Interstellar: Last Mohicans and Elysian Fields

I went to the first local screening of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar on Friday, November 7, 2014, at the Cinemagic IMAX, here in southern Maine. It was a visually compelling experience.

(BTW, watch the movie, then read this essay. Spoilers aplenty.)

Seeing it there, on that huge screen, with a great sound system, did remind me of my first viewing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That occurred when I journeyed to St. Louis, from Carbondale, Illinois, in 1968, to see 2001, presented in 70 mm, at a widescreen theater.

I saw Stanley Kurbrick's film at St. Louis' Martin Cinerama, which was said to have the world’s largest indoor screen, measuring 100 feet on a curve. The two story building attempted to be a “modern movie palace.” It was a wonderful venue to see 2001. Bye bye to the retro Cinerama.

There are many ways to observe and analyze, synchromystically, a cinema event like Interstellar. In the beginning, such an analysis, whether critically inclined or dynamically detailed, is, by its very nature, extremely personal. So seeing Interstellar at an IMAX, of course, did parallel my 2001 experience at the Cinerama.

The word "synchromysticism" was first coined by Jake Kotze in August 2006, on his website-at-the-time, Brave New World Order. Kotze defined the concept as: "The art of realizing meaningful coincidence in the seemingly mundane with mystical or esoteric significance."

How do we do that exercise with Interstellar?

What items in the movie appear to stand out with some connection to other events, fictional or nonfictional. What links to other movies were placed internally on purpose? Or showed up by coincidence?

Which seemingly hidden meanings are to be inferred from names, locations, and incidents that seem to be tied to others? What in-jokes were planted within the movie versus some source beyond our understanding seemingly intervening?

Synchronicity. The justification or the rationality for this type of activity usually involves a direct or indirect reference to the "collective unconscious mind," thus the "synchro-" in "synchromystic," refers to "synchronicity."

"Mystic" = from the Greek μυστικός, mystikos, an initiate of a mystery religion is the pursuit of communion with, identity with, or conscious awareness of an ultimate reality, divinity, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, instinct or insight.

The notion is that some items in, for example, a motion picture are there by "coincidence," whatever that means.

But part of what must be understood and deciphered are the objects placed there by Christopher Nolan or his brother writer Jonathan Nolan, deliberately, as tributes and homages to others. I cannot read every blog and article about all of these sync objects, but let me share a few items with you.

Much, for instance, has been made about the role of 2001's monoliths in Interstellar's appearance of the robots. But looks from the outside often do not reveal, fully, what is happening in the minds of geniuses.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Interstellar writer-director Christopher Nolan says on this matter:

AP: For their shape, were you inspired by the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Nolan: I think, in its science fiction context, inevitably your mind goes to that — and that's fine by me. Definitely, the spirit of "2001" hangs over the film. It was one of our aspirations to pay homage to that film. It also relates strongly to the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. As we honed in on the idea, I asked my designer (Nathan Crowley), who's a very big fan of modern architecture: What if we designed a robot as if Mie van der Rohe designed a robot? I think he really nailed it.

The Seagram Building is located 375 Park Ave. and 53rd Street in Midtown Manhattan, New York and was completed in 1958. This building was designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe with the aid of Philip Johnson and stands 525 feet tall with 38 floors. The Seagram Building is setback 90 feet from the street and upon completion was the most expensive skyscraper built. (This pewter replica stands 5-1/2 inches tall and is finished in antique copper.) Source: ReplicaBuildings

Even the specific setting of the wormhole in Interstellar is grist for the sync mill.

Cooper..., Amelia Brand [Anne Hathaway], Prof. Romilly (David Gyasi) and Doyle (Wes Bentley) head towards Saturn (not unlike the voyage the Discovery took in Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, switched to Jupiter in Stanley Kubrick’s spectacular cinematic version from 1968). Source.

Saturn is a location for recent science fiction space dramas, perhaps as a nod to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. In Star Trek (2009), the new re-imagined film, the crew of the USS Enterprise hides behind Titan, using Saturn's magnetic field as a shield, while beaming Captain Kirk and Commander Spock aboard the Narada, which is about to attack Earth.

There are other ways that synchros look at the data. Onomastics or onomatology is the study of proper names of all kinds and the origins of names. The word is Greek: ὀνοματολογία [from ὄνομα (ónoma) "name"]. Toponymy or toponomastics, the study of place names, is one of the principal branches of onomastics. Anthroponomastics (or Anthroponymy), a branch of onomastics, is the study of anthroponyms (anthropos, 'man', + onuma, 'name'), the names of human beings.

So what about the name "Cooper" and "Coop" in Interstellar? Nothing coincidental there, right?

Matthew McConaughey’s former astronaut, now farmer, character (above with an Apollo Lunar Lander) is named Cooper, and he's called "Coop." There's been online discussion about whether Coop's son Tom (Casey Affleck) has named his son "Coop," or is that just a generational skip in the use of "Coop" as a nickname from their last name? Whatever.

Andrew West Griffin (see his review here) asks, now that Interstellar is here, what are to we to make from the name "Cooper" being "used a lot" in movies, television, and so forth? Specifically, AWG says later, "I was thinking [about] Agent Dale Cooper, on Twin Peaks. His willingness to go through the 'door.'"

In Nolan's movie, it may be the reflective factor, just a great name for an American astronaut, right? Or is it about baseball and being one of the last of the Mohicans? Stay with me here.

Time Magazine's senior writer Jeffrey Kluger notes:

One of the niftier details in the script involves the names of Hathaway's and McConaughey's ­characters—Brand and Cooper, the names of real astronauts. In McConaughey's case the name is actually twice resonant, a hat tip to both NASA's Gordon Cooper, whom everyone called Gordo, and to Hollywood's ­Gary, whom people called Coop. The characters in Interstellar address Mc­Conaughey's Cooper in the same abbreviated way, a little wormhole of its own that neatly links the lone commander stepping forward to save the planet in Interstellar and the lone sheriff doing the same for Hadleyville in High Noon.

Cooper, the astronaut without a first name but the nickname of "Coop," flashes back to Gordon Cooper, one of the first American astronauts, who went by the nickname of "Gordo." That's not a coincidence but a conscious choice of the Nolans.

Mercury 7 astronauts: (l-r front) Walter Schirra, Donald Slayton, John Glenn, and Scott Carpenter; (back) Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, and Gordon Cooper.

Who can overlook the success of The Big Bang Theory, lead by the humor produced from the dialogue of character Sheldon Cooper?

But looking across the landscape, consider this. Cooper Theaters built the first Super Cinerama in suburban Denver, Colorado in 1962 - where 2001: A Space Odyssey was shown in 1968 - a mere eight miles from the future site of the Century Aurora 16 Multiplex where Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises opening on July 20, 2012, caused a "red dawn" awakening of modern copycat violence. (Image credit.)

Cooper, also, makes one think of Cooperstown, New York, a village in Otsego County, New York. Judge William Cooper purchased the land in 1785, on which Cooperstown now exists. Judge Cooper was the father of noted American author James Fenimore Cooper, author of The Leatherstocking Tales, one novel of which was The Last of the Mohicans. (The phrase, "the last of the Mohicans," has come to represent the sole survivor of a noble race - a notion that might be extended to Intersteller's Cooper.)

Contrary to popular belief, the village was named after Judge Cooper, and not his son. Cooperstown is best known as the home of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

Baseball is an enigma in Interstellar wrapped in a riddle, so to speak. There is more to baseball than meets the eye in Christopher and Jonathan Nolan's movie.

The movie, in many ways, uses baseball as bookends. I think it is more significant than most people are realizing.

Blogger Jes (an extra in the red circle above) points out that Interstellar's baseball scene at the movie's beginning was filmed at the Okotoks, Alberta baseball diamond.

"The small town located just [11 miles/18 km] south of Calgary hosted much of the filming," Jes writes.

Okotoks' name is derived from "ohkotok," the Blackfoot First Nation word for "rock." The name may refer to Big Rock, the world's largest known glacial erratic. In 1879, the area saw the killing of the last buffalo, a piece of history that overlaps with Interstellar's dying planet theme. In 2007, the energy efficient planned Drake Landing Solar Community was established in Okotoks, designed to model a way of addressing global warming and the burning of fossil fuels; again with eerily links to the plot of Interstellar.

It seems rather improbable that the Nolans would have known about these kinds of "coincidences," regarding Okotoks, tied to the underlying themes of their script.

I have already written about the Masonic mystical sense of this sport (here); that's a distraction here. But this baseball business in Interstellar has something deeper about which to think.

Alexander Joy Cartwright, Jr., a significant figure in Freemasonry, is acknowledged as the "Father of Modern Baseball," in Cooperstown, at the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Cartwright's team the Knickerbockers had to play someplace, and intriguingly, the "base ball" team found a "roomy spot called Elysian Fields" in Hoboken, New Jersey.

The Elysian Fields, or the Elysian Plains, among the Greeks, was considered the final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous. In Greek mythology, Elysium (Greek: Ἠλύσια πεδία) was a section of the Underworld (the spelling Elysium is a Latinization of the Greek word Elysion).  Elysium is an obscure and mysterious name that evolved from a designation of a place or person struck by lightning, enelysion, enelysios. This could be a reference to Zeus, the god of lightning, so "lightning-struck" could be saying that the person was blessed (struck) by Zeus (lightning).

Scholars have also suggested that Greek Elysion may instead derive from the Egyptian termialu (older iaru), meaning "reeds," with specific reference to the "Reed fields" (Egyptian: sekhet iaru / ialu), a paradisaical land of plenty where the dead hoped to spend eternity.

The 2013 film, Elysium (starring Matt Damon, please note) deals with a luxurious space habitat using this name, above an overpopulated and devastated Earth. No reason Interstellar shouldn't go there again, with the more covert darker meaning of Elysium.

Some (even if lightly) have noticed the significance of baseball in Interstellar. Sean O'Connell, although none of the above is referenced, appears to be going in this direction in Cinema Blend's "Why Interstellar's Ending Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means."

O'Connell, who gets a few things wrong, like the factor of relativity in aging math, does make good baseball points here: 

Cooper’s "reunion" with Murph has several visual cues that call back to the life he led with his daughter – most notably the baseball field outside his window. This was, after all, the place where he took Murph as a reward for her suspension from school. A dying parent might drift back to happy memories of the baseball field, while also wondering what Murph would look like as an older woman.

Maybe. Maybe not. But the baseball fields in Interstellar are certainly more than baseball fields. Are they sort of fields of dreams?

Interstellar is a baseball film dressed in space opera clothing.

"Almost the entire film appears to be an expose' of the struggles of an aging hero searching for his lost youth."

And "there are the several references to the farm that seem to be obvious references to the natural hero tendency that tries to avoid…all the…evils of the civilized society….The farm symbolizes the simple life, the natural life that is free of [compromised] people….It is home."

"It is implicit as well as explicit in this film that youth over aging is a key value."

These are not quotes from reviews of Intersellar. The first two are insights about the film The Natural (1984) and, and the last one concerns Field of Dreams (1989). They are by Gary E. Dickerson from his book The Cinema of Baseball (Meckler: Westport, CT/London, 1991).

Dickerson clears sees these baseball movies as showing the special bonding relationship between fathers and their children; how "heroes were taught the game by their fathers."

In those two films, "Roy joins his son on a Nebraska farm at the conclusion of the film, and Ray joins his [dead] father on the baseball field in Iowa," write Dickerson.

Both of those baseball movies are about farms, fathers, and, yes, basically, time travel. So is Interstellar. It even has the corn. The pinstripes. The baseball.

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steam rollers. It's been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again but baseball has marked the time. This field, this game is part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again. ~ Field of Dreams

By the time we reach the end of the movie, we have baseball being played in Cooper Station. That space station near Saturn is named, not after astronaut "Coop," but in tribute to his astroscientist daughter Murphy Cooper, known as "Murph." This sort of reminds me of the naming of Cooperstown, in reverse.

Did you catch that unnamed character serving as a tour guide, showing Coop around Cooper Station and to the house from which Coop watches the ball game? This small but important player was portrayed by Elyes Gabel, who went on to also be the lead character Walter O'Brien on the successful new CBS television series Scorpion. (See my discussion of Scorpion, Room 237, and Apollo 11, here.)

This brings us full circle to the Apollo missions, space and rockets. (It has been a period, during the November release of Interstellar, of intense incidents of green fireballs, space craft mishaps, and other "coincidences.")

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Interstellar takes to heart, for the plot, the theories, rumors and all the Room 237 material on Stanley Kurbrick's alleged faking of the Apollo missions to the moon. This Kurbrick "confession" was covertly telegraphed in The Shining, allegedly, and then the Nolans put it right at the start of Interstellar.

Here is one writer's overview of that moment in the Nolan's epic film:

His daughter, Murph (Mackenzie Foy) tags along with her dad. She's fascinated by his stories of the now obsolete space travel and is a budding scientist herself. She's recently been suspended from school for bringing in an old book, which talks about the Apollo space mission. New textbooks have been replaced that debunk the Apollo "nonsense," the teacher tells Coop, because it's common knowledge that the "Apollo mission was faked by the United States to bankrupt the Soviet Union." Source.

Elyes Gabel, after a fashion, is a synchromystic link to the Apollo story that the Nolans could not have forecast.

And what's the production company name at the beginning of Nolan's films? Syncopy.

Interstellar is a cousin of Inception and The Dark Knight trilogy. Literally.

Christopher Nolan's Syncopy was behind Batman Begins (2005), The Prestige (2006), The Dark Knight (2008), Inception (2010), The Dark Knight Rises (2012), and Zack Snyder's Man of Steel (2013). Syncopy was there again for Christopher Nolan's newest film Interstellar (2014), which was released on November 7, 2014.

How much fun is the name Syncopy itself, in the context of Nolan's films? It almost sounds like a combination of synchronicity and the copycat effect. But the mainstream story is the name came about another way.

Syncopy Films Inc. is a British film production company based in London, England. The company was founded by award-winning film director, screenwriter and producer Christopher Nolan and his wife Emma Thomas as co-founder. The name Syncopy Films derives from "syncope," the medical term for fainting or loss of consciousness. Okay, that's what the explanation in Wikipedia says.

I'm not too surprised synchromystic folks are interested in yet another Syncopy production.

Loughner & Mars

The news is filled with the Red Planet landing, and with killer Jared Loughner. They would seem to be two separate threads that have little to do with each other. But we have to remind ourselves that they naturally overlap. The Mars lander, Curiosity, touches down early on the morning of August 6. The next day, Loughner allegedly is due to plea guilty to the murder of bystanders during his attempted assassination of a Member of Congress, who happened to be married to an astronaut.

Back in January 2011, I posted some thoughts, after the assassination attempt on January 8, 2011, of Representative Gabrielle Giffords. The story had many angles, and these were three of them:

"Mind Control" Mass Shooter: Jared Loughner

Loughner: A Copycat?

The Loughner Space Coincidences

Under the "Space Coincidence" postings, I detailed these groupings:
1) NASA Obsession
2) Giffords' NASA Astronaut Husband
3) Giffords' Husband's Astronaut Twin
4) "Erad"
5) The Very Strange Name Game Coincidence of the Two Dr. David Bowmans

Dr. David Bowman of 2001 and 2010.

Please click here to learn more about those "coincidences."

"What is government if words have no meaning?" 

Jared Lee Loughner asked 

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in 2007.

So what is the meaning of Loughner? It appears to be a Americanized version of the German name Lachner, which is an occupational name for a physician, Middle High German lachenære "healer" (as in Leach), which issues from the "topographic name for someone who lived by a pond or lake, from Middle High German lache." The leeches found in aquatic locales, of course, are associated with and employed in the medieval medical practice of "bleeding," often by applying leeches to the sick person (source: Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press). "Lough" is the Irish word for "loch" or "lake," so the origins of the name is decidedly watery in nature.

Was Loughner, literally, engaging in a "bleeding"?

At top: Jared Loughner, with UFO imagery,

created by Red Pill Junkie, a Fortean blogger.

One last "coincidence," sent in by aferrismoon: "If you go to the map of the Safeway on N. Oracle Road [site of Loughner's assassination attempt] you will find there is a road crossing called W. GIACONDA, which also skirts the shopping complex. This is odd as you posted about Mona Lisa [a/k/a La Giaconda], the post after your first Loughner posting."

The Loughner Space Coincidences

Jared Loughner, with UFO imagery

created by Red Pill Junkie, a Fortean blogger.

"What is government if words have no meaning?" Jared Lee Loughner asked Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., in 2007.


So what is the meaning of Loughner? It appears to be a Americanized version of the German name Lachner, which is an "occupational name for a physician, Middle High German lachenære 'healer' (see Leach), which issues from the "topographic name for someone who lived by a pond or lake, from Middle High German lache."  The leeches found in aquatic locales, of course, are associated with the medieval medical practice of "bleeding," often by applying leeches to the sick person, (Dictionary of American Family Names, Oxford University Press).

"Lough" is the Irish word for "loch" or "lake," so the origins of the name is decidedly watery in nature.


The Jared Lee Loughner case has developed into a classic weird trip through a variety of twilight language links, often with an assortment of strange space coincidences.


Here's a list of some that have been revealed, to date:


1) NASA Obsession


Jared Loughner is allegedly a believer in numerous conspiracy theories. Loughner did express views such as the U.S. Government was responsible for the 9/11/2001 attacks, a New World Order would bring about a one world currency, there would be a 2012 apocalypse, NASA had faked spaceflights, and the government was using mind control to brainwash people by controlling grammar.  


Some of the more bizarre speculations that he espoused at the Above Top Secret forum (as Erad3) involved space-related topics, including that the Space Shuttles and the International Space Station were flying empty, without humans aboard, and that NASA's Mars rovers were faked. Erad3's logic was incredibly contoured. For example, he would write passages like this:

If the NASA Space Shuttle is with a crew in orbit then they're able to perform the mission with the conditions in orbit. 

They're not able to perform the mission with the conditions in orbit. 

Thus, the NASA Space Shuttle isn’t with a crew in orbit. 

And...

If the pictures are from mars then the mars rover is on mars. 

The Mars rover is not on mars. 

Therefore, the pictures are not from mars. 

NASA creates a remote control rover that is impossible to reach mars. 

NASA fakes the situation they plan with the mars rover. 

Therefore, NASA creates a remote control rover that’s impossible to reach mars and fakes the situation they plan with the mars rover. 

Considering Loughner's NASA-related thoughts, the factual and fictional links to the NASA Space Programs in the Tucson shooting are chilling.


2) Giffords' NASA Astronaut Husband


Loughner's alleged assassination target was Representative Gabrielle Giffords. She has been married, since 2007, to NASA astronaut and Space Shuttle commander Mark E. Kelly. Mark Edward Kelly (born February 21, 1964, in Orange, New Jersey) is an American astronaut. Kelly is the commander of STS-134 Endeavour, the final planned mission of the American space shuttle program.

Kelly (pictured above) first went into space as the pilot for STS-108 Endeavour December 5–17, 2001. He returned to space as the pilot of STS-121 Discovery July 4-17, 2006. On Kelly's third mission he served as commander of STS-124 Discovery May 31 to June 14, 2008. Kelly's fourth mission, STS-134, has a target launch date of April 19, 2011.

While three members of Congress themselves have flown in space, Kelly is the first person to fly in space while married to a member of the U.S. Congress.

3) Giffords' Husband's Astronaut Twin

Gabby Giffords' husband's brother is an astronaut too. Mark E. Kelly's twin brother, Scott Joseph Kelly, is also a NASA astronaut. The Kelly brothers are the only twins and the only siblings who have both traveled in space.


Scott J. Kelly (born February 21, 1964, in Orange, New Jersey) is an American astronaut. Kelly is the current commander of the International Space Station, Expedition 26 (ISS). He took over command after the undocking of Soyuz TMA-19 on November 25, 2010. Kelly served as a flight engineer on the final part of Expedition 25. A veteran of two space shuttle missions, Kelly joined the crew of ISS on October 9, 2010 after arriving on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. He was in space when his sister-in-law was shot.

On 1.11.11, Commander Scott Kelly, Gabrielle Giffords' brother-in-law, led a moment of silence through NASA at the International Space Station. "The crew of ISS Expedition 26 and the flight control centers around the world would like to observe a moment of silence in honor of all the victims, which include my sister-in-law Gabrielle Giffords, a caring and dedicated public servant," said Commander Kelly. Kelly is in charge of a six-person team at the ISS.

4) "Erad" appeared at first to refer to "radiation energy density," a term associated with electromagnetic radiation in space. Erad thus would be a space-associated, frequently used, NASA-understood abbreviation. Jared Lee Loughner apparently used the name erad3 on the Above Top Secret forum, where he made an impression disputing the reality of NASA missions. 


Some have said that "erad3" means "triple dare," since "erad" is "dare" spelled backwards + 3.  Info on 1.14.2011 supports Loughner having used the name "dare" on a gaming fantasy site, so "erad" may be "dare" backwards. Perhaps it is merely another coincidence that there are NASA documents denoted with the "ERAD3" designation.


Was Loughner obsessed with the NASA links to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords?  If so, we may never know.  Meanwhile, the cosmos played a bizarre twist of fate in the next chance event.


5) The Very Strange Name Game Coincidence of the Two Dr. David Bowmans

Dr. David Bowman and his wife Nancy both rendered care to victims of the Tuscon shooting; they are shown above with Bill Hileman.  The main person that Dr. Bowman treated was Bill's wife, Suzie Hileman.  Suzie Hileman had taken 9-year-old Christina Taylor-Green to the "Congress On Your Corner" event.  Christina was born on 9/11/2001.

The fictional astronaut and scientist Dr. David Bowman is a character in the Space Odyssey series. He first appears in a story jointly written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, called 2001: A Space Odyssey (which is both a book and a movie). The character later appears in the sequel to the book, 2010: Odyssey Two and the sequel to the movie, 2010: The Year We Make Contact. The character also returns in two more books by Arthur C. Clarke, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: The Final Odyssey. In the foreword to 2061: Odyssey Three, Clarke makes it clear that the plots of the movies and books do not necessarily follow a linear arc, and take place in parallel universes, consequently there are apparent inconsistencies in the character of David Bowman throughout the series.

In the two movies, the character is played by Keir Dullea. The character is infrequently referenced as being "twin astronauts" in parallel universes.


As has been pointed out on other sites and forwarded to me by correspondent SMiles Lewis, another tie-in with the David Bowman/Space Odyssey coincidences, of course, is that the twin brother of Gifford's husband, Scott Kelly, was a pilot for the space shuttle Discovery, which is the name of the spaceship on which David Bowman makes his fateful journey in 2001 on his way to becoming the Starchild. The links revolving around the first flight for Mark Kelly in 2001, and that the year 2001 was the year of birth for Christina Green are all rather chilling.

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What other weird links will be revealed in this Loughner story?