Modern Transcendence in Movies: The Immanent Answers of Interstellar – Christ and Pop Culture

The previous entry in this series on the modern search for transcendence in movies explored the Shimmer of Alex Garland’s Annihilation. Garland’s bizarre sci-fi horror (one of the best films of 2018) continued to flesh out Charles Taylor’s ideas in A Secular Age through its portrayal of the limits of rationality and the threatening nature of what lies beyond those limits. As Taylor describes it, the transformative success of scientific reason “can lead us to feel that it unlocks all mysteries, that it will ultimately explain everything.” But this turns the inexplicable into an obstacle, even an enemy. The alien force (be it literal or metaphorical) that collides with the demystified world in Annihilation therefore becomes an ominous presence confounding its rational characters.

With its monstrous deformations and Lovecraftian atmosphere, Annihilation provides a fairly harsh picture of the confrontation between science and mystery. It’s not for everyone. But it’s not the only recent movie from a major director to foreground this dilemma. Four years before Annihilation, Christopher Nolan released Interstellar, the most epic journey of his career—at least up until The Odyssey. Interstellar offers a gentler, if no less provocative, exploration of humanity at the end of its scientific abilities.

The world is dying. Climate change has decimated the world’s food supply, incapacitating whole societies and returning the American heartland to a Dust Bowl-era vista of barrenness. The only real hope for humanity is to find a new home out in the cosmos. The remnant scientists at NASA, led by Michael Caine’s Professor Brand, recruit former pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) for that mission. Cooper is certain that such a mission is hopeless, but Brand eventually prevails, and he joins Amelia Brand, Doyle, and Romilly (Anne Hathaway, Wes Bentley, and David Gyasi, respectively). This last-resort crew ventures out past Saturn and into a wormhole that launches them even farther from the earth in order to investigate three planets that could offer humanity a safe haven.

But there’s a staggering cost to the mission. Saving humanity will require Cooper to leave his children, Murph and Tom (played as adults by Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck), missing the rest of their childhood and potentially never seeing them again. As Cooper drives away, his eyes strain to fight back the tears. These scenes are the beating heart of Interstellar: they clarify the conflict between the broader necessity and the personal damage, between the requirements of reason and the pull of emotions. In his journey, Cooper must attend to both poles of this dilemma to find humanity’s future.

Interstellar is not just a story about the relationship between humanity and science—that relationship structures its very origins. The script was written by Christopher and his brother Jonathan Nolan, but it was first conceptualized by Lynda Obst and physicist Kip Thorne. The latter pair had collaborated previously on Robert Zemeckis’ Contact along with Carl Sagan, who had the original idea for that 1997 film. Like Zemeckis’ film, Interstellar weaves mystery and tension around hard science. Where Contact incorporates Thorne’s wormhole theories into its narrative, Interstellar expands its use of astrophysics into matters of black hole cosmology and gravitational time dilation. Thorne’s expertise—he would be awarded a Nobel Prize in 2017—shaped Interstellar in significant ways. Nolan reportedly scratched a scene involving faster-than-light travel after Thorne argued that it was impossible per the laws of physics.¹

Science is one of Interstellar’s core guiding principles. Thorne comments that Nolan’s movies “have always had their own internal logic. He always lays down a cohesive rule set for each one about what can and cannot happen… But this is the first film where that rule set closely corresponds to the known laws of nature, and some truly wonderful things came out of this.”² And this is in keeping with Taylor’s understanding of how scientific rationality shapes our interaction with the world: “We start from our understanding of human individuals united in societies of mutual benefit, and capable of grasping and controlling Nature, through the use of disengaged reason.”³

For Taylor this becomes one of the main engines of disenchantment. “The mechanical outlook which splits nature from supernature voids all this mystery.”⁴ Through reason we gain a greater functional understanding of how the universe works—an undeniable achievement. But if such a posture affects the entirety of our engagement with the world, then we lose mystery. We lose the possibility of awe. We discount the possibility of powers that don’t bend to human techniques (namely, God). Taylor’s far from the only one to perceive this historical trend; Gustavo Gutiérrez wrote that “Secularization is, above all, the result of a transformation of human self-understanding. From a cosmological vision, humankind moves to an anthropological vision, due especially to scientific developments.”⁵

But scientific theory is not the only guiding principle directing Interstellar’s voyage. Nolan’s film is dialectical: It’s grounded in scientific reason even as it ventures into the far reaches of space, far beyond our grasp of the universe. In this way, it simultaneously reasserts our reliance on scientific techniques while imaginatively pondering what lies beyond them. There is an emphatic sense of wonder that breathes throughout the film. It’s first sensed when Murph, Cooper’s daughter, observes odd phenomena in the bookcase in her room. The dust from the shelves falls in odd patterns that couldn’t be dictated by nature—something else must be acting as a force to cause this event. It is a puncture of mystery in a story assembled with the principles of astrophysics.

That puncture opens up in the film’s climax when Cooper accelerates into the black hole they’ve named Gargantua. After a sequence of stunning and distorting visual effects, Cooper finds himself floating inside a tesseract that compresses space and enfolds time, such that he finds himself returned to his homestead and observing his daughter as a child, though she’s now even older than he is. At first he’s confused, but realizations gradually dawn on him. The power of the black hole gives him the ability to use gravitational force to alter physics in the time and place that he’s observing. He’s the one who caused the dust in Murph’s room to fall in such odd patterns. It was always him acting, sending a message into the past so that Murph could play a role in humanity’s salvation. Human love is perceived as the transcendent force that humanity has been searching for.

Whereas the films covered so far in this series assert that there are forces at work beyond our comprehension, for good or for ill, Nolan’s film turns inward. The external power that enters our history is, well, us. As Cooper tells it, “No, they didn’t bring us here at all. We brought ourselves.” Humanity is behind the unanswerable mysteries, guiding our own progress and knowledge. Gutiérrez goes on to say that, as a result of the new, anthropocentric vision, “we perceive ourselves as a creative subject. Moreover, we become aware… that we are agents of history, responsible for our own destiny.”⁶ This is just what Interstellar plays out: the longing for something greater to rescue us can only be fulfilled by ourselves.

In Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, transcendence is finally locked in an immanent frame. Contact climaxes with an extraterrestrial encounter, a full rupture of the idea that humans are the sole or supreme creative subjects. Interstellar inverts that resolution, imagining that humans are indeed the sole agents of destiny; we only have to grasp the laws of nature. Is this a satisfying conclusion? Nolan’s film is fervently loved, yet the perpetual recurrence of movies that do envision a transcendent power make me think that our modern audiences hunger for something beyond ourselves. As Mother Mary, The Green Knight, and Annihilation (all of which were released after Interstellar) demonstrate, there’s a latent sense that there are inexplicable forces outside of ourselves. To this chorus we can add recent sci-fi blockbusters such as Project Hail Mary and Disclosure Day. I don’t believe our culture is all that convinced by the idea that we have all the transcendence we need within ourselves. When I survey the cultural works and entertainment that continue to arrest our attention, I see the search continuing.

One of the necessary questions then becomes: Where do we search? Interstellar looks to the stars before finding its transcendence in the force of human love. The next essay will center on a film that asks what happens when that love is lost. Instead of gazing upward at the heavens, Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera looks down to the earth and back through history. Its hero is a modern Orpheus who’s searching for something even more awesome than a way through the cosmos: he’s seeking a love that will lead beyond death.

1. Lee Billings, “Parsing the Science of Interstellar with Physicist Kip Thorne,” Scientific American. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Harvard University Press, 2007), 568. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 547. ↩︎
5. Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (SCM Press Ltd, 1988), 42. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 42. ↩︎