DE Weekly: Dylan Thomas, Interstellar, & Death
Below is an archived email originally sent on December 2, 2024.
Dylan Thomas, Interstellar, & Death
”Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” These lines from Dylan Thomas are instantly recognizable.
They’re the final lines to his poem “Do not go gentle into that good night”, a poem Thomas wrote about his father, who was dying.
In the poem, he’s trying to encourage his dad to stay alive, to keep fighting and to keep going.
Thomas knows his father is going to die at some point. He knows all of us die at some point.
But just because death is inevitable doesn’t mean we should give up–instead, Thomas urges his father–we should fight bravely against it.
It’s something most of us can relate to, especially if we’ve experienced death–so much so that it has been used in popular culture nearly 80 years after it was written.
This poem appears in one of my favorite movies, Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. It’s one of the driving messages behind the film, and used purposefully throughout the film–the times it is recited are at key plot points in the movie.
Interstellar takes place in the late twenty-first century, at a time when Earth is dying from a disease called “blight” which kills all the crops except corn. However, it’s discovered that it will soon kill corn, too.
Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper–a former astronaut turned corn farmer–volunteers to head a NASA mission whose aim is to save humanity by discovering another habitable planet.
Time is ticking, and there’s no guarantee the mission will be successful. In fact, the chances of everyone on board the ship dying is pretty high.
Ultimately, Cooper chooses to go on the mission. He leaves behind his children, who beg him not to go. Especially his daughter, Murph.
There’s a lot that transpires between this point and the end of the film, but this isn’t a movie review and I don’t want to spoil the journey–so I’ll stop there for now.
Plus, I’m not qualified to explain worm holes, time dilation, and the “tesseract” inside the black hole. You can search for that stuff elsewhere.
The takeaway from what I’ve shared of the film is this: Cooper does not give up. He willingly makes a sacrifice–he does not go gentle. He rages against the dying of the light.
Despite having plenty of reasons to stay on Earth, raise his family, and hope for the best, he takes a faithful leap into the unknown.
He makes an immense sacrifice for what he sees as a bigger purpose. One for all of humanity.
This film is deeply existential in this way.
When the universe has no meaning, when it feels like there’s no hope, when the chips are down… we have no choice but to make our own meaning, to seize our chance and to act.
This is why I see both Thomas’s poem and Interstellar as one and the same; they are not only bravely existential, they are great works of romanticism.
Romantics celebrate the human spirit, brave individualism. Romantics seek to unlock the mysteries of the world and tame nature.
An example of what this looks like is Caspar David’s Friedrich’s 1818 masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.
You’ve probably seen this artwork before. To me, it evokes the same ideals of Thomas’s poem and Chris Nolan’s film.
Tragedy may lurk around the corner, yes.
Death awaits us all in time, yes.
But we don’t have to give up.
In another poem titled “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, Dylan Thomas again confronts the inevitability of death.
In it, he conveys that, although powerful, death cannot control every part of our lives. We can choose to stand up and revolt against it, to stare bravely in its face with our dying breath. We all must go into that good night. But it does not have to be gentle.
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I know I’ve said this before, but it’s worth reiterating: existentialism is everywhere, if you look for it. It’s such an all-encompassing philosophy. So even if you’re not sitting down to read Sartre or Camus, if you dig down deep enough, you can find it all over pop culture–just watch Interstellar.
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