Page 77 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

The image above is from a scene in The Shining. The Shining was released in 1980 after Kubrick had
devoted years of his life to the Apollo Moon project. The young boy is wearing an Apollo 11
sweater. This is one of an immense number of covert allusions to the Apollo project in this movie,
a movie which ostensibly has nothing at all to do with the Moon program. It would perhaps have
been too blatant for Christopher Nolan to have placed a copy of Stephen King’s The Shining on the
bookshelf, but those with an alert mind which searches for subtle clues will recognize the
connections.

Right beside The Stand is a smaller book titled The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne. This
too is a work of fiction and is infused with meaning. This novel details the story of a 9 year old
German boy named Bruno whose father works for the Fuhrer in 1942. The family is relocated to
Auschwitz where the boy’s father is employed. They have a home near the Auschwitz concentration
camp which can be seen from their yard. The story is about how the young boy is presented with a
false view of the purpose of the concentration camp and what occurs there. In short, it is a story of
a deception, and how the truth eventually becomes known. Perhaps Nolan also had in mind that the
American space program arose from the NAZI V-2 rocket program, for he has placed a book which
focuses on the NAZI regime directly behind the model of the lunar lander.

Also on the bookshelf in this section of fictional writings one can see the book The Night Listener
by Armistead Maupin. The book’s publisher begins their description of this novel with the words,
“The lines between reality and illusion are intriguingly blurred in this novel from the author of the
Tales of the City series.” It seems apparent that Christopher Nolan is attempting to tell us something
fundamental about the blurring of reality and illusion in the NASA Moon program. There were
undoubtedly real aspects to the NASA space program, while illusion was also integral to it. That
Interstellar features this “model” of the lunar lander so often serves to convey subtly that the Apollo
Moon projects were carried out using models, and the lunar landers were not authentic functioning
vehicles.

Aside from this very telling emphasis on a model of the lunar lander, Interstellar focuses intensely
on NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Cooper is led, through an anomalous
occurrence, to discover the secret location of NASA, an agency of the government he believed to be
no longer extant. Arriving at NASA’s remote headquarters he is brought into a meeting of top
officials of the agency.