Listen to me when I say that love isn't something we invented.
It's... observable, powerful, it has to mean something.
Christopher Nolan's science fiction epic, Interstellar, has sparked many discussions since its release
for a story that deals with complex science this doesn't come as a surprise
but I found that aside from the topics that are addressed most often such as explaining the plot, discussing scientific accuracy,
debating the role of technology and artificial intelligence and drawing parallels with
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the dust bowl era. There hasn't been that much real
discussion on one of the more controversial moments from the film. The scene in which Brand
suggests that love might be more real and powerful than we previously thought
Maybe it means something more something, we can't
yet
understand maybe it's
some evidence some
artifact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. Love is the one thing
we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space
Maybe this topic often gets overlooked because of the slightly awkward writing or could it perhaps be that
we are unwilling to explore an attempt at making a sincere
statement about an intimate subject that is not rooted in post-modern
deconstruction or science devoid of the subjective human experience or as Aaron Stewart-Ahn and puts it in his
fantastic article on Interstellar,
Have we become more terrified of intimacy than interstellar travel?
My main goal for this video is therefore to explore how Nolan's views the connection between time and love in
Interstellar. There's going to be some science but because
that topic has already been covered so much I'm just going to stick to the basics that are needed to understand the world of interstellar
It is well known that Nolan
collaborated with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to base the film on actual science. They deliberated on things like
wormholes and black holes but for the purpose of this video I'm going to focus on time what is time in Interstellar?
To answer this question Nolan again turned to science which unfortunately doesn't provide a clear answer.
Time is the thing
that everyone knows
intimately
until you ask them to tell you about it.
There is basically no aspect, of time which I feel we fully understand.
Thanks to Einstein and his Theory of General Relativity, we do know that time and space are connected.
Establishing our experienced universe in four dimensions, also referred to as space-time. One important discovery of this
is that our experience of the past, the present, and the future is actually just an illusion when, in fact time
exists all at once. But unlike the spatial dimensions within which
we can move around freely, we seem to be imprisoned by time.
Always experiencing only one slide of space-time which, we generally call the now
We are however always moving forward in time from what we see as the past towards what
we see as the future. We call this linearity the arrow of time. In short, the arrow of time most likely
exists because of entropy. The movement from order to disorder that was set in motion by the Big Bang.
Another important discovery, one that is especially relevant to Interstellar
is that time is not experienced the same by everyone and is strongly
influenced by gravity which makes time go slower for those who are closer to a strong gravitational force.
Scientists confirmed this by using highly
accurate atomic clocks. They found that if they placed one of the clocks higher, further away from earth's gravity,
let's say from the floor to a table, time moved a little bit
faster. The difference here, of course, is infinitely small but when
we look at a black hole for example, which has immense gravity, the difference becomes far more significant
This is in a nutshell the known science behind the concept of time and pretty much
establishes the rules of time for Interstellar. "Time is relative, okay
it can stretch and it can squeeze but
it can't run backwards
just can't. The only thing that can move across dimensions like time is gravity." It is interesting to look at how Nolan
incorporates this knowledge in Interstellar. For aside from the obvious use of time and time dilation in the story
Nolan is known for using his films to make meta statements on
filmmaking and the act of watching a film.
In inception, for example, the dream world is created in pretty much the same way that
films are made. There is a director, a producer
a production designer, an actor, and the studio who all work together to deliver an experience to the audience
that impacts their lives in some way or another. I think that in Interstellar
Nolan wanted to make a similar statement. A statement about the experience and
manipulation of time, both in film and in real life. For starters the first act of Interstellar is
surprisingly linear compared to some of Nolan's other films, like in most films time is compressed but still
experienced linearly by the viewer. The story unfolds to us in the same way that it does for the characters.
Nolan even employs the traditional cut to black to show the passage of time. An
editing technique he almost never uses. It's not until
we enter the wormhole and are introduced to Einstein's Theory of Relativity
that time becomes distorted not just for the characters in the film but
also for the audience as from this moment the film breaks up our linear experience of the story by
cross-cutting scenes and jumping back and forth in time while
however still being limited to the established rules of time. For even a
medium like film that can manipulate the experience of time is still bound by its arrow.
Always showing us a story one frame at a time.
Besides the scientific foundation of Interstellar, Nolan
also tends to ground his films within a reality that is built from familiar elements. Taking everyday
experiences and enlarging them building them
into the bigger story. Again going back to Inception when establishing the rules of the dream world and the concept of
extraction, Nolan used universally
experienced elements to make a science fiction concept feel relatable to the audience. Such as the kick and the idea that
dreams feel real while, we're in them "It's only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange."
In Interstellar he does this by drawing on our universal experience of being imprisoned by time, which is
beautifully symbolized by the clock shaped Endurance that while moving in infinite space
binds the crew within its limits and Hans Zimmer's score which during high tension scenes
becomes a ticking clock at exactly 60 beats per minute.
We also see this in what is perhaps the most devastating
scene in the film, the moment when Cooper and Brand come back from Miller's planet to find out that
23 years have passed in the mere hours they were gone. In what feels like the blink of an eye,
Cooper's children have aged decades. What was once their future is now a
series of
memories that he was not a part of and we too as the audience are deprived of being part of their story like
we were in the first act of the film. Why do we find this moment so profoundly moving? I'd argue that this is because
we do in fact
experience this dilation of time and subsequent feeling of loss in our own lives.
Take for example the stories of people who are forced to stay in one place for a long period of time.
Or stories of those who went on some kind of journey. Coming home for them is rarely so much about the spatial
element as it is about the passing of time.
It is the realization that life has moved on in your absence, it is knowing that
no matter how you move within the spatial dimensions, you cannot escape time. All of us
experience this to some extent when we reconnect with old friends or family members, when
we revisit places where we might have lived years ago or when we get back from a long trip.
We find out that things have changed or perhaps even that, we have changed. That
we are no longer in touch with that which once felt familiar.
Again not because of changes in space but because of this passing of time that forever dooms us to experience
fundamental loss. Whether this loss is as
significant and traumatizing as missing out on the lives of your loved ones or as insignificant as
missing out on a moment of a movie after going to the bathroom. All of us
inescapably suffer under arrow of time.
In Interstellar, this harsh reality of time is taken to the extreme by enlarging it through the science of
gravitational time dilation. Yet it still shows us something essential about the way in which we experience time in our own lives. lives?
So what resistance can we offer against such a
relentless force of nature? The short answer is that we cannot escape time but
we can transcend it and we are doing so increasingly. This is because human beings have the arguably unique
ability to defy time by
documenting language and images. For a long time the most important way to do this was through books.
Books allow us to reach back in time and access
moments from the past. Not just to experience stories of old but
also to develop a sense of cultural history and pass on ideas and
technologies. Just imagine what today's society would have looked like
were it not for this vast accumulation of the past.
Today we revisit the past through photographs, audio
recordings, music, and film. This increased ability to transcend time is referred to as
atemporality. One consequence of atemporality
is that our ever-growing access to the past is unbinding us from time. A development that
Interstellar takes to the extreme with the Bulk beings. The Bulk beings had complete access to time but it was exactly this
unboundedness that became their disadvantage.
For them, time is happening all at once from beginning to end
infinitely.
Pinpointing a specific moment must for them
be like what
pinpointing one specific drop in an endless ocean is for us. That is unless we have some way to create a
connection which is exactly what the tesseract
was for. Now to fully understand what happened inside the tesseract, we first have to understand
a different film that clearly inspired
Interstellar, and that is the 1962 french film La Jetée.
La Jetée is a
30-minute science fiction story that is told entirely through photographs
linked together by a
narrator as if the story was already at hand in its fullness from the very beginning. After a third world war
destroyed Paris and forced its people to live on the ground to escape radiation, a group of
scientists explore time travel to learn from the past to help their situation in the present. They
experimented on prisoners but found that most of them went insane when
unbound from time. Just like the Bulk beings in Interstellar, they simply
couldn't find a moment to connect to. They were
eventually able to send one man back to before the war because of a strong connection he had to a
specific memory of a woman's face.
The narrator explains "[French] Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments."
"Only later do they become memorable"
"by the scars they leave."
"That face was to be the only image of peacetime to survive the war."
"He'd often wondered if he'd really seen it, or just invented that tender moment to counter the moments of madness to follow."
When we compare this to Interstellar it becomes clear that the tesseract is not about Cooper it's about Murph. Time is
transcended by her. She is the one
haunted by her childhood. By a memory of her dad leaving his young daughter in her bedroom with a
ghost she didn't understand. In the beginning of the film, Cooper even tells her
"Your mom used to say something to me I never quite understood."
"She said now..."
"we just hear... the memories our kids."
Notice, also our Murph is still wearing Cooper's jacket decades after he's gone. It
was her, not Cooper's connection to the past that gave the Bulk beings a specific anchor point for communication.
A connection ultimately determined by love.
Cooper realized that what he found in the tesseract was not his love for Murph it
was her love for him that created the bridge.
Understanding that is what gave him the confidence to code the data
into the watch. The watch that he knew she would come back for because he gave it to her.
Just as in La Jetée, Interstellar uses love as a supposedly
quantifiable force to navigate the dimension of time. Now all this is not to say that love is something
supernatural or has its own dimension
or that it is the answer to all of our issues. It is simply as
Aaron Stewart-Ahn puts it that "Our lives are a strange journey through time." A
construct that is as intimate as it is alien. Forever binding us yet
always eluding us. In time we find the essence of our mortality. The confrontation with our own annihilation.
Always looming in the distance.
interstellar shows how love is inexplicably tangled up in this part of life
we do not really understand. Not just in a sentimental way but more so in the deep sense of grief, of
mournfulness that inevitably follows as we pass through time. Frame by frame
moment by moment
always losing it. Against this sorrow, Interstellar gives us not science, but poetry.
"Do not go, gentle into that good night. Old
"age should burn and rave a closer day."
"Rage, rage."
"Against the dying of the light." This poem by Dylan Thomas is often
interpreted as a poem about the struggle against death.
But in the light of Interstellar I would argue that it is about the struggle against time.
Against our cosmos being driven towards nothingness by entropy. The true
antagonist of the film. As Professor Brand explains "I'm not afraid of death."
"I'm an old physicist."
"I'm afraid of time." It seems that the only thing
we can do is commit the memory all that which will be lost. Be it the sounds of Earth in deep space or the
testimonies about our lives. And in doing so keep pushing the boundaries of this strange dimension, this
temporal frontier waiting to be explored.