An image of Pluto captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.
It’s been 15 years since Pluto was unceremoniously disbarred from the solar system’s official planets—do you miss it yet?
In 2006 when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) sealed the fate of our most diminutive and remote former planet, callously relegating it to “dwarf” status, the move struck a nerve in the astronomy community and beyond. Really, anyone with the heart to root for the little guy saw what was happening: The most irrelevant of the planets, with little claim to distinction among the solar entities, was getting kicked to the curb and bullied to the lower rungs of the solar system. Just like that, our collective years of committing Pluto facts to memory had turned to dust.
The news didn’t exactly shake mankind to its core; it did, however, ignite a conversation (and sparked a protest or two) about the nature of our investment in space exploration. For all of the scientific hand-wringing over Pluto’s status—so much, in fact, that the IAU assigned a committee to officially define the term “planet” before expelling Pluto—another conversation aimed to answer the question of why any of this mattered in the first place.
Writer, filmmaker, Pluto-protest-participant, and recent Tisch Grad Film alum Tim Delaney is one of the rare non-astronomers still pondering Pluto’s fate. His award-winning screenplay The Plutonians is based entirely on the IAU’s conference that ultimately determined Pluto’s planetary status, and the script’s farcical nature lays bare the absurdity of the ‘06 proceedings. The Plutonians has received two major awards propelling its production forward: the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Feature Film Award, given each year to a student or recent alum from Tisch’s Kanbar Institute of Film and Television to produce a feature-length narrative that challenges stereotypes about science; and Sundance Institute’s Sloan Commissioning Grant, a $20,000 cash award. With the project set to head into its next stages of development, we spoke with Delaney about his affection for Pluto’s story, the deep-dive research process that birthed his lead characters, and why the debate about a name could mean so much to people.
Writer and filmmaker Tim Delaney
It’s one thing to participate in, arguably, a tongue-in-cheek protest in defense of Pluto’s planetary status; it’s another to adopt this story as your film’s premise. Why has this story endured in you for this long?
I think the thing that kind of glued this to me in the first place is that it was a weird split: There was the pageantry of protesting something that is utterly inconsequential, but also there was this emotional knee jerk reaction that I related to—this feeling of, “Aw, Pluto, the little guy, he got a bad deal there.” There’s an innate feeling that it was the little kid on the playground that didn’t get picked for kickball. So the thing that struck me from the very beginning is that those two things exist simultaneously. The knowledge that this doesn’t impact you in any way...but there’s still a residual emotional connection that everyone kind of feels.
The thing that makes us feel not alone in space is the naming of things. We think of Jupiter as the big mighty planet out there, and Mars is like our brother—all those sort of things create this idea of a bountiful neighborhood that we’re a part of. When you take something out of that it reveals how much we rely on that to get the sense that we’re not alone. That’s what the script is about at the end of the day.
What were some of the more memorable aspects of the research process that helped shape the story for The Plutonians?
It was really fun to read the many reactions and takes people had. It's an important moment and there are a lot of factors that go into it, but there isn’t a definitive history of what went down in real life.
In real life Pluto is not a lot like the other planets, but it’s unique, so it is named a planet when it is discovered. We then discover a ton of other things that are like it, specifically Eris, which is roughly the same size, farther away, but kind of forces the issue: If Pluto is a planet, what about all these other things? The IAU, which is like the UN for astronomy, are the people responsible for deciding what is a planet. There was no definition for what a planet is, so they form this committee that debates for two years, back and forth, and cannot land on a definition. Finally they hit on something. There is then a conference—which is where my film takes place—in Prague and occurs every three years over two weeks. This committee brings their definition there, and it’s a surprise announcement. They announce the definition, and people just hate it. It was supposed to be, here is what we came up with, there you go. And instead, a bunch of different scientists were saying, “This is terrible, I’m writing my own.” So the two-week conference becomes this pitching battle with all these different factions trying to get their definition through.
Now, there’s another interesting angle, which is that six months before this conference, NASA spent $750 million dollars to launch a probe to Pluto that was going to take nine years to get there. It’s six months into a very expensive, very long journey. Ultimately there are just so many fun facts that informed my script.
Especially for non-scientific onlookers, it can be difficult to discern how serious the debate around Pluto is. Your film is farcical in nature, but is the script a bending of the real-life events or a reflection of it?
The characters themselves are inventions; there are no real scientists that I’m using here. The genesis of this story was that a Pluto expert wakes up one morning and his planet’s not a planet. It becomes clear to him how much that makes people not care about the thing he’s spent his entire life studying. But when I did research into how Pluto got disbarred and how the actual scientists reacted to it and how bitterly contentious it was… Well, there was this one guy who was heavily influential for my main character. He’s heavily involved with the probe that they launched to Pluto, and you can look at the statements that he put out where he says, “This is a disgrace; it’s a humiliation. History is going to laugh at you.” It is vehement, venomous, personal [commentary].
Through the Sundance Institute Sloan Commissioning Grant I was able to reach out to a variety of science advisors, and one in particular who is a Pluto expert. When I showed him the script I didn’t tell him that’s who I modeled this character on, but he said, “Oh, you nailed this guy. This is him to a tee.” I’m avoiding mentioning names here, but it was such a divisive issue within a usually insular community.
This film, and the Pluto debate at large, could easily be interpreted as a kind of existential metaphor. Is this debate ultimately about our own desperate search for meaning as much as it is about Pluto’s planetary status?
Strip away all the science and there’s still an emotional, true thing that I can hold onto. The hook that is pulling me through this long journey to make this film is in thinking about the dedication of the people who spend their entire lives studying something that does not know about them, and cannot care about them. Pluto is one object in an infinite sea of objects. While there is an almost limitless amount of information to study in our environment—for example if you’re a geologist, or if you study plant life—ultimately there is a finite amount of things to catalogue on Earth. That is not true of space—the universe is infinite. It is a choice to say, “I will study this one thing.” Ultimately you could have studied anything and it all kind of would be the same. You might draw grander conclusions that have value, but the choice to study one pixel on an infinite screen is fascinating.
I relate to this immensely as a writer, because there’s a similar [act of] planting a flag in an arbitrary location that you believe is meaningful. The uncertainty of it: Is what I’m doing meaningful? Will anyone care about this? That is very much part of the creative process of making this film and it’s what the film is about. I think a lot of people can relate to that.
