{"id":5396,"date":"2014-12-02T12:05:43","date_gmt":"2014-12-02T20:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5396"},"modified":"2014-12-05T07:51:31","modified_gmt":"2014-12-05T15:51:31","slug":"interstellar-and-my-inner-antiabortionist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=5396","title":{"rendered":"Interstellar<\/I> and my Inner Anti-Abortionist."},"content":{"rendered":"

Let’s start this review by warning you all that major spoilers follow. Then let’s talk about abortion.<\/p>\n

If I squint really hard, I can sort of see how someone possessed of a belief in an immortal soul\u2014 and further, that it slides down the chute the moment some lucky sperm achieves penetration\u2014 might hold an antiabortion stance on the grounds that they’re protecting Sacred Human Life. What I can’t see is how that stance would be in any way compatible with actively denying the means to prevent such life from being jeopardized in the first place. And yet\u2014 assuming the stats haven\u2019t changed since I last looked in on them\u2014 the majority of those who unironically refer to themselves as “pro-Life” not only oppose abortion, but birth control and sex education as well.<\/p>\n

You can’t reasonably describe such a suite of beliefs as “pro Life”. You can’t even reasonably describe them as “anti-abortion”. What they are is anti-sex<\/i>. These people just don’t want us fucking except under their rules, and if we insist on making our own we should damn well pay the price. We deserve that STD. We should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term, to give up the following two decades of our lives\u2014 not because new life is a sacred and joyous thing, but because it is onerous and painful, a penalty for breaking the rules. We should suffer. We should live to regret our wanton animalistic shortsightedness. It is galling to think that we might just skip gaily off into the sunset, postcoitally content, unburdened by the merest shred of guilt. There should be consequences.<\/i><\/p>\n

Movies like Interstellar<\/i> serve as an uncomfortable reminder that maybe I have more in common with those assholes than I’d like to admit.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

In a market owned by genre, where every second movie is crammed to the gills with spaceships and aliens (or, at the very least, plucky young protagonists dishing out Truth to Power), Interstellar<\/i> aspires to inspire.\u00a0 It explicitly sets out to follow in the footsteps of 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/i>. It wants to make you think, and wonder.<\/p>\n

It succeeds, too. It makes me wonder how it could fall so far short of a movie made half a century ago.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that Interstellar<\/i> is a bad movie. It actually has significantly more on the ball than your average 21rst-century genre flick (although granted, that’s a much lower bar to clear than the one Kubrick presented). The dust-bowl vistas of a dying Earth evoke the sort of grim desolation we used to get from John Brunner’s environmental dytopias, and\u2014 most of the time, anyway\u2014\u00a0 Interstellar<\/i> shows a respect for science comparable to that evident in Gravity <\/i>and 2001<\/i>.<\/p>\n

\"This<\/a>

This part was pretty cool.<\/p><\/div>\n

Admittedly, my delight at seeing space presented as silent<\/i> has more to do with the way decades of Hollywood crap have hammered down my own expectations than it does with any groundbreaking peaks of verisimilitude; it’s not as though every school kid doesn’t know there’s no sound in a vacuum. On the other hand, the equations Interstellar<\/i>‘s FX team used to render the lensing effects around Gargantua, the movie’s black hole\u2014 equations derived by theoretical physicist-and-science-consultant Kip Thorne\u2014 have provided the basis for at least one astrophysics paper<\/a> here in the real world, an accomplishment that would make Arthur C. Clarke jealous. The hole was carefully parameterized to let our protags do what the plot required without being spaghettified or cooked by radiation. The physics of space travel and Gargantua’s relativistic extremes are, I’m willing to believe, plausibly worked out.\u00a0 So much of the science seems so much better than we have any right to expect from a big-budget blockbuster aimed at the popcorn set.<\/p>\n

Why, then, does the same movie that gets the physics of event horizons right also ask us to believe that icebergs float unsupported in the clouds of alien worlds? How can the same movie that shows such a nuanced grasp of the gravity around black holes serve up such a face-palming portrayal of gravity around planets<\/i>? And even if we accept the premise of ocean swells the size of the Himalayas (Thorne himself serves up some numbers<\/a> that I’m sure as shit not going to dispute), wouldn’t such colossal formations be blindingly obvious from orbit? Wouldn’t our heroes have seen them by just looking out the window on the way down?\u00a0 How dumb do you have to be to let yourself get snuck up on by a mountain range<\/i>?<\/p>\n

Almost as dumb, perhaps, as you’d be to believe that “love” is some kind of mysterious cosmic force transcending time and space, even though you hold a doctorate in biology.<\/p>\n

\""Love<\/a>

“Love is a\u2014 you’re joking, right? Please tell me you’re fucking joking.”<\/i><\/p><\/div>\n

You’re probably already aware of the wails and sighs that arose from that particular gaffe. Personally, I didn’t find it as egregious as I expected\u2014at least Amelia Brand’s inane proclamation was immediately rebutted by Cooper’s itemization of the mundane social-bonding functions for which “love” is a convenient shorthand. It was far from a perfect exchange, but at least the woo did not go unchallenged. What most bothered me about that line\u2014 beyond the fact that anyone with any scientific background could deliver it with a straight face\u2014 was the fact that it had to be delivered by Anne Hathaway. If we’re going to get all mystic about the Transcendent Power of Lurve, could we a least invert the clich\u00e9 a bit by using a male as the delivery platform?<\/p>\n

The world that contains Interstellar<\/i> is far more competent than the story it holds. It was built by astrophysicists and engineers, and it is a thing of wonder. The good ship Endurance<\/i>, for example, oozes verisimilitude right down to the spin rate. Oddly, though, the same movie also shows us a civilization over a century into the future\u2014 a whole species luxuriating in the spacious comfort of a myriad O’Neil cylinders orbiting Saturn\u2014 in which the medical technology stuck up Murphy Cooper’s nose hasn’t changed its appearance since 2012. (Compare that to 2001<\/i>, which anticipated flatscreen tech so effectively that it got cited in Apple’s lawsuit against Samsung half a century later.) (Compare it also to Peter Hyam’s inferior sequel 2010<\/i>, in which Discovery<\/i>‘s flatscreens somehow devolved back into cathode-ray-tubes during its decade parked over Io.)<\/p>\n

Why such simultaneous success and failure of technical extrapolation in the same movie? I can only assume that the Nolans sought out expert help to design their spaceships, but figured their own vision would suffice for the medtech. Unfortunately, their vision isn’t all it could be.<\/p>\n

This is the heart of the problem. \u00a0Interstellar<\/i> soars when outsourced; only when the Nolans do something on their own does it suck. The result is a movie in which the natural science of the cosmos is rendered with glorious mind-boggling precision, while the people blundering about within it are morons.\u00a0 NASA happens to be set up just down the road from the only qualified test pilot on the continent\u2014 a guy who’s friends with the Mission Director<\/i>, for Chrissakes\u2014 yet nobody thinks to just knock on his door and ask for a hand. No, they just sit there through years of R&D until cryptic Talfamadorians herd Cooper into their clutches by scribbling messages in the dirt. \u00a0Once the mission finally achieves liftoff, \u00a0Endurance<\/i>‘s crew can’t seem to take a dump without explaining to each other what they’re doing and why. (Seriously, dude? You’re a bleeding-edge astronaut on a last-ditch Humanity-saving mission through a wormhole, and you didn’t even know what a wormhole looked like until someone explained it to you while you were both staring at the damn thing through your windshield?<\/i>)<\/p>\n

You could argue that the Nolans don’t regard their characters as morons so much as they regard us<\/em> that way; some of this might\u00a0 be no more than clunky infodumping delivered for our benefit.\u00a0 If so, they apparently think we’re just as dumb about emotional resonance and literary allusion as we are about the technical specs on black holes.\u00a0 Michael Caine has to hammer home the same damn rage against the dying of the light<\/i> stanza on three separate occasions<\/i>, <\/i>just in case it might slip under our radar.<\/p>\n

And yet, Interstellar<\/i> came so close<\/i> in some ways.\u00a0 The sheer milk-out-the-nose absurdity of a project to lift billions of people off-planet turns out to be, after all, just a grand lie to motivate short-sighted human brain stems\u2014 until Murphy Cooper figures out how to do it for real after all.\u00a0 Amelia Brand’s heartbroken, irrational description of love as some kind of transcendent Cosmic Force, invoked in a desperate bid to reunite with her lost lover and instantly shot down by Cooper’s cooler intellect\u2014\u00a0 until Cooper encounters the truth of those idiot beliefs in the heart of a black hole.\u00a0 Time and again, Interstellar<\/i> edges toward the Cold Equations, only to chicken out when the chips are down.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

But the thing that most bugs me about this movie\u2014 the thing that comes closest to offending <\/i>me, although I can’t summon anywhere near that much intensity\u2014 was something I knew going in, because it’s right there in the tag line on every advance promo, every Coming-Soon poster:<\/p>\n

The end of the Earth will not be the end of us.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0Or<\/p>\n

Mankind was born on earth. It was never meant to die here.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Or<\/p>\n

We were not meant to save the Earth.\u00a0 We were meant to leave it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Which all comes down to<\/p>\n

Let’s trash the place, then skip out and stick everyone else with the bill.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Check<\/a>

Check your technosapiens privilege, asshole.<\/p><\/div>\n

This is where I finally connect with my inner antiabortionist.\u00a0 Because I, too, think you should pay for your sins. I think that if you break it, you damn well own it; and if your own short-sighted stupidity has killed off your life-support system, it’s only right and proper that that you suffer<\/i>, that you sink into the quagmire along with the other nine million species your appetites have condemned to extinction. There should be consequences<\/i>.<\/p>\n

And yet, even in the face of Interstellar<\/i>‘s objectionable political stance\u2014 baldly stated, unquestioned, and unapologetic\u2014 \u00a0I can only bristle, not find fault. Because this is perhaps the one time the Nolan sibs got their characters right<\/i>.\u00a0 Shitting all over the living room rug and leaving our roommates to deal with the mess? That’s exactly<\/i> what we’d do, if we could get away with it.<\/p>\n

Besides. When all is said and done, this was still a hell of a lot better than Prometheus<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let’s start this review by warning you all that major spoilers follow. Then let’s talk about abortion. If I squint really hard, I can sort of see how someone possessed of a belief in an immortal soul\u2014 and further, that it slides down the chute the moment some lucky sperm achieves penetration\u2014 might hold an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ink-on-art","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5396"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5424,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5396\/revisions\/5424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}