Interstellar – The Unified Theory of Gravity and Love

#fiction #films #SF #boundedimagination

Today ‘technological progress’ means LLMs convincing your boss to put you out of work, while consuming astronomical amounts of water and energy in the process. So it is easy to forget that only a decade ago the zeitgeist was one of futuristic techno-optimism. The time when Elon Musk was still the Prometheus who would save the Earth by electrifying transport while simultaneously bringing us to Mars, rather than the herald of ascendant techno-fascism. The 2010s may have been the aftermath of the financial crisis and the beginning proper of climate breakdown, but there was still hope that technology might save us.

A product of this time, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar perfectly expresses that blend of existential angst and technological optimism, showing us humanity reaching for the stars to escape catastrophic ecosystem collapse on Earth. With a unique and titanic score by Hans Zimmer, there are moments where Interstellar almost feels like a soundtrack with a movie attached, were it not for the high calibre of its imaginative plot, realistic physics and humane interpersonal dramas.

It is the conceit that hope is the product of technological capability and interpersonal connection that elevates Interstellar above the vulgar techno-utopianism promoted by the Californian Ideology. But viewed as a parable of our times, it obscures more than it elucidates, and its message of hope turns out to rest on a profoundly fatalistic base.

Interstellar starts in the near future of 2067, when a mysterious blight is slowly poisoning the atmosphere, causing increasing crop failures and threatening human survival through starvation and suffocation. For this, technology offers no cure, and so like most of humanity, former astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is engaged in a progressively more futile effort to maintain agricultural production. That is, until mysterious messages guide him to a secret NASA facility where a last ditch effort is underway to find a new home among the stars for humanity. A wormhole has appeared near Saturn, leading to another star system with potential habitable planets. And so Cooper, the last astronaut, is drafted into a plan for a small crew to transit the wormhole and link up with an earlier recon team sent to establish whether any planets on the far side might support human life.

Cooper must leave his son Tom (Timothee Chalamet, Casey Affleck) and daughter Murph (Mackenzie Fry, Jessica Chastain) behind, not for a few years, but possibly for a lifetime. For the planets on the far side orbit a supermassive black hole, warping time and space around it. Interstellar is serious about its physics, both the orbital mechanics of spacecraft and the uncanny time dilation of general relativity theory, and the movie feels partly like a love letter to (and some product placement for) a NASA that may only ever have existed in our collective imagination. The increasing age difference between the away team and Earth caused by relativistic forces is central to the story, with Cooper forced to watch his children age decades in what to him are only a few hours, viewing their mounting frustration at his lack of reciprocal communication.

Cooper and Murph’s separation by space and time is the heart of Interstellar, and if its concluding message that love can transcend both risks being saccharine, the movie is more than salvaged by the respect with which it treats both the impersonal forces of physics, and the deeply personal struggles of Cooper and Murph. And by the incomparable soundtrack, of course.

With the relationship between Cooper and Murph the emotional core of the movie, the intellectual heft lies with the desperate attempt to secure a future for humanity, and the moral dilemmas inherent in the leap into space. And while adequately compelling courtesy of the usual accidents and interpersonal conflicts that beset missions like these, this is where Interstellar falls into a depressingly familiar pattern of stories featuring mysterious catastrophes that can only be overcome via a single technologically sophisticated but highly dangerous gambit, placing the burden of humanity’s survival on the shoulders of an intrepid and often reluctant few. For Interstellar it is crop failure. In Project Hail Mary it was space bacteria. Elsewhere it might be asteroids, or the Earth’s magnetosphere, or some other quasi-plausible disaster. Regardless of their precise nature, these putative apocalypses can all easily be read as allegories for climate change, which itself remains firmly taboo on the silver screen, presumably because it is too confrontational for the audience. This displacement conveniently redefines the existential threat as something that is emphatically not amenable to radical social or political transformation, but can only be overcome through a single, ‘neutral’, technological fix. To do otherwise might after all lead the audience to inadvertently imagine a world beyond capitalism. The effect of stories like Interstellar, even if achieved unintentionally, is to enclose our political horizons and obscure the fact that the technological solutions to our actually existing existential threat are already available to us.

Interstellar does present varying responses to the blight, ranging from the reluctant hero willing to suffer personal hardship for family and humanity but unable to sacrifice the many so that a few might survive, to the scientists who hold fast to the technological breakthrough that might save humanity in some form, even if it does require cold moral calculus. There is however one character which represents the stubborn refusal to accept the inevitable and, quite literally, plough on in the face of adversity: Cooper’s son Tom, who inherits the family farm and holds the agricultural frontline against the encroaching blight. Tom is neither astronaut nor scientist. He is emphatically not special, but one of millions if not billions of farmers like him desperately trying to keep humanity alive. Adherence to Interstellar’s techno-optimist tendency however requires that he is portrayed as a stubborn Luddite, engaged in a futile and even harmful rearguard action as dust storms and crop failures make his situation increasingly untenable.

And yet, we are more akin to Tom than any of the other characters. No convenient wormhole will come to our rescue. No single technological breakthrough will be our salvation. We do not need a futuristic technological fix to traverse the cosmos or go to Mars. The manifold solutions we have to our predicament, technological or otherwise, are already at our disposal. What is standing in our way is not our failure to unify quantum theory with general relativity, but a system optimised for the generation of short-term profit at the expensive of all else, including the future habitability of our planet. Our solution is the collective power of many, coming together to save the world we have from the billionaires who would happily watch millions of us die to safeguard their wealth and status.

Interstellar is objectively an epic movie, admirably rooted in real scientific knowledge and with an affective father/daughter relationship at its heart. But despite its ostensible hopeful ending, its intellectual core is fatalistic and tacitly reactionary, reinforcing the narrative that we cannot collectively solve our problems here on Earth, but must wait for a heroic saviour to lead us to the stars.

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel will not save us. We can only save ourselves, if we collectively decide not to go gently into that good night, but to rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

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