Interstellar opens with a pan across a bookshelf covered in dust that drifts down like snow. A toy space shuttle sits in front of the shelf’s many books. The title comes onscreen, and then we fade to black.
We hear an old woman, who we won’t know until the end of the movie is an ancient Murph, recalling her father being a farmer long ago. She speaks to the camera as if being interviewed. A field of corn comes onscreen, spanning as far as the eye can see. Murph says her father didn’t start as a farmer, and suddenly we’re on the outside of a space shuttle propelling upward through the atmosphere. In the cockpit, alarms beep and a voice from mission control tells her father, Cooper, to shut the mission down. He protests, but the shuttle tips suddenly downward and mission control reiterates that they’re shutting it down. Cooper protests again and then screams as the shuttle lurches and his head is thrown back.
He awakens suddenly in a dark, quiet bedroom. Murph, age 10, stands in the doorway. He tells her to go back to bed, and she says she thought his noise-making was “the ghost.” He says there’s no such thing. She asks if he was dreaming about “the crash.” Cooper sends her back to bed and she goes. He then slowly gets up, still breathing heavily, and crosses to the window. As he does, the music crescendoes with a single organ chord as he looks out over an enormous field of corn. The old Murph narrates that all the wheat had died when a blight came and they had to burn it, and that while they still had ample corn, mostly they had dust. As she says this, we see heavy dust blowing through the cornfield.
A second old woman, also speaking to us as if being interviewed, narrates that she can’t even describe how much dust there was. We see Donald, Cooper’s father-in-law and Murph’s grandfather, sweeping heaps of dust off of the porch of their small farmhouse as morning breaks, surrounded by nothing but cornfields and dirt roads. A third woman describes putting small sheets over their faces to avoid breathing in the dust. An old male interviewee says they always set their tables with the dishes face down to keep their dinner from getting dusty. We see a dust-covered table set with upside-down dishes, which Donald turns over and wipes with a rag.
We cut to morning in the kitchen as Donald cooks at the stove while Cooper’s teenage son Tom eats at the table. Murph comes downstairs with a broken space lander toy in hand and asks her dad to fix it. She says her “ghost” knocked it off her bookshelf, along with some books. Tom teases her for believing in ghosts. She corrects that it’s a poltergeist. Cooper says that she needs to think more scientifically by researching “the how and the why,” and then present her conclusions. She agrees to. Donald reminds Cooper that the kids have parent-teacher conferences at school that day.
Later outside, Tom honks the horn as Cooper and Donald see a great plume of black smoke in the distance. Donald reports that their neighbors are burning the last crop of okra in existence, as it has become infected with the blight. Donald teases Cooper about being nice to Murph’s teacher so that they can start “repopulating the earth.” He watches as Cooper, Tom, and Murph drive away.
In the truck, Cooper has Murph controlling the stick shift when they blow a tire and have to pull over. Tom teases that it’s because of Murphy’s Law, which angers his sister. He and Cooper attempt to plug the tire. Murph appears upset and asks her father why he and her mother named her after something bad. Cooper clarifies that Murphy’s Law doesn’t mean that bad things will happen, just that whatever can happen, will happen.
They’re interrupted when a large, low-flying drone goes overhead. Cooper ushers them back into the truck, the tire unfixed, and they give chase to it, eventually turning off the road and driving through a huge field of corn. Cooper says the drone is an Indian Air Force Drone with solar cells that can power an entire farm. Tom takes the wheel as Cooper pulls out a laptop and tries to lock on to the drone’s signal with Murph’s help. They chase the drone through miles of corn until they reach a cliff, at which point Cooper slams the brake. They think they’ve lost the drone, but it appears again with Cooper now using the laptop to control it. He lets Murph land it gently by the nearby reservoir.
They approach the drone. Cooper says that the Delhi mission control went down 10 years ago, just like America’s, and that the drone has been self-sustaining its flight since then. He wonders if some kind of signal made it fly so low. Murph wants to let the drone go instead of using its parts for farm machinery, but Cooper says it has to adapt just like everyone else.
They arrive at Tom and Murph’s school, the drone strapped to the truck bed. Tom heads to class as Murph warns her father that she did something wrong that her teacher will tell him about. She scribbles lines into her notebook.
Cooper meets simultaneously with the principal and Murph’s teacher, Ms. Hanley. They chastise him for being late. The principal reports that Tom’s test scores predict that he’ll be an excellent farmer. Cooper asks about college, but the principal says Tom’s scores aren’t high enough for it. Cooper asks where his tax money is going now that there are no more armies. The principal says not to the universities. Cooper gets angry, asking how it can take 2 numbers to measure the principal’s pant size but only one to measure his 15-year-old’s future. The principal says that while Cooper is clearly an accomplished pilot and engineer, the world needs food, not machines.
They move on to Ms. Hanley’s report. She says that Murph caused trouble in class by bringing in one of Cooper’s old federal textbooks detailing the lunar landings. The school has replaced them with the “corrected” versions, which state that the lunar landings were faked propaganda used to bankrupt the Soviet Union, and that rockets and other similar technologies were useless. Cooper coldly says that the lack of technology like MRIs meant that doctors didn’t find the cyst in his wife’s brain until it had killed her. The teacher offers condolences but says that Murph got into a fist fight over the textbook. Cooper plans to reward her with a trip to a baseball game.
Back out in the truck, Cooper reports that he got Murph suspended, to her chagrin. Over the truck radio, they get a call that their combines are malfunctioning. They arrive home to see the great machines all leaving the fields one by one and stopping at the house. Cooper and Murph head inside and hear a thud upstairs. They go to Murph’s room and see a series of books knocked off her shelf. Murph says she’s been counting the spaces the “ghost” is making in the books, trying to see if it's communicating, maybe with Morse code. Cooper says he doesn’t think her bookshelf is trying to talk to her.
Cooper resets all the combines and sends them back out, and then he and Donald have a drink on the porch. Cooper laments being part of a “caretaker” generation of farmers instead of creating new technologies. Donald recalls when the earth had 6 billion people all vying for the newest gadgets, and says their newer, less populated world isn’t so bad. He says Tom will be fine, that it’s Cooper that doesn’t belong.
Another series of interviewees report how the life-giving dirt betrayed them when a huge dust storm came in. We cut to a poorly attended baseball game on a field no bigger than that of a high school, where the “World Famous New York Yankees” are playing. Donald reminisces about the old days of baseball. Cooper tells Tom that he’s going to follow in his footsteps, which pleases Tom. The game is cut short when everyone sees an enormous dust storm approaching in the distance and an alarm begins ringing. They try to beat the storm home, but Cooper’s truck gets caught in it as it barrages the town. They drive home anyway, masks donned. Murph realizes she left her bedroom window open and Cooper follows her upstairs and closes it. As the clouds of dust settle in her room, they fall in a bizarre, unnatural pattern, creating very specific parallel lines on the floor. Murph says it’s the ghost.
Later, Murph finds her father still in her room, studying the lines on the floor. He throws a coin in the dirt and it sticks without bouncing. He says that it is not a ghost that caused the lines, but gravity. He takes her notebook and begins writing. She brings him lunch as he discovers that the lines spell out coordinates in binary code, with thick lines representing 1 and thin ones 0. Together they flip through maps and find the corresponding location. He packs the truck and tries to leave without her, warning that it’s not safe, but she stows away under a blanket in the shotgun seat, so they head off for the coordinates together.
Section 1 Analysis
Interstellar opens with a series of interviewees discussing the effects of the dust clouds ravaging America’s farmlands, providing exposition for the dystopian future our characters inhabit. This future might seem strikingly familiar, and for good reason: all but one of these interviews come directly from Ken Burn’s 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl, which details the period of time in the 1930s when America’s prairies were victim to a series of catastrophic dust storms as a result of drought and excess loose topsoil. The Dust Bowl was one of the country’s worst ecological and agricultural disasters, causing food shortages and leaving hundreds of thousands of people homeless. The interview of the older Murph, played by Ellen Burnstyn, was inserted among them to tie the real, past Dust Bowl to the future one depicted in the film. This paints a powerful picture of humanity’s very real, potential demise as a result of our environmental impact; it’s a commentary on the inevitably of history to repeat itself if we can’t learn from our mistakes.
We see early on in the story that Cooper has a powerful influence on Murph. From his discussion with her about finding the “how and the why” with regard to her broken space lander toy, to allowing her to land the drone via the laptop, Cooper encourages her to think scientifically and engage with the world around her firsthand. Their close relationship is a critical reason why his departure is so intensely painful for Murph, and why she then resents him so much, as well as how she turns into the brilliant scientist that she ultimately becomes. And, of course, the love they share becomes the force that “transcends time and space” like gravity, allowing Cooper to communicate with her through the tesseract to help her save humanity. Establishing the power of that love from the get-go is therefore crucial to the plot.
Director Christopher Nolan rises to the arduous task of efficiently and powerfully painting a picture of a miserable, dystopian future Earth. The Dust Bowl interviews help to make this dystopia believable and relatable to the past, but there are other moments that further fill us in: the drone Cooper and his kids capture is said to be left over from when Delhi’s mission control went down a decade ago, “same as ours.” This, combined with Cooper’s acknowledgement that there are no more militaries, indicates to us that Earth’s remaining nations exist in a post-militaristic and possibly post-diplomatic state. Many of the nations that populate the world we know today may not even exist anymore. Indeed, though Earth’s rapid de-population is never explicitly quantified, Donald’s recollection that there “used to be” 6 billion people tells us that there are now significantly fewer, and perhaps that entire nations’ populations have perished. Cooper’s discussion with the principal about taxes suggests that there is still some form of government in place, but that the government is clearly not their friend, as Murph’s teacher shows us that federal textbooks censor history to remove hope of space travel from anyone’s minds. Finally, featuring the “World Famous New York Yankees” as a poorly attended daytime event at a local baseball field tells us that while humanity still enjoys some of its old pastimes, their role is significantly diminished, likely as a result of smaller populations and increased prioritization of survival over entertainment and recreation.
Interstellar’s music is a particularly powerful, memorable aspect of the film. Christopher Nolan approached composer Hans Zimmer about the soundtrack with the idea that conventional strings and drums were off the table. Instead, he provided Zimmer with a page of text talking about Zimmer’s own life, and asked him to use that to get a rough idea of the film’s musical themes. Zimmer ultimately borrowed heavily from a previous soundtrack he’d worked on for the film The Thin Red Line (1998). Epic organ is prominently featured throughout Interstellar, beginning with the first crescendoing chord as Cooper gets up and looks out over the field of corn outside his window. This little motif will return at multiple points throughout the story, including at the end when he sees Murph in the hospital room aboard Cooper Station.
There is an important example of irony when Cooper tells Murph that he doesn’t think her bookshelf is talking to her. Cooper will ultimately be revealed to be the “ghost” on the other side of her bookshelf, communicating via gravity through the tesseract, so not only is he wrong that her shelf is trying to tell her something, but he won’t know until later that, in fact, he’s the one doing the telling. This is also a moment of important foreshadowing.
