Interstellar - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Explores Our Fears in Outer Space

The reluctant wife and I decided that it really would be worth seeing Interstellar on the big screen, but its first run was done, so we saw this film at the cheap theater.  Housed in the very back of the biggest mall in our area - a mall that has been a spectacular failure - getting to the movie was, in itself, a post apocalyptic adventure.  One cut rate department store is open - and three decidedly home grown stores in the mall proper, clustered near the front door, and then a very long walk - through empty dimly lit mall corridors, with little heating, through the intersection of the four gargantuan wings, past an abandoned food court, and down another long corridor to a dead end where you buy the ticket from the popcorn maker (and there is no ticket taker), all to arrive at a small screen, largely empty theater where the movie that maintains that our way of life has been precipitously imperiled because almost all food crops have succumbed to some terrible blights - corn is the only remaining food source, and it is only a matter of time before corn fails as well - is believable, and, especially in the bowels of this huge empty space, it is believable that our hubris, our belief that bigger is better, might be a deeply problematic thought.

Despite our preparation and willingness to believe, our credibility was strained by a movie that imitated life - it seemed too big and sprawly to support itself.  It labored under seemingly unnecessary subplots that made apparently tangential points.  Though the ideas played with in these tangents were interesting, and some of the visuals they afforded were the most stunning in the movie, it began to feel like a marathon not because it was long, which it was, but because there was just too much freight to bear.  But the movie opens up when you get closer to the center of it, and the tangents, along with the gripping, powerful action sequences that were riveting, begin to make some sense, despite the fact that they now seem self indulgent, because it takes work, at least for me, to see the center amidst what had distracted us from a deeply searching exploration of the variety of ways that we can cope with inter generational loss and love.

The primary story at the center of this movie is a love story between a father and a daughter.  The love that is portrayed is strong enough to bend time and space.  It is powerful enough to save the human race.  A parallel but less apparent relationship is the one between a father who believes the race is doomed and sends his daughter on a mission that will allow her to live out her own life - even though he believes they can never see each other again and that she will end her life in deep space.

OK, so what happens?  In the post apocalyptic world, our hero, a former NASA flyboy (played by Matthew McConaghey), is now tending corn because technology or biotechnology and mono-cropping - it really isn't clear to me - has led to viruses that have killed all but a few food crops. The crop failures have led to global economic ruin, and turned people against technological solutions to problems.  So the government can no longer publicly work on anything but agriculture - presumably in a low tech manner.  Flyboy is back on the family - in this case the family in-law - farm.  His wife has died and his beloved daughter, who is math/science brilliant (and played by Mackenzie Foy as a child and Jessica Chastain as an adult), is not going to get the education she needs because of the collapse of the educational system, especially around training scientists.  This dead end existence is interrupted by a ghostly/poltergeist phenomenon that, even though Flyboy the engineer pooh poohs ESP as a non-scientific entity - reveals the coordinates to NASA's top secret ongoing project intended to relocate the people of earth, or at least a big chunk of them, to a planet in a galaxy far, far away.

This is where we meet the second father/daughter pair.  The scientist (played by Michael Caine), is working to solve the problem of how to power the mammoth ship they are building.  He sends his daughter (played by Anne Hathaway) and Flyboy ahead to scout things out.  Meanwhile the scientist agrees to teach Flyboy's daughter science and, ultimately, because she is very bright, to enlist her aid in solving the power problem.  The twist (spoiler alert) is that he, and he alone, knows that the power problem for the big ship is (apparently) insoluble.

So the comparison is between a father who leaves his daughter intent on saving her and a father who sends his daughter out knowing that he will never see her again.  The scientist has, however, a different plan in mind.  His daughter - and Flyboy - are carrying human embryos that will populate this new world.  So the real comparison is between Flyboy, who is intent on saving his daughter, and for whom saving mankind is a bonus, and the scientist who knows that he is doomed and that his daughter will have a strange life without him, but that she and the race will carry on.  But the kicker is that the scientist works with Flyboy's daughter for years, deceiving her into believing that she and the other humans will survive and that she may be reunited with her father.

In Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, Freud conceives of depression (melancholia) as a failed mourning process.  We become depressed, Freud argues, when we can't let go of the people that we love - when we can't mourn or grieve them.  This happens, Freud maintains, when we have not reached a level of maturity that allows us to experience ourselves as functioning autonomously - and others as doing the same.  He sets this up as a dichotomy - some of us are able to mourn, others can't.  Like most dichotomies, I think this is better understood as a continuum - and I think it is the case that we have different levels of attachment (attachment is a word that wouldn't be used in this way until 20 years after Freud died, so I can't fault him) to different people.  Thus, I think that it is easy to mourn the loss of colleagues, but much more difficult to mourn the loss of a parent or, worse, a child.

In my own case, while I have pretty thoroughly mourned my father, who died almost four years ago, he still "haunts" me - returning in my dreams with a clarity and vividness that is stunning - and reassuring.  When others talk of losing their father, I frequently tear up; sharing their grief, and continuing to process my own.  All that said, there is pathological grieving, and Freud's conception of depression as a failure to mourn, not necessarily a death, but frequently a more subtle but difficult loss, like an unavailable parental figure; someone who seems to be there but really isn't, and so we hang onto this relationship - and deny our disappointments with the other because to acknowledge them and the anger they cause would imperil our relationship to the person that we believe we depend on.  So there is tremendous psychological cost associated with staying connected with an unavailable other.

From this perspective, the scientist has "rationally" mourned his relationship with his daughter - she is a separate person who is capable of functioning autonomously and he wishes her well on her journey.  Further, he has rationally mourned the people of the earth - gravity won't save them, so there is no use crying over spilled milk.  Let's send the embryos and start over.  And I think the writer and director (who are brothers) and we as the audience are horrified by this.  They (and we) are rooting for flyboy and his saving - not people in general - but  this person - my daughter.

Now, here I have a casting problem.  Mathew McConaghey as Flyboy doesn't overtly convey his attachment to his daughter.  He conveys anger and is an action oriented guy.  We have to infer the connection.  Because I was curious, l looked up the casting decision and the casting person said that they cast McConaghey because he represented everyman.  And, OK, I think everyman, especially every man, is stereotypically cast as as being challenged in expressing his attachment.  And, interestingly, I think this is related to Freud's position.  In so far as we don't acknowledge the depth of our attachments, I think his position is that we are more likely to experience difficulty mourning.  Pretending to be a rock, a la McConaghey or Eastwood or Whoever, actually makes us more vulnerable, not less, in so far as we are all (to a certain limit - there are people whose disconnection is so great that they only connect sadistically) remote; McConaghey becomes everyman refusing to let go of his daughter.

And he is rewarded for it.  He finds himself in a space - after giving up both his daughter and the scientist's daughter - towards whom he has feelings - because he is invested in what is best for them - he finds himself in a space where gravity helps him be able to haunt his daughter - to become the poltergeist that he pooh-poohed.  And from this position, he is able to transmit the data that is needed to save mankind - to store it in one of his possessions that he left behind, and this is the right place to store it because this will be hung onto by his daughter.  She will never let go of it - because it symbolizes his connection to her - a connection she will never give up - not because, as Freud would have it, she is melancholic, but because she is human and no grief as intense as that towards a lost father is ever resolved - so we hang onto a totem because of the vestigial connection that we feel - and though it may be vestigial, it is certainly not impotent - quite the contrary, it is hugely powerful.

All that said, I still think that the last twenty minutes of the film are gratuitous.  Having made the connection and saving humanity is enough.  We don't need to see Flyboy connect with both his daughter and his girlfriend.  He's already done what needs to be done.  I think it is a testament to movie convention, which in turn, from this perspective, is a testament to how grounded in our "pathological" - meaning ungrieved - connections to people - to particular people - that we need to have a "happy" ending - an ending where our wishes to stay connected with those we love are gratified- we never have to face the pain of grief.   Especially when we are grappling with the issue of the damage we have caused Mother Earth - when we are concerned that we have irreparably damaged our home - the reassurance that we, like Flyboy, are concerned about those we love, even if that love has contributed in some small measure (and by, the power of multiplication, a great deal) to the impending disaster, and even if we know we should be more like the scientist, we may need the reassurance of the movie's happy ending that we can survive to be able to face the possibility that we won't.

POST APOCALYPSE UPDATE:
It is now April of 2020 and we are social distancing during the Covid-19 Pandemic.  We decided to re-watch this film on the small screen we both enjoyed it a great deal.  I remembered that I had posted about it, but not much more.  I reread the post with the Reluctant Wife and we were both surprised by the negative tone of my reading, though we came up with two very different hypotheses about it.

Hers:  It's a complicated film and I sometimes "get" a film much better on a second viewing.  She recommended that I watch all films twice before posting on them.  I think that is a good idea, but not very doable.  I will try to work harder to "get" films the first time through more frequently - particularly keeping characters straight.

Mine:  I think the apocalyptic nature of the place where we saw it and the apocalyptic and believable premise of the film evoked defenses in me.  Rather than feel uncomfortable - and bad for not having done a better job to take care of the planet - I blamed the film for being bad and overly saccharine to boot.  In fact, I think the reunion at the end of the film is essential to the premise.  It is our love for each other as individuals that allows us to accomplish the things that we have and might - including saving the planet.

I think there is something to both hypotheses - and I'm also leaving the post up.  I think it is too wordy and focused on Mourning and Melancholia, which I must have been reading at the time, but I don't disagree with the premise of the role that mourning takes - in fact, I think that may have applied to my own process of mourning our (and my) destruction of the planet that was just beginning.  As silly as it is to feel guilty about that, if we don't, we won't get anything accomplished.  In my viewing of the film the first time I was defended against the message.  In the middle of having a virus threaten us?  Not so much.

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