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.

Here, the film embraces what Shaviro calls the “modulation” of the digital. The image isn’t trying to be a window to reality; it’s a fabrication that overwhelms our senses. The deafening roar of Hans Zimmer’s organ score doesn’t just tell you to be sad; it physically vibrates your chest. That vibration is affect. It bypasses your logic and hits your nervous system directly.

The Algorithm of Awe

This aligns with what recent media theorist Shane Denson discusses in his 2020 work on “discorrelated images.” Denson argues that modern cinema is increasingly defined by images that are generated by algorithms, not human eyes.

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.

We see a similar, albeit more frantic, version of this in The Big Short (2015). As noted in Matthias Stork’s “Chaos Cinema” video essay, modern editing often sacrifices spatial clarity for sensory impact. The Big Short bombards us with pop-culture montages and fourth-wall breaks. Like the Tesseract in Interstellar, it mimics the data-overload of the modern financial world. It doesn’t just explain the chaos of the 2008 crash; it makes us feel the anxiety of it through rapid-fire visual affect.

Why It Matters

Why does this distinction matter? Because it explains why modern movies feel different. We are moving away from the “Kodak moment” of capturing reality and moving toward a “digital reality” that constructs new sensations.

When Cooper screams at himself through the bookshelves in the fifth dimension, it works not because it makes logical scientific sense, but because the affective overload—the sound, the light, the sheer scale—forces us to submit to the experience. It is a perfect example of Shaviro’s post-cinematic world: a subjectivity that is fragmented, digital, but overwhelmingly human in its desire for connection.

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