“Interstellar” and the Ghost of 32 (writes)
Murph (Mackenzie Foy) and Coop (Matthew McConaughey) from Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014) - Credit WB and Paramount Pictures
Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” is one of my all-time favorite movies. As its 10th anniversary rolled around, I lamented the idea that its anniversary screenings would dismiss arriving in Singapore. That changed this past Sunday. As I was on my third version of writing this piece, I discovered late IMAX screenings here in Singapore, showing for two more days. I bought tickets to the first screening I saw available. The movie needs no explanation, but if you have never heard of Interstellar, or seen it, IMDB’s synopsis states: “When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.” It's arguably one of Nolan’s best and an all-time sci-fi classic. One of the movie’s most famous scenes comes in the second act of the film, as Coop (Matthew McConaughey), Brand (Anne Hathaway), and Doyle (Wes Bentley) trek to visit one of the possible planets for humans to immigrate to, simply named “Miller’s Planet”, named after the researcher who initially visited the planet and who is supposedly sending a live beacon for rescue. The trek is a perilous one, as the planet is in the gravity pull of a black hole, named “Gargantua”, distorting the planet’s passing of time relative to Earth. It’s believed every hour on the planet is seven years passing on planet Earth, where Coop is urgent to get back, as his young children Murph and Tom are waiting for his return. The trip down to “Miller’s Planet” is nothing short of disastrous. The planet is uninhabitable, covered in water, and a giant tidal wave kills Doyle, flooding the ship’s engine, delaying Coop and Brand’s return back to the home ship in space. Upon their return to the spacecraft, angry, and distraught about the time now lost, they are greeted by their cabinmate Romily, now well-aged, who greets them by saying, “I’ve waited years”. Coop asks “How long?” only to be told it has been “23 years, four months, eight days”. Agonizingly accepting the amount of time lost, Coop walks to the back of the ship, to watch the video messages his kids have sent him over the last two decades. “Play it from the beginning.” Coop says, as he watches the years go by. His son Tom (Timothee Chalamet) grows into an adult (Casey Affleck). He sees Tom’s son, his grandson, and as the series of messages near an end, he’s greeted by a video of his, now adult, daughter Murph (Jessica Chastain).
Murph (Jessica Chastain), now older, messaging her father. Credit WB and Paramount Pictures
It's such a cliché for the writer to contemplate writing on their birthday, but as you’ll quickly learn, I enjoy clichés. I had the idea for this piece a year ago, before my 32nd birthday. I never wrote it, and again the idea came up as my 33rd birthday approached, but I still never wrote it. It is only now, after watching Interstellar one more time, the timing finally feels right.
When I was a kid, my father and I were very close. As a child, my father was THE hero in my life. I idolized him and remembered thinking “I want to be just like him when I grow up”. One day, in the early stages of realizing he was more than a concept, I asked him, “How old are you?”. My father responded “32”, and for over 20 years, that number has occupied a permanent space in my mind. I always thought, “That’s the age of a real adult.” 32, I carried that number through my teens, and my twenties, as I stumbled, fumbled, and moved all over the country, still thinking to myself “32, that’s the age of a real adult”. It’s funny, no one tells you in adulthood, no one really knows what they’re doing, that everyone is surviving, figuring shit out, if only (!!!) existentially. As I left my 20s realizing how much of a shit show life really can be, entering my 30s only slightly more mature, I started to realize 32 was a myth I had been carrying since that day all those years ago. 32 came, forcing me to reconcile with the facade I created around adulthood and the mythology I convinced myself was a fact. In year 32 I watched as my wife became pregnant, reflecting on the closing chapter of “not being a parent” in my life, curious about the beauty that would come next. Seeing the end of the road is a gift I quite enjoy, and I spent the year writing, only realizing like many instances, that it takes the passage of time to receive the gift of reflection, to truly understand what the closing season actually meant. I thought immensely about what I’ve done in my life so far. The failures, pains, and wounds I’ve given to others. I spent time comparing myself to the ideas of what I thought my parents had accomplished by this age, wondering if I have even come close. By his mid-20s, my father had spent time as an executive chef for a high-end club in New York City and had done so much. My mother had built a career on Wall Street, modeled, enjoying the spoils of 80’s and 90’s New York City, from sitting courtside at Knicks games to sitting with Dr. J and Clyde Drexler at HOF dinners and traveling the world. It’s easy to see your parents as concepts, dismissing the reality they had lives before my brothers and me. Now at 33, it’s dawning on me how much the many lives I’ve lived, have been laid to rest.
I never really envisioned myself at 33. I don’t mean that morbidly. 32 was just the number I thought my life, would be, “my life”. It very much is, as I look and see what’s happening. I’m married and living in Singapore, and our beautiful baby girl is two weeks old, as I write this. This piece was originally about “reflection”, and I think in some ways, selfishly was going to be about atonement for the regrets one carries as one arrives at this part in one’s life. Another secret adults never shared: the more life goes on, the more you learn to make peace with the regrets you form. After this most recent experience of Interstellar, I’m moved in a slightly different direction, with the perspective of what two weeks of parenthood has brought me, already vastly changing my ideas and scopes of how I see the world, and how I want to live in it. As the birth of our daughter crept closer, I was given so many clichés on how it would feel, and it would be such a cliché to say “I get it now”, but in many ways, I do. Language tends to fail us for these moments and to describe what the birth of my child felt like, would be a disservice to the moment. You know these types of moments, even if you haven’t experienced this specific one. The moments when someone describes getting married or feeling the deep love of those who have held you in the depths of your despair or joy. It is the same language that leads us to use clichés failing to describe the indescribable. As a failing Christian going through deconstruction, the birth of my daughter was the most spiritual experience of my life, which felt more like a baptism than my actual baptism. To be submerged and fully covered by an intense love I never knew existed…and since then, it’s shifted things. It has shifted my perspective on my art, the work I want to do, and the life I want to continue to live. I do not mistake the current space I am in for wisdom. I am but a fool, in the middle of an emotional tsunami, unaware of the many failings I will yet have as a parent. I simply know amid the tsunami, the writer must explore the waters.
Coop with young Murph before he leaves for space. Credit WB and Paramount Pictures
In the first act of Interstellar, just before Coop leaves his daughter Murph, he quotes his dead wife, telling Murph, “Now, we’re just here to be memories for our kids. I think that now I understand what she meant. Once you’re a parent, you’re the ghost of your children’s future.” Another cliché: we become the things we fear. It’s so easy to look at the trauma our parents create for us, fearing we will pass those same traumas along to the next generation. I don’t hold that fear too greatly, because it’s never the same, and we learn to heal past many of the wounds we were given. What I do realize is, in actuality, I am becoming just like my parents, accepting my roles, both in my existence, and now as a ghost, a memory, and a concept in my precious daughter’s life. With this naive early acceptance, I’m contemplating the ghost I want to be, the memory I hope to be. My daughter has given me this gift of reflection in a new light, of new hopes, and the burdens I’ll be letting go. Selfishly, I want to live my life more delusionally, chasing my photography, writing, and art, letting go of the burden of false expectations only created by the ego, and in return handing me fear of failure. I have succumbed to that fear and will live through and past it. As a better husband and community member, I want to live my life a little calmer, letting go of the burden of explaining myself to those who don’t care to hear the truth. Whether family, friends, or those who refuse to receive me as a whole, I lived far too long believing I could persuade those who choose not to be convinced. I’m slowly trying (many times failing) to let go of the expectation of being fully understood knowing the anger it brings when the predictable failure occurs. I want to let go of more of my shame, carried by my guilt of the past, suffocating me to coward away from responsibility and ownership of moving forward, by being better. I want to do the things I have been afraid to fail at, whether being a better artist, speaking better Spanish, or starting over wherever necessary. It’s taken me most of my life to see my parents in their humanity, more than the concepts I believed them to be, beyond the ghosts of the memories that made me who I am. I am grateful for those ghosts and memories. I want to see my parents more in their humanity, not because I fear the same inevitability from my child that I did with my parents, but because as stated before, it takes time to pass to properly reflect and piece together the existence and meaning of the past. I hope my daughter sees me as one who fans the flames of the curiosity of her wonder. The ghost that empowers her to speak confidently, defiantly, with justice, empathy, and love I’m still learning to have. I hope she sees me as a father who loves her eternally and is in her corner to help her discover who she wants to be, and not the expectations life tempts me to burden upon her.
As I write this, It’s been two weeks. 14 days. by the time this piece is released, only a little more time will have passed. My daughter has already given me the gift of changing everything. It’s 3:22 am, as I sit at my table writing this, 9000 miles away in Singapore, farther away from my original home than I ever imagined. I have been tired beyond imagination, but even in exhaustion, I have found a new reason to write these words. It has simultaneously felt as if the world has stopped and completely shifted. I have seen Interstellar at least 15 times in the 10 years since its original release, where I viewed it in Pineville, North Carolina, with my loving cinephile of a mother, who gave me the gift of loving movies. In all those years, I have loved the film, enjoyed Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack, and interpreted the movie as Nolan telling the story of a father getting back to his kids. That was until a few weeks ago. It’s only now, all these years later, weeks after our little Moon was born, which I see more than anything, Interstellar is a movie about a father, living as a ghost for his daughter, looking to fulfill a promise he made years ago. Right now, the memories created with our daughter aren’t for her, she will never remember. As my buddy Jim told me, “You get to hold those. You get to hold those memories, their guilt, their love.” Quickly I am learning that is a significant part of what parenthood is. And for that, I am grateful to my parents, for holding the love I did not understand, holding the memories I can’t remember, and holding the guilt I was not capable of owning. I hope to see my parents beyond the ghosts and concepts I created them to be, healing the wounds community and family create, and hopefully gifting them a newness that is being gifted to me.
Sources: IMDB, YouTube, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros Media
Pictures from ScreenRant
