INTERSTELLAR & CULTURE SHIFT

Interstellar is a 2014 space adventure film directed by Christopher Nolan. Starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine, the film features a team of space travellers who journey through a wormhole in search of a new habitable planet. It was written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan; Theoretical physicist Kip Thorne, whose work inspired the film, acted as both scientific consultant and executive producer.
           I saw the film the night before the launch of 'Culture Shift' and so the issues that the film raise were still floating around the following morning. The sense of 'apocalypse now' permeated the start of the launch with 'The re-enactment of art'- an interview with two artists by Suzi Goblik. In 1991 She wrote,
         "I suspect we are at the end of something-a hypermasculinised modern culture whose social projects have become increasingly unecological and nonsustainable."
         In the film, Interstellar, Michael Caine's character, the Head of NASA, says that human beings were not intended to save the planet, they were made to leave it. The film set a few decades in the future finds our planet choked by dust storms and ecological disasters, resources almost run out, the earth can no longer sustain our race. We follow explorers into space to find a place where we can all escape to, not as tourists but as emigrants. What is particularly moving to me is the exploration of what it is to be human, the attachments we need to survive, how we find our ways to adapt to loss, but the pain of separation can be unbearable. The relationship between father and daughter is especialy moving. Michael McConaughey's character, is brilliantly portrayed- an astronaut who has to leave his daughter, probably never to return-in order to save the human race.
          Topically, Caine's character quotes the Dylan Thomas poem, 'Do not go gently into that dark night,' about the death of his father, 'Rage rage against the dying of the light.'
          Coming back to the idea suggested by Suzi Gablik that we should always keep the image of apocalypse in our mind's eye, Interstellar certainly does that. To reaffirm the importance of both, here's another quote from the report, quoting Gablik.
         " It is precisely to the periphery and the margins that we must look, if we are to find the cores that will be central to our society in the future, for it is here that they will be found to be emerging."   

          Interstellar is on general release now.