i wanna know what love is

some thoughts on interstellar

By the time they were on their way to the third planet I, too, was almost out of fuel. I’ll admit all my weaknesses up front: I have little patience for films set in space and am skeptical of sci-fi, and it was 10:45 PM by the time the opening sequence rolled. But I got on board because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and I pretty much stayed there until the scene where Matthew McConaughey’s character should die but doesn’t.

Really what happened on the way to the third planet is that the question of “How will this movie end?” crystallized in my mind and wouldn’t go away, which is what tends to happen when a movie’s self-proclaimed main themes start to unpeel from the movie’s actual contents. It’s Christopher Nolan, so no one has to guess what the themes are; one of the characters just says it. In this case it was Anne Hathaway’s Amelia Brand, after she has been revealed to be in love with one of the twelve astronauts sent to explore potentially viable planets in another galaxy through a wormhole. She wants to go to his planet next; she says love is the only thing that can unite people through space and time. Cooper (McConaughey) overrules her, and they wind up waking Matt Damon’s Dr. Mann from a cryogenic sleep on the second planet, which he has led people back on Earth to believe can sustain life but which, he admits, he’s known from the first day is inviable. This wasteful sojourn leaves them low on fuel on the way to the third planet, which is why Cooper has to eject himself from the spacecraft they’re on so that Brand can get to the planet of her beloved.

I thought Cooper should die in that moment, shot from below in unearthly light, and I thought, yes, this is how you justify that monologue and that sappiness: blast everyone off into a vortex of mystery, space exploration for the sole purpose of the perpetuation of the “human race” ending in death and oblivion, mostly pointless except for as an exercise in the torturous remembrance of what really matters: not the promise of forever but the fickleness of now. Cooper left his daughter, lost years of life with her which he’s never getting back—Brand makes that clear in another little speech (“you knew about relativity”)—and he loves her. He is haunted by that love and his inability to act upon it, but Interstellar refuses to accept that as evidence of the transcendent power of that particular emotion. It needs instead to make love literally transcend space and time. Instead of dying, Cooper falls into a tesseract, created by humans in the future who inhabit five-dimensional space, that allows him to see and travel between infinite copies of Murph’s bedroom, where he sends her messages hoping she’ll convince him, in the past, to stay put on Earth, and then once that fails, additional ones that help Murph, who’s followed in her father’s footsteps, to solve the equation that will make it possible for humans to decamp to outer space.

All those speeches, all that effort, all that fuel—only for the film to hold itself together via magical thinking and a childish fear of death as part of life, a naive lack of understanding that life’s inevitable end is the only thing that makes love mean anything at all. Murph and Cooper reunite on her deathbed after the tesseract collapses—he’s 124 and she’s maybe 90—and she sends him away before she passes. Not even here is there room for life’s inevitable tragedy, only for a narcissistic version of love: mutual admiration between two people with the same single-minded hubris, the only thing really stretching across time and space.