Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages (2019)

whom Cooper has thought was lost, triggers his futile efforts to call out to her and pound on the tesseract. This is a powerful paradigm scenario of desperation, like trying to escape by hammering on a door. The tension rises when he sees a replay of his departure, with Murph turning from him as he tries to console her. At this point, leaving Earth seems the biggest mistake of his life. “Don’t go, you idiot” he shouts as then-Cooper leaves. In the esseract Cooper finds another point in time and frantically punches out books that she deciphers: STAY. Then-Cooper ignored the message, but grownup urph finds it a revelation. “Dad, it’s you. You were my ghost.” Cooper’s regret and frustration rigger Murph’s new appreciation of his sacrifice. Now TARS the robot can communicate the data she needs. It’s not just the laws of astrophysics hat save the world, Cooper comes to realize as he sobs with joy. The lingering concern that brought urph back to her bedroom (“a feeling”) and his ranscendent devotion to her made the difference. Whatever Kip Thorne might say, in Interstellar’s rule set, love is a force no less real than gravity. Emotional beings The tesseract scene is one of several peaks in he emotional landscape of Interstellar. The plot is designed as a series of strong affective sequences. The first burst of energy comes when Cooper akes Tom and Murph racing after a wayward drone. It’s a chase, granted, but nowhere else in he Nolan oeuvre is there such a surge of innocent exhilaration. Here the characterizations are set in place: Tom likes farming, which Cooper detests, while Murphy is a budding scientist, which wins her father’s special affection. When the pickup blows a tire, it’s Tom who has to patch it, but during the chase Cooper tutors Murphy in tracking the drone. to the NASA facility arouses Cooper’s urge to protect Murphy, a feeling intensified by an The visi other emotional conflict: his departure. She begs him not to go, and in a protracted scene she shows the ghost’s message that he ignores: STAY. The scene condenses many emotion-laden motifs: the wristwatch he leaves her, the prospect of her ag ing at a different rate (“Time’s gonna change with me”), and above all the ghost. He explains that her mother had told him that parents are there o provide memories, serving as the ghosts of the child’s future. “I can’t be your ghost right now. I need to exist. They chose me” The separation of a parent and a child is a prototypical scenario for inense emotion, and here it’s prolonged by Murph’s ast-minute impulse to run helplessly after him. The sequence is capped by a piercing detail. As he drives Cooper absentmindedly checks under a blanket that hid the girl earlier, as if he hoped she were there again. Thanks to the video transmissions, we’re invited to sympathize with Cooper when he sees the family’s years of struggle condensed into a few minutes. It’s a somber confirmation of the observation made by the robot TARS: humans are “emotional beings.” The emotional pitch rises when the final video is that from the long-unseen Murph who announces that she’s now the same age Coo per was when he departed. She bitterly announces her birthday, and on this note the film’s narration switches to NASA and her efforts to help Brand solve the equations. The videos are affective spurs ater as well. The last message we see from Earth, in which Murph accuses Cooper of leaving them behind, is given to us alone. Cooper is out of the ship, so that we can anticipate his shock and anxiety when he finally catches up with it. This is the owest point in the father-daughter relationship; he tesseract scene exists to counterbalance it and put things right. Nearly every motif gains an affective charge. Afer cracking Cooper’s space helmet, Mann warns hat the last thing he’ll see before he dies will be his children. Initially, crosscutting links Mann’s Murph and Tom’s quarrel about But the references to the omment to bandoning the farm. ¢ al children become more subjective when Cooper, gasping for breath, remembers Murphy flinging way the wristwatch—a painful way to recall his hild for what may be the last time. But the flashback also has the dramatic value of reminding the a c audience of the wristwatch that will provide humanity’s salvation. Another daughter provides a conceptual mo tif that will energize the climax in the tesseract. Amelia argues that the Endurance should choose Dr. Edmunds’ planet over Dr. Mann’s, and she defends herself against Cooper’s charge that she’s letting her love for Edmunds overrule her com mitment to science. Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, powerful... I’m drawn across Pathos and the Puzzle Box Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages * 48