Erik: Every once in awhile I like to see a big budget Hollywood movie, especially when I think it might be a window into the cultural episteme. I had a hunch Interstellar might touch on some themes related to this blog so I suggested we go.
Kelly: And I went for the popcorn.
Erik: I wasn’t disappointed, at least with the epistemological bits. The movie itself was a mess.
Kelly: You and your big words. We should tell people who don’t know that this is a science fiction film set in a near-ish future, in the wake of Something Bad happening which causes massive depopulation of the Earth. I think the food supply failed.
Now, everyone left is a farmer, and working hard to keep failing monocrops going. We seem to be living on an all-corn diet. There are no animals to be seen, anywhere. Not even a cat. I’m assuming we ate them. There seems to be plenty of gas left, perhaps because there are so few people. At any rate, things aren’t good–there are constant dust storms and disease threatening the crops. It seems that humanity isn’t out of hot water quite yet. And our hero, Cooper, who is a ex-NASA pilot forced to play farmer, discovers that NASA still exists, in skeletal form, in an underground bunker. (For Angelinos: The NASA bunker is the Bonaventure Hotel!!!!) From there the plot turns to “How can we get all of us off this sorry rock before humanity expires?” aka “Space will save us.”
Kelly’s photo of the Bonaventure Hotel: the set for underground NASA.
Erik: Two more big words for you: eschatological panic. To me that’s what the movie is about. That panic is intertwined with, as you note, a profound disrespect for Mother Earth. We screwed up the source of all life, but thankfully we can shoot ourselves up into heaven (through the Bonaventure!). Anyone who thinks otherwise (like the school bureaucrats depicted in an early parent/teacher meeting scene) are cranks.
Kelly: I think we should spell out that scene with the teachers which Erik is referring to, because it is important to what I’ll have to say later. In this scene, the hero/pilot, Cooper, goes to a parent teacher conference where his son’s high-school teacher blithely states that the Apollo landings were all a brilliant CIA hoax designed to drive the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. She believes this as absolute truth, and shows him that it is written into all the revised textbooks. Cooper is horrified. Somehow he has missed the re-education program that came after the big die-off.
This is important to me because it is a good example of the typical, lazy — and typically lazy– thinking about science and nature and philosophy which goes on in popular culture. There is a central narrative which tells us that science will save us, and that science must be protected at all costs from backward thinking nutjobs–whether these be religious zealots or brain dead bureaucrats.
In the world of Interstellar it seems a new sort of political correctness has been developed which privileges some very narrow band of ag studies over all other kinds of learning, and downplays the achievements of science in the past. There are hints that this may be because the failures of science are what got them into their predicament to begin with– this is not clear.
But what is clear is that the only hope for humanity, both physically and spiritually, is abandoning the planet. We see this played out in Cooper’s adult children: one is a farmer, one is a scientist. The farmer is blind, blind even to the suffering of his own family, while the scientist literally saves mankind.
This dualistic set-up–Science vs. Farming or really, as the story plays out, Science vs. Earth is a very bad model, yet it is the one we are presented with over and over again. You’ve heard the quote attributed to Einstein that says something along the lines of “We’re not going to solve our problems by using the same thinking we used to get into trouble”? I feel like we are swimming deep in those problematic waters, and this false duality is an example of it.
Erik: Interstellar, like most Hollywood movies, takes the techo-utopian side of that dualism. So does Richard Branson with his plans to sell expensive eschatological roller coaster rides. On the other side of that dualism you have pseudo-science and a kind of rainbows and unicorns denial of the physical plane.
Two things really bug me about Interstellar: first it’s the ultimate expression of suburban flight. We screwed things up here, but thankfully a wormhole has opened and we can (spoiler alert) repopulate a new planet that looks like Joshua Tree. It’s dry but there’s some great rock climbing!
Secondly Interstellar’s denial of the sanctity and beauty of Earth. And, I want to be clear that I’m not misanthropic: I believe in human civilization. I’m saying that there is something special about this planet and that it is our place in the universe. And, practically speaking, the rest of this solar system is inhospitable to life and the stars are so remote we’ll never reach them. We really need to tell different stories than this one.
Kelly: Yup. And to be clear, neither of us is anti-science — we just want to look a little more closely at the stories we tell ourselves in this culture.
For instance, why can’t we see a story which tells about people rebuilding after the Bad Thing happens, and being happier than they were before?
Instead, the story is always apocalyptic. In Interstellar they make passing reference to the greed and blindness of the before-times, but the present reality for the survivors is grim. Everyone is “stuck on the farm” and Cooper’s farm house needs a paint job real bad and there’s not much to do except watch for dust storms. Leaving the planet becomes our manifest destiny. As Cooper says at one point, “I was born on Earth–I wasn’t meant to die here.”
Here’s a different story. In the wake of the bad times, people awaken to their true humanity? What if we let go of materialism and greed and fear and live in more cohesive communities? We develop a positive, living spirituality and a deep bond with nature, to which we are now devoted to healing?
What if we celebrated the role of the caretaker as much as we do the explorer?
I know, I know, that would be a boring movie because it would have no spaceships or explosions.
Erik: I can think of some positive examples from science fiction with both spaceship and explosions. First, Frank Herbert’s Dune which values human abilities over machines. Then there’s Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which, among other ideas, explores what happens when we become detached from nature. And in some ways Gravity is the inverse of Interstellar. Gravity celebrates humanity and culture (Remember the radio conversation? See the short the director’s son made about the other side of that conversation with the Inuit man–very worth watching) with a plot about how inhospitable space actually is and how good it is to be standing on the living earth.
Kelly: All true. But my obsession right now is not with SciFi but with real life. I’m tired of our culture’s hostile and dismissive attitude toward nature. I’m more than tired of narratives which have already given up on nature. This includes the “Let’s get off this rock” narrative of this movie, but it also includes the “Don’t worry, the Rapture is coming” narrative and the “It’s too late to do anything, the planet is doomed anyway” narrative and the related “Humans are doomed for X Y or Z reason and the planet will be glad to see us go” and the most pernicious narrative of all, “It won’t happen in my lifetime, so why should I care?”
I want new narratives. We deserve more. Our children deserve more. Our planet deserves more.
It’s funny, I saw this movie also last weekend but came away with a different message. I saw it as a warning about what happens when we let our manned space program go, as we have pretty much done at this point with the demise of the Space Shuttle program and its lack of a successor program. To me, it’s all about balance — caring for the earth while also exploring the cosmos. I think at the rate issues we will not control (like overpopulation) are multiplying, a small colony someplace else (maybe a terraformed Mars) would not be a bad idea. I do not think saving the earth and exploring space are incompatible. To me, the most poignant moment was when Dr. Mann and Cooper were duking it out on the surface of another world….meaning that perhaps we will never truly succeed because everywhere we go, we will also bring our too-human tendencies to make war with each other. That being said, I’m pretty sure if we get out far enough to the outskirts of our galactic area, we’ll find the equivalent of a barbed wire fence, keeping others out of our area, with a sign which says, “Do not enter. Primitive, dangerous species swarming on the third planet from the sun. Do not approach.” Yup, that’s us.
Actually, I think we agree. This was definitely a warning about the dismantling of the space program. Without the space program, how are we ever going to get off of this rock? And I also agree that space exploration is cool, and I’m not against it. I just don’t like seeing other planets as some theoretical escape hatch when all of our real work is down here on the soil.
And you’re totally right about the fight–that was a very depressing moment.
Agree with Kelly.
The space program needs to be about resources and defense, not some race to land on the moon and back, then NOTHING, and opposite spectrum looking for aliens.
We need to keep out space program up and running as a substitute to using up our own Earth resources, instead mining and harvesting water, minerals, etc from asteroids and other planets.
Defense would be from meteors and asteroids hitting us, they have the big ones tracked, the ones that can send us back to kingdom come, but the ones that could wipe out towns and small cities, they can’t even see.
So resources and defenses, using the space program to stave off our current predicament. Using our solar system, so we can preserve our world. That should be the thrust of a global space program–other stars and galaxies, save that for a later time, now the focus should be this world.
Thanks for the heads up. I’ll skip this one. I am sick of the same old stories too. Why can’t we just stop all the madness now? Rhetorical question.
I just don’t get it. Why is piling tons of dangerous chemicals into absurdly expensive machined pieces of metal and then igniting them into a controlled explosion “science”, but something like using left over newspapers and old fishing line to harness the wind and fly a kite isn’t? How is using modern chemistry to create neuro toxins to kill insects science? But learning how micro-organisms work so you can bake sourdough bread and in the process make wheat flour more digestible isn’t?
The divide isn’t between science and non-science, it’s between using brute force to fight against nature versus understanding subtle processes so we can “flow” with it.
The real struggle is between “hard” style societies, and “soft”, as in martial arts. But to harness the “soft” we need to be able to become more sensitive and subtle, whereas to be “hard” we need to be insensitive and ignorant. The forces of ignorance fight mightily against opening their eyes—-.
What interests me with all this space-is-going-to-save us mentality is the fact that we can’t do it (get permanently off the planet, that is) and we probably never will. My otherwise intelligent, analytical and logical husband still thinks that trying to find another planet to populate is worth the effort of trying, knowing full well that until we conquer space radiation and the bone-liquifying (that’s an exaggeration- it’s more like bone-jellying) effects of zero-gravity, our distance from anything remotely likely and the time it would take us to get there will keep us firmly rooted on Earth. Humans just can’t survive the trip.
Can you imagine how much better off we’d be and the technologies we could have to help us if we’d spent all the money wasted on the space program to save our planet instead?
Actually most of the technology you’re using now, are as a result of the Space race.
I love all the space movies and TV shows, but to me they are just fantasy. I never seriously thought we were going anywhere especially after 2001 came and went and here we are.
I was listening to a science radio show and one of the guests(I wish I could remember his name) was speaking about aliens on our planet.
He said it’s not possible, because the bacteria would kill them, species evolve with the bugs where they live. And the next comment was that we could not live on another planet either.We need our bugs to survive.
Never say never. That’s like Paula saying human’s can’t survive the trip.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
These Star Trek type movies inspiring to think the impossible these things are good, it’s just that as Kelly/Eric have stated when we marry that space exploration theme with our it’s-all-gonna-end and we’re-all-gonna-die theme. That’s not cool.
I don’t care for sci-fi, nor do I much enjoy dystopian films or novels. They all seem to present a tiresome future of an every-man-for-himself return to medieval Europe, but with nifty light sabers and other super-duper weaponry. Totally, totally unrealistic and not very helpful. Maybe if thoughtful people with a connection to the Earth and to Nature made movies, things would be different.
This movie sucked… ass.
It’s 3 hours long, because they really didn’t know what the movie was to be about–a critique on climate change, a nod to explorers/adventurers, the PBS series Cosmos (both old & new) as movie, or a time travel movie.
Since Kip Thorne (Cal-Tech) was their go-to guy, they should’ve just stuck to the whole time travel, 5th dimension, worm hole, black hole theme.
The setting for NASA’s Lazarus base also sucked ass, I went to Belmont High, up to that point I was in awe of the whole thing. I was on cloud nine when I first saw TARS, being a Kubrick fan and all.
Then when they showed the base, and I was like, Lazarus base looks familiar, hey that’s right next to the really good cheap Korean terriyaki place at Bonaventure. Oh no, The Burger King closed down… getting high and riding up and down those outside elevators… noooooooooooooooo…
It was all down hill from there, like experiencing time dilation from afar. Don’t watch this movie, even when it comes out on DVD, instead read Toomey’s “New Time Travellers” and Everett/Roman’s “Time Travel and Warp Drives”.
Somewhat off topic, but I gotta share this. Kelly you CAN become a tree when you die:
http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/how-to-turn-into-a-tree-after-you-die-end-of-cemetaries/
Ha! Thanks!
I think a big fallacy is that humans can exist as one species all on their own in a technological bubble. For space colonization to work, it is not just humans that will participate… it’s the whole biosphere. Plants and insects would have to pave the way for human colonization. There is no magical C02 scrubber that is better than a plant: a human inhales its waste and the plant inhales and grows in the human waste. Oh, and humans can eat plants too.
I think JMG recommended a book that was set on an Amish generation ship. It’s called The Dazzle of Day by Molly Gloss. I thought it struck a realistic balance: tending the crops was treated with the same importance as mending the solar sails.
We just watched this… It was amusing, but I do agree with your attitude toward the themes. I thought the idea that some inhospitable looking dead rock planet would somehow be better than earth was a pretty far stretch. They did make an attempt to say the reason humans couldn’t stay on earth was because this mysterious blight that was slowly killing off crops one by one was also changing the atmosphere so we wouldn’t be able to breath it anymore, but it really seems unlikely to me that transporting colonies of people across space-time AND turning a rocky alien planet into a thriving, productive world could possibly be more feasible than fixing whatever agricultural problems we have here on Earth. But, you know, gravity. And love.
That being said, I often really enjoy sci-fi. The good sci-fi is about humanistic themes, just transcribed into a different setting.
Wall-e is another movie that comes to mind with an ultimately positive message.
I enjoyed the spectacle of Interstellar while watching it, even while twitching from assaults to my suspension of disbelief every five minutes or so. I agree with George Monbiot’s critique of it as ‘technological optimism and political defeatism'(possibly the definition of our age) http://permaculturenews.org/2014/11/13/better-dead-different/
Kelly, I recommend reading selected sci fi novels for more complex – and helpful- narratives than ‘cowboy with big tech saves the universe’. Try ‘The Dazzle of the Day’ by Molly Gloss for a permaculture/Quaker/feminist take on the escape from Earth plot.
“I want new narratives. We deserve more. Our children deserve more. Our planet deserves more.”
Amen.