The Politics of: Interstellar

Christopher Nolan's film Interstellar is in theaters now. What are its politics? The first section reviews the movie--the second assumes you have seen it (spoilers!).

Interstellar
It's hard to talk too much about Interstellar without spoiling it: it was filmed with baked-in secrecy and even major plot points were held at bay. What you know from the trailer, though, is this: at some point in the future, Earth is dying. Matthew McConaughey is selected to go on an interstellar mission to try and save humanity.

He must leave behind his family and his farm house to go into the depths of space where he will see amazing things and, you know, maybe die ... or not. The movie delivers on all these points--sometimes in a surprising way (McConaughey is not employed as an astronaut in the beginning of the movie--and there is no sign of the space program).

People have criticized (and lauded) the science of Interstellar. To be certain: it isn't a "hard science" narrative even if it kind of looks like it might be one. It does things with black holes, for example, and time-dilation, that seem improbably to the non-astrophysicist eye. On the other hand, it did have theoretical physicist Kip Thorne on-board--so who knows. In any event, the problems are not primarily with the science.

The movie is emotional--and emotionally manipulative--without perhaps having a great deal to say about its topics (love, death, family). That might be because there isn't much to say (would you go on a mission that would mean you'd probably never see your children again? To maybe save them--to save humanity? Uh--yes, and it would suck.). It gives us hardships that are seen in passing inviting us to either not care or possibly care more than the movie deserves (the asthma-ridden boy whose father won't abandon their dust-bowl farm house is a primary one here).

On the other hand, it's a stunning visual ride. If Nolan got the physics of time-dilation wrong, at least he got the look of a super-massive black-hole right. His robots are some of the most personable in sci-fi history and some of the strangest in design. When he has clouds of ominous dust threaten the farm house it really does look like how you'd expect the end of the world to look.

But in the end, it's not as unconventional as it appears. There are patterns to these kinds of movies--in Sunshine (humanities last-ditch attempt to save humanity by stopping the sun from going out) we have a delusion-induced mass murderer for them to fight. In 2001, which notably wasn't about saving humanity, we get a psychotic AI. Usually, in deep space, the vast vacuum, solar radiation, and meteor showers aren't quite enough to make it to the silver screen: we need an antagonist.

That's not too bad a thing though--there's only so long you can worry about the ship falling apart (see any submarine movie) before you just can't take it any more. Interstellar, for all its amazing visuals--and reasonably innovative story-line, does toy with being a more traditional movie.

Nolan has realized he has a really amazing degree of latitude in telling us stories he wants to. He's able to do things that, for example, the Wachowski brothers were not (if only they had been aloud to make the The Matrix's use of humans be for their brain's parallel processing power instead of ... erm ... body heat sources--the movie would have been 100% smarter right there). His use of this to make the nearly 3-hour Interstellar isn't a bad use of his super-powers ... but he left some money on the table.

Interstellar's emotional intelligence doesn't match its visual impact. Interstellar's technical-intelligence doesn't quite carry the weight of its human-experience narrative. It's awesome to look at. It packs a punch. It may not, in the end, quite justify it's 169 minute run-time.

Let's do the politics ...

The Politics of Interstellar
The National Review Online asked if Interstellar was right wing or left wing based on the clip above. It's 1 minute, 11 seconds long. Watch it. The clip shows McConaughey at his daughter's school because she's been insisting the moon landing was real and getting into fights about it. The book she's read--his old text book--is called a "Federal Text book" and the teacher says the school uses the corrected editions that show the moon-landing was faked to bankrupt the Soviet Union.

The point the movie is making is that all of human society is now focused on the earth (where crops, stricken by the blight) are dying. The author wonders if Interstellar will be another environmental disaster movie where leftist Hollywood wags a finger at us for failing to save the planet.

He shouldn't worry: even the scene with the drone (wherein the McConaughey family capture a rogue drone to harvest its power cells) doesn't have the drone doing anything evil. It's just a runaway piece of old technology. It isn't armed, isn't spying, isn't a relic of a surveillance state--nothing. It's empty symbolism--a literal indication that the world has suffered some kind of collapse and while we're not exactly post-apocalypse, we're no longer, for example, building MRI machines (cars run just fine though).

The idea of faking the moon landing is prime conspiracy fodder but it isn't left or right wing, exactly. It's a fringe conspiracy in the way that, for example, Birtherism or even Trutherism, is not. Both of these are nasty and small-minded--but it's considered socially acceptable to "wonder if something is there," right?

If you're going around wondering if they faked the moon landing you're a nut job. Space exploration also isn't primarily right or left. Both sides have factions that like it (remember Gingrich's moon base?) and factions that feel the money would always be better to be spent at home (the 1960's Space Program ... did both!).

The eco-apocalypse isn't a Job-Killing-Cap-And-Trade thing either. The visions of massive clouds of dust call back--explicitly--to the American Dust Bowl (in fact, characters seen on camera speaking about the dust bowl are real people taken from the 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl talking about the real event--and the footage is just applied to the movie). Now, you can say that a sci-film that features a 2nd-helping of the Dust Bowl effect has an environmental message--but in Interstellar it's some kind of disease (the blight) and not explicitly global warming or GMO food or whatever.

No, in this case Nolan's cigars are just cigars.

Conversely, Literary Ecology finds Interstellar decidedly right wing! It gives us unsavory "Luddite" characters (the school staff), has scorn for the life of a farmer vs. an engineer, and it projects a white, masculine Americana vision into outer-space (only one crew member is African American and only one other is a woman!). The author thinks McConaughey's character is out there for his children which, the movie sees, really, as just an extension of him. Uh-huh.

The problem with this analysis is that what it's really talking about is the embedded cultural structure that got the movie produced in the first place--i.e. that Interstellar is a product of its culture. If it's not utterly counter-cultural, gender-bending, transgressive--then it's right-wing. That's okay so far as it goes--but that makes almost everything right-wing (which the author of Literary Ecology would probably agree with--fight the patriarchy, yo!) but instead we should look to The Incredibles: If everything is right wing nothing is (and if you think that changes with 'almost' in front of everything, that's fine--but you also have to then put 'almost' in front of nothing and we're back with that being a useless critique).

Interstellar, like Nolan's Batman movies, just isn't political (despite what you may think of Batman) and this is actually somewhat impressive: It isn't accidental. Nolan could do what many other people do and throw in a Global Warming reference because it'd speak to a lot of his likely audience. No one would bat an eye if we were told that Global Warming (instead of, say, over-farming) had precipitated the blight--we'd all have nodded our heads and gone "Yeah, yeah--we got it."

He uses plenty of images and symbols the audience will recognize: drones, dust storms, and baseball games--but they're not linked to specific key-words like surveillance, global warming, or the American Dream.

But Nolan refuses to "throw the gang-sign." Why? The Omnivore doesn't want to read his mind--but The Omnivore suspects that it's the same reason the Joker's plan to have people on the ships blow each other up fails before Batman gets to them: because the story is about the human heart. Once you put politics on that--even a thin patina--you remove some of that power. Once you're talking about global warming or surveillance drones ("It's a left over Net Neutrality defeater from the Cruz administration!") or whatever, you start excluding people and Nolan doesn't want to do that.

It would damage his story in a way he predicts getting the science wrong won't.