Do Not Go Gentle

I almost never see movies in an actual theater. The sound of people eating popcorn makes me want to punch a hole through the seat in front of me. That’s normal, right? For Interstellar, though, I was willing to brave opening night crowds. Christopher Nolan is one of the few popular directors to consistently craft films that are both popular and thoughtful, both exciting and beautiful. No one will confuse one of his films with a philosophy treatise, but they are none the worse for engaging a wider audience. I loved the movie. At almost 3 hours long, I wish it had been longer.

Many of the initial reviewers hated it. Wesley Morris at Grantland hated it, writing, “It gives you everything you want in a vision of the future, everything except awe.” Armond White at National Review hated it. He considers it “insipid” and “hackneyed.” To these and the many other reviewers who accuse Nolan of creating a new-age, derivative jumble of cliché that “gets the science wrong” and devolves into sentimentality, I have an important rebuttal:

I almost wonder if we are all so jaded that we confuse emotion with sentimentality, story structure with cloying cleverness, and virtue with unreality. A good film, we have convinced ourselves, must be gritty and nihilistic. When people like Nolan attempt to present to us unironic beauty, critics interpret it as cliché, as if there is a fault with the telling of old themes. There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with old stories. There are certain themes that are able to be examined from infinitely many angles and still enchant and delight us. These themes, by and large, have to do with the struggle of man with the eternal virtues. What is love? What happens after I die? How can I be good? To toss these themes in the dustbin as hackneyed is shortsighted and it is the reason that many of our movies are not worth seeing.

Interstellar does not bother to hide its themes. They are there for all to see. Space travel is an analogy for the true destiny of mankind, the way in which we survive death. The question at hand, though, is what that destiny might be. Is science and technological advancement enough, as Dr. Mann (again, no attempt to hide!) contends. Are we here to survive simply for the sake of some abstract concept of the species? Project Lazarus (yeah, pretty obvious) has two options. Plan B is favored by Dr. Mann and consists of survival at all costs, manufactured life, the abandonment of everyone left behind on earth to a long, slow suffocation. Let’s let that one die along with Matt Damon, errrgh, Dr. Mann. To follow this plan would quite literally destroy all that makes humanity worth saving.

No, a resurrection requires sacrifice, true magic exacts a price, and love turns out to demand all that a lover has to give. The science with its promises of easy regeneration will not live up to its promises. There is in fact, only one power we know about that transcends the limitations of this universe–love. Before you laugh, stay with me for a moment. Love is not sentimentality or mawkishness. It is sacrifice, virtue, heroism, the total gift of self. The demands love places upon the characters clears up this misconception quickly. The answers do not come easy, and when they do they do not short-circuit the science. Love is grace, and grace does not destroy nature. It completes it. The science works! But it is not enough. Mankind will not survive on science alone. We are here for a greater destiny.

Back to the outer space analogy. Gravity is a force that exercises its influence instantaneously and mysteriously. It is gravity that holds us in place across time and space. Astronaut Brand makes the analogy for us when she declares, “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” Love is our gravity. It is, so to speak, Plan A. As St. Augustine writes, pondus meum amor meus. My weight is my love. Are we to sink down into the soil, choked by the blight, or are we to rise as flames in a fire? The only measure will be our ability to love.

The words of Brand as she explicates this concept to her fellow astronaut Cooper could not possibly be more Catholic:

Cooper: You’re a scientist, Brand.

Brand: So listen to me when I say love isn’t something that we invented. It’s observable. Powerful. It has to mean something.

Cooper: Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing.

Brand: You love people who died. Where’s the social utility in that?

Cooper: None.

Brand: Maybe it means something more — something we can’t yet understand. Maybe it’s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.

This is not mere sentimentality, as if love is an emotion, or a physical attraction, or social utility. Nolan characters have been observed in the past reading Plato. Socrates, like Cooper, is schooled in the virtue of love by Diotima:

“For love, Socrates, is not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only.”

“What then?”

“The love of generation and of birth in beauty.”

Love is a virtue. All virtues are bound up with each other in some mysterious way. All of them speak to one, single truth of being, a kind of analogy to eternity. These virtues are not mere extras to the human being. They are, in fact, the fundamental stuff of which we are made. Love brings us back to ourselves. Says Diotima, “Wherefore love is of immortality.”

Let’s look at this from a different angle. I would be remiss if I did not at least mention it in an essay written for a literary magazine. It is the Dylan Thomas poem. We hear parts of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” four times during the movie. Constructed as a villanelle, the poem written for a dying father declares,

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

All sorts of men, wise, good, wild, and grave, all grow old, all are alike as they press against the given limits of a lifetime, all are encouraged to hope in the face of despair. In what way do we rage against death? What tools is a frail man to wield in his favor? Nolan attempts to provide his own answers: family, sacrifice, love. One does not defeat death or scientifically subvert it, one is transformed by death.

Love is our gravity. The black hole, Gargantua, is the locus, taking us into the unknown, a place where physics seems to think our lives stretch out into a sort of eternally occurring death. Love in Interstellar comes with an enormous price. A father leaves his children to never see them again, slipping through a wormhole and into the event horizon. Gargantua takes a toll. This is a theme Nolan has explored in the past. In The Prestige, for instance, he explores the cost of true magic. Real magic always requires a sacrifice, whether it be the dove’s brother, or a pair of fingers, or a marriage, or the very life of the magician. The question, as I see it, is if we really appreciate the cost involved or if we are content with the mere spectacle. To be content with the latter is to miss the point entirely and it makes the virtue of love into mere sentiment. Without death there is no resurrection.

Why do we fight death? Should we? To not go gentle, does that mean fear of death or does it mean to hold tightly to that which will allow us to live again, that which death cannot snatch away: faith, hope, and love. The greatest of these, I am more confident than ever, is love. In such a way perhaps each of us in our time is gathered to his fathers and sees that in the heavens above there is, as Dante observed in wonder, “The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.”