I Finally Understood Affect; I think... Ft. Interstellar
Some of the media are so striking that you never get to think it through. It is a shock in advance, in advance of your being able to name it. Such is the entire purpose of affect. It is not the neat, name tagged affections we all bumble with like happiness or sadness. It is a more of a rush or a charge that rushes past you before you can get to explaining it.
Gregg and Seigworth discuss affect as an ability to affect, as well as to be affected, one that travels between bodies, images, sounds and space (Gregg and Seigworth, 2009). Affect is relational. It is not encased in the media object or the head of the viewer. It happens in the in-between. It makes digital media so potent in the sense that the media is an affective playground that screens, sound, movement, scale, and interactivity all collide against one another as though something is being touched, yet nothing is being touched.
To discuss further on how this works, I’m taking Interstellar (2014), this film shows that affect does not have to scream or be obvious to be intense.
Affect Is Not Emotion
One important thing affect theory makes clear is that affect is not the same as emotion. Emotion is what we name after something happens. Affect is what happens before naming. Gregg and Seigworth describe affect as intensity rather than representation (2009). It’s ongoing, unstable, and always in motion.
Spinoza famously wrote that no one has yet determined what the body can do (Spinoza, 2002). Affect theory builds on this idea. Media does not just represent feelings. It activates bodily responses. Tightness. Stillness. Discomfort. Longing. These responses are not always readable, but they are powerful.
Affect in Interstellar
Interstellar works affectively because it prioritises sensation over explanation. The film constantly plays with time, distance, and absence. Time dilation is not just a scientific concept in the film. It becomes emotional pressure. When years pass in minutes, the audience feels loss in a compressed, almost unbearable way.
Image credits: IMDB
Sound dominates here. The music composed by Hans Zimmer is loud, repetitive, and heavy. It does not evoke sensations gently, but rather forces them. The same care is taken with silence. Space is vacant, cold, lonely. Narrative clarity subsides before these sensory decisions in the pumping up of affective tension.
Manovich believes that the digital media creates new positions of subjectivity in terms of intensity and affective interactions instead of narrative (Manovich, 2001). Interstellar corroborates that notion. Interstellar fits into this idea perfectly. The film doesn’t always want you to understand what’s happening. It wants you to feel the scale of it.
The Sense of Scale and The Vulnerability
Visually, Interstellar constantly places the human body against massive environments. Planets. Black holes. Endless space. This creates a feeling of fragility. Humans feel small, temporary, and exposed.
However, the movie does not seem emotionally detached. It does the opposite. The smaller the human beings are the more their emotional attachment is attached. Love, guilt, regret are the sole variables that come into significance in a universe that is indifferent.
That is why the affect theory is concerned with relationality. People are not influenced by isolated topics. It entails bodies in a relation to forces, environment and other bodies (Gregg and Seigworth, 2009).
What Affect Actually Does
Affect is not a means of explaining meaning. It drags you into a condition not giving a neat message. According to Sara Ahmed, emotions do not passively, but rather match your body with ideas, spaces, values more based on intensity than logic (Ahmed, 2004).
Image credits: The scene that affects
In Interstellar, affect aligns the viewer with loss, waiting, and emotional endurance. You may not fully understand the physics, but you understand the feeling of time slipping away. Affect turns abstract ideas into lived sensations.
This is why affect is so effective in digital media. It works before critique. Before distance. Before interpretation.
Conclusion
Interstellar demonstrates the power of affect, which is not representational. The film captures the interest of the emotions without excessive explanations with the help of sound, scale, pacing and silence. Affect moves first. Meaning lands later.
Affect is not a matter of telling you what to feel. It is about creating the circumstances where it becomes impossible not to feel. That makes Interstellar more than just a sci-fi movie, it is a heartfelt film that imparts into your flesh even after you turn the television off.
References
Ahmed, S. (2004) The Politics of Emotion Culture. New York: Routledge.
Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G.J. (2009) The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.
Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Spinoza, B. (2002) Complete Works. Cambridge: Hackett.