Why Interstellar Continues to Haunt Us
Christopher Nolan’s most ambitious film is a Secular Age Parable
Recently I was talking with Damien Walter, host of one the most popular international podcasts on science fiction, fantasy, and modern myth, and Walter (who professes to not have any particular religious commitments) suggested that empty churches across Europe and America would be filled if they had services that comprised of watching select scenes from Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar with Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack filling the sanctuary. As a pastor, I laughed and thought, “He’s probably on to something here.”
I mean, just watch this and tell me there isn’t some taste of transcendence in this experience of beauty.
More so than any other Nolan film, Interstellar embodies the tensions of living in what philosopher Charles Taylor called the Secular Age.
At its core, Interstellar is about the deep pangs for transcendence we expereience as we feel trapped in the closed universe of the naturalist worldview- trapped in what Taylor called the “immanent frame” of our Secular Age. The dominant story of reality in the modern, secular West has enclosed us all within this encompassing naturalistic story about reality, telling us that is all that is real is the matter in front of us, around us, and in us. There is nothing that transcends our purposeless, random material universe. There is only the immanent.
Interstellar provokes its secular age viewers to ask:
Is reality comprised of simply matter and nothing more, fating our existence and our very sense of meaning and purpose to be nothing more than the crude evolutionary appetites of common animals?
Are our very feelings of love and capacity for compassion reducible to some sort of computer like mechanical programming beyond our control?
And what do we do with those sudden intrusions of thought that disrupt our notions of a closed, unenchanted universe- those moments of feeling haunted by something more… by something transcendent?
In the film, the earth of this not-so-distant future has been struck by cataclysmic blight. Like Gotham City in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and like the plague struck city of Oran in Albert Camus’ masterpiece The Plague, this world is an indiscriminately cruel and absurd existence, symbolic of our experience living within the closed universe of the Secular Age.
Yes, global superpowers have disbanded their armies, but humanity is threatened by a far more dull and simple demise than global war. The blight and undisclosed environmental catastrophe hangs like a heavy cloud of despair, as thick as the clouds of dust over all the characters in the film. Borrowing a phrase from the poet Dylan Thomas’ Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night (which is famously narrated by Michael Cain’s character Professor Brand) the “dying of the light” slowly and inescapably approaches.
The primary protagonist, Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) , is a former NASA pilot who lost his wife to a treatable brain cyst- treatable in times-past before civilization ceased production of MRI machines in order to focus all financial and technological investments on staving off the blight. Cooper is an explorer and an adventure-seeker at heart, but despair has all but stripped him of his will to search for meaning beyond the immanent frame. Cooper longs for the past- a past where he felt a sense of meaning and purpose, a past where people were encouraged to “look to the stars” for answers.
Cooper’s initial efforts to find meaning are through attempts at using “historical nostalgia” to stabilize his existential crisis. As Taylor argued, and more recent scientific research from psychologist Clay Routledge has confirmed, nostalgia is just one way that people facing the despair of being trapped within the immanent frame search for meaning and purpose.
But Cooper soon finds himself “haunted” by an experience that disrupts he and his daughters’ stable grasp of reality. In Taylor’s language, a haunting is an experience that beckons our curiosity about the transcendent. Cooper’s daughter Murph is the first to experience this haunting as books keep mysteriously getting knocked off her bookshelf with no explanation that easily fits within the immanent frame. She is quick to call it a “ghost,” but Cooper’s gut response is to simply re-establish for his daughter the acceptable bounds of the immanent frame. Immaterial ghosts and spiritual beings like that aren’t real and she should use science to determine the true cause of the books falling from the shelves in her room. At this point, Cooper is what Charles Taylor would call being closed to transcendence.
But Murph’s gut response, while not denying that science should be used to discern all possible information from this event, is far more open to it being something truly transcendent. She represents what Taylor would call as someone open to transcendence.
Whether intended to be symbolic by Nolan or not, there is something brilliant about what transpires to cause Cooper to become slightly more open to Murph’s transcendent ghost thesis. That constant and yet nearly imperceivable cloud of dust, that symbolic weight of despair, or what Charles Taylor might have called a general malaise that seems to saturate everyone and everything, takes the shape of a powerful dust storm and blows into the open window of Murph’s bedroom actually causing Cooper to come face to face with the evidence of Murph’s ghost.
Now Murph isn’t the only character who demonstrates a certain level of inherent openness to the transcendent. We see it also in Dr. Amelia Brand (played by Anne Hathaway). Amelia Brand is a scientist that in principle agrees with the naturalist framework and yet also expresses a deeper, suprarational feeling about the hopeful possibility of the existence of the transcendent. At the very least, she feels cross-pressured, meaning she feels a pressure to adhere to the culturally established stories of a closed immanent frame one side, and yet simultaneously feels a deep sense of its inadequacy on the other side.
Amelia Brand proposes that there might be some transcendent quality to love that is beyond the scope of reductive naturalism.
This scene sets the stage for what becomes the two primary questions about the possibility of transcendence explored throughout the film.
Is love evidence of the transcendent or is what we call “love” merely a biological phenomenon useful in the evolution of our species and perfectly explainable within the closed universe of reductive naturalism?
If Murph’s ghost, whatever opened the wormhole for our interstellar travelers from earth to explore beyond our solar system, and whatever/ whoever reached out to touch Brand as they began to traverse the wormhole is trying to save humanity, then what is it? Is it evidence of the transcendent being personal and loving?
Let’s begin with the first question. In many orthodox understandings of Trinitarian theology, God’s loving essence, this eternal communion shared within God who is Father, Son, and Spirit, is the very reason God created. His act of creation is intrinsically linked to His loving essence as He gives himself away in love to create objects of love who can participate in perfect love. As image bearers, humanity has a special invitation into a communion that exceeds the invitation to the the rest of creation because God became a human in the incarnate Christ.
Cooper’s initial response to Brand was to reject her theory about the relationship between love and transcendence. Love is an evolutionary deception that drives us to procreate and protect our progeny. But as the film progresses, Cooper demonstrates a growing, subconscious openness to the transcendent. Cooper acts as if there is some transcendent value to the love he experiences towards his children. It’s as if the cross-pressuring grows and grows until the pressure reaches a bursting point.
This bursting point comes during the confrontation with Dr. Mann (played by Matt Damon). Mann was part of the prior Lazarus missions, a theologically symbolic name that seems quite appropriate, that had stranded him on this ice planet as he searched for habitable worlds.
Mann deceives Cooper, Brand, and Dr. Romilly in an effort to preserve his own life, lying about the fitness of the planet to sustain human life, and attempts to kill Cooper in order to hijack their ship and escape off of the barren planet.
Mann is a wonderful representation of another response to the immanent frame and the closed universe of naturalism- the Nietzche-like rejection of traditional Christian ethics and the replacement of that system with social darwinism. If God is dead than we are the only authoring agents left in the universe. All of our notions of the good, the true, and the beautiful are driven by evolutionary forces in our biology. The strongest of those forces is our survival instincts, and if our survival comes at the cost of another…well, that is simply how natural selection works.
Certainly, the audience may experience a certain moral repulsion at Mann’s attempted murder of Cooper, but trapped in the immanent frame, what is there to point us towards the ultimate good when each of us our free to author whatever we feel is the ultimate good?
This is why people like Sam Harris, who most certainly has a closed orientation towards the possibility of the transcendent, are giving much of their life towards trying to find an objective, ultimate good that fits within the naturalist story. They realize that this radical self-authoring of what is good produces conflicting visions of what is good among people, and ultimately threatens humanity as whole by those who simply have the power to exert their will over others.
Emerging from this climactic incident with Dr. Mann and having come face to face with death, Cooper symbollicy demonstrates one of the oldest Christian notions of what the ultimate shape of love looks like. He rejects his own evolutionary instincts for self-preservation, and gives up his life so that Brand, and perhaps what remains of humanity on earth, might live.
But Cooper doesn’t actually die as he descends into the abyss of the black hole. In fact, he emerges on the other side of the abyss with a transformed perspective. One which has now concluded that love is a transcendent force beyond our explanations.
His willingness to go down into death actually saves not only himself, but ultimately humanity.
What is it about this act compared to Mann’s actions that appeals to our sense of right and wrong so sharply? Why does this so deeply resonate with us as a heroic act, while Mann (who actually also seemed to want to save the species) comes across on a gut level as malevolent?
Sure, some may take a Dr. Mann-like perspective in an attempt to keep the immanent frame closed to the possibility of transcendence and dismiss our deep resonance with these stories where one willingly gives of their life for the sake of another as nothing more evolutionary conditioned altruistic behavior that we’ve had to learn in order to for our species to survive. What if, instead, there is some deeper, innate resonance with the good, the true, and the beautiful intentionally wired into humanity in order to lead us to the transcendent ultimate source of it all?
While Interstellar encourages viewers to explore beyond the imminent, attempting to name “love” as something transcendent, and even symbolically models in Cooper’s heroic self-sacrifice a symbolic Kierkegaardian model of how to ultimately transcend despair by dying to self and taking a leap of faith into the Infinite, what appears to be the intended message of Interstellar’s conclusion is ultimately unfulfilling.
In the end, the answer Nolan gives to these deep questions is still exclusive humanism. We are still alone in the universe, with no one to look out for us but ourselves. Nolan’s vision of a humanity that has somehow transcended space and time is in many ways similar to the perspective of New Age humanists such as author and psychologist Jean Houston. Houston has argued that humanity's evolution into higher and higher states of consciousness will eventually lead us to “become the gods we have invoked.”
In fact, the vision of reality presented in Interstellar is in many ways a picture-perfect cinematic portrayal of Houston’s belief that we will inevitably progress from what she calls Type 1 civilizations where will be leaving earth to create space colonies that have viable ecologies, to Type 2 civilizations where we become capable on sensory level of controlling the resources of entire solar systems, and ultimately to Type 3 civilizations where we become gods ourselves.
Haunted by the Transcendent, Nolan’s magnum opus still falls short of true re-enchantment. It haunts with us with the sights and sounds of beauty and calls us to love, only to tell us in the end that we are all alone and unloved by the mysterious universe that brought us to be.
Just viewed this again a couple of days ago! I’ve rewatched this film a few times, and I find myself even more mesmerized this go around. Feeling the inescapability to reckon with all that I hold dear. For the more people I have lost in this life, and the more people I have gained, the philosophy of Interstellar - more so the portrayal of transcendent love - strikes even harder.
Never knew how intimately grief and hopefulness were played in this storyline, but gosh…. My wife and I were tearing up with this last rewatch.
Really appreciate your take on this film!
Currently reading A Secular Age now, and Interstellar has long been my favorite movie of all time. I am taken aback at how this article feels 'made' for me. Good work Anleitner!!!