Interstellar - the perfect Liberal parable
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is haunted by a spectre it principally cannot recognize. Where the “ghost” elliptically referred to at the beginning of the movie provides an all-too-tidy circularity of plot, this one shadows the film like its guilty conscience, always threatening to erupt unsummoned, to blow up the film’s coordinates. It is paradoxically unremarkable that a science fiction epic premised on a dystopian future contorts itself just to deny the implications of this spirit for a world in crisis, for its name is simply Politics. The film attempts to sidestep this shade, ironically enough, by recourse to the reassuringly post-political triptych of the transcendental-mystical-Love, only to find itself finally distorted into a shadow of the epic it promised to be at the start.
To begin with, the film makes clear that it is not interested in politics, and despite positing a politically charged situation prefers to ignore the potentialities of its premises. A dystopian world that unmistakably approximates to our climate-change future is hesitantly reasoned away as arising from naturally occurring forces acting independently of Man. Quaintly set exclusively in mid-west America, we also curiously see no presence of an American government otherwise presently comfortable with flagrant infractions of civil and constitutional rights in the fight against imagined problems (cf Ferguson, drones, NSA, discriminatory policing, etc.) except in the de-politicized scientific authority of a NASA now planning to shoot people off into space to colonize other planets. Incidentally the film doesn’t deign to raise questions about who decided colonizing other planets would be a good idea, who gave it approval, who decided who should be the ones undertaking the mission, etc. All we know is that the outcome of these questions, if they were indeed given the chance to stand as questions rather than hastily foreclosed preludes to an answer pressed with ideological obviousness, comes to be delivered in the figure of a physicist named Brand.
Funnily enough, its politics consists precisely in substituting for these questions of the Political a very simple moral binary that takes shape in the two plans proposed by Brand: Plan A – SAVE EARTH: create a space-station that can house the remaining Earth population who will then travel towards the newfound planet for repopulation. Plan B – DITCH EARTH: leave the people there to die, and focus on colonizing the new planet with the frozen embryos that have been stored on Cooper’s spacecraft. For convenience, this binary will henceforth be referred to as paradigm 1.
The problems with positing such a paradigm almost immediately begin to surface – how to frame the fate of an entire civilization in the otherwise incidental ethical agency of an Individual? Of course it deserves recourse to the Hero-Villain tradition; our good-hearted protagonist then stands committed to the humanism of plan A, while the potentially nihilistic plan B comes to be embodied in the rather fascistic vision of Mann, the previous captain of the Lazarus mission. Mann tries to kill Cooper before attempting his hijack of the main mission spacecraft because, unlike our Hero, he believes that plan A was only ever an ideality, and that the mission can only succeed in the form of plan B. While rhapsodizing about the necessity to “save humanity by sacrificing humanity,” Mann’s fate can only follow that of all other villains; his psychotic vision is too much to bear and the film has him die.
The problem is that despite killing the person of Mann, the film leaves alive the pressing pragmatism of plan B for which he stood, in fact finding it now an increasing reality as it is revealed moments before that Brand himself only ever meant for plan A to be a ruse for Cooper to undertake the mission, and that all bets were on plan B to begin with. In fact Mann dies not without leaving the main spacecraft, and the mission by extension, so profoundly compromised that the possibilities of realizing plan A are entirely writ off.
Thus paradigm 1 necessarily collapses in on itself, as the film is unable to make the debilitating choice between the alternative fates of the mission, and by extension Humanity. That is, the ethical paradigm fails to fulfill itself, let alone contain the “intolerable closure” of the Political it was initially meant to mediate and repress.
And indeed the film’s political unconscious here presses in against its cinematic frame and threatens to distort the film’s texture as the earlier questions about the premises of the film return with added weight. For example, there is a curiously counterintuitive moment featuring Cooper’s now adult daughter, Murphy (incidentally a physicist at NASA), who, while driving pass a jam-packed road of otherwise faceless townspeople caught in the middle of a sandstorm, notices a pallid white girl sitting out in the open-air cargo area of a van that is bursting at the seams with the family’s belongings. Murphy is obviously having a significant spiritual and emotional connection (that later reads as a catalyst for her eventual theoretical breakthrough) with this girl who is now coughing hysterically in the midst of the sandstorm. As the camera zooms in on Murphy’s introspective face, we notice at the corner of the frame an entirely empty backseat in her air-conditioned pickup; the scene ends. Where the moment inadvertently raises questions about resource division and otherwise sets you up to expect throwaway gestures towards some semblance of charity, the film substitutes an abstract, individuatory spiritual experience garnished with an aestheticized cute girl on the cusp of death. Cue also other shockingly unreflexive sequences featuring a fully furnished NASA facility peopled with healthy physicists and engineers spliced with scenes of a desolate agrarian community made increasingly sick from the arid Earth surface and struggling to find food and healthcare; on an Earth beggared of natural resources, resource scarcity can be a thing for our most basic needs, but never for the grand task of building spaceships.
Incidentally the film hastily reasons away this otherwise ugly depiction of an apocalyptic division of resources with only the most hackneyed of ruling class ideology regarding the division of labor: “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are… Explorers, pioneers, not caretakers ... We’re not meant to save the world. We’re meant to leave it.” What this gracelessly justifies is a covert NASA secretly funded by tax monies taken from people the film derogatorily depicts as myopically concerned with the pragmatics of survival, and who must remain ignorant of the truth if the necessary actions for their wellbeing are to be undertaken (this presumably being the project of imperialistic interspace colonization involving and directed by a select few). Thus, an organisation working partly in the shadows to sidestep the shade of Politics for the sake of saving that suspiciously post-political subject called “Humanity.”
‘Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.’ – Bertolt Brecht, The Life of Galileo[1]
Is it so surprising then, that paradigm 1 had to fall? It necessarily implodes because the film from the beginning could never differentiate its politics from those of Mann. Mann was only the most explosive manifestation of the film's guilty conscience - its fundamental distrust of the People, and by extension the democratic project of which the latter are fundamental constituents. The ascendance of the Villain maims the film’s narrative and rhetorical structures so profoundly because it incisively makes clear the ambivalence in the film’s unifying maxim, one that is incidentally delivered by its Hero: “We’re not meant to save the world” could refer to both the planet and humanity.
This brings us back to the Hero-Villain dichotomy. Sure Mann dies, but he takes along with him the symbolic role of the Hero from Cooper. Beggared of its moral gravity, the film threatens to mix the two of them up. Post-Mann, the film’s dirty secret, its political unconscious, threatens to erupt.
To save Cooper, and itself, the film needs something truly monumental. To avoid the political abyss, it tellingly opts for the physical abyss of a Black Hole.
The Black Hole is quite literally the black hole of politics, for its artificial intervention allows Nolan to suspend the pressing realities of the film’s premises (paradigm 1) in favor of a new terrain focused entirely on the Personal, that is the space of paradigm 2 – the transcendental-mystical-Love. Inside this kernel of the Universe’s mysteries, previously implied promises of discoveries that might save Earth are momentarily forgotten, and the film instead posits a domain exclusively dominated by the intricacies of Cooper’s life; literally scenes from his family life form the very material structure of the space, and it is his spiritual and emotional connection with his family that allows him to physically manipulate this space. Thus the time-tesseract depicting infinite scenes of Murphy’s childhood bedroom; thus Cooper sending messages to an adolescent Murphy trying to right his past wrongs for abandoning her and his family; thus also the gimmicky reveal that he was the ‘ghost’ communicating to her at the beginning of the film. It is significant that it is inside this domain of the Personal that the film strains to posit such an artificial circularity of plot, that it tries to tie its loose ends, because the entire sequence is precisely meant to shortcircuit the failed trajectory of the narrative as carried along by paradigm 1, and to retroactively substitute for it what is nothing more than a love parable between a Father and a Daughter.
“It seems useful, therefore, to distinguish from this ultimate subtext which is the place of social contradiction, a secondary one, which is more properly the place of ideology, and which takes the form of the aporia or the antinomy: what can in the former be resolved only through the intervention of praxis here comes before the purely contemplative mind as logical scandal or double bind, the unthinkable and the conceptually paradoxical, that which cannot be unknotted by the operation of pure thought, and which must therefore generate a whole more properly narrative apparatus – the text itself – to square its circles and to dispel, through narrative movement, its intolerable closure.”
- Fredric Jameson, Political Unconscious
Don’t get me wrong. The Black Hole sequence, and its ancillary introduction of the Personal domain, is not meant to repress the politics we wish it would practice. It is the Black Hole of the film’s own mediated politics, one that had to be suppressed as it now threatened too much. The film then doubly tries to escape the “intolerable closure” of its political unconscious, and frantically resorts to the idiosyncratic inner life of its character, now bolstered by a transcendental spiritualism, to construct a domain it imagines to be perfectly neutered of the politically-charged signifiers it initially inherited with paradigm 1; better elements of an inner life in crisis (that can easily be posited and solved by filmic intervention) than the potentially political elements of a world in crisis (that constantly escape easy editing).
Of course paradigm 2 occasions implications for paradigm 1 – before the close of the sequence, Cooper receives data about the ‘singularity’ from the disembodied voice of TARS who has inexplicably chanced upon it off-screen, and he transmits it to Murphy who, deciphering it, somehow manages to save Mankind. By the end of the film, paradigm 1 isn't so much rehabilitated as it is magically resolved; it simply posits the breezy utopian vision it imagines we demand. But the happy ending is a result of such an incidental convergence of off-screen coincidences that originate from paradigm 2, that the civilizational panorama now stands eclipsed by the abrupt ascendance of the Personal domain.
I think it is through this schema of the film’s pained contortions and strategies that we can come to understand those absurd moments that bewilder any common sense.
Climactic scenes such as those where Murphy and Cooper finally reunite at the end of the film; an 80 year old Murphy is on her deathbed surrounded by 3 to 4 generations of her spawn, and Cooper swoops in only to be swiftly dismissed by a dying daughter who now believes he should go back out into Space to pursue the romantic afterthought of his mission colleague Amelia. They’ve not seen each other for decades, so much of the film’s later half is premised on their compromised father-daughter relationship, the whole of its previous half is saved by their supposed transcendental Love for each other, and yet no more than a minute of Hello and Goodbye is dedicated to the scene. Not to even mention the noted absence of any questions about planet Earth, the final stages of mankind’s exodus, Humanity’s current state, etc.
This should also include scenes that now re-read as patently absurd from a Leftist perspective. Post-Black-Hole, Cooper awakens from his mini-coma in a hospital room surrounded by a doctor and a nurse. The doctor tells him that he’s on Cooper station, and Cooper vocalizes appreciation at being canonized. At this point the Nurse bursts out laughing but can hardly articulate her thoughts; she defers the camera’s gaze and looks in anticipation at the doctor, who tells Cooper that the station has been named after his daughter and that he’s been mistaken. A century or so has passed since the film’s posited beginnings, planet Earth has collapsed, mankind faced and then survived extinction, and at the veritable happy end the professional hierarchy stays perfectly unscathed and unchanged - subordinate nurse has to defer articulateness to the superior authority of the doctor. Cue also snapshots of the spacestation terrain as a perfect replica of ideal suburban America – potted terraces tucked into their respective plots by lush green lawns and white fences with kids playing on a baseball field. We take only our most banal aspirational visions of the good life with us till the very end. Nuclear families, landed property, professional hierarchies, recreational economy, heterosexual romance, the colonial project – the world can end, and mankind can be forced into all sorts of existential contortions, but these can never change. At the end of the day, we survive only to take Capitalism, Heterosexuality, and Whiteness (imperialism writ large) along with us to colonize the rest of the Universe.
Frustrations with the forced narrative closure have led to a rather perverted reading made of the Black Hole sequence and what follows after – that Cooper died somewhere along the way and all of it was a dream of his. It tempts an easy dismissal because of its conspiracist air, but I don’t think we should let the texture of that frustration go to waste. What if it isn’t so much Cooper’s dream, as the film’s dream? And what if the film’s dream is in fact Liberalism’s dream?
To posit an easy political resolution as an afterthought to a personal parable is a dream not peculiar to Interstellar, not even to Christopher Nolan, but to the project of which the two are only some of the most adept progenitors – the Liberal project of the 21st Century. It is a hallmark of Liberalism to think politics through the prism of personages, to imagine History as the product of Man, and specifically of some men. More importantly, as a political project whose present dominance was borne of the devastating dramas of the 20th Century, Liberalism confronts politics the same way Interstellar posits the figure of Mann – it misreads political demands as existing within the binary of 20th Century Communism and Fascism, and then further conflates these two distinct political programs within a singular figure defined by its unintelligibility and singed with a Fascistic metabolism threatening explosive violence. It then begrudgingly suffers the political domain only as a marginal force, whose technicalities are to be handled partly in the shadows by the knowing expertise of a select few (cf NASA in Interstellar); Democracy is a luxury Liberalism cannot afford.
The impossibility of imagining a future other than haphazardly positing one so absurdly similar to our present it could hardly survive the vagaries of History is a defining trait of Liberal ideology – the universalizing of present social relations as existing unchanged in the past as they will in the future.
The ossified sameness of Interstellar’s breezy post-apocalyptic utopia should be read as the bankruptcy of the political vision of a world evacuated of politics; Liberalism holds no future for us.
[1] Bertolt Brecht, Galileo, ed. Eric Bentley, trans. Charles Laughton (New York: Grove Press, 1966), p. 115. Thanks to Tristan Burke for directing me to this quote.
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