[COLUMN] In Interstellar, Christopher Nolan Crafted an Emotional Masterpiece | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Interstellar. If you haven’t seen it, it’s on Paramount+, but also there’s tenth anniversary screenings taking place, so check those out.

Released ten years ago this week, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar defied expectations.

The film opened to polite-but-sniffy reviews. In The Boston Globe, Ty Burr opined that Nolan had revealed himself to be “a showman who fancies himself a philosopher.” In The Washington Post, Ann Hornaday complained that, “for a movie about transcending all manner of dimensions, Interstellar ultimately falls surprisingly flat.” Claudia Puig at USA Today found some of the movie’s plotting to be “tedious.” The box office was sluggish, Interstellar opening to a modest $49m.

To be fair, there was a sense that Nolan was at the point in his career where the director was due a humbling. Interstellar followed The Dark Knight Rises, a film which garnered extremely positive reviews and grossed over a billion dollars, but was not the highest-grossing superhero movie of its year and became a focal point for the era’s plothole-driven mode of criticism. Nolan was already one of most distinguished directors of his generation, and maybe he needed to be put in his place.

Despite a generally positive critical consensus, Interstellar was often positioned among “the most disappointing films of 2014” and framed as the “most disappointing film” of Nolan’s career. There was a particularly vocal disdain reserved for a key moment in the middle of the film where scientist Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) delivers “an unscientific soliloquy” and makes “corny statements” that argue for love as a universal force that transcends space and time.

Interstellar endured. It grossed $730m, the last live action film not based on existing intellectual property to gross over $700m. Coincidentally, Nolan’s Inception was the last such film to gross over $800m. (Nolan’s Oppenheimer comes close, having earned $975m, but it was based on the book American Prometheus.) It is currently Nolan’s second highest-rated film on the Internet Movie Database, enjoyed a successful pandemic re-release in China and now is hosting tenth anniversary screenings.

Interstellar is a very interesting entry in Nolan’s filmography, because it is a movie that is – in part – in conversation with the very idea of “a Christopher Nolan movie.” Early in the filmmaker’s career, Nolan was renowned as something of a clockwork mechanic, an artist who constructed elaborate mystery boxes that uncoiled to reveal some satisfying twist. Movies like Memento and The Prestige contain brilliant third-act twists that ask the audience to reconsider their understanding of the story.

Nolan was regarded as something of an arch-rationalist. It was something of a critical cliché to compare Nolan to Stanley Kubrick, another distinctive auteur famed for their long relationship with Warner Bros. This is a frankly absurd comparison. Most obviously, it is impossible to imagine Kubrick directing any sequel, let alone the entire Dark Knight trilogy. Kubrick worked very slowly, while Nolan’s schedule had always been fairly consistent and reliable.

Still, more than any earlier entry in Nolan’s filmography, Interstellar has an obvious point of comparison in the Kubrick canon. Nolan is an avowed fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey, proudly overseeing an “unrestored” print of the classic to premiere at Cannes. The films feel like companion pieces: space epics about mankind investigating strange phenomena at the edge of the solar system. A Space Odyssey journeys to Jupiter. Interstellar cheekily inches further, just past Saturn.

Kubrick was a notoriously cold and arch filmmaker. His films are often bleakly cynical meditations on the absurdity of human nature. Kubrick often seems detached from his subjects, approaching them with a dispassionate eye, something reflected in his signature style from the uncanny “Kubrick stare” to his symmetrical compositions. A Space Odyssey is renowned as one of the great “hard” science-fiction films, rooted in technology and worldbuilding that is grounded rather than fantastical.

As such, there was a great deal of expectation that Interstellar would also be “hard” science-fiction, that it would depict a vision of the future that was strictly rational and logical, eschewing physically impossible genre conventions like faster-than-light travel. Much was made of the detail with which the film’s special effects department rendered computer simulations of black holes, producing models so accurate that it guided scientific consultant Kip Thorne to real-life breakthroughs.

This fixation on rationality didn’t just inform the production of Interstellar. It was woven into the script. The film places a heavy emphasis on the importance of stoicism and objectivity. It is populated by scientists and engineers who find themselves forced to make impossible decisions about the fate of the human species, which is suffocating and starving on Earth. Such decisions cannot be trusted to emotion. They require a certain detachment.

Scouting three potential colony planets, NASA sends three astronauts on “the loneliest journey in human history.” At least two of those astronauts will die, whether due to the harshness of the environment in which they find themselves or simply because NASA doesn’t have the resources to rescue them. “None of them had families, huh?” muses Cooper (Matthew McConaughey). “No,” Brand replies. “No attachments. My father insisted.” These heroes needed to be objective.

After their first landing goes awry, Cooper and Brand argue over which of the two remaining planets to visit. There is a stronger signal broadcast by Doctor Mann (Matt Damon), but there’s also promising data from the other planet visited by Wolf Edmunds. Cooper deduces that Brand was in love with Edmunds, and that is pushing her to champion his site, in the hope of reuniting with him. “That doesn't mean I'm wrong,” Brand protests. “Honestly, Amelia,” Cooper replies, “it might.”

This sets up an interesting tension within the film, and it is often misunderstood in criticisms that present Brand as overly emotional. There is a tendency to describe Nolan as “a cold guy who makes cold films”, to suggest that his movies are “emotionless.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Nolan’s movies aren’t about emotionless characters. They are often about men who sublimate their emotions and try to construct elaborate mechanisms to avoid acknowledging them.

In Memento, Leonard (Guy Pearce) creates a mystery that he can solve as a way to avoid having to deal with his own complicity in the death of his wife (Jorja Fox). In The Prestige, Alfred and Freddie Borden (both Christian Bale) believe that twins can split a single life between them. In the Dark Knight trilogy, Bruce Wayne (Bale) responds to his own feelings of fear and powerlessness following the death of his parents by creating a myth powerful enough to strike fear into others.

In Inception, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) insists upon a very complicated and rigorous set of rules to try to keep the memory of his dead wife (Marion Cotillard) in check. While Kubrick’s style was one of rigorous objectivity, Nolan’s narratives are intensely subjective. The audience does not sit outside of these characters, they experience the films through their perspective. Any pretense of logic or rationality is a lie that the character tells the audience – and often themselves.

In each of these cases, the elaborate mechanisms these men create to avoid confronting their own emotions inevitably collapse. Leonard creates holes in his own narrative to keep his quest going. Borden’s deceptions drive his wife (Rebecca Hall) to suicide and end with the death of one of the twins. Bruce Wayne’s decision to let Ra’s Al Ghul (Liam Neeson) die prompts his daughter (Cotillard) to avenge herself upon Gotham. Cobb frequently breaks his rules, jeopardizing his entire team.

As much as Cooper hides behind rationality in dismissing Brand’s arguments, the truth is that his own decision-making is compromised by his own emotions, in particular his desire to return home to his daughter Murph (Jessica Chastain). Brand’s father, John (Michael Caine), makes an argument for letting the humans on Earth die and repopulating the species using frozen embryos on Cooper’s ship. However, that’s a very convenient argument to make when he knows that his own daughter is safe.

Even Mann, who Brand describes as “the best of us”, is ultimately revealed to be motivated by his own emotional needs rather than any greater objective principle. Visiting Mann’s planet – which the scientist describes as “cold, stark, but undeniably beautiful” – Cooper and Brand quickly discover that the planet isn’t viable. Mann fabricated his data because he knew it was the only way to summon a rescue. It’s not a rational decision, because people are not rational.

“You know why we couldn't just send machines on these missions, don't you?” Mann asks Cooper. “A machine doesn't improvise well because you can't program a fear of death.” That fear of death provokes irrational and selfish responses. It drives Mann to risk dooming mankind because he is unable to accept the necessity of his own death for the greater good. He is just as motivated by emotion as Brand. However, like Cooper, he is unable or unwilling to acknowledge this. Even as he plots to maroon Brand and Cooper, Mann monologues clumsy justifications for his selfishness.

There is something very pointed in this. It’s telling that Cooper is quick to weaponize Brand’s willingness to acknowledge her own feelings against her while insisting that his own emotionally-motivated position is more objective and therefore more valid. There is a longstanding (and scientifically debunked) stereotype that women are more inherently emotional than men, and that cliché is often weaponized to undermine them professionally. By explicitly gendering this dynamic, to the point of calling Matt Damon’s character “Doctor Mann”, Interstellar deconstructs this idea.

Interstellar arrived at a heated moment in the culture. There was a very vocal online push towards pseudo-rationalism. Between 2013 and 2017, campaigns known as “the Sad Puppies” and “the Rabid Puppies” pushed back what they saw as the erosion of traditional (and conservative) hard science-fiction by more literary and progressive forms at the Hugo Awards. However, the debate had implications outside the confines of the science-fiction genre.

In late 2014, shortly before Interstellar premiered, the Gamergate campaign made a high-profile push for “objective reviews” in video games. The following year, Ben Shapiro would coin a new conservative catchphrase: “facts don’t care about your feelings.” This was a defining trait of conservative discourse during the 2010s, with pundits frequently positioning themselves as objective and rational observers to disguise the fact that they were making extremely emotional arguments.

Interstellar is not explicitly about any of these individual trends in contemporary pop culture, but it speaks very strongly to that particular moment. Interstellar isn’t about a conflict between Cooper’s rationalism and Brand’s emotions. Instead, the tension exists between Brand’s willingness to openly acknowledge her emotional investment in the situation and Cooper’s refusal to do so under the guise of rationality. Cooper is no different from Leonard, Bruce, Borden or Cobb.

Interstellar was always a hugely emotional work for Nolan. To paraphrase Nolan’s later film TENET, Interstellar is designed to be felt more than understood. Hans Zimmer’s score feels like a hymn, played at such intensity that it literally broke cinema sound systems. Along with The Dark Knight Rises, this was the point where Nolan started burying dialogue in the sound mix, making a point that these films were more than just exposition. Incidentally, Zimmer’s entire score was derived from a single note that Nolan gave the composer with just two lines of dialogue: “I’ll come back.” “When?”

Interstellar uses the theory of relativity to tell a very human and very personal narrative. It is the story of a father who leaves his children to go to work. As years pass for the children, the father only generates a few hours of work. It is, in short, the story of Christopher Nolan leaving his own children for years on end to make these movies. “There is a lot of guilt for that,” Nolan confessed. “A lot of guilt.” Interstellar is not a movie about black holes or robots or spaceships. It is a story about the crushing guilt of a father missing the most important years of his children’s lives. Everything else is just set dressing.

Dismissing Kubrick’s clinical cynicism about the human condition, Interstellar argues that all human decisions are ultimately guided by emotion: Brand’s love, Cooper’s guilt, Mann’s fear. Detachment is impossible. Perfect objectivity is an illusion. In the end, the film argues, the best that human beings can do is to hope that they are guided by the right emotions.