By LAI WEI 33870474

We often talk about movies in terms of plot or character development—did the ending make sense? Did the protagonist grow? But have you ever watched a film where the story seemed secondary to a sheer, vibrating physical intensity? If you’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) in IMAX, or Adam McKay’s The Big Short (2015).

This is particularly evident in large-scale digital cinema. Watching Interstellar (2014) in IMAX, or the frenetic spectacle of The Big Short (2015), the viewer is often struck less by story than by sensation. These films do not simply invite interpretation; they exert pressure on the senses.

One way to make sense of this shift is through Steven Shaviro’s concept of post-cinematic affect (2010). Shaviro argues that digital cinema marks a transformation in how films are experienced. Rather than prioritizing linear storytelling or visual realism, contemporary cinema increasingly produces a new “structure of feeling,” shaped by speed, abstraction, and technological mediation. We are no longer just watching representations of the world; we are being subjected to sensory intensities that resemble the fragmented, non-linear conditions of contemporary life.

Emotion vs. Affect: The Tesseract Moment

To understand this, we have to distinguish between emotion and affect.

Emotion is personal and recognizable: “I feel sad because Cooper is leaving Murph.” It has a name and a narrative cause. Affect, however, is pre-personal and visceral. It is the bodily “shimmer” or shock you feel before your brain processes the feeling. It’s the intensity of the experience.

Take the climactic Tesseract scene in Interstellar. When Cooper falls into the black hole, traditional narrative logic dissolves. We aren’t watching a “scene” in the classical sense; we are watching a digital architecture of time—a kaleidoscope of moments rendered into a physical 3D space.

In this sequence, the film embraces what Shaviro calls the “modulation” of the digital. Rather than functioning as a transparent window onto reality, the image operates as a constructed sensory event designed to overwhelm perception. The sequence does not ask to be interpreted so much as endured. Hans Zimmer’s organ score, for instanceaffect: a pre-cognitive force that bypasses interpretation and registers directly on the nervous system.

The Algorithm of Awe

This logic resonates with Shane Denson’s concept of “discorrelated images,” where he argues that contemporary cinema is increasingly shaped by algorithmic and computational processes rather than human perception. Denson argues that modern cinema is increasingly defined by images that are generated by algorithms, not human eyes. The result is a visual experience that often feels excessive or uncanny, precisely because it has become “discorrelated” from—or no longer aligned with—embodied human vision.

In Interstellar, the depiction of the black hole, Gargantua, wasn’t just CGI art; it was a simulation based on actual physics equations that took thousands of hours to render (Thorne, 2014). As Denson (2020) suggests, these “post-cinematic” images create a sensation that feels slightly alien because they aren’t strictly made for human vision—they are data visualized.

The Big Short (2015) takes this logic and cranks the tempo up to a fever pitch. Borrowing from the “Chaos Cinema” playbook, director Adam McKay swaps traditional storytelling for something much more visceral. Between the celebrity cameos and the jagged editing, the film feels like a data-driven Tesseract—a high-speed collision of information that mirrors the frantic pulse of Wall Street. It’s less a history lesson and more a sensory simulation; the film weaponizes its visual chaos to make the 2008 collapse feel as terrifyingly claustrophobic as it actually was.

References

Shaviro, Steven. 2010. Post-Cinematic Affect. Winchester, UK: Zero Books.

Denson, Shane. 2020. Discorrelated Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Thorne, Kip. 2014. The Science of Interstellar. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Stork, Matthias. 2013. “Chaos Cinema.” Video essay, Vimeo.

Nolan, Christopher, dir. 2014. Interstellar. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures.

McKay, Adam, dir. 2015. The Big Short. Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures