Chris Nolan’s
Interstellar and the irresistible pull of out there
The Film teases,
“Perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers…”
PLEASE NOTE: We’re going to speculate here about a movie that’s not out yet, gleaning information from the film’s two trailers and its Wikipedia page. We’re not going to be spoiling anything on purpose, but if you want to avoid even inadvertent spoilers or strung-together clues, pull the ejection handle now. This is your only warning!
I
have a shameful admission that will probably cost me some geek cred: I disliked Christopher Nolan’s last film, The Dark Knight Rises. It was a crowded mess of a movie, so enslaved by its own structure and so in love with its own plodding sense of foreboding spectacle that I found myself engrossed in Bejeweled on my phone as Bane was blowing up Gotham or whatever. Even my wife, who’s normally so gung-ho about superhero movies, was bored. We turned it off without finishing it. And so the visceral reaction I had to the teaser trailer for Nolan’s upcoming Interstellar was totally unexpected. It’s been a long time since I got tears in my eyes from a movie trailer, but this one did the trick:
Exodus “But we lost all that,” drawls McConaughey sadly over a clip of shuttle Atlantis touching down at KSC for the final time. Next up is darkness, then a dust-covered bookshelf with a toy rocket (or perhaps it’s ash from those burning fields?). We see McConaughey speeding away from a farmhouse in a pickup, and his soft voice off-screen accuses an equally off-screen audience of losing its way.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yieldd.
The starting imagery is incongruous with the narration: a vista of lush crops gives way to dustbowl images from the Great Depression and burning fields as an unseen Matthew McConaughey narrates about overcoming the impossible. After a moment we see images much more suited to the narration—Chuck Yeager’s Glamorous Glennis taking flight, followed by NASA launch footage and shots from within a Gemini capsule, and then footage from the Apollo and shuttle programs.
“Perhaps we’ve just forgotten that we are still pioneers—that we’ve barely begun,” he admonishes, “and that our greatest accomplishments cannot be behind us; that our destiny lies above us.” As the music swells, two figures in the foreground hold hands as a distant rocket lifts itself high over a field. Who has forgotten? Is it us, the actual movie audience, or is it the people of McConaughey’s country or world, wherever and whenever that is?
In mid-May, some questions were answered in the movie’s first trailer— we can now infer quite a bit about the film’s setting and first act, though the rest remains shrouded in mystery. McConaughey’s character is named “Coop,” and he’s a pilot and an engineer. He has two children, including a plucky-looking redhead named “Murphy,” after “Murphy’s Law.” But McConaughey and his engineering and piloting aren’t what the world needs anymore—the world, we learn almost immediately, is starving. To tighten the dramatic noose, we hear what can only be Michael Caine’s voice: “We must confront the reality that nothing in our solar system can help us.” Things begin to come together. There is a plan. Someone—possibly a government, or possibly a rogue research institution or something—has a working spacecraft, and they need McConaughey to fly it. Following a tearful set of family goodbyes, McConaughey next appears suited up inside the spacecraft, which amidst soaring strings is shown first next to an enormous ringed gas giant and then approaching a warped and distorted lens-like phenomenon. “[T]he film features a team of space travellers who travel through a wormhole,” notes the movie’s Wiki page. As the ship skims closer to the distortion and huge swaths of sky flow beneath like churning white-water rapids made of suns, it becomes clear that this is what we’re seeing—this is a wormhole. And at the music’s crescendo, the ship vanishes into it.
Into unmapped darkness I’ve watched both trailers many times, and each time I shed a few tears. The why is easy: exploration and discovery are deep and profound human drives. With a modern audience, those drives are most directly tied to NASA and space travel, but the themes of leaving a home behind and flinging oneself into the unknown can be found in human literature and culture for just about as long as there’s been human literature and culture.
It’s a freeing explanation. The Earth of Interstellar cannot sustain us, and perhaps it does not even want us anymore. We must go find a new home, and to do so we must leave the cradle and sail on that ocean of black above—a wine-dark sea infinitely more vast than Homer’s Aegean. The journey will be of unknown length, and the chance of success isn’t addressed. It’s implied heavily that as a species we’re doomed if we don’t try.
The best stories are the simplest, and behind the set and setting of Interstellar we find the outlines of an archetypical hero’s journey—at least, we see the outlines of its first act. But the fact that we’ve seen this story before makes it no less compelling—in fact, in the face of a familiar beginning, the mind leaps to form connections and fill in blanks about what is to come. There are strains of Odysseus woven through McConaughey’s Coop, just as Interstellar echoes strains of Homer’s Odyssey, though he leaves behind a daughter named Murphy instead of a son named Telemachus (in the leaked draft of the script floating around the Internet, “Murphy” is a boy, not a girl). The dying, starving Earth needs an avatar for Coop to save, and what better avatar than his daughter?
The trailers don’t offer much beyond that; they deal with only the movie’s first act. However, the purpose of the trailers is to generate desire to see the movie, and these two masterfully pluck at the strings of our explorer hearts. They latch onto one of the central facets of humanity—to go and see and find. This drive to learn and know runs deep. It might ultimately find its roots in the fact that every person living must eventually die, and regardless of whether or not one holds with religion and believes in an afterlife, death remains a veil to be lifted only at the end of life (to brutalize Shelley). We ache to know that which we cannot know—it’s baked into our genetics, and we run toward the unknown from the moment we can first crawl under our own power, all as a proxy for our yearning to see behind that veil.
But it’s Michael Caine (filling in for Nestor, perhaps?) who sagely delivers the core of the film, gift-wrapped in a sage British accent: “We’re not meant to save the world,” he tells us. “We’re meant to leave it.”
Of course, the globe-spanning information ecology we’re building feels sometimes like it takes all the fun out of things—as the philosopher Hans Gruber once famously uttered, “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer.” The borders of our own world are pretty well known now. Even hiking around in whatever woods are near where you live doesn’t have the same sense of mystery it used to have before you could fire up Google Earth and see that they do in fact end. We have little outlet for our desire to go and see—it’s one of the things that makes movies and television popular.
But there are still vast oceans beneath us and boundless sky above— and those too are things we explore through computers and movies and TV. You don’t have to go far on the Web to see every photograph taken by all 12 human beings who walked on the moon, for example. We can slake some of our desires to pierce that veil by gazing through NASA’s lens into space, or through other agencies’ lenses to peer underwater into the equally terrifying abyss there—but we still venerate those who actually go. What child doesn’t want to be an astronaut at some stage? And if the average person now can consult Google and Wikipedia and whatnot, how much more do we envy the few who slip those damned surly bonds?
One of the most eloquent passages ever written about the undeniable, unswerving urge to explore was spoken by former President George W. Bush at the memorial for the space shuttle Columbia’s crew. In front of a crowd of a few hundred people on a warm Houston February day in 2003, the seven astronauts who had been killed were eulogized thus:
T
his cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose—it is a desire written in the human heart. We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return. They go in peace for all mankind, and all mankind is in their debt. Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Behind the Interstellar teaser and trailer lurks the press of that desire— the need to see for ourselves and conquer the overwhelming, threatening, tantalizing unknown. If we set aside the curiosity that drives us beyond horizons, we starve—spiritually and physically. Even though it seems an easier path to turn inward, doing so lessens us. It makes us small.
The man in the beginning of the trailer is wrong: a spiritually dead people who do not explore, cannot survive. McConaughey’s ship with its mariners leaves the port of our solar system as the warp of space-time puffs their vessel’s sail; though instead of an aged king and his old companions setting out to again to find that which ultimately cannot be found, here it is the human race itself that is old and tired. But there is still within a few of them desire, and will, and a yearning to go out there.
The end of Tennyson’s poem’s dovetails with the trailer’s, and my heart leaps to know what happens next. “Though much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
The trailer closes with the last ship sent by a dying people from a dying Earth vanishing into the unknown—a timeless picture in spite of the sci-fi trappings. It takes a small amount of dramatic hammering to retrofit Tennyson’s “Ulysses” onto the journey. In the small glimpse of Interstellar we’ve been shown, McConaughey’s Coop leaves his uncaring kingdom to his child, and though he may not be the driving force behind the mission to Interstellar comes to theatres on November 7, 2014. explore beyond the wormhole, he is its catalyst.
Tis not too late to seek a newer world
(Text by Lee Hutchinson, from arstechnica.com)