# on interstellar scale bs and christopher nolan to criticize christopher nolan's inception to a twentysomething man who works in the media is tantamount to questioning ir mother's birthline. fanboys want to layer on all kinds of depth mystery and maverick genius but could it be the profundity they want - we all want - is just a dazzling mirage with very little under the bonnet other than some stylized visuals and deliberately baffling plotting? > "you just didn't get it" they'll say. my hunch is there's nothing much to get (.. > ~ will hersey esquire // video here the three most insidious ideas in interstellar that need questioning 1. "we're not meant to save the world - we're meant to leave it" that is it's ok that humanity has shit in the nest because we can simply find another cosmic dumping ground for ourselves and our oversized suv tanks here's zizek on ecology // video here 2. "we must think not as individuals but as a species" danger will robinson: pinky-white skinned people in authority telling you not to think - that ir concern is with the greater good(tm) indeed the eggy oeuvre of nolan may be considered crawling / undead with dubious non-philosophical ideas / ideology: condescending cringeworthy lecture movies for 'low wattage clever people' to make nolan and themselves look smart. but the question is at what truer intellectual price take interstellar: an entertaining flick - entertaining in that (much like the 2d character parodies that inhabit it) the fact viewers have to constantly suspend disbelief over the move's darkly laughable ideas - ignoring suspect concepts poorly expressed imagine that christopher nolan only ever made one good (tv) flick - memento: the story of a murderer who willingly chooses to ignore ir (/existential) condition - that of constantly lying to himself over the degree to which ey understands memory - and therefore that ir knowledge about the world is inherently unreliable and limited ey therefore must constantly refit / manipulate the past to falsely justify the awful moral choices ey makes in the present similarly good ol' boy matthew mcconaughey sips beer on ir porch apathetically looking out at a world ir's helped destroy with ir willing indifference spinning convenient / righteous home spun falsehoods over ir true role not as a mere caretaker of earth but - like those impossibly ancient soviet realist statues with birdshit on ir heads - as a real man forever looking upward in an accidental self parody of all-amerikan manifest (space) destiny forever bound forward and upward (way over the peasant farmer heads of those who - with infinitely more humility - look down at earth) just like leonard shelby from memento but even more extreme this guy literally bends space and time to send ir daughter liberal bleeding heartfelt goofball messages of 'weighty' love gravity - an apparently quantifiable commodity like everything else - through the dirty wormhole of christopher nolan's zealous arts. (and like gravity apparently all it takes for some is a little push into fully believing all this hokey bs - ala that x files "i want to believe" poster) this pious flick features pleasantly smelling proto-fascist nihilists that don't believe in anything - except 1000% in ir own god-given pseudo-doubting cleverness - eg. that dangerous old fart played by right wing conservative michael cane - a potent mixture of bug eye'd "norman rockwell painting" flavoured religion and country-plain old chuck elwood yeager-era "right stuff." what a succulent pile (caption id="attachment_37834" align="aligncenter" width="500") crying as automatic intellectual honesty: mcconaughey hams it up(/caption) a typical interstellar "adam & eve" exchange widowed former pilot and nasa astronaut cooper: "we have to make tough decisions for the future of maximum amerika" catwoman in a spacesuit: "but what if we're wrong coop?" widowed former pilot and nasa astronaut cooper: "fear not - our unshakable faith in new age tinted sci fi know-how and mom's half baked space apple pie will see us through" catwoman in a spacesuit: "i love yer coop - you're a good man i can taste it in your crocodilian tears of sacrificial sincerity" widowed former pilot and nasa astronaut cooper: "no time for non-scientific sentiment baby 'i = amerika' is saving itself *cough* i mean humanity" etc what is incredible is how researchers are being culturally forced to read such low-grade chickenfeed as somehow remotely deep. yet exactly like the dying (willingly abandoned) crops of future earth interstellar is mostly corn **update patch** in which it appears there's an ironic anti-intellectualism which emerges as a backlash against critiques of nolan's bizarrely borderline religious 'hope-inducing' propaganda (ironic precisely because nolan is another mere master of selling the sizzle and superficial appearance of intellectual engagement with so-called big ideas; in this regard michael bay is more 'honest') william reichard author of "evertime: the iteration of the martingale" for $7.99 on amazon arguing rather poorly that interstellar is "big reaching daring and yet human" (site 404) perhaps. and perhaps it's merely meant to be 'correctly' read as being automatically so by a mindless culture system that elevates cosmic sized millionaire egos like nolan to the mythic levels of (apparently) universal storytellers able to capture and encompass every facet of human existence and being with ir holy artistic vision > but that's what earnestness gets you. earnestness is a crime in our world > ~ william reichard wherefore art this dread-ful earnestness of which interstellar is the one true source? and so what when earnest fools abound - fervently intent purposefully determined industriously ambitious in ir vain hollow pursuits - and interstellar might certainly qualify for that; 169 long arts minutes of overstated cheddar dressed up in the pseudo intellectual finery of big budget cgi for researchers easily even wantonly overwhelmed and bamboozled by constantly soaring strings and the quantum-schmantum patina of seemingly 'big idea' spectacle smoke and mirrors image: awakening from the nolan matrix why one might as well get one's existential wisdom and philosophical sense of place in the universe through watching hollywood movies > christopher nolan's "interstellar" spends hundreds of millions to take the audience on a journey to the farthest parts of the cosmos.. so they can be told sentiments as close and as cheap as any of the offerings at your local hallmark card retailer > ~ james rocchi indiewire // republic of bob