Interstellar 2014
TheLiteraryBrain
In 2007, Steven Spielberg and producer Linda Obst hired screenwriter Jonathan Nolan to develop the ideas of scientist Kip Thorne into a space storyline for Paramount Studios. As a result of his triple collaboration with the producer and the scientist, Jonathan Nolan delivered a draft titled Interstellar in March 2008, in which Thorne and Obst were listed along with the writer as the originators of the original idea. Basically, the plot was about a team of explorers who, after accessing a wormhole, manage to travel to another dimension. Spielberg was forced to abandon the project when, in 2009, he moved DreamWorks headquarters from Paramount to Walt Disney, but Jonathan continued to develop the script. After learning about the premise of the Interstellar story, the director had been especially drawn to the idea of an unavoidable journey: necessarily, humanity must one day leave the planet and travel beyond the Moon and Mars. On the other hand, the theme of interplanetary travel as a necessity was also linked in Jonathan Nolan's premise to recent space history: specifically, the pioneering spirit that gave rise to the exploration of the cosmos and the state in which all that had remained more than half a century later, both culturally and anthropologically. From this perspective, the biography of the Nolan brothers and their contemporaries with the lunar program influenced the introduction of a nostalgic element, key to the emotional strategy of the script. This element would be crucial to provoke a historical awareness in the viewer, related to the significance of the spatial dream and its subsequent frustration.
While conceiving his story between 2006 and 2007, Jonathan Nolan was reminded of his childhood years in the 1970s, as the country experienced an unprecedented technological boost thanks to NASA programs. At that time, the two brothers became fond of watching Super8 movies about space launches that their uncle Tony, a General Motors technician who worked on the Apollo project, gave them. Growing up we were promised rocket packs, and in return we got Instagram.
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This feeling of nostalgia is evident in the opening scene of Interstellar (one), in which retired space pilot Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) relives in his dreams the limit moment of a flight that is reminiscent, due to its style and dramatic tension, of sequences of Chuck Yeager aboard the X-1 in The Wright Stuff.
According to the Nolan brothers' final script, Cooper has been forced to abandon his career as a NASA engineer and pilot to earn a living as a farmer and support his family, consisting of his father-in-law Donald (John Lithgow), his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet) and his young daughter Murph (McKenzie Foy). Cooper is widowed and the farm is his only resource, though he longs for his years as a pilot.
The Nolans present a future society that, in giving up the space dream, has also given up exploration and frontier culture, essential keys to the American ethos. For this reason, the design of the protagonist is the embodiment of a frustrated dream. As a character, Cooper represents the imaginary archetype of an American dream detached from the space dream: a pilot, expression of the modern pioneer, reduced to a farmer and watchman of fields that long ago ceased to be a land of promise. The former NASA pilot not only expresses his personal frustration but that of an entire society stranded on the ground, once opportunities for travel and expansion through space have been suppressed. Judging by the odyssey that is about to begin, Jonathan and Christopher Nolan appeal in 2014 to a true recovery of spatial expansion as an essential key to the sociocultural ethos and the spirit of the border, and not just as a nostalgic claim. The indefatigable American spirit requires perpetual mobility and continuous improvement. Conformism equals complacency. Cooper's reflection takes place in the midst of a landscape devastated by a dusty blight, which threatens to ruin crops and flood the homes of settlers and farmers (two). This nightmarish image is included among the apocalyptic icons, which Dixon and other authors use to illustrate their diagnosis of the sociocultural landscape at the beginning of the 21st century. To do this, the Nolans turn to the imaginary of the Great Depression, the first crisis of the American dream, and specifically take the Dust Bowl (three) as a reference: an ecological catastrophe that occurred between 1934 and 1940, consisting of a series of dust storms that affected various agricultural states in the Midwest—Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado, in particular—as a consequence of the drought and the agricultural exploitation techniques applied. In Interstellar, the writer and director relied in the visual style of Ken Burns' documentary The Dust Bowl (2012), which included a series of interviews with elderly witnesses of the ecological disaster that affected tens of thousands of farmers. The Nolans also took Dayton Duncan's book Miles from Nowhere as a reference. During the writing of the script, the Nolans were aware of the evocative power of the Dust Bowl as an icon of a critical moment.
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The introduction of the action of Interstellar presents a double coincidence, where the crisis of the American dream appears as a phenomenon inevitably associated with the crisis of the space dream. As a consequence, prosperity is no longer possible in a society that has given up space travel but neither is it possible on a planet whose resources are running out. Meanwhile, a global dusty plague threatens humanity with extinction within a single generation. This approach is dramatically reversed when Cooper and his daughter Murph interpret mysterious alterations that are repeated in the girl's room: recurring marks in the dust, books fallen to the floor, holes in the shelf. Father and daughter discover that all of it involves a coded message, specifically geographic coordinates that lead them to the secret headquarters of NASA (four).
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The agency, converted into a clandestine institution in practice but endowed with resources, has spent years promoting a program to search for habitable worlds, the project Lazarus, to prevent the extinction of humanity. Cooper's former mentor, Professor Brand (Michael Caine), runs the program and manages to involve the ex-pilot in a mission to verify the living conditions of three possible exoplanets, which can be accessed through a wormhole (five). The entrance is in an "anomaly" that appeared in the vicinity of Saturn. Through Lazarus, the agency returns to the original space dream and puts it at the service of a humanity doomed to catastrophe. From the perspective of the trip, Cooper appears invested with the aura of the first test pilots according to the code of what it is necessary to have, since he is capable of handling aircraft in extreme situations.
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After receiving his peculiar call to adventure with Professor Brand's proposal, the protagonist regains his rank as a NASA pilot and leaves the cornfields—wheat has long since disappeared from the planet—to become a stellar navigator, thus following the ancient archetype of the farmer with heroic aspirations. Lewis highlights this mixture of nostalgia and amazement in the ex-pilot, which can be extrapolated to those who have observed the progressive decline of space exploration, from the golden age of NASA to the dismantlement of the space shuttle: "Christopher Nolan seems to be trying to recover of the admiration that used to be associated with space travel. It is a return to Tom Wolfe's ideas explored in his 1960s essays on test pilots and early astronauts”. On the other hand, the film does not lack references to science fiction classics on space travel such as The Woman on the Moon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Encounters in the Third Kind and, especially, biopics such as The Right Stuff and Apollo 13.
Indeed, Professor Brand is presented in the script as an imitation of Professor Mansfeldt in Fritz Lang's film: the former has dedicated his entire life to solving an equation that allows gravitational release, while the latter he has dedicated his to the dream of lunar ascent (six). Dave Bowman's odyssey aboard Discovery One also inspires Joseph Cooper's interstellar journey at the controls of Endurance (seven), and both astronauts experience fifth-dimensional realities that break the space-time continuum.
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Interstellar presents a suggestive tension between cosmic location and domestic location, a struggle that dominates the entire film from its setting in the mundane farm setting to its climax in a five-dimensional alternate reality. This dramatic arc originates with the conflict between Cooper and Murph regarding the ex-pilot's hasty trip, which will separate father and daughter in space and time. Both scenarios, the cosmic and the domestic, are built symptomatically on an identical location: a children's room (eight).
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Analyzing the farewell scene in Murph's room (nine) reveals Christopher Nolan's inspiration for another memorable scene from the film To Kill a Mockingbird: the one in which the lawyer Atticus Finch chats with his daughter Scout in the nursery (ten). Both parents are widowers trying to raise their children in a Depression-hit, agrarian environment. Indeed, Nolan and Mulligan compose scenarios dominated by a national home in crisis, where their respective heroes carry out Rescue missions with improbable success: a space trip, the defense of an accused. The environments of both stories take place in hostile settings, while two parents try to guarantee a future for their children in a race against time.
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Lawyer Atticus, a lawyer for lost causes, tries to protect the innocence of his children, Scout and Jem, before the racist intolerance of the environment ruins their growth; astronaut Cooper says goodbye to Murph and Tom to embark on an uncertain odyssey, eager to minimize his absence to avoid the ravages of temporal relativity. Both are due to their children, but also to a society in danger for various reasons. Time is the true villain of Interstellar. Murph reacts angrily during the farewell and, to Cooper's frustration, throws the watch her father left her as a pledge against the wall. As a precocious expert in physics and mathematics, the girl knows that relativity will end up making her wait much longer and destroy her bond with her father. The younger Scout asks Atticus to show her one more time the watch her brother Jem will inherit, which bears a dedication from their mother (eleven).
In 2014, the director assured in this regard: The authentic sadness of saying goodbye to people is an enormous expression of the love you feel for them. For me, the movie Interstellar is really about being a parent. The feeling that your life is passing through you, that your children are growing up before your eyes. We are all engaged in the greatest of all mysteries, which consists of living through time. In the script by the Nolan brothers, time also becomes a link that crosses three narrative areas, each one specified in a home dimension: the domestic family home, whose core is Murph's room; the national home, extended to the global home of a planet doomed to extinction; and finally, the cosmic home where humanity must establish itself to survive and continue its development. Time passes like a countdown in each dimension;
(1) Cooper must not delay too much so as not to lose his daughter in a time plane faster than his own;
(2) Professor Brand must solve the gravitational equation that allows space stations to be put into orbit, as gigantic lifeboats; (3) the Lazarus mission astronauts must act quickly through anomalies, black holes and wormholes, before the plague literally suffocates the next generation.
During the climax of the film, Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) and Joseph Cooper are separated after the destruction of the Endurance (twelve). The first goes to the third planet that gives hope of habitability. For his part, Cooper enters the interior of the black hole to try to obtain the physical data that will allow him to solve Brand's gravitational equation: without them, humanity will be definitively doomed. The immolation of the astronaut extends the rescue mission to the extreme of sacrifice, in a plot to search for and refound the home that, allegorically, begins and ends in Murph's children's room (eight). The reunion of father and daughter occurs in a five-dimensional reality, within a tesseract: a grid of corridors where infinite cubic enclosures are arranged.
The tesseract becomes an expression of time in the spatial dimension, and each enclosure is a portal to Murph's room at various times in his life. Cooper can see his daughter at infinitely different times, at the same time. It is a scene with a high dramatic impact, marked by isolation and the simultaneous emotions of frustration, anguish and surprise. Immediately, the despair begins to subside as the astronaut remembers that, as Dr. Brand warned him, gravity can cross dimensions, including time. This factor allows Cooper to jump the time barrier to communicate with Murph in binary and Morse code that allows the transmission of quantum data from the black hole to solve the gravitational equation. Love and gravity, in their different spheres, are capable of transcending the dimensions of space and time: a teaching that Cooper and Amelia experience in their respective affective experiences. In the case of Murph, as an adult, she realizes that the mysterious character that haunted her nursery was none other than her own father: a "ghost" who, like Boo Radley in Mulligan's film, only wanted to protect her and communicate with her. Inspired by the scientific theories of Kip Thorne, Nolan set two firm rules in Interstellar: travel back in time is impossible, and only gravitational forces can send messages back in time. One of the creative challenges of the film consisted precisely in visualizing a multidimensional reality to, at the same time, allow a family reunion in a context of maximum emotional tension. The images showing Matthew McConaughey approaching the event horizon of a black hole are no less astonishing than Kubrick's Odyssey, and have something of the distorted beauty of Gerhard's paintings.
Translations: Italian - Spanish
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