All Go Into The Dark
Alan Green's "
Suicide Kings" was, on this occasion, the augur leading back into the desert. After reading Weston's
From Ritual to Romance, I decided to reread Conrad's
Heart of Darkness and T.S. Eliot's
The Waste Land. Living in Japan, I do a lot of my reading on the train. One day, just as I was about to finish
Heart of Darkness and begin reading Eliot, I decided on a whim, as I had the afternoon off, to watch Christopher Nolan's
Interstellar. I got through the Conrad on the train and was just wrapping up
The Waste Land in the theatre as the movie started.
I was truly not expecting much from this film at all, and I was actually only there because I wanted to see
Interstellar before listening to the (very sadly defunct)
Moon Room Cinema podcast on it by Mark LeClair and Alex Fulton. Not long into it, though, I realized that Nolan's largely mediocre film was exploring precisely the same themes as were haunting myself.
The central "character" of this film is a black hole. At one point it is described as "
the literal heart of darkness." This got me sitting straight up in my seat. Even more cortex-crackling was the fact that, in a key scene, a "ghost" knocks a book by T.S. Eliot among others off a bookshelf. In my slobbering astonishment came the instant recollection that I had just finished reading Eliot's poetry.
Later, not believing my senses, I checked online to see if this actually occurred in the movie. A review from the
Telegraph informed me that it was even more uncanny, more improbable, than I had imagined:
I had literally, without previously knowing anything about
Interstellar, just completed reading works by
both Conrad and Eliot immediately before watching the flicking film! How is this possible? What dream realm had I entered into? Had the "ghost" also decided to contact me?
Further digging on the web confirmed that
Nolan was very consciously playing with these themes. In an interview he stated:
Dr. Mann, a brilliant yet twisted scientist/explorer stationed on an uninhabited planet orbiting the black hole, was also Kurtz. All of the pieces snapped into place.
I in no way want to defend
Interstellar as a great work of art, or even less so to affirm its very questionable message. The conclusions of this film, when its surface is scratched, are quite disturbing. That it actively promotes a transhumanist agenda seems obvious, and there is no better exploration of this angle than in the LeClair and Fulton podcast I mentioned above. But, given the deep weirdness I was awashed in, this is by no means the entire story.
Nolan
knows. It's hard to avoid this conclusion. The "ghost" of the bookshelf turns out to be Murph's father attempting to communicate to her via gravity waves from the heart of the black hole in a Borgesian labyrinth of the imagination apparently constructed by humanity's four-dimensional descendents. A few startling claims are implied here about the nature of the "conspiracy" which rules our present world
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