Interstellar: Science!

 Warning: Spoilers for Interstellar ahead!

This blog post will be a little bit different from the others because I will, instead of focusing on the historical context of the film, focus on the scientific context of the film. For the historical context, simply look around; it was only released three years ago. Wait, three years ago? Already?

In order to generate the visuals for the film, director Christopher Nolan enlisted the help of a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist named Kip Thorne. One of Interstellar's most iconic visuals is that of the massive, rotating black hole Gargantua (pictured above), and Nolan enlisted the help of Thorne to create that visual.

Thorne also served more generally as a scientific consultant for the film, ensuring that the parts of film that should have been grounded in reality actually were. For example, one of the film's main plot devices is the time dilation that occurs near a black hole. The group of astronauts land on a planet where, for every hour they spend, seven years pass back on Earth. Thorne was responsible for ensuring not only that the numbers given were correct but also that being close enough to a black hole to experience such extreme time dilation was even possible in the first place.

Of course, some parts of the movie were more speculative than others. Most notable is the "tesseract" that sits in the center of Gargantua. Through it, Cooper is able to make small changes in his daughter Murphy's past that allow her to solve the equations necessary to save humanity from impending climate-related disaster. This is all, of course, pure speculation; no human alive knows what really lies at the center of a black hole, and it could very well be impossible to tell. Interstellar explains this away by describing an extremely futuristic society that could build such a thing at the center of a black hole.

More interesting than science's effects on the movie are the movie's effects on science. The following interview describes some of the insights that visualizing the black hole gave Kip Thorne:

As matter is sucked into the black hole, it forms a brightly glowing disk, called an accretion disk, around the black hole. Though the disk is flat, it does not appear to be due to the black hole's gravity bending light. In order to determine what a black hole would actually look like, Nolan enlisted the help of a team of computer scientists, who used memos written by Kip Thorne to model the light emitted by the accretion disk.

The shape the disk appeared to make was striking, creating a glowing halo around the black hole, and its appearance did not have to be modified much to create an image ready for the film. In fact, finding out what a black hole really looked like was a notable enough finding that it warranted a scientific paper about the gravitational effects and the computer programs used to visualize them.

Blade Runner: Capitalism Run Amok

 Good news! This post contains no major spoilers for Blade Runner! It was released in 1982, but its plot is largely based on film noir tropes and Philip K. Dicks' 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, so I'll be talking about its setting instead. I still encourage you to watch it, especially considering its sequel just came out to critical acclaim.

Blade Runner is an intensely pessimistic film. Its vision of 2019 Los Angeles is chilling not so much because it is the worst dystopia shown on screen, but because it was, in the 1980s at least, the one most based on the political climate of the time. It depicts a world of rampant consumerism; of global companies with immense power; and of a government complicit in the subjugation of its population.

By the early 1980s, the end of the Cold War was in sight. The Soviet Union was stagnating, and the capitalist half of the world, particularly the British PM Margaret Thatcher and the US President Ronald Reagan, was turning up the heat. Despite this, the pessimism brought on by the ever-present threat of nuclear war persisted, contributing to the film's bleak worldview.

The future of Blade Runner (the city of Los Angeles in the year 2019) is one in which most of the life on earth has been replaced by synthetic organisms called replicants produced by the global Tyrell Corporation. Conditions are cramped, polluted, and devoid of wildlife, all a result of massive corporations left unchecked.

This vision of the future is undoubtedly a reflection of the prevailing economic views of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thatcher and Reagan pursued policies intended to advance capitalism; Thatcher, in particular, valued curbing inflation more than curbing poverty or unemployment. Both leaders' policies hinged on deregulation; they rolled back environmental protections, consumer protections, and labor protections in favor of economic growth. The world of Blade Runner is one without any such protections; companies are essentially free to do whatever they want, in an extreme exaggeration of these policies.

Blade Runner's depiction of Los Angeles's culture is, more than anything else in the film, reflective of global trends of the 1980s. In the late 1970s and continuing into the 1980s, Japanese firms underwent a large expansion into the American economy. This was especially prevalent in the automotive industry, with companies like Toyota, Mitsubishi, and Subaru, and the technology field, with companies like Sony and Casio. Many economists predicted that Japan would surpass the United States in economic output, and, in fact, by the end of the 1980s the Japanese automotive industry had become larger than its US counterpart.

In Blade Runner, these predictions have evidently come true. In the future of 2019, Japan wields enough influence that the Japanese culture and language are now dominant in Los Angeles. In one of the film's most iconic images, a woman in Geisha makeup is projected onto the side of a building, advertising birth control pills.

The one ray of hope in Blade Runner's world is leaving the planet. Off-world colonies are advertised as luxurious, spacious, and clean. The film's inclusion of these colonies could be in response to the recent launch of Voyager I, or even the space race as a whole; Scott evidently believed that we could have off-world colonies in the near future. Of course, these colonies are likely not what they are advertised to be; though not shown, it is implied that conditions are still harsh and crowded. This is perhaps the film's setting's most pessimistic aspect; the unchecked capitalism of 2019 has tainted even the noble goal of space exploration.

2001: Evolution to the Stars

 Warning: Spoilers for 2001: A Space Odyssey ahead. I highly suggest that you watch it. Unfortunately, it cannot be found on Netflix.

Finally, a movie in color! And what a movie it is!

Stanley Kubrick's magnum opus 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in the midst of the space race. In 1961, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, and the world's two great superpowers shot for the moon. 2001 was conceived of by Kubrick in 1964, and was released in April of 1968, a little over a year before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

The film imagines a future (well, 2001 was the future at the time) in which space travel is a normal occurrence; the astronomer Dr. Floyd takes a shuttle to a massive space station orbiting earth, then boards another shuttle for the Clavius moon base. Through all of this, even in zero gravity, he wears normal business attire.

The film sets out to produce a realistic view of space travel, in part by taking inspiration from the fledgling space programs of the time. Food comes in vacuum-sealed packages, and is drunk through straws. Gravity is not produced through some mystical process, but rather through the spinning of the space station. Even when Dr. Bowman and Dr. Poyle set out for Jupiter on a later mission, their travel time is represented accurately. And, of course, there is no sound in space, and there is no sound in 2001's version of space, either.

The film is a reaction to the space race in more ways than the accuracy of its space travel. Its central mystery is a number of strange black obelisks. In the first scene of the film, one such obelisk comes to a group of apes, appearing to teach them to use tools and leading to their evolution into humans. Millions of years later, another obelisk is found on the moon; the subject of Dr. Floyd's research, this one does nothing but send a radio pulse to an area of space around Jupiter. When Dr. Bowman examines this area of space, he finds anothe obelisk.

The obelisk flings Dr. Bowman through the universe at faster-than-light speeds, before transforming him into a giant, baby-like creature looking down at earth from orbit.

Kubrick seems to suggest that such a state is the next stage of human evolution. Obviously, we aren't going to evolve into star babies, but during the space race the possibility that we could evolve beyond the earth was very real. What would humanity look like, once it had colonized other planets or even other stars? Perhaps we would be looking down at the earth from above, seeing it as a single, unified planet.

Kubrick's message seems to be, like so many others of his time, at least partially a response to the cold war. The star baby does not see individuals, or even nations, but rather a single planet, one among many. Kubrick suggests that to perceive the world as the star baby does, as a unified whole, represents an evolution beyond the conflict of the cold war.

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Fears of a New Atomic Age

 Warning: Spoilers for The Day the Earth Stood Still ahead. I highly suggest that you watch it; it can be found on Netflix.

"Klaatu barada nikto," Helen tells Gort, panicked. The 8-foot-tall robot stops suddenly, carries Helen inside the saucer, and departs to find Klaatu. When Gort returns, he lays Klaatu's body in a kind of bed, restoring Klaatu's life.

This jumble of nonsense words describes the climactic scene of The Day the Earth Stood Still, and one of the most famous scenes in all of science fiction.

The alien Klaatu and his robotic bodyguard Gort have touched down in Washington, D.C., in a prototypical flying saucer. Their arrival is not a pleasant one; Klaatu is shot almost immediately by an overeager soldier, and is rushed to the nearest hospital. While there, the Secretary of Defense visits him. Klaatu tells the secretary that he has an urgent message for all of the world leaders to hear; the secretary, of course, recognizes that this is impossible with the divide between the USA and USSR. Klaatu resolves to go undercover as Mr. Carpenter to find out more about this strange, divided planet.

Already, the film is reacting to the seemingly senseless divisions of the burgeoning Cold War, and this reaction only grows stronger as the film progresses. Klaatu/"Mr. Carpenter" finds himself in the care of a woman named Helen, her husband Tom, and their young son Billy. Billy shows him Arlington cemetery, where he is surprised at the number of humans killed in wars. Again, the film comments on the deep divisions possible among humans, and their costly toll, pointing out the seeming pointlessness of it all.

The Day the Earth Stood Still saves most of its sociopolitical commentary for the end, though. After Klaatu is killed by a soldier and subsequently resurrected (in a not-so-subtly Christlike manner), he delivers his urgent message to a gathering of some of the world's top scientific minds: now that Earth has developed nuclear weapons, it poses a threat to other planets, and must disarm itself or face annihilation.

While Klaatu spoke of interplanetary danger, lines such as "There must be security for all, or no one is secure" make it clear that he speaks of nuclear proliferation on one planet only: Earth.

Out of all of the film's message, the sentiment expressed in this final speech was by far the most timely. In 1949, the USSR conducted its first successful weapons test. US President Harry S. Truman, after learning of the weapons test via covert surveillance of the USSR, announced its success to the world on September 23rd of the same year. The test immediately prompted calls for thermonuclear weapons tests, sparking the Cold War.

The Day the Earth Stood Still was written, filmed, and released in 1951, only two years later. It reflected the frustration of the American populace at even more senseless conflict after two massive wars, and offered a fragile vision of hope in its final moments.

The successful test of a hydrogen bomb was carried out in 1952, shattering this hope.

Metropolis: Anti-Industrialism and Populism in Weimar Germany

 Warning: Spoilers for Metropolis ahead. I highly suggest that you watch it; the most recently restored version can be found on Netflix.

The New Tower of Babel looms over the massive futuristic city of Metropolis. Joh Fredersen, the city's industrialist boss, watches over all. His son, Freder, lives a paradisaical life in the eternal gardens. Underneath the luxurious city, however, is a second city of workers, powering the machines that keep Metropolis running. Unbeknownst to the above-ground, a young activist named Maria urges the workers to search for a mediator between the two classes and end the inequality. Meanwhile, Fredersen's rival, the mad scientist Rotwang, creates a robot capable of taking human form.

Such is the premise of Fritz Lang's 1927 science fiction masterpiece Metropolis. It was made in Germany, during the culturally and politically turbulent times of the Weimar Republic, and this is evident in more than just the language the characters speak. The film advances an anti-industrialist worldview that could even be described as anti-American, and highlights both the successes and downfalls of populist movements.

Lang was given the idea for the city of Metropolis by a visit to New York City in 1924, and the influences of New York's architecture on the film are clear, particularly in the abundance of Art Deco buildings. Though impressed by New York City's scale, Lang saw the bright lights and tall buildings as little more than distractions from real problems of inequality. He imagined Metropolis as a natural progression of the industrialization and capitalism of America.

This anti-industrialist sentiment was informed by more than just a visit to New York, of course; it stemmed from the economic conditions of Weimar Germany. The Weimar Period was marked by hyperinflation, high unemployment, and sharp class divides, largely as a result of burdensome reparations and poor economic decisions. As a result, discontent with the upper-crust industrialists who gained power before and during World War I was widespread in Weimar Germany.

Metropolis also examines the virtues and vices of populist movements, tending more toward the latter. Despite its rather Marxian view on class inequality and class struggle, its portrayal of a revolution is one of easily manipulated, vicious mobs. The worker's revolution in Metropolis proves to be pointless and counterproductive.

The negative portrayal of populism is, again, a reflection of the Weimar Period. In the first half of the 1920's, Weimar Germany had seen two major left-wing populist uprisings, one in Bavaria and one in Ruhr. Neither were effective in achieving their goals, and both were brutally crushed. Lang likely drew from these counterproductive revolutions in his own portrayal of revolution.

More foreboding was the growth of the Nazi party between 1920 and 1923. Though temporarily stalled by the failure of the Beer Hall Putsch, they had shown that a radical populist movement could gain support rather quickly. Lang saw this, and portrayed the mob mentality that led to the rise of the Nazi party; in Metropolis, the workers are incited by Rotwang's robot (disguised as Maria) to destroy the machines that keep the city running. They are so rabid in their fury that they forget to evacuate the children from their underground city, and the children nearly drown due to a pump failure.

Lang was perhaps naive to think that such rabid populism could have a happy ending; Metropolis ends with Freder fulfilling his role as the mediator, and cuts to its most famous line, "The mediator between head and hands must be the heart!" Unfortunately, Lang's worst fears about populism came true when the Nazis came to power at the start of the 1930's.