The Soundtrack’s Contribution to Interstellar’s Narrative

Abstract

In this study about the movie Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, we demonstrate how a simple musical idea proposed by Hans Zimmer – an up and down diatonic scale segment – served as iconic material, not only for the development of the musical themes of the sound track, but also as a metaphor for the film narrative. The plot of the movie is based in the classical model of the Hero’s Journey, defined by Joseph Campbell after Homero’s Odyssey. In a short analysis, we show how the film structure follows with precision the paradigm of the Hero’s Journey, fulfilling the necessary stages of Departure, Initiation and Return. In the following section, we show how the Main Theme introduces the nuclear motive, subsequently elaborated by many transformations in minimalistic style that form five new recurring themes that we named Cooper and Murph Themes, Phantom Theme, Gravity Theme and Space Theme. We also recognize that a fundamental element of the sound track efficiency depends on the almost omnipresent sonority of the organ of tubes, in contrast with the common place of science fiction movies that is to use electronically synthesized sounds. We analyze, yet, the intertextual relations that the film elaborates, not only on the plot, but also in the sound track, which refers to films that use minimalistic music, such as Koyaanisqatsi, as well to films that use pre-existing music materials, like Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey. However, Interstellar uses a different compositional strategy from those models; ,nsofar it retrieves the Wagnerian operatic technique of developing a unified music discourse after some leitmotivs associated to characters and concepts.