There is already plenty of evidence of America’s alarming inability to reckon with climate change, but perhaps none is more surprising than this: Even Hollywood doesn’t get it. The entertainment industry is rightly thought of as a haven for progressive thought, but in the last few years, while it has made big-budget blockbusters about income inequality (The Hunger Games), the dangers of a corporate government (The Lego Movie), and the surveillance state (Captain America: The Winter Soldier), Hollywood has yet to adequately address the issue of climate change. Of course, neither has any government in the world, and maybe for the same reason: When faced with unpleasant realities, we all prefer a fantasy.
Which brings us to Interstellar. The film has divided public and critical opinion; to some, it is a majestic and optimistic work of science fiction, but its detractors find the narrative structure too clunky, the dialogue too corny, and its insights about the transcendent power of love hollow and unearned. But no matter how you feel about Interstellar as a piece of entertainment, one thing should be agreed upon: As a climate-change parable, it fails.
Climate change is never mentioned by name in the film, but writer/director Christopher Nolan uses its imagery to define the terms of his story. Interstellar is set in a near-future Earth on the verge of total ecological collapse, with drastic changes in weather patterns and devastating food shortages driving human beings to the brink of extinction. We never learn exactly what caused this devastation (there is a vague reference to a crop disease called “a blight”), but Cooper, the tough and tender protagonist played by Matthew McConaughey, pins it on a failure of the human spirit: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt,” he says early on. When he is asked to lead a secret NASA expedition to look for another planet to colonize, he gets a chance to live by those words
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