![]() “Most people talk about fear of the unknown, but if there is anything to fear, it is the known.” -Deepak Chopra Every step into the unknown is a risk, but it is not always what scares us the most. According to Webster's dictionary, the unknown is described as something that requires discovery, identification, or clarification. In a movie and short story analyzed in class, this concept is a fundamental support in the storyline for both. When connecting this quote and idea to the movie "Interstellar," directed by Christopher Nolan, the initial talk of fear was that there were no guarantees that they would make it back and that they would survive the journey or what they would find beyond the stars. This unknown of what is out there in the universe could not be classified as it still required discovery. Therefore, these thoughts are not what keep Cooper from being scared and giving up; instead, it was the realization that "Plan A," the idea to carry out mass evacuation and bring humanity onto one of three potentially habitable planets, was utterly a ruse. It was never even there to begin with. Cooper soon learns that to guarantee the human population's survival, the endurance team must travel to the planet with the best chance of supporting life and growing embryos there. Putting Cooper's children before anything is apprehended that Murphy believes that by leaving for this expedition, Cooper is leaving her behind and would either perish in space or not return. Cooper is scared of the known, not the unknown. The clarification that he might never get to see his children again is a greater fear than the whole undiscovered galaxy. Furthermore, Howard Fast wrote a short story that also connects to the quote from Chopra called "The Large Ant." In this narrative, Morgan kills what appears to be enormous and out of the blue with a golf club. Later, he brings the corpse to an entomologist who, oddly, is interested in Morgan's discovery and asks him why he murdered it. Sequentially, Morgane needs an answer to this question. Even though the type of creature was unknown, it at first glance seemed to be a giant ant: "I had to look at the ant now, and I realized that I had not truly looked at it before. We don't look carefully at a thing that is horrible or repugnant to us. You can't look carefully at a thing through a screen of hatred." (Fast) The only known idea planted into a human's brain in a situation like Morgan's is bitterness and disgust. Instinctively, our species will not always reason to escape a position where the fear is known. For example, Moragne killed the ant on the spot. Even though the results hold more questions of what kind of creature died, one thing is for sure: It was the initially known fear that had been identified and led Morgane to assassinate the creature. In conclusion, the idea the known scares us more than the unknown is a common theme in the movie “Interstellar,” and the short story “The Large Ant.”
1 Comment
Mawada
11/30/2022 06:33:15 am
Hi Carolina! What a great blog post! I took delight in reading your comparison between Interstellar and The Large Ant. The quote you shared by Deepak Chopra is an excellent summary of the theme present in both the movie and the short story. While reading through your blog post, I found it especially interesting when you shared Cooper’s greatest fear. I agree with your idea that “it was the realization that “Plan A,” the idea to carry out mass evacuation and bring humanity onto one of three potentially habitable planets” that Cooper feared the most. Driven by the fact that Plan A was a scam, Cooper’s fear wonderfully ties back to the quote, “if there is anything to fear, it is the known” (Chapra).
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