Untangling Interstellar
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 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 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 malevolence at the start of the film is evident through its complicity in the "stratospheric bombing" and "killing" of state enemies. The education system is similarly "degraded" from a pure science mission, teaching the Apollo moon landings as a fiction of Cold War geopolitics rather than an accomplishment of aspirational science, and transforming its students into not engineers but rather "caretakers", a word which perhaps not insignificantly describes those who maintain cemeteries and serve the burial of the dead.
And yet Interstellar is not simply cheerleading for NASA, for the idea that science can be a destructive as well as constructive force is one of the underlying themes of the film, something that comes to the forefront not only with the duel nature of NASA, but also very clearly with the robot characters. In sharp contrast to his peaceful and obedient nature when TARS travels into the black hole with Cooper, for instance, the script emphasizes that the robot is "unpredictable" and dangerous when he makes his first appearance as a gun-wielding marine on loan from the Army. The same duality is present in the scenes of the Indian military drone (a former weapon which is now "not hurting anyone") as well as with the robot KIPP. And the ambiguous relationship that exists between man and science (which will end up serving which?) is also the thematic point behind TARS' off-the-cuff joke that the Endurance mission's real purpose might very well be to found a "robot colony" with "human slaves".
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 HAL-like blowing of the airlock). Yet TARS makes the same transcendent journey as Cooper, and ends the film seemingly more human than before, with his humour settings apparently independent of Cooper's attempts to control them. CASE is the weak-link in this reading, although the robot does seem to be associated with Brand in the sense that it serves her on Miller and Edmunds' planets.
Regardless of whether the robots are intended to mirror their human counterparts, the explanation Interstellar seems to offer for the dualism of science is the idea that I believe lies at the heart of the film: the message that any behavior is only redemptive to the extent it is guided by love. Speaking to Cooper about his desire to join the Endurance mission, Donald makes this theme explicit, explaining that the "why" of any action is more important than the "how". Professor Brand's lies may serve the interests of peace (producing rivets not bullets) but his actions are thus negative because they are not driven by a desire to rescue his fellow man from death. Nor is lying 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) 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 water-saturated 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 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 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 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 thus have faith - in addition to love - as a guiding and moderating force that shapes human action and helps us uplift ourselves.
So for me the film is fundamentally ambiguous, but clearly also quite clever. Is this what Interstellar means? Are there other themes lurking in the film that should change the way we view it? Given the intellectual complexity of Nolan's previous films, it is likely that there is much more to say. With that said, I'm still personally thinking it through. So if you have any suggestions or feedback, please do drop a line. And if you'd like to be added to my private mailing list for when I put out occasional thoughts on various films, please feel free to email me at <david@popupchinese.com>.