*The following contains spoilers for the movie Interstellar*
Throughout the first hour of Interstellar, you're told twice about the yet-to-be-introduced Dr. Mann, the leader of a group of semi-doomed space colonists sent into the far reaches of space as humanity's last ditch effort to find a new home. In both of these brief mentions, Mann is referred to as remarkable. "He's the best of us," Anne Hathaway's Abigail Brand tells Matthew McConaughey's Cooper, "He inspired eleven people to follow him on the loneliest journey in human history."
It doesn't take a film student to guess by the second mention that we're going to be meeting Dr. Mann somewhere in the course of this story and he's unlikely to be in the shape that once inspired such reverence in his peers. It's not hard to imagine that Mann has been killed like his colleague Dr. Miller, whose oceanic planet drowned her within moments of landing, or driven to insanity by the years spent alone on the desolate surface of an unknown world. But when Mann's cryo-pod opens, rather than a corpse or a bearded madman, they find the boyish, heroic, face of Matt Damon.
But the state they've found Mann in is more upsetting than the gory or tragic alternatives the audience might have imagined. Awareness surges into his eyes as he recognizes that he's been saved from what was meant to be his last sleep. There's a brief moment of relief. Maybe our haggard explorers can finally exhale and submit themselves to the steady hand of Dr. Mann's leadership just as the original colonists once had. Mann then bursts into heaving, childlike, tears. He sobs like a child in Cooper's arms as the crew exchanges thousand yard stares.
Mann regains his composure, explaining his tears as a side effect of believing that he'd never be rescued. Having adjusted to this sudden second chance, you're given a glimpse at the person who convinced those eleven people to follow him. He's confident and charming, an expert deployment of Damon's charms that becomes even better as Mann's cracks begin to show.
Mann's planet is icy and unforgiving but supposedly habitable at the distance surface below their camp. He speaks in the same flowery, platitudinal way as the story's other authority figure (and Abigail's father), Dr. Brand. It's comforting and paternal but a little hollow. This sort of Brave Man's talk feels a little flat in the face of all these characters have been through, but only for the audience. Cooper, Brand, and their third crewmate Romilly, have been through hell. They've lost time, resources, and friends to a mission that's been slowly spinning out of control since the moment it began. They're eager for some good news from guy they can trust and Mann is eager to fill that role, despite the fact that it's one fundamentally built on deceit.
As it turns out, Mann's planet is a total stinker. The air is ammonia and the "habitable surface" is a fantasy. Mann knew immediately that his planet wasn't the one, but his status as NASA's golden boy hadn't prepared him for the possibility. He'd lured eleven astronauts into the cold void with talk of bravery and sacrifice but when forced to show a willingness to engage with either, he balked. He was the best of us. His failure was never an option.
Whatever plan Mann had to dispatch the crew is disrupted by the news that Brand's father, NASA's top physicist, has passed away and taken all hope of saving those still living on Earth with him. Mann, needing the ship Cooper plans to take with him, begins to improvise. He attacks Cooper and leaves him for dead and an explosive charge he'd rigged kills an unsuspecting Romilly. While Brand is able to rescue Cooper, Mann gets a head start on returning to their ship and intends to make a run for it. The two watch in horror as Mann, confident as ever, attempts to dock the lander into their ship.
Even as he's leaving them to die on an icy hellscape, Mann is proselytizing. Even as he executes a plan that will directly lead to the deaths of three innocent people whose only crime was believing in him, Mann talks about his greater purpose. "This is about all mankind" he says, "There is a moment-"
He's interrupted by a soundless explosion as his docking mechanism fails and he's blown out of the ship. His body is instantly lost in a hail of debris as the ship spins out of control and starts to plummet towards the planet below. There is a moment, indeed.
The last hour of Interstellar is taut. As all the film's pieces move into place for the film's climax, not a second is wasted. Tensions hit a high and stay there for a solid thirty minutes of screen time, but before this breathless final sequence the audience is given this single beat of silence as Mann's body is sucked helplessly into space, a single second to laugh as a coward dies a coward's death. It's as close as the film's ruthless world has come to justice in the preceding two and a half hours.
Mann's death is undeniably funny. From the moment you meet him and see the snowbound hell he claims is humanity's new home, you know something's up. You can't help but wonder if he'll take a page out of Sunshine's book and start knifing crewmates or if he's started worshipping some nonexistent lifeform on the distant surface below. The revelation that Mann is just a garden variety coward, a guy so blinded by his own exceptional reputation that he couldn't cope with anything but success, should be disappointing. Instead, it's perfect.
Interstellar is a movie about the end of the world. It's about hope in the face of oblivion. But so much of the story is also spent showing us what happens to men whose hope lapses. Nolan's assertion seems to be that many of our heroes, particularly men, with all our ego and bluster, are not equipped to stare down a truly hopeless situation and keep their nerve. What happens when the golden boy's big, rousing, speech is met with silence? What happens when they can't preach to the the cold vacuum of space? This is where Interstellar shines.
The character who introduces us to Mann is Dr. Brand, the father of Anne Hathaway's Abigail Brand. He's played masterfully by Michael Caine, weaponizing his sage British wisdom in the same way that Damon weaponizes that all-American charm of his. From Brand's first line of dialogue, he's delivering grandiose speeches about the future of the human race and Cooper's importance to securing it. He makes frequent reference to the famous Dylan Thomas poem "Do not go gentle into that good night," encouraging our explorers more than once to rage against the dying of the light. He assures them that if they find a suitable new home for humanity, he'll resolve the unsolved physics problems required to get the rest of humanity there.
When Brand's dishonesty comes to light, Mann calmly explains that humans can care deeply for each other but that this empathy doesn't tend to extend to those outside our immediate vicinity. Where Mann's betrayal is one of cowardly impulse, Brand's is cold and pre-meditated. He has no idea how to unravel the gravitational equation he's sworn to solve. He sends the expedition into space knowing full well that the promise he used to get Cooper to join them (that he could save his family from life on a dying planet) was a lie. The revelation of this deception is the news that prompts Cooper to make the sudden decision to return home, commencing Mann's betrayal. It's in the cascading failure of these two men who serve as stand-ins for the institutions and ideologies that we turn to for comfort that Interstellar underlines its point: the only way forward is a willingness to sacrifice.
After Mann's implosion, Cooper and Brand are watching in disbelief as their ship spins towards the planet's surface. The ship isn't just their only way home, it contains the only hope of setting up a colony for the human race. Cooper has two choices: to die watching his hope crash and burn or to die trying to salvage it. For a character defined by his eagerness to do the one thing he's trained all his life to do, it's no choice at all. He pilots his and Brand's lander toward the crashing shuttle and, in an awe-inspiring sequence, manages to slow its out-of-control spinning. The ship is miraculously intact and with a little finessing, they're able to get it moving again but the victory is short lived. They're drifting closer to a black hole and in order to allow Brand to continue on to one of the potential colony planets, Cooper jettisons himself in one of the ship's landers to shed necessary weight.
Where Brand's rash decision to protect himself results in his humiliating death, Cooper's improvised sacrifice is rewarded. His willingness to embrace oblivion over cowardice puts him in a position to finally save his family. Ultimately, he's flung outside of space and time, denied the life with his son and daughter that he so desperately sought, but in doing so gives them a future they couldn't have otherwise had.
This melancholic ending is what's made the movie age so well over the last decade. As our own times get more bleak and confusing, a film about navigating hopelessness feel extra poignant. Hope for the future is noble, but it can also be an expression of narcissism. Yes of course I'll figure this out, I'm me! It's only in the acceptance that our hope needs to be bigger than us that we can truly start to think about the future.
Look at that! An extra lil Brain Worms! I'm trying to put out these looser and more freeform pop culture essays as a little extra something for paid subscribers. I hope you enjoy it!
