Is cosmic sense-of-wonder incompatible
with humanism?
I recently saw Interstellar, the SF film by Christopher
Nolan, and the reviews repeatedly compared it to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The comparison raises a
question, however, and suggests an innate limitation to SF film itself.
Like 2001, Nolan’s film has visual outer-space grandeur and encounters
with overwhelming phenomena: other
planets where humans are dwarfed by the environments, a black hole magically
used for ultra-light transportation, and the disturbing relativistic effects of
time dilation in heavy gravity. Because
of the time dilation alone the movie warrants its “cosmic” designation; it
depicts realms more complex, peculiar, and “transcendent” than what we normally
experience on Earth. 2001 did the same with its inexplicable
messages from aliens, undefined confrontation with galactic “others,” and a
transformative experience at the end of the film.
But there’s still a big difference.
Interstellar is memorable not for its interstellar grandeur but for
its emotional tie between an astronaut father (Matthew McConaughey), whose life
passes at a slow rate because of acceleration and gravity effects, and his
rapidly aging daughter back on Earth (played, throughout the movie as she gets
older, by Mackenzie Foy, Jessica Chastain, and Ellen Burstyn). Indeed, the relationship is so strong that it
transcends the vast space and time between them. The human connection triumphs over the
horrendous distances between the stars.
Interstellar
Yet the emotion in 2001 comes from the gosh-wow effects of
big space and big cosmic powers, of moving into an area which is different from
what we can know and control. Humans are
almost out of place here; they botch the meeting with the aliens by relying too
much on a self-programming (and unstable) computer, and they make no decisions
once whisked away and “remade”—if that’s what happens at the end, and our not
being able to pin a label on what does happen indicates the point: it’s beyond human understanding.
Such emotional responses to the
cosmos are suggested in Interstellar
too—the big scenes of Saturn, that huge tsumani that engulfs people, the
brooding icefields of the dead world, the gossamer chandelier of the black
hole. But the film’s viewers connect
more to the relationship between the father and daughter: her hatred of him for leaving her and his unflinching
determination to return (even though he’s losing the daughter he knows as she ages past him), and the
attempts to communicate between them when stellar communication is impossible or
“garbled.”
I’m not saying one emotional
response is better than the other. It
comes down to which you prefer. What I
wonder, though, is whether you can ever have both responses in one film. Are
they maybe incompatible?
2001 was criticized for its lack of particularized and interesting characters,
a claim they were too sterile or trivial. Interstellar has characterization and feelings
galore—it’s a love story between father and daughter, and there’s love between
the Anne Hathaway character and the lone astronaut on another planet, and we
also see the brutal effects of confinement and isolation on the Matt Damon
character who goes berserk. But 2001 hardly cared about such things (the
only father-daughter talk is about birthday gifts, telephones, and the mother
who went shopping—more materialistic than emotional, and the deaths that do
occur are almost icily clinical—“Life Functions Terminated”). What’s important for 2001 is the alien-spawned Star-Child at the end, and we never learn
how “human” it really is! Indeed, the
most emotion in the movie is shown by the computer—which indicates just how far
from humanity its characters are.
Meanwhile, Interstellar lavishes in pulling heart-strings and sharing
lamentations, to the point where the characters hardly care about how grand,
incredible, or overwhelming that black hole (and the universe) really is. The father just wants to know whether it will
get him home to his daughter.
One film is cosmic and
ultimately post-human. Its sole
surviving human character is made into something other at the end—which says
little for a human-controlled future, given the power of the alien
interventionists. The other film is so
human that anything cosmic becomes secondary.
Its protagonist is hardly transformed by his experience of outer-space
wonders and terrors—at the end of the movie, he still wants exactly what he
wanted at its start; he follows his single-minded devotion and ultimately meets
again with his daughter.
2001 is so focused on galactic wonders that it maybe trivializes
humanity, while Interstellar is so
caught up in its human viewpoint that maybe it trivializes the universe.
And so the question I raise: are
human experience and galactic experience incompatible?
Or is this just a film
phenomenon? Prose science fiction has
been criticized, and defended, as a genre where characterization is often
generalized to cover the whole human race, where a protagonist might be a
“representative” human being to confront and provide reaction to a changed
future or incredible galactic events.
But some classic examples in
prose of compatible successes do come to mind.
Like “Nine Lives” by Ursula LeGuin, which uses cloning to demonstrate
how humans are ultimately alone: a member
of a cloned “family,” whose members live together intimately and almost
telepathically, suddenly has all his “sisters” and “brothers” killed in an accident,
and he’s alone, which he’s never experienced before. As the other humans in the story suggest, now
he knows what humans always feel. And Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris gives equal weight to both the “inhuman” story of the
sentient planet (with its mimoids, symmetriads, and other bizarre phenomena
that evade human understanding), and the “love story” between a terrestrial
male and alien-created reproduction of his dead wife, where he tries to treat
the relationship as “normal” and finds it impossible. (Note that the Steven Soderbergh film version
of Solaris did not even try to tell
the “inhuman” part of the story—the weird surface activities of the planet are
not presented at all.)
Ultimately, I raise the question
more for debate than to offer any conclusion (for, to be honest, I don’t want humanism and the universe to be
incompatible, in film or otherwise). I’m
sure that defenders of Interstellar
would argue that humanism doesn’t trivialize the universe but presents it as a
formidable opponent, to show just how strong and precious human love can be in
its triumph over any distance and time. And
the defenders of 2001 would say that
if the universe is to be presented with any authenticity at all, then humanism has to succumb to its overwhelming power,
to be flattened by it in order ultimately to be moved and transformed by it.
And both arguments make
sense.
Maybe the word “cosmic” means
exactly what’s implied here: everything
that’s incompatible with
humanity.
And maybe always will be.
