’s a special one because you told me… you once told me that when you came back we might be the same age. And today, I’m the same age as you were when you left.” If that doesn’t reinforce the reality of Cooper’s abandonment of his children, nothing will. She begins to cry, and says, “so it would be a real good time for you to come back,” but he won’t. He can’t. Jessica Chastain’s (typically) wonderful performance underscores this terrible vulnerability in the sense that she clearly wrestles with what her brilliant mind tells her is likely, against what her heart desperately wants in the face of that unkind reality. Her brother, on the other hand, seems to have no such conflict; he has long ago abandoned the idea that anyone or anything will save them. What remaining survival they might still eke out is all that matters to him.
Cooper, for his part, satiates his own conscience during his final moments with his dreams of a miraculous last-minute reunion. But these are real feelings which Murph has had to endure her entire life. Brand attempts to console Cooper at one stage, suggesting he could have told her he was going to save the world. Cooper replies, again with a kind of caustic righteousness, that “when you become a parent, one thing becomes really clear… that you want to make sure your children feel safe, and that rules out telling a 10-year-old that the world’s ending.”
Presumably, Cooper’s ethical vision does not include the avoidance of making promises you have no realistic capacity to keep. Furthermore, it might be nice for his children to feel safe, but if their actual existence is in fact not safe, then there is an ethical negligence being exercised in pretending otherwise. What exactly is the best practice here? Truth and hopelessness? Or the gentle reassurance of a careful, if fragile, fallacy? It’s a very religious question.
Perhaps the most egregious irony of all is that, if Cooper had stayed—as his emotionally-conflicted future self seems to demand via the same fifth-dimension messages he both sends and receives—he would have satisfied his promise to his daughter and remained emotionally cohesive. The small price for which would have been ensuring the destruction of all human life. There’s a sad conclusion that, in all probability, this is what happened anyway—even in Cooper’s ideated dream-sequence, where he is the ultimate arbiter of all things, some part of his sub-conscious retains this knowledge of humanity’s ultimate demise: the only thing his mind, in despair, can think to do is imagine himself literally reaching out to his earlier incarnation in a desperate attempt to undo the emotional damage he has inflicted on himself and his daughter in the past. That is to say that if it seems ridiculous that he might be willing to pay such a steep price—the extinction of the human race—in order to repair a personal betrayal, then if he knows that price has almost certainly already been paid then that terrible cost is mitigated considerably.
And so, the fairytale begins: he becomes the ghost, the ghost transmits the code via the fidgety watch, Murph solves the riddle; a neater bow was ne’er tied around the shell of such beautiful illusion.
Yet, to point out yet another crack in that intra-stellar solution, when Cooper enters what TARS later refers to as the “tesseract”, he appears to fall into a spherical object; a dynamic visualisation of what the higher beings have allowed him to use to communicate through time with gravity. However—suggesting that the film is knowingly complicating Cooper’s status as the ultimate saviour of humanity and merely projecting his subconscious desires across the final nanoseconds of his life—a tesseract is a four-dimensional projection of a cube, not a sphere.
Speaking of TARS, the robot also says, in one of its many interesting and humorous interactions with Cooper, “absolute honesty isn’t always the most diplomatic, nor the safest, form of communication with emotional beings.” The context is a discussion about why its ‘honesty parameter’ is set to 90 per cent (rather than, say, 100). In similar fashion, Interstellar could be projecting a similar thesis; its honesty parameter falls short at the moment Cooper drops into Gargantua, and we are allowed all the tepid emotional tidiness of the purported last-minute reprieve for a species shown to be distinctly undeserving of it.
The film runs for approximately 170 minutes. Cooper ejects from his ship at the 140 minute mark, which, discarding 5 minutes of credits, leaves the black hole sequence to run just under 25 minutes: a bit more than ten per cent of the film, but not much. It is therefore tempting to wonder if this section falls within the boundaries of a narrative ‘honesty parameter’. Enough to realise that it isn’t intellectually cogent, but with enough imprecise ‘truth’ to maintain legitimate ambivalence, perhaps, which is undoubtedly one of Nolan’s distinct calling-cards.
We are, ourselves, undoubtedly emotional beings; it is also one of the pleasures of cinema that we are able to absorb patently mythological material as being real (or, perhaps, a better description might be ‘containing an element of truth’), despite extensive evidence to the contrary. Interstellar’s self-referential sabotage is unusual in that it serves to potentially make the film more interesting, than less.
The moment of truth
When Mann meets his end, triggering a cycle of events which will force the crew toward both a number of dynamic decisions and their ultimate fate, he is desperately grappling (unsuccessfully) with the seals between the landing craft and the Endeavour itself. This very event has already been foreshadowed, and its danger thoroughly expressed. And so, in that moment of haste, of desperation, Mann says:
this is not about my life, or Cooper’s life. This is about all mankind. There is a moment—
And at that moment he is interrupted. But this phrase tells us, with a very plain statement, all we need to know about the meta-narrative. He doesn’t say ‘there comes a time,’ or ‘this is something I need to do’, or anything else; he says there is a moment. There is. Here is Mann, “the best of us”, the representation of humanity itself at its most brilliant and innovative and also its most instinctual and cowardly, saying that this particular moment isn’t about individuals—he and Cooper don’t matter—but all humanity, and its fate, are represented in this moment.
The moment he speaks of, which of course he hopes is survival, turns out to be… what? Un-gratifying destruction. Instant death, as it turns out—this is the answer to what happens when your perfect seals have not locked and the amazing flying machine is exposed to reality outside the very thin veneer of control, both literal and figurative, we create for ourselves by venturing beyond Earth. Mann is instantly killed. But he has been cast as villain, so the audience is programmed to see this as justified, a kind of karmic retribution for his own betrayal. We forget about his symbolic and narrative purpose.
But importantly his choice of words also recalls Cooper’s previous statement about “moments when we dare to aim higher, to break barriers, to reach for the stars, to make the unknown known.” This is one such moment, writ large. We see here what the likely outcome is, uncomfortable as that may be. We may dream, we may stoke our ambition, we may strive to become more than the simple design our planet has engineered us to be; but nevertheless we remain simple life forms unable to truly comprehend the vast, cold void beyond our fragile home. The unknown, in my view, isn’t as unknown as it seems—it’s just more unpleasant and perilous than we would care to consider.
Indeed, humanity does possess the impressive ability to overcome the seemingly impossible—simply by ignoring reality. We do it all the time. Humans pretend that growth (whether population, economic, or anything else) can or should increase indefinitely (despite extraordinary evidence to the contrary). We behave as though our planet will support us forever or “we” (ergo, some scientist somewhere) will continue to invent technology to make up any shortfalls—and we do this even if we sometimes wonder whether that is really the case. In other words, our behaviour remains unchanged by such reflection until a literal crisis is upon us (note that figurative, conceptual or only vaguely existential crises don’t really seem to work in this fashion).
It’s an impressive feat, and it allows us to at least make an attempt to persevere in the face of ridiculous odds (for, no matter how infinitesimally small a chance may be, it does remain a chance). But it falls well short, logically, as a value we should be espousing, despite its prevalence in popular culture (such as this very film). Heroes are created to defy odds, not to safely sit back and choose the most sensible path. It’s where reality and drama diverge, but it has a bad habit of seeping into our cultural consciousness.
It is the ignorance-as-confidence masquerade personified. It is Mann’s desperate attempt to survive, even at the cost of his conscience. It is mirrored by Cooper’s descent across the event horizon not long after, with similar consequences. The attempted evasion of finality.
Instant death—this is the answer to what happens when your molecular form, along with that of the vessel which carries you, enters a singularity and interacts with infinite gravity. This critical concept, which restores the integrity of the film’s narrative, is the juxtaposition to the flaccid romanticism—reassuring though it may be, and perhaps less jarring than the unkind reduction of human life to metaphysical irrelevancy—which Cooper desperately clings to in his final moments, as Mann himself had explained. All paths lead to the same moment.
The moment in which Mann and—symbolically—“mankind” fail, and are cast into oblivion.