Explaining the singularity: Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”

Home Culture Explaining the singularity: Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar”

The subject of space travel inevitably causes a reflection upon humanity. Space travel is man in extremis: pushed to his farthest reach, separated from death only by inches of tin and plastic. In space, man approaches the grand, terrifying infinity that is the universe, which inevitably casts us into a state of wonder about the mystery of our own metaphorical position in the endless unknown. Where did we come from? Where are we? And where are we going? Where will man be after being pushed to the extreme of his abilities and being?

Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a film which was clearly the guiding influence for Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar,” is an unparalleled work of timeless significance about the outcome of man in extremis. Defying all convention, Kubrick’s masterpiece abandons concerns with entertainment and takes his viewers on a baffling journey of sublime experience, starving them for explanation and overwhelming them with sensation. Powered by ambiguous meaning and ancient human symbols, “2001” explores the meaning of man, his evolution and transcendence.

Nolan’s “Interstellar” is a reinterpretation of “2001” into a modern blockbuster. It is the form and matter of “2001” injected with personable characters, with a complex plot, with emotion and human drama. It is an intellectual film about complicated theories and ideas which the everyday viewer can still approach because it is also exciting, beautiful, suspenseful, and funny at parts. It is a magnificent and powerful film concerned with humanity, mortality, time, and the moving force of love, which uses the particular to speak of the universal, and which is certainly Nolan’s most ambitious film to date.

Still, “Interstellar” is no “2001.” In his bid for a work rivaling that of Kubrick, Nolan makes a critical mistake in his storytelling. “Interstellar” is a film with a tremendous and baffling need for explanation. It overflows with exposition and justification. The bulk of character dialogue is used to explain to the audience exactly what is happening and why. Nolan seems overly concerned with his audience instantly understanding everything about the movie but the end result of his efforts is that nothing is left to mystery. All impenetrable questions about man, his past, present, and future have somehow been answered. The outcome of man in extremis has been resolved. Nolan’s high need to explain forces him to create answers to questions which are inherently unanswerable. They are unanswerable because in reality the future of man is a singularity from which no light escapes. How do we even begin to guess at what its nature is? We do not know what man will be after being pushed to his farthest reach. Nevertheless, in Nolan’s film not even singularities are safe from man’s intrusion.

In contrast with “Interstellar,” “2001” deals successfully with the same unanswerable questions by using visions and symbols. Its success is due to its ambiguity and its tremendous restraint. Kubrick’s genius is that he refrains from trying to answer the unsolvable questions about man’s future and instead creates a human experience of wonder and mystery which surrounds these questions but never seeks to deconstruct them. Despite visuals comparable to “2001,” “Interstellar” does not have the restraint to let its visuals tell its story. For some reason, Nolan feels the need to explain everything to his audience, an unfortunate mistake when dealing with questions that have no pronounceable answer.

Nolan’s error is understandable. As humans we want explanation and resolution, and, as a popular director under pressure to make a profit, Nolan must appeal to this desire. We like everything to be explained and then wrapped up nicely so that all loose strands of plot are brought together into a coherent string. In our lives we need reassurance of coherence and can find it in entertainment: an epilogue is necessary to our human well-being. However, solid answers and neat resolutions to the mystifying questions surrounding man in extremis do not exist. To pretend that they do is to pretend to see inside of a singularity. Life for humans is confounding, terrifying, vast, and mysterious: it is a constant struggle of interpretation and a long, arduous journey filled with enigmatic events and an uncertain end, much like “2001: A Space Odyssey.”