It's a Trope: Morse Code

There is even a version of Morse in the (now dead)
Star Wars Expanded Universe called Mon
Calamarian Blink Code. Leia is better at it than Han.

Welcome to the first installment of a new series I am going to be doing involving noticeable tropes in TV, movies, and books that have always bugged me. I want to explore them, where they came from, and how based in reality they actually are. To start off this series, I decided to tackle one thorn that has really been sticking in my side since childhood, Morse Code.

I was once again alerted to the trope of Morse Code while watching Interstellar, a movie which I have already said enough about, but there is one thing that I left out of my review. The crux of the plot revolves around Matthew McConaughey communicating with his daughter via Morse Code, and seeing as how the move takes place at least sixty years in the future in a world that has been almost desolated by climate change, and has no standing army and barely any government, I have to wonder how many people in that future actually know Morse Code? Yet for the purposes of Interstellar, the Morse Code usage is one of the more believable aspects, as the message is actually being sent by an artificially intelligent robot, via McConaughey, which I can (at least) believe has a program from Morse Code translation somewhere in its databanks. It is also being received as one long continuous and repeating message, which means McConaughey's daughter has the time to open an old Morse Code book and translate every dot and dash there is. However, the use of Morse Code in other media, especially when we talk about science fiction always seemed less plausible to me.

For official purposes, Morse Code was retired as an International Standard of Communication in 1999, and in 2007 the FCC even dropped their Morse Code proficiency standards for amateur radio operators (which was the last group that seemed truly enthusiastic about actually using it.) Some navies, including the United States Navy, occasionally uses the code for signal lights, but learning it is not required for most US military personnel. Obviously the language peeked with the invention of the telegraph, but I can't imagine its ever going to experience such a time of popularity again. Thus, when Captain Kirk uses Morse to communicate with Scotty, I find it a little hard to believe that, in the 23rd century, they are both fluent enough in what is, essentially, a dead language to be able to relay any meaningful message to each other.

"It's seems as if we're getting a message for the Americans in old Morse Code"
"Aren't we in the Iraq Desert under siege by technologically superior aliens?
Where did we get an old telegraph from? And what is the likelihood that any
of our survivors would have the technical proficiency with Morse Code to
even understand the American's complex battle plan as relayed by dots
and bloody dashes. That's just absurd."

Even worse, when TV shows and movies do show people using Morse Code, anyone (in real-life) who actually knows Morse Code usually notes that the actors are usually just randomly tapping at a speed that is much faster than most users could interpret. It gets even less believable when the receiver begins reading the message as fast as he/she is receiving it. The fastest operator could send about 35 words per minute, and anyone who was masterfully fluent in Morse could decode a message in their head at up to 40 words per minute. Bear in mind that those records were set back in 1942, at the height of Morse Code usage. So it is completely unlikely that most people, (especially modern or future users) whom we assume only have basic training in Morse Code could even send more than 10 words per minute, let alone decode them on the fly.

Subversions of the Morse Code trope often come in forms of comedy. Most notably on The Simpsons during the episode Mountains of Madness, when Homer and Mr. Burns are trapped in a cabin together. Mr. Burns tries typing out a distress signal on an old telegraph machine, but the audience learns that the other end is connected to a telegraph machine in a museum. No one gets the message. Another notable subversion comes from the The Office (US) when Jim and Pam admit to attending a Morse Code class just to use the obscure knowledge to mess with Dwight in the episode, The Cover Up. In fact, (in my opinion,) the trope is often best employed as a subversion. A character takes time to tap out a long message and the receivers all stand around looking one another because nobody  knows what the hell it means.

Along those lines it could also be argued that when ever a character uses S-O-S, that they are actually not conforming to the trope. As S-O-S is the most common and well known use of Morse Code, with it being only three dots, three dashes, three dots (. . . - - - . . .) However, S-O-S has a lot of misnomers attached to it. For instance, it does not stand for "Save Our Ship," or "Save Our Souls," or anything. S-O-S was picked because it was determined to be the easiest code to use as a distress transmission, so easy that even a layman would be able to do it. Additionally, it is not really S-O-S, but actually S-O-S-O-S-O-S, etc... You were expected to send out the code alternating between three dots and three dashes as long as you were able. Thus, maybe you can make an argument that many TV shows and movies use it incorrectly, but it is still hard to consider it a trope, as it can be argued that S-O-S is more vernacular than any other Morse Code transmission, at least for modern humans.

Pointing a finger at Star Trek when talking about this code is easy. Even though Starfleet is a military-like organization it is still unreasonable to believe that Starfleet Academy teaches classes in a code language that is over 300+ years old, and based upon an alphabet of one language of one planet when a Federation that has thousands of member worlds and species. One could argue that, "maybe they are using an updated code," and that, "there are still some people in the US military today who still know Morse," even if they are a rare breed. The franchise does sometimes attempt to explain it away, most notably because Uhura is a communications specialist, or because two characters know the language from playing in an holographic program based on the 1930's. Regardless, Star Trek is not the first and not the last to perpetrate this sin.

Interstellar is just the latest incarnation of this trope, but I am sure there will be more. Whenever a ship loses communication or someone has to send a warning without talking it doesn't take much effort on the part of the writers to have their character drum on some pipes, wrap their fingers on a table, or blink in rapid succession. Tropes, by their very nature are a sort of "easy-out"for writers and audience members. Despite not knowing the code, most book readers, TV watchers, and movie goers understand what it is and what it is about. Morse Code, like other tropes, is a short-hand that writers and audience members agree upon, even if it is not always believable.

If McConaughey or Captain Kirk, or Mr. Burns want to communicate via dots and dashes, we will buy into it, especially in terms of our heroes. We want to believe that the heroic characters are better than us, smarter than us, have knowledge we don't have. After all, that's why their heroes. Besides what writer or audience member wants to sit through a five minute explanation of how two character developed their own language of knocking and scratching sounds from that time they spent together back in summer camp when they were both in grade school. Sometimes it's just easier to say... "Yeah, okay... Morse Code," because ITS A TROPE.

The Signs of Interstellar

"They should have sent a poet."

Today is my birthday. I'm turning the big 3-1, which is great and all, but it really starts to make a man think about what he will be leaving behind. When you are just about a quarter of the way through your life, it starts to make you wonder what the future will hold, and what your legacy will be. Along those lines I found myself in the movie theater preparing for the three-hour journey that was Christopher Nolan's newest odyssey into loud noises, Interstellar.

Now I want to start this article by saying that I actually "kinda" liked this movie and I would recommend it. I also want to put it out there that I am not going to censor my thoughts on it, so SPOILERS AHEAD. Go watch the movie and come back and read this article.

I think above all, I appreciate the sentiment the most. Nolan hits us pretty heavy with the metaphors. A dying world, a population literally regulated to toiling in the dirt, the understanding that we have lost our spirit of exploration, all very appropriate for today's world, where all we send into space anymore are robots and Richard Branson. It is certainly a movie that tries to capture the thrill of those early Apollo missions, (among other things) and it nearly succeeds. It is for this reason I want to really really like this movie. Instead I find myself only "just" liking it, because for me it all starts with the science.

Everyone from Michio Kaku to Neil DeGrasse Tyson seems to have nothing but praise for this movie, because of its realistic portrayals of time dilation, black holes, and even a visually accurate representation of a wormhole, and I can't argue with that, (because I have never seen a wormhole.) Theoretical physicist, Kip Throne, was one of the producers of the movie, and aside from a few of the more minor nit-picky details, (such as the fact that McConaughey's ship would have been flash fried and irradiated by the black hole's accretion disk before he ever got close enough to fall into it,) the movie holds close to ideas found in Einstein's theory of relativity. Even if those concepts are so basic (such as the relationship between time and gravity) they can literally be found in any Physics 101 textbook (well maybe not in Missouri.) Really, it's once we enter the black hole that thing start to break down... for me.

If only that answer could give us some Signs.

The movie goes to great lengths to tell us that we cannot observe what happens inside a black hole, and that is completely right. Once you enter a black hole all known laws of physics start to break down, and so does the movie's artistic license (in my opinion,) because that is really when we see the movie make the jump from the realm of science to the realm of convenient plot device. You see, it's not really the science I have the problem with. Instead, it is Nolan's inability to decide what kind of movie he wants to make. Is Interstellar meant to be a call for a re-invigoration of human exploration? Is it a homage to Kubric? Is it a story about the how love conquers all? Or is a Deus Ex M. Night Shyamalan-esque concoction of events that are trying to lead us up to some big "ah-ha" moment?

First of all, the "twist," of who Murphy's Ghost is, is pretty evident from about five-minutes into the movie, and the fact that Nolan hits us on the head with bread crumb after bread crumb feels a bit ham-fisted, especially for him. Even worse, for a movie that wants to claim to be true to science, the plot is ultimately resolved not by hard-facts and calculations, but by "the unknowable power of love," and it was at the point of Anne Hathaway's "love transcends time and space," speech that the movie took a real turn for me. If Nolan had dropped all the puzzle pieces and just made a movie actually based around exploration and science and not some contrived "twist" ending, the whole thing would have been tremendously improved, in my opinion.

I didn't make that past M. Night Shyamalan comparison lightly. The way the movie sets up the ending felt a lot like Signs, with seemingly unconnected incidents coming together for some kind of cathartic payoff, and ultimately, it is Shyamlan I feel bad for. After all, Nolan is pulling off the exact same thing that poor M. Night gets crap for, every single time. Now I am not comparing their directorial styles, because Nolan is the better director by far, but more and more it seems he is trying to rely on this convoluted plot-device where you shove everything into a convenient little box by the end so that the audience can go "Ohhhhh, I get it." (Except for the solar-powered UAV scene. That went nowhere.) Regardless it is beginning to feel forced. I mean at least in Signs we were told to accept it because of "God," but in Interstellar we accept it because of what? "God-like beings who are possibly future versions of humans?" I'm not even going to get into the Fry-like grandfather paradox that whole scenario creates, because it will make your head spin.

"I did do the nasty in the pasty, with wormholes."
-5th Dimensional Future Humans

Now, I am a person that is pretty good at suspending his disbelief. You want to have me accept all the technology in Guardians of the Galaxy? That's fine. It's a fun movie and I don't care if Starlords' ship conforms with all Newtonian and Einsteinian laws of physics, because the movie isn't billing itself as being a science conformist. What irks me about Interstellar is that the advanced alien/future-us-beings that placed the wormhole near Earth, and basically transported Matthew McConaughey across time and space at the end of the movie, could have just as used their 5th dimensional powers to send an email to Michael Caine with the secrets of the math formula he was working on. Why did they have to engage in a convoluted plan to get McConaughey sucked into a black hole so he could communicate complex mathematical ideas to his daughter via morse-code-watch? Yet, even that is not the worst sin in my opinion.

The message of the movie is not that humans are explorers, or the indomitability of the human spirit, or the necessity of space travel, or even that science is cool. The message of the movie is that "the power of love conquers all, (including physics,)" which I am pretty sure was the same message as those Twilight movies. Nolan setup a movie that was supposed to be one of the most realistic science fiction movies ever made and then solved everything because "love is a thing." You can't always make an apple pie from scratch and then eat it too. You have to make a decision between being a movie about hard science and being a movie that asks the audience to wish really hard so that they can save Tinkerbell. You can't try to adhere to science and then say that "love is a greater force than gravity," especially when the only justification given is: that we are capable of loving someone who has died. I also hate a lot of people who have died too. Could McConaughey have saved the world through hatred, because the same principles apply?

Still, even that might have been salved for me if the movie had tried to end more realistically. McConaughey should have been killed (or even trapped) by the black hole. Fine, you can give him his communication of love with his duaghter through that M.C. Escher black hole, but then he has to die. Nothing escapes a black hole. Then you can end it by seeing Anne Hathaway's character arrive at her planet, and because of the time dilation she experienced while using the black hole to slingshot her there, she finds a thriving human colony. Those colonist could then tell her the story of how humanity was saved. Hell, you could even name the settlement Cooperstown or something like that, with a statue and everything, (if you really wanted to go for the gusto.) but they didn't do any of that. When the movie chose to save McConaughey from the black hole by 5th dimensional space magic, that is when Nolan shows his true colors of what he thinks is more important, science or happy endings.

"Nothing, not even light itself, can escape the forces of
a black hole... except Matthew McConaughey." -Carl Sagan

Science, and in particular space exploration, are the keys to humanity's future. I have always believed that and will continue to believe that even after they shoot my cold dead corpse out into space inside a proton torpedo casing while Scotty plays the bagpipes. Yet, I feel as if lately we have begun to move away from our pioneering roots. In that regard I was moved by this movie and its illustration of that plight. I want us to start going out among the stars again: space stations, moon colonies, Mars colonies, the works. We are quickly approaching the point in our history where we will have the technology to accomplish these amazing feats. In fact, tomorrow, the European Space Agency will be making the first ever soft-landing on a comet. That is amazing, but most people nowadays are barely aware it is even happening. I worry that even if the technology becomes viable for extended man space travel, will humanity still choose to to turn a blind eye to the stars. We need more movies like Interstellar to show us the necessity of space exploration, and the potential of humanity's future.

I will wrap this up, as this article is going almost as long as a Nolan movie. The truth is I did actually like the movie. Unfortunately, much like Inception I found Interstellar to be an enjoyable movie experience but not something I feel the need to repeat or even purchase when the inevitable blu-ray arrives on store shelves. The one thing Nolan was able to do was put a lot of quotable sound-bites in this movie, and as cliche as some of them are, they are also very true. So on this day, my 31st birthday, I will end by quoting Nolan, "Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here." If I can have one legacy for myself and the people of my generation, it is the hope that humanity will take that idea to heart, and embrace all the possibilities that accompany it.