Seeing and Interpreting Visions of the Next Age in Interstellar Seeing and Interpreting Visions of the Next Age in Interstellar

Abstract Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) uses multiple styles of cinematography – documentary, painterly and expressionistic – to guide interpretation of its apocalyptic review of history. Within the prologue and epilogue of the science fiction film, clips from interviews originally filmed for Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl (2012) invite questions about how to interpret documentary, revisionist and eschatological reviews of history. Cinematography functions as a self-reflexive cue to spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to engage in eschatological interpretation. The representation of spectatorship and vision reveals the challenge of interpreting prophetic visions of the last things and the next age, which are conventions of the apocalypse genre.


Introduction
Interstellar directs attention to Vivian Sobchak's argument that science fiction, as a film genre, "emphasizes actual, extrapolative, or speculative science and empirical method, interacting in a social context with the lesser emphasized, but still present, transcendentalism of . . . religion." 1 As I will explain, Interstellar uses multiple styles of cinematography to visualize conventions of the apocalypse genre, as defined by scholars of religion and film criticism. Although Interstellar, like apocalyptic films discussed by Justin Heinzekehr and Conrad E. Ostwalt, does not refer to divinely ordained destruction, 2 it adapts and visualizes conventions of the apocalypse genre identified by scholars of religion. In particular, Nolan's science fiction film creates visual analogies to apocalyptic conventions such as a narrative framework set at a particular historical moment that recounts revelations, represented as journeys and visions that an "otherworldly" mediator interprets to provide a hopeful consolation. Interstellar, like apocalypses discussed by Eugene Weber, interprets historical events in relation to eschatology, that is, "the last things": death, resurrection, judgment, reward and punishment, the closing of the present age and the beginning of the next. 3 The narrative of Interstellar, like ancient and modern apocalypses studied by Mitchell D. Reddich and Paul Boyer, 4 reviews history in order to reveal the meaning not only of the present but also of the future.
The epilogue of Interstellar offers a vision of the next age typical of the apocalypse genre that, Andrew M. Greeley argues, "is more a reconstruction than destruction, more of a beginning than an ending of the old, more of a vision of hope than a vision of dissolution." 5  Interstellar structures its review of history into three acts framed by a prologue and epilogue. The first act reviews the history of an ecological disaster called "the blight" that has grounded Cooper, a former astronaut, on Earth where daily life is a struggle to produce corn, the one remaining crop that sustains Earth's population. Advanced technology is suspect and limited; space travel is dismissed as wasteful, MRIs are no longer available to diagnose illnesses, and sophisticated defence drones are recycled as farm machinery. In this context where the practical science of horticulture is the only measure of a productive adult life, Cooper relies on science as the key to interpreting daily life, including both mundane and miraculous visual experiences. When a fierce dust storm miraculously reveals navigational coordinates that lead him to a hidden NASA base, Cooper gains an opportunity to pilot the Endurance space station through a wormhole on a journey to another galaxy. Cooper and a crew of three scientists will travel to join surviving members of the Lazarus mission, a previous space mission that has identified three planets for human colonization. The Endurance mission aspires to implement two plans to sustain human life. Plan A to transport the population of Earth to another planet in the future depends upon Professor Brand, the head of NASA, who affirms theoretical science can reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics; the solution is an ongoing project that, he tells Cooper, will be accomplished before members of the Endurance mission return to Earth. The journey of the Endurance in the meantime will implement Plan B by transporting 5,000 fertilized human eggs as a population bomb to establish a colony. Cooper's faith that the science and technology of the mission are "solid" guides him to pilot the journey while his young daughter and son remain with their grandfather on Earth.
The second act traces the erosion of Cooper's confidence that with science alone he can interpret his visual experience in another galaxy. His journeys to two planets, a water planet and an ice planet, do not identify habitable environments to establish a colony using the population bomb. More importantly, while on the ice planet Cooper learns he and the crew have been deceived by Professor Brand, who abandoned Plan A, and by Dr. Mann, a leader of the Lazarus mission who in order to be rescued falsified data to indicate the ice planet was suitable for colonization.
Cooper's own near-death experience on the ice planet as well as the deaths of members of his family on Earth and members of his crew change his understanding of his journey and human mortality; he condemns Professor Brand's and Dr.
Mann's scientific justifications for abandoning people on Earth to die. As a result of a vision that he has of his daughter Murph, Cooper determines not only to enable his remaining crew member, Dr. Brand (the daughter of Professor Brand), to reach another planet to implement Plan B but also to journey into the black hole Gargantua to find data needed to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics, and thereby save people on Earth.
In the third act Cooper struggles within Gargantua to interpret his visual experience of the tesseract, a three-dimensional space where intersecting lines of time, space and gravity reveal an infinite number of scenes of his daughter, literally every moment of her life within a room in their farmhouse on Earth. Using his scientific understanding of the tesseract, Cooper uses gravity to send quantum data to his daughter who then solves the equation to reconcile relativity and quantum mechanics. After she has resolved the equation, Cooper experiences an eschatological vision of his journey and a prophetic vision of the next age confirmed in the epilogue set on Cooper Station. The epilogue reveals the challenge of interpreting visual representations of history and their relevance to the next age.
When Cooper awakens on Cooper Station, the relativity of time means he has aged little more than a decade since he left Earth but his daughter is now an elderly woman on her deathbed. The future represented by Cooper Station, however, is not the terminus of Cooper's journey. His daughter encourages him to undertake another journey to humankind's "new home" on the desert planet where Dr. Brand has established a colony. Changing styles of cinematography in the film's three acts not only represent Cooper's and Murph's changing interpretations of their visual experience and journeys but also guide spectators' interpretation of the narrative as a prophetic vision.

Interpreting Reviews of History
Christopher Nolan states that he included clips of interviews from Burns's documentary The Dust Bowl in his science fiction film Interstellar in order to impress upon the spectator "the feeling of dread, the feeling of the imbalance between the human race and the planet to be real and credible." 6 Many of the interviews in The Dust Bowl specifically address dread and other emotions caused by the dust storms that Burns documents. Floyd Coen from Morton County, KS, explains when a dust storm occurred, "as far as you could see it was coming right towards you, this giant wall just coming towards you. And you still had the feeling, whether you would admit it that something was going to run over you and just crush you." 7 His feeling of life-threatening menace is explained further by Dorothy Williamson of Prowers County, CO: "The dust, there is nowhere you can run. You can try to get out of it but it's as if it follows you, follows you, follows you. You can't escape it. Looking back on it, I think it carried with it a feeling of, I don't know the word exactly, of being unreal but almost being evil." The affect of these and other interviews in Burns's documentary engage spectators' sympathy and guide spectators' interpretation of montages of black and white images from the 1930s, including found footage and Farm Security Administration still photography, that create a review of history. 8 The interviews that punctuate the exposition of Ken Burns's documentary focus spectators on the historical past. Throughout the documentary, twenty-six elderly people or "survivors" speak about their experience as children living in the 1930s. The spectator listens to their words during voice overs and on-camera interviews that identify them by their names and the locations where they lived as children. The interview with Don Wells that introduces "The Great Plow Up," the first episode of The Dust Bowl, exemplifies the documentary's presentation of the survivors as witnesses and their words as testimony about a period of history. In the opening sequence of the documentary, spectators first hear the sound of the wind while viewing a montage of black and white photographs 9 of a dust storm and film clips of extreme winds sweeping soil from the land, blowing trees and worrying cattle. Then, as spectators view clips of found footage from the 1930s in which men, women and children seek shelter from dust storms, a voice offers to explain the truth of these historical events: "Let me tell you how it was." The speaker anticipates spectators may dismiss his statements as exaggerations. He objects to this potential response to his words and those of others interviewed when he states: "I don't care who describes that to you, nobody can tell it any worse than what it was. It was that bad." His voice speaks with authority about truth telling while spectators view images of dust storms driving people indoors to shelter. The  interpretative; the first interview is over-exposed whereas the two following interviews have dark, balanced lighting that reflects each survivor's words and emotions. Together the interviews create an introduction that prompts spectators outside the mise-en-scène to interpret the storm in the following sequences as a phenomenon not only caused by the environmental disaster occurring in the film's narrative but also similar to a well-known historical event that occurred on April 14,1935.

Scientific and Eschatological Interpretation
Within the first act of the narrative, characters interpret their experiences literally; to Cooper and his family the journey home through the dust storm is not a revelation but instead an experience typical of their daily lives. At this point in the narrative, characters assume that science and not eschatology is the key to understanding their visual experience. Like other journeys taken in the truck by Cooper and his family such as their earlier journey to school, the drive home from the stadium begins with a vision, a black cloud that characters interpret in scientific, factual terms. Their assumption about how to interpret what they see in a valid and meaningful way was explained earlier to Murph by Cooper: he instructs her not to assume "a ghost" knocked a model and books from the shelves in her bedroom but instead to use "scientific" method to understand these seemingly inexplicable events. He instructs her to "record the facts, analyze the how and the why, and present your conclusions." This is the method that he will use, after the dust storm, to interpret the dust pattern on the floor of her bedroom as binary code identifying coordinates that guide their journey in the truck to the NORAD base where he learns about the Endurance mission. Although the creation of binary code by a dust storm seems not only an unlikely phenomenon but also a miraculous revelation,    representing an infinite number of scenes with Murph in her bedroom when she was ten years old. These two narratives crosscut nineteen times with another representing forty-year-old Murph on Earth in her childhood bedroom remembering and re-enacting past events that correspond to actions of her childhood self and responding to her father's actions inside the tesseract. Only spectators see the adult Murph remembering and re-enacting memories of her "ghost" when she was ten years old. Cooper, within the tesseract, sees his young daughter who tells him, "go. If you're leaving -just go." In response Cooper, within the tesseract, pushes books off the shelves to represent "STAY" in Morse code, a message the child Murph correctly transcribed in a notebook that the adult Murph now interprets as a revelation that her father was her ghost. The crosscuts represent the characters' line of sight literally as a visual process that differs from, but is necessary for, interpretation. Metaphorically, the characters' line of sight, that is their empathy and love, is what makes the revelation across space-time credible to

The Symbolism of Vision and Eschatological Interpretation
Murph whose empathy like her father's extends to others on Earth, a bond that neither Professor Brand nor Dr. Mann trusted.
Cooper's journey into Garguantua where he enters the tesseract and his subsequent journey out through black hole and the wormhole visualize its eschatological significance. His journey in the third act of the narrative is not simply a review of his history but, more importantly, a symbolic review of history extending from the blight on Earth to a prophecy of the next age. In this sequence, visual effects frame the unfamiliar image of a black hole, based on theoretical astrophysics, with light rays that make its blackness and its form visible to Instead he asks, "What happens now?" before a bright, white light fills the entire frame as he journeys again into the wormhole through which the Endurance first entered the new galaxy.
In the second act the wormhole initially appeared to be a black spherical  literally foregrounds the problem of the museum's visual representation of history.
Its anachronistic physical reconstruction of the Cooper farm obstructs rather than facilitates interpretation of the relation of the present to the past and, more importantly, to the next age.

The monument in honor of the Lazarus and Endurance missions on Cooper
Station, in contrast, is a revisionist interpretation of history. This monument is inscribed with the names of sixteen astronauts and a dedication, "To the brave men and women who gave their lives so we could begin again." The monument in itself is an inaccurate review of the history of these missions. The monument mistakenly indicates all the astronauts on these missions died. More important, however, is its omission of any record of Dr. Mann's betrayal of his duty, an event lost to history.
While under the circumstances these factual errors are understandable, they pose an impediment to interpreting history, that is, not simply the fact of people's deaths but also judgment of their meaning. The monument is also inscribed with the words: "Do not go gentle into the night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, and "our new home" give allegorical and hopeful meanings to IMAX images of a seemingly barren, desert landscape captured at dusk. In the concluding vision of the desert planet, IMAX cinematography does not produce detailed, realistic images simply to foster verisimilitude but instead painterly images of a landscape and nuanced portraits of Dr. Brand's emotions; the effect of optimism and hope created by the images reveals the consolation the desert planet offers to humankind.
Murph's words in the voice over also interpret the planet as the new home for humankind in the next age.
In the epilogue, different styles of cinematography guide the response of spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to two reviews of history: a brightly lighted, colorful and inaccurate recreation of the past on Cooper Station and a softly lighted, earth-toned desert landscape, which is a prophetic vision of the future.
Cooper Station orbiting Saturn in its entirety recreates life as lived on Earth before