Interstellar is dazzling in every sense of the word: brilliant and disorienting because of its shear magnitude and confusing on a grand scale. And it is sharply divisive. But it doesn’t just divide people who come away with different opinions, the divide exists within each individual movie-goer. There is something in it that draws everyone who sees it and something also that repulses, or makes us roll our eyes. Amid all the buzz, there is something in Interstellar that no one wants to talk about, and that is its portrayal of human failure. It shows us the faults of the West, but we are slow to see this in the film, because we are slow to see OUR OWN faults. Interstellar encapsulates the uneasy conscience (or perhaps subconscious) of the modern west played out in dramatic form.

Interstellar is the old mythic longing for salvation of the tribe or city or, in this case, the human race. We understand this. But what we don’t highlight is that Interstellar is in large part about the FAILURE to achieve that salvation. Humanity looks not to religion but to science, experts, NASA for salvation, but the experts fail to deliver that salvation. When salvation does come, it does not come from science, at least not science alone.

What goes wrong in Interstellar is that, time and again, experts fail the people who trust them. Those failures have consequences, and those consequences are borne, not just by the scientists who make them, but by the people who rely on the experts.

Experts may have proficient knowledge in a field, and even dazzling levels of intelligence, but they are still fallible people. And even the broader institution of science which tries to minimize the errors of individuals through community accountability can’t stop the mistakes of individuals or even a group of experts from sometimes slipping through the cracks, resulting in disasters like the Space Shuttle Challenger or Chernobyl. These were all simple incompetencies that had devastating consequences.
Incompetence aside, Interstellar reminds us that experts are also moral creatures. The fact that a person has prolific expertise in a field does not negate the possibility of them lying to us. Even if they are held up as bastions of authority, it is quite easy for experts to lie, And in fact, I was surprised to discover just how often scientists lie, especially with regard to their research. The documentation of this is abundant. You can find plenty of articles on the subject online. Wikipedia has a growing list of major scientific fraud. Frankly It seems to be a major problem that is mostly swept under the rug. And we should all be deeply troubled.

Interstellar is the uneasy conscience of a modern western society that is told to trust experts and to look to science for salvation, while deep down it is suspicious of experts, suspicious of anyone who would tell them how to live their lives. We wonder if science can really solve our problems, or if our problems are really worth solving if it means living in a world without love.
“Lost is all that time I did not spend in love.” —Tasso

It is a nightmare rising from the subconscious in which our deepest hushed suspicions come true: Science fails, and ultimately it is only the (apparent) deus ex machina of the bulk beings that saves humanity—the intervention of the gods—or as the film would seem to have it, humanity saving itself by letting love guide the way. It’s probably BS. But it hits on something important, namely that Motivation is important.

Motivation makes all the difference. Without love, science leads to lying, to murder, as in Interstellar, or even to concentration camps, human experimentation. It leads to the good of the many over the lives of the few. Dr. Mann and Michael Caine, like the Nazis and Soviets, constantly emphasize saving the group or species instead of the individual, actual people, who are still alive, and this leads them to lie and kill, just like Nazi’s and Soviets. Great atrocities are carried out in the name of loving the group rather than individuals. It’s only when we love people with real faces and names, our neighbors, the people we carry inside us that, as Cooper and Amelia did, that we end up saving not only them but the whole species as well.

The love monologue scene is the central heartbeat of a film that is about honoring what you know to be true, and honoring what you love in this confusing, uncertain existence of ours, rather surrendering your life to others, trusting people you don’t know, even if they have resumes the size of books. Interstellar is a call to take hold of our own agency. Don’t shirk the duty of being an independent individual who thinks and feels for yourself. Never surrender your agency to other fallible agents, even if they are called ‘experts’. Even if the whole crowd of fallible humans tells you that you should.

#Interstellar

Stock footage provided by Videvo, downloaded from www.videvo.net

(From Youtube)