The Emotion Of Interstellar.
We’ve been looking to work with Tom Bond for some time now. Here he is examining the emotional backbone of the work of Christopher Nolan. Plot details for the entire Nolan oeuvre lie ahead, tread lightly if you’ve yet to see Interstellar.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
While there’s little doubt that Interstellar is Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious film to date, what has proven to be less agreeable is how satisying an emotional experience it is. Some critics have dismissed it as another triumph of head over heart, but in truth, it’s easily Nolan’s most emotionally affecting film.
Nolan’s work is more cerebral than emotional, particularly his most recent ‘personal’ film, Inception, with the strength of a single idea dominating any traditional dramatic pay-off. Cobb may be motivated by a dead wife and the desire to see his children again, but this never feels like more than emotional shorthand. Inception isn’t about Cobb’s road to redemption, it’s about the inspiring invention, both visual and intellectual, of Nolan’s Russian doll dream worlds. As is so often the case, the emotion of the film is stifled in favour of the giddy thrill of the idea.
Looking back at Nolan’s breakthrough Memento, it seems to buck this trend. Like Inception it has an insanely complex structural concept at its heart, but here, the gimmick fits the character. The alternating timelines with their reverse chronology perfectly express the frustration and bewilderment of Leonard’s memory loss and as each episodic scene flits by our sympathy grows for this tragic innocent, manipulated by those he trusts. All until the final few scenes where Nolan’s love of ambiguous resolutions jeopardises all the sympathy Leonard’s earned.
By floating the idea that Leonard is on an eternal self-created murder spree to give his life meaning we simply don’t know who to trust. In fact, it’s impossible, precisely thanks to the film’s very structure. Instead of allowing an emotional pay-off, Nolan ties the viewer in knots and leaves us trying to work out what the film means. It’s hard to feel if you don’t know what you’re meant to be feeling.
The plots in the Dark Knight Trilogy are far clearer, but they are still obsessively preoccupied with the battle between raw emotion and cold logic. Take Batman choosing to save Rachel instead of Dent in The Dark Knight. When he chooses personal happiness over the city’s well-being, his reward is losing Rachel thanks to the Joker’s double-cross. The message, loud and clear, is that to be Batman and protect Gotham, Bruce Wayne must sacrifice the most human, emotional side of himself.
Reaching its ultimate peak at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, this idea could have provided a great, tragic end for the character but Nolan fumbled the conclusion once again. By offering a suggestion that Bruce Wayne might have survived, Nolan keeps the audience guessing and stops them caring.
So often the sacrifice is the conclusion, but in Interstellar it begins the film and the remainder of the running time is left to explore the emotional consequences. It feels counterintuitive, but so often the tension of wondering what will happen next, or the aftermath of a catastrophic plot point is far more affecting than the incident itself. It’s why most blockbusters are all spectacle and no drama — a boring procession of incident without meaning.
The consequence of this sacrifice in Interstellar is that love becomes a survival instinct, the guiding force in Cooper and Brand’s journey. The speech where Brand explains this is a load of hokum, but the simpler truth in Interstellar still rings true. There may be trips to alien planets and visualisations of human memory, but the story is simply about the importance of being with the ones we love.
The alternative is a chilling and emotive prospect, and so often in Nolan’s films the nightmare that must be faced is being alone. It’s no coincidence that when Nolan wants a character to suffer he isolates them: Batman in The Pit in The Dark Knight Rises, Cobb in the self-created memory prison where he confronts the spectre of his dead wife, and now Dr. Mann on the ice planet. This fear is realised so effectively in Interstellar thanks to the cross-cutting section that jumps between deep space and Earth. It may seem more powerful to isolate Cooper and keep the story with him, but by reminding the viewer of what he’s missing back on Earth and what’s at stake, it makes his isolation more intense.
Nolan is famous as the man who brought realism to comic book movies, but so many of his films are hard to identify with emotionally because they’re so ludicrous. No matter how gritty the colour palette or production design on his Dark Knight Trilogy, bringing a sense of levity to a guy dressed as a bat is an uphill struggle (Likewise in noble failure with Inception, trying to bring logic to the inherently illogical concept of dream worlds). In Interstellar the realism is essential for creating what is almost a horror film once Cooper & co reach deep space. The relentless destruction of the barren wave planet, accompanied by Zimmer’s stentorian gothic organ. The desolate ice planet, entirely believable and entirely alien. These environments are meticulously realised and without that crutch, the danger of Cooper’s journey would be a false alarm rather than a chilling step into the unknown.
It might feel like a petty point, but the characters of Interstellar are also far more sympathetic than anything in The Dark Knight Trilogy or Inception. When you get down to it, the plot of Inception is basically some criminals brainwashing a guy immediately after his dad has died in order to destroy his company and help a rival. Real sympathetic. Likewise, the Dark Knight Trilogy is about a billionaire playboy wallowing in self-pity and punching psychopaths. Excuse me while I get out my tiny violin.
Cooper may be a well-educated engineer and pilot, but like the rest of humanity he has been humbled and brought to his knees by the desperate state of affairs on Earth. Dragged down to the level of a blue-collar farmer, for all his movie-star good looks, McConaughey is resoundingly the underdog, fighting a lost cause with everything at stake.
All of these small changes in style combine to create a new tone for Nolan that lets the emotions take centre stage. Interstellar is by no means a simple film, but its twists and turns don’t affect the power of the central story. Cooper is alone, like Bruce and Cobb at various points in their stories, but thanks to the ultra-realistic portrayal of space, it truly feels like it could be forever. Cooper sacrifices so much for the greater good, just like Bruce Wayne, but he doesn’t hide his emotion behind a mask, he lets it out, sobbing helplessly at the sight of his children suddenly aged twenty years before his eyes. That’s the difference.
In the Dark Knight Trilogy and Inception everything is a shield to emotion. The suit, the voice, the dream layers, literally repressing Cobb’s emotional side several dream levels deep. Here, in Interstellar, Nolan finally confronts and lays bare the emotional truth. The tin man’s found a heart and he’s wearing it on his sleeve.
