in which Joe Romm has my heart (sorry, T)
Interstellar may be the greatest silent movie ever made. It is a
stunningly gorgeous but annoyingly noisy, second-rate sci-fi movie with
Icarus-like aspirations of greatness, an intentionally-confusing film
with hints of climate change.
....First off, thank goodness this anti-inspirational movie isn’t
(clearly) about human-caused climate change, given that a main theme, as
expressed by its genius NASA scientist (played by Michael Caine)
appears to be:
“We are not meant to save the world. We are meant to leave it.”
And if you find it hard to believe that any modern eco-parable could have such a ludicrously defeatist theme, here’s the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LqzF5WauAw
Christopher Nolan himself admitted of that line, “Obviously, if that’s taken literally it would not be particularly positive.” Duh?
....As the Washington Post notes,
the movie ”never explains the source of the blight and the dust storms
that plague Earth’s remaining residents.” This Nolan-esque-ambiguity
appears to be intentional, based on this recent interview:
Reuters: In “Interstellar,” Earth faces a severe
environmental disaster brought on by the grounds drying up. Did you
want to address climate change?
Nolan: Not consciously. The honest answer is we live in the
same world, my brother and I. We work on the script, we live in the same
world as everyone else so we’re sort of affected by the same things,
worried about the same things, but we try not to be didactic in the
writing, we try not to give any particular message or sense of things.
Yes, why make a big-budget movie about an eco-collapse that looks a
lot like worst-case projections for global warming and then bother to
give viewers “any particular message or sense of things”?
Nolan responded to media and viewer complaints that there were “parts
where the music totally obliterates the dialogue” by explaining that was
intentional!
What about Michael Caine’s deathbed scene where it’s hard to tell if he
is in fact admitting the whole notion that his efforts were aimed at
saving humans on Earth was a lie? That was also meant to be intentionally confusing!
George Monbiot writes in the U.K. Guardian:
“Movies about abandoning Earth reflect the political defeatism of our
age: that adapting to climate breakdown is preferable to stopping it.”
Grist notes
in its take-down of the multiple absurdities of the movie, “I can’t
believe that intergalactic space travel was the best route to food
security.”
That’s especially true since — “plot” spoiler — it’s fair to say that
humans from the future are not going build a wormhole near Saturn for
us to flee Earth to another galaxy. In the U.K. Guardian piece “How Interstellar made Michael Caine think again about climate change,” the actor himself says:
“If Earth screws up, I think we all go. How many people can go through a black hole in a rocket? It’s not a bus.”
Interstellar — the climate solution for the one percent.
- ClimateProgress
