Homesteading in the Anthropocene: future visions of rural landscapes and home in Interstellar and US sci-fi films of the 2010s

Newland, Paul (2022) Homesteading in the Anthropocene: future visions of rural landscapes and home in Interstellar and US sci-fi films of the 2010s. In: Screen conference, 1-3 July 2022, Online. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

In Interstellar (2014), Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) goes on a time-travelling odyssey, eventually finding himself on a space station orbiting Saturn, on which his mid-Western farmhouse has been reconstructed. In this near-facsimile of his family home, Cooper says ‘I don’t care much for this, pretending we’re back where we started’. In this paper I will show that while Interstellar and other US science fiction films of the 2010s respond to a growing public awareness of the climate disaster, they choose to explore human responses to disastrous Anthropocene change through nostalgia, developing aesthetic visions of future rural landscapes and bucolic lifestyles as something to be aimed at or wished for. In Interstellar, the trauma of ecological breakdown is thus ameliorated by an aesthetic ‘return’, which draws on the iconic imagery of Hollywood (and the American Western genre in particular) to depict future US rural landscapes and homesteads in positive terms; as representative of a desired continuation of the foundational American concept manifest destiny. As such, Interstellar and other sci-fi films of the period contribute to the continuing relationship between landscapes and US national mythmaking, even in the face of the collapse of the Earth’s ecosystems.

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