Murph's Bookcase Unlocks Interstellar, and Hints That TARS's Heirs Built the Tesseract

Every single book on Murph's bookcase in Interstellar was hand-picked by Christopher Nolan, and together those titles hold the answers the film never spells out. My theory is that they also point to who really built the Tesseract: I believe the future bulk beings were AI descendants of TARS.

The film never explicitly reveals who those fifth dimensional beings were beyond "it was us". Buried in the bookcase is a myth about a father who misses his daughter, but also a question about his son, and about why Timothée Chalamet's Tom gets hidden behind Casey Affleck. I will get to that theory below, but the bookcase is the framework where every detail comes alive.

Nolan opens on the bookcase and a lie about the past

After the sepia studio cards, Nolan's opening shot is this dusty bookcase. The dust floats in a line because of the gravitational anomaly Cooper later uses to reach Murph. Murph's toy NASA shuttle collects dust because in this near future NASA's history has been erased from textbooks, turning these into science fiction toys like X-wings. Dust, or sand, is also the first thing Cooper sees when he crosses the black hole's event horizon.

One title is L.P. Hartley's The Go-Between, which Nolan chose for its view of childhood through the halls of adulthood, praising its opening line: the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Nolan plays on that by opening with what seems to be the past, interviews taken directly from Ken Burns' 2012 documentary The Dust Bowl, real survivors of the 1930s. We later learn these are stories told by future survivors of Earth, including an older Murph played by Ellen Burstyn, seated in front of her bookcase recreated in the space station museum.

Kip Thorne's rules shaped a story that starts in 2067

Cooper's test flight is shut down by a gravitational anomaly, and the voice grounding him is one of the robots like TARS, which establishes his abrasive relationship with them. It is never spoken aloud, but the main events begin in 2067. That comes from producer Kip Thorne's book The Science of Interstellar, which places the wormhole's discovery in 2019, which Brand says was 48 years prior. Cooper's test flight would be sometime in the late 2050s.

Thorne, an astrophysicist, conceived the idea with film producer Lynda Obst; both had consulted on Contact, which also featured McConaughey. They sold it to Steven Spielberg, who hired Jonathan Nolan, who spent four years studying astrophysics at Caltech. When Spielberg departed, Paramount brought in Christopher Nolan, who kept most of Jonathan's first act on Earth's ecological collapse but reconceived Acts 2 and 3 with him. Nolan agreed to Thorne's two rules: nothing could violate established physical laws, and every wild idea had to come from scientific theory. Thorne's equations were coded into the effects, with some frames taking up to 100 hours, and the results advanced the academic understanding of black holes. That is Miller's planet level time dilation.

Cooper is the ghost in a world of corn and dirt

Nolan always provides the answer to his mysteries at the beginning. When Cooper jokes that Grandpa is close to being a ghost himself, the film tells us Cooper is Murph's ghost, and that the older generation always becomes the ghosts of their children. Nolan planted 500 acres of corn in Calgary, Alberta, for the unnatural image of cornfields against mountains, showing corn growing everywhere as one of the last crops. The blight has thinned the population so much there are no more wars or militaries, much like Stephen King's The Stand, also on the shelf. Breakfast is cornmeal pancakes, cornbread and corn chowder.

When the truck blows a tire, Tom calls it Murphy's Law, the origin of Murph's name, and Cooper explains it means whatever can happen will happen. Amelia later frames it as why Miller's planet was doomed: so close to a black hole, the comets and asteroids that might have seeded life were swallowed instead. Murphy's Law is a good thing we need, and the whole film demonstrates it.

Chasing an Indian drone shows that neither the Indian nor US militaries patrol the skies, and Cooper hacks it remotely. He runs his hand along it, probably grateful to touch something without dust. It was being attracted to the anomaly on his farm, which also explains his tractors going off course. At school a textbook carries a brown stain, from Murph's bookcase and its dust. The teacher at the parent-teacher conference believes the Apollo missions were faked, a conspiracy that keeps kids focused on farming; in real life, theorists claimed it was done with Stanley Kubrick's sets from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film that inspired the Nolans most.

Cooper says we used to look up and wonder at our place in the stars, and now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt, but dirt is caked on the windowsill behind his head. He is so blinded by the stars he cannot see the answer, and it takes Murph's generation, raised in the dust, to find it buried there. When a dust storm leaves bands of sand forming binary coordinates, you can see Spielberg's interest: it is essentially Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with hills of dirt in place of Richard Dreyfuss's mashed potatoes.

TARS was designed as a monolith and a soldier

NORAD's underground missile bases make sense as NASA's launch bays, and the dots on the door are Braille for TARS. Nolan reasoned that humanoid robots would be impractical, settling on a sturdier, easily transported segmented rectangle, and Cooper hints they were built for combat with his line about Marines. The shape nods to the monolith of 2001, the symbol of technology and ultimately salvation.

Bill Irwin voiced TARS and puppeted both robots, with Josh Stewart voicing CASE, and was digitally painted out, and Nolan mixed the audio diegetically so it sounds tinny, as if coming from the room. As I put it, "TARS is my favorite character in this movie and he saves everyone in more ways than you think."

The Lazarus plan, Dr. Mann and a father's goodbye

Amelia Brand is named after Amelia Earhart. Professor Brand lays out plan A, solving gravity to lift the centrifuge off the planet, and plan B, populating a new world with embryos. When Cooper notes Lazarus had to die first, Brand stares back grimly, knowing the real plan lets humanity on Earth die. The centrifuge's curved floor recalls Kubrick's jogging scene, and the wormhole sits near Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture, so again the secret of the stars is hidden in the dirt.

Dr. Mann appears only distantly in photographs to hide that he is Matt Damon. He is modelled on Kurtz from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a brilliant mind lost when cut off from civilisation, and his name represents the weakness of mankind. When Cooper leaves, the book knocked off the shelf is his future self begging him to stay, and right by his head is Lois Lowry's The Willoughbys, about children abandoned by their parents. Hans Zimmer's music was performed on the Harrison and Harrison organ of London's Temple Church after Nolan gave him one page about a father leaving his daughter. Cooper checking the passenger seat always gets me emotional, and the side mirror view echoes a rocket as the countdown plays.

Clocks, poems and Flatland frame the journey

TARS jokes about blowing Cooper out of the airlock, with an indicator light for humour. As someone who despises sarcasm, I would love humans to come with that light; it is also a nod to HAL. Nolan commits to accurate zero sound outside the shuttle. The Endurance, based on the International Space Station, is a clock with 12 compartments, like the 12 Lazarus pilots and 12 disciples including the Judas traitor. It is a surprisingly religious film, and I like it. A shot of the latch tells us what it means when it fails for Dr. Mann.

Brand recites Dylan Thomas's Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, which leads to T.S. Eliot's selected poems on the shelf. Nolan said concepts of time are sometimes best expressed through art, and Burnt Norton opens with time present and past both perhaps present in time future. When Amelia mentions Wolf Edmunds, Cooper senses she loves him; his empathy is his greatest strength. She hopes to escape human evil, foreshadowing that evil is a blight carried by people like Dr. Mann.

Romilly's folded paper explains why a wormhole appears as a sphere, an idea from Edwin Abbott's Flatland, which Carl Sagan summarised on Cosmos. The passage looks like space folding like a bedsheet rather than something added, unlike Contact or Star Wars. Amelia's handshake with a distortion, implied to echo Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, is future Cooper. This is what I call type 4 time travel, predestination, like Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban or Tenet. In my opinion Nolan answers the free will objection by never showing the bulk beings, but that is not exactly the case, as I explain below.

On Miller's planet every tick is a day on Earth

Miller's planet adds time dilation, which I call type 3, so the film has a plan A and B of time travel too. Cooper flies by feel because the cloud cover is that thick, and since Miller would have died minutes before they land, a lingering whitecap might be her wreckage. Zimmer's ticks run about 1.25 per second, each about one Earth day. The wave first looks like a hill, because Nolan primed us with those mountains behind the corn, and it was probably the wave that killed Miller. CASE fails to save Doyle, showing why humans had to go: you cannot program a fear of death.

They return to Romilly aged 23 years, four months and eight days, echoing One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the most heartbreaking scene, Tom finishes second in school yet gets Cs, graded on a curve where only the valedictorian goes to college. Poor Tom was never given a chance. His son Jesse dies, and Nolan cuts to Murph ending the call at the film's exact midpoint. Amelia's argument for Edmunds based on love was right; Mann's planet was a trap.

Dr. Mann's planet exposes the weakness of mankind

The frozen ammonia cloud is supposedly the film's one element with no basis in physics, but it traps Mann between frozen death above and below. He sobs at seeing a face, and his survival instinct makes him want to be humanity's patriarch. He waited 10 years to Romilly's 23 and still lost himself; Romilly, I believe, is the film's ultimate tragedy. His line about empathy rarely extending beyond our line of sight is why the bulk beings needed Cooper, an astronaut with a direct link back to Earth.

On Earth, a girl wiping dirt off her face is Flora Nolan, and the production title was Flora's Letter. It is widely interpreted that the film might be Nolan and Emma Thomas working through being far from their kids, and Jane Austen's Emma sits on the shelf. Mann is smart enough to know his cowardice. Casting Damon is perfect because he would play a similar but likable role in The Martian. KIPP's "please don't make me" was in Jonathan Nolan's 2008 draft and explored in the prequel comic Absolute Zero. TARS disabling docking follows through on his airlock joke. These robots were originally built as Marines, so they definitely do not have Asimov's law against hurting humans, only reprogramming to be helpful; yet through that programming TARS does follow the law by making it impossible for Mann to abandon Cooper and Amelia, and Mann's own choice to open the hatch ends him.

The docking is the best sequence of the film. Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow asks what you do before everything ends, and Thomas answers: rage. Cooper matches the Endurance's counterclockwise spin, turning back the clock, the solution he uses in the Tesseract. The thruster readouts say LMAO1 and LMAO2, which I think recalls TARS's joke.

The Tesseract turns the bookcase into salvation

The term tesseract was first used in Robert A. Heinlein's 1941 story And He Built a Crooked House, about a house folding into a dimensional loop. Nolan visualises it through a room and a bookshelf, the summation of human knowledge. Sherlock Holmes, Charlotte's Web, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and Jorge Luis Borges' Labyrinths, whose Library of Babel inspired the infinite library, all sit there, with Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, where Meg Murry rescues her father. Read that one.

My analysis has its own ghost. My father was a Navy S3 pilot who broke flight records, flew a captured terrorist back to the US after an FBI raid, and retired after 31 years. As the youngest, I remember a dad who stayed; my siblings remember him deployed. "I am my Father's son."

Why I believe TARS's descendants built the Tesseract

Some cynicism comes from the oversimplified answer that the bulk beings are us. Why not save Earth from the blight? The Nolans wanted a space film, not an Earthbound climate film, but many miss who else is in the black hole: TARS. Tom feels underdeveloped because Cooper's structural son is TARS; he calls Tom turbo, then gives the robot that nickname, going from fearing robots to loving them.

I believe the bulk beings were AI descendants of TARS, which is why the Tesseract echoes his 90 degree design. Lacking a soul, they would need a human bridge, partnered with their ancestor. Scrabble on the shelf? Tesseract almost spells secret TARS, though we are missing an R. Back at Cooper Station, his first act is rebooting TARS. Edmunds proves love transcends, and humanity, by definition, is destined to be interstellar.

Do you think the bulk beings were simply future humans, or could TARS's descendants have built the Tesseract?