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. Its also pretty complicatedand not
just because of the scienceinvolved. If youre like us, you probably
walked out of the theater with a bunch of questions. We try to answer a
number 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), their
experience of time is not linear in the same way that ours is. They
create the wormhole and the tesseract that saves Cooper.
I dont understand the ending. If they are descended from
humans, and Cooper saves humanity, then how could they exist
in the future if Cooper hasnt saved humanity yet? Or, as Vulture put
it, you cant travel back in time and engineer your own salvation.
Right?
A lot of science fiction, at least, would disagree with you. The ending
ofInterstellar 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 Connors mother.
The paradox is that Reese turns out to be the father of John Connorby
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 remains
theoretical, but its something theoretical physicists do argue about.
(If youd like to read more, theoretical physicist Kip Thorne has a whole
chapter about this in his book The Science of Interstellar.)
Whats a tesseract? Isnt that the thingy from The Avengers?
Yes, in the Marvel Universe, the Tesseract is an Infinity Stonean object
of extraordinary power. In our universe, however, tesseract is the
geometric term for a four-dimensional cube. If a cube is the threedimensional 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 the
tesseract is a space built by they so that Cooper can communicate
with Murph.

Why does Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) try to kill Cooper and escape?
Because its only a matter of time before they figure out that hes 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 hes 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. Whats
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 thats 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 movies computer effects artists
taught him new things about the ways black holes behave. The effects
team based their visualizationthe product of a year of work by 30
people and thousands of computers, Wired reportson Thornes
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 wasnt
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.
Whats up with the blight? Why is corn the only crop left on earth?
Interstellar is vague about what has rendered the Earth nearly
uninhabitable, 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 worlds
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most popular cropsin the conditions shown in Interstellar, but that it

wouldnt be by much. Corn, Weisman explained, has an advantage
over rice and wheat in that its more efficient in processing solar
energy. Still, all grains are vulnerable, and Weisman says its
extremely unlikely that any grain would have much chance under
Interstellars 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 dont leave the farm,
they will all die. (Theyve 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.
Whats the poem that Michael Caine is always reciting?
Thats 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 dont 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 dont
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 Americas

Cup Race in the 70s and 80s, has said he never learned how to
swim. His friend, the quadriplegic racer Paul Callahan, cant 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.

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 needs
graphs, 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 the
scary 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 confused
by 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 and
from 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 were
so 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 being
struck 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 to
imagine 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 image
of 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 Earth
to 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 gravitational
anomaly.
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 accretion
discs 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 the
universe 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 strange
indeed, and we wanted to humbly hint at that.

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11 BIG QUESTIONS LEFT UNANSWERED BY CHRISTOPHER NOLANS

INTERSTELLAR
I know what youre thinking. Here come those movie-hating FSR jerks
to poop on Christopher Nolans Interstellar with all their negativity!
No wonder they were rejected from film school! Good one guys. But
heres the thing we love movies, and more than that, we know that
criticizing or asking questions of a film doesnt negate the things a
movie gets right or the overall entertainment value we derive from the
film. Honest. Heres my positive, spoiler-free review of Interstellar as
exhibit A. (And heres our own Neil Millers 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 dont find Nolans latest to be anywhere near
great I do think its a good movie... with questionable plot turns and
head- scratching moments. Its 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 fathers love for his
daughter. Its worth seeing in theaters.
But enough of that. Its 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 its Coop and his like-minded daughter
Murph who go ripping through the corn fields destroying untold
number of meals beneath their wheels. (Its worth noting that these
two events happen 23 years apart, and the corn fields in Murphs time
look as healthy as they did in her dads, 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 wouldnt
that be even more prevalent in the future? Were not given a wide
glimpse of the world and its remaining population, but it cant 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?
Its 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 that
it was all a fraud? Maybe Im 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?
Well assume yes, but even if they did and failed wouldnt 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
arent yet contaminated and secure them away to a location where
they cant be infected? Or spend the cash on underground bunkers
where people can live, form communities and keep mankind alive
until they can eventually return to the surface? Or maybe share the
technology theyre 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 theyre sinking every last dime
into solving gravity. What the what?
5) Why arent MRI machines available anymore?
During Coopers chat with his kids teachers he makes mention of the
fact that they no longer have MRI machines, but why is that the case?
Its not part of a blanket dismissal of all things NASA (hinted at with the
Apollo nonsense) as NASA didnt 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 cant be due to an anti-science backlash that extends to all
electronics 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 populations sole purpose was mandated to focus
strictly on growing food, but we know thats not the case because there
are still teachers and smart kids going on to college. Someone says at
one point, The world doesnt need any more engineers. We didnt 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 Coopers son an asshole as an adult, and is it because his
father clearly doesnt care about him?
Seriously, Coop wakes up from his deep space sleep and never even
asks about Tom hell, he doesnt 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 hes a monstrous prick whod 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... couldnt they have just done
that all along without even giving the wormhole a second thought?
When Coop wakes up its been a total of 73 years since he left Earth,
and wouldnt you know it... the humans are fine, happy and playing
baseball on a space station near Saturn. Theyre not on the new world,
theyre not even through the wormhole. Theyre exactly where they
could have been 73 years ago. Again, we have space stations now, so
why couldnt 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 theres no reason
why space shuttles couldnt 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 theres a bigger
question here if he was actually in control. He has windows into
Murphs 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 theres no logical answer. Its 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
shes 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 were supposed to think
shed make a great bed/heart buddy for Coop? Theres no emotional
connection between the them, and again, weve 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. Its bad enough we never get to see Murph and friends solve
gravity and launch that underground bunker into space, but here were
also cheated out of the reunion thats been driving the entire film.
10) If its 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 its 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 shes a woman? I say that not because women are
inferior, but because the movie already went out of its way to have her
be 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 its we. (Its unclear as there are no English majors in
the dusty future.) Aliens didnt send us the wormhole, we sent it to
ourselves. Aliens arent saving mankind, were saving ourselves. Aliens
arent peeking into a ten year-old girls bedroom, were peekhmm,
anyway, what Im saying is if we sent it back then we obviously
survived already and didnt need the wormhole to do it. The message
of self-reliance and accomplishment is nice, but its 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 two
kinds of space . . . blend . . . and become identical.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
The title of Christopher Nolans extraordinarily ambitious sciencefiction filmInterstellar is three-dimensionally flat and far less
descriptive than it should be. Pointing only to exterior space and
distant stars, it obscures the films 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 films inward focus on the immensity of intimate space as
it is lived in intense love and irrevocable loss by an earthlyand timebound human family. Finally, given its empirically neutral tone, it
conveys nothing of the films heart-rending affect and moral gravity,
which, encouraging each other in their growth, expand individual
anxieties about the future of ones own children into collective
responsibility for the future of others. In sum, suggesting just another
science-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, fourth21

dimensional time, and a cross-dimensional gravity that enfoldsand

blends cosmic and intimate immensity to transform what, in other
hands than Nolans, would have likely been a comfortably predictable
variation of a long-familiar science-fiction plot about ourand our
planets impending extinction. Set in the near future, Interstellars
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 NASAs
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 crews search,
there are, of course, increasing complicationsboth 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 expandedand compoundedthe
relativity of space-time and its effects by layering them in the multiple
dimensions not only of Interstellars narrative but also of the films
overall structure and its immersive mise en scne. Simultaneously, all
three play out the tension between intimate and exterior spacetime and, in the films moving final third, resolveby unifyingtheir
different immensities and seemingly incompatible values.
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At the narrative level, this resolution occurs in two plot threadsone

personal, the other cosmic. Immense in its intensity, the personal
thread ultimately reconciles a widowed father, Cooper (Matthew
McConaughey), 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 humanitys 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 films last third,
this reconciliation occurs not in theory but through experience, and
resolves fundamental incompatibilities between Einsteins
geometrical description of the relative structure of space-time and
quantum physics mathematical description of the particle- and wavelike 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 humanizeand provide
occasional relief fromthe genres 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,
23

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 Interstellars personal narrative is drawn from Einsteins
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, its 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 Coopers anguish at the
botched heroics of crew member Brand (Anne Hathaway) as he tells
her she has cost them all decades.
Interstellars cosmic narrative also draws its rules from contemporary
astrophysics, and particularly the work of theoretical physicist Kip
Thorne (credited as one of the films executive producers). His research
24

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 phenomenon
is spectacularly visualized in the film.) Also relevant to the scientific
credibility of the narratives temporal trajectory and resolution,
Thornes work suggests that the frequently polarized behavior of
quantum fields makes backward time travel impossibleand 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 presenta
temporal paradox that has particular significance to both the logic and
great poignancy of the films final third, which keeps father and
daughter apart and yet brings them together across what seems an
infinite 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
films 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
25

acts (as theyre 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 futurealthough
its mise en scne 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
possiblea 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 films 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 Coopers teenage son and particularly
beloved young daughter, watch an azure sky obliterated by a massive
dust storm, and learn, through small but surprising futuristic details
casually placed in an otherwise familiar mise en scne, 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
26

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 so
as 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 the
collective loss of hope and can-do pioneer spirit with tag-line dialogue
that has appeared in almost all the films 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 genres 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: Were not
meant to save the world, were meant to leave it. By the first acts end,
to Murphys great despairand angerat her impending
abandonment, her father has been recruited as the missions leader.
The rich and deep texture of the first acts 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
27

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

towering and gleaming rocketry. Unfortunately, this comparative
flatness pervades the films second act (as well as its title), and
certainly has something to do with CGI and a lot to do with our
familiarity with narrative and visual science-fiction conventions.
Indeed, despite Nolans 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 clichs or
references to iconic science-fiction films. Indeed, after mission lift-off,
the second acts first major opportunity for spectaclethe ships
passage through the wormholeis thus a dazzlingly kinetic light-show
reflected on Coopers helmet as our only point of spatial reference,
which, not surprisingly, recalls the Star Gate sequence in
Kubricks2001: A Space Odyssey (reported to be number one on
Nolans top 10 list of favorite films).
Since weve seen it all already but for small variants (however
spectacularly big on screen), the genres visual and narrative novelty
has become more limited in outer space than if, as Nolans first act
proves, it had remained on Earth. Thus, however likely to be
Interstellars biggest attraction, the films second act tends to substitute
obligatory generic spectacle and action for textural substance and
textual depth. However, to Nolans great credit, narrative attention
keeps returning to Cooper, and to hisand the filmsawareness of
times irrevocable passage, whatever its relative elasticity.
28

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 a
series 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 (Coopers father-in-law)
and cancerous (Coopers 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 exploration
of two potentially habitable planets. As spectacle and action accelerate,
Cooper, always thinking of home and his promise to return to Murphy,
experiences times 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
ships 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
29

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 into
the black hole.
In contrast to its second act, the third act ofInterstellar 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 earthly
home 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 Murphys 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 ownand the Earths
very lastgeneration.
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
30

form of a multilayered and infinite multiplication of Murphys

bookcase and bedroom. Catching himself at one bookcase and
instance, Cooper looks from behind the books on a shelf both at his
daughter in her present and as a young child in hisor 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 soand
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 simultaneous
and 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 presentone,
the intimate interior of an earthly bedroom, and the other, the infinite
exteriority of the cosmosthere 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 circumstancesand in
31

the fleshfather 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 Nolans
ravishingly beautiful and philosophically profound film also resonates
in lines from Dylan Thomass greatest poem, Do not go gentle into
that good night, which, spoken in dialogue and voiceover several
times, serve as both the narratives commentary and chorus. However,
the poems exhortation to Rage, rage against the dying of the light
seems directed less at the films characters than at its present
audience. Indeed, Interstellars call to action urges all of us watching in
our own dying light to do more than passively resign ourselves to
imminent extinction.

32

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. In
truth, 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
33

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 to
the 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
34

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 early
people 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?

35

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 beginning
with 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 at
least -- 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
36

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 be
the 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 in
the 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
37

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 to
build 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 hadfound
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
38

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 get
ourselves 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 will
set 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
39

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 which
space-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 amount
of 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
40

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 not
articulated 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 a
message 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
41

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 playing
with. 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 struggle
with 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

42

As in the Batman trilogy, Nolan's structuring metaphor in Interstellar is

Eden imagery. The film starts with Cooper falling out of the sky, and
transitions to shots of dusty corn fields that suggest a metaphorical
fallen garden, with dust literally burying the farm in death imagery
("ashes to ashes, dust to dust"). Themes of destruction and death
worsen through the film until the garden becomes an inferno of
flames, with man's hellish descent only reversed at the climax as
humanity uplifts itself through love and returns to a recreated garden
in the heavens.
This religious imagery establishes Interstellar as a fall-and-redemption
story arc: something causes society to fall apart, and something else
triggers its renewal. But what are the causes of social decay? And what
rescues mankind from death? As in The Treasure of Sierra Madre, which
Nolan has cited as an influence on his film, the answers are provided in
the way Interstellar comments on its individual characters. Cooper's
son will show us the consequences of stunted intellectualism and
unquestioning scriptural indoctrination. Mann demonstrates the
destructive forces of selfish egoism, while Professor Brand shows
hopeless apathy in the face of death, failing to struggle against
mortality once he realizes his equation is "impossible" to solve.
The redemptive characters (Cooper and Murph) differ from the other
figures in the film in their association not only with religious faith, but
also aspirational science. Just as Murph will "observe and record" her
ghost at the start of the film, the script has her father "observe and
43

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 contrasting
both 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
44

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 the
narrative 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' offthe-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 whom
they 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 HALlike 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 destructive
psychopath 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 with
night, 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 watersaturated death worlds unfit for human habitation, or that in the case
of 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 she
lacks 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" that
allows 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 to
take 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 the
Christ 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 is
apparently 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
52

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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