Transcending Time Through Love — Lessons From Interstellar
“Listen to me when I say that love isn’t something we invented, it’s observable and powerful, it has to mean something…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.” — Dr. Brand, Interstellar.
Few movies have touched me as Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. I’ve watched it tens of times, and after each viewing, come away deeply moved, questioning the reason for my existence and always, always in tears.
In tears at how beautiful, profound, deep and full of meaning this movie is. It’s certainly ahead of its time, and may not be everyone’s cup of tea; sci-fi rarely is. But if you haven’t yet seen it, I highly recommend that you do.
Interstellar explores the significance of our lives as humans on Earth, the future our children will excitingly live out, and links this to love, the hypothesized bridge that will connect us to them or as the movie so expertly explores, them to us through time.
Set in a dystopian future, we follow a crew of astronauts, who travel across the stars into an unknown and far-reaching galaxy, to look for a new, habitable homeworld for us. Earth is dying. It’s an endeavor in skill and a race against time, to figure out how to get the last remaining humans out and transport them to a new life across the stars.
Time And Love In Interstellar
Nolan uniquely explores the connection between time and love, in a way that has never before been seen in film. His collaboration with theoretical physicist Kip Thorne to make sure that the movie projected actual physics, was outstanding.
They based the plot especially to showcase Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, and tackled several scientific theories, from wormholes to black holes, and gravity to time dilation, with splendid accuracy. The result was a beautifully dramatic but realistic treatment of these complex, groundbreaking theories of physics, which won praise from the scientific fraternity on how close to science the movie was.
What truly moved me, however, was how well the concept of time and how we are total prisoners of it, was treated as a running theme throughout the movie. Time, that which we know so intimately, but which we cannot clearly explain. Time, that which we experience every day of our lives, but cannot manipulate or control as we do space and matter. Time.
Thanks to Einstein and his breakthrough discoveries, we do know that time and space are connected. We live in a four-dimensional world, also known, as Einstein first theorized, as space-time.
Our experience of the past, present, and future is an illusion because time ingeniously exists all at once in space-time. The past, present, and future will ever exist. So according to the laws of time, we have always been born, we are always being born, and we will always be born.
And although we freely move through space in our dimension of space-time, we are imprisoned by time and restricted to only experience one slide of the space-time continuum, which we call the present. We will never experience the past again once it’s gone and we can never experience the future before we experience the now. In our dimension, we are always moving forward through space-time, and never backward.
We also know, thanks to Einstein, that time is not experienced the same by everyone, and that the force of gravity slows down time. The closer one is to a gravitational force, the slower time moves for them.
The Human Condition And The Passage Of Time
“Time is relative. It can stretch, and it can squeeze, but it can’t move backward…it just can’t.” — Dr. Brand, Interstellar.
Interstellar begins linearly, much in the way we experience time in our daily lives. But the plot changes as soon as the astronauts enter the wormhole; time suddenly becomes distorted. Nolan enables us to experience the past, the future, and the present, all at once. We see the “first handshake” with the so-called “bulk beings”as the crew of the spaceship Endurance traverse the wormhole, only to later discover that it was, in fact, Cooper, trying to reach out to Dr. Brand, as he traveled back through the same wormhole after the collapse of the black hole tesseract.
We also see how the closer a person is to a force of gravity exerted, the slower time moves. This concept is dramatically explored in the scene showing the devastating effects of time dilation near the black hole Gargantua; 23 years on the Endurance pass in mere hours on Miller’s planet, which orbits this immense gravity black hole that slows down time.
The consequence of this is that when Cooper and Dr. Brand return to the Endurance from this planet, their colleague Doyle has aged 23 years while waiting for them to come back and so have their families. In a devastating scene that always has me sobbing, Cooper accesses his messages to find that his children have grown up, and are living a future, of which he’s now not a part. His son is now a father, his daughter who finally agrees to speak to him, explains how she coped in a life without him, and how he sadly missed it all. It all just screams loss, incomprehensible human loss.
And this is what gets me; that life can and will move on without your presence. How places you were once a part of can change beyond recognition when you move away and eventually come back to them. How people who once loved you, who you couldn’t imagine a future without, can and do often become strangers over time. How if you knew how precious that first date would be in your future memory, you would capture the whole experience and if possible, bottle it. How ten years after your loved one has died, you suddenly wake up in a sweat wondering how you’ve managed to live life without them, and yet on the day of their death, you couldn’t, couldn’t, imagine doing so.
No matter how we move within our dimension of space-time, we cannot and haven’t yet figured how to, escape time. The passage of time dooms us to experience this profound loss. No one is exempt from this arrow of time, and we must all learn to live with this as a fundamental aspect of the human condition.
So If We Can’t Escape Time, What’s The Point Of It All?
We can’t escape time, but we can transcend it, we can defy it. Defy it through language and images. As a civilization, we have ingeniously passed on ideas and knowledge of our shared history through technology. We revisit the past through voice recordings, the written word, film, music, and photographic images. We can now experience and traverse time this way; this fleeting access briefly unbinds us from time.
In the 5th dimension in Interstellar, we see that time exists all at once. The black hole tesseract shows us what appears to be Cooper transcending time and connecting with his daughter Murph through to our dimension. He uses the force of gravity, which according to known science, can transcend time. He’s the ghost that causes the books to fall off the shelf, which at the beginning of the movie, his daughter encounters but fails to understand.
Murph connects with her father Cooper by always carrying her love for him in her heart. Despite her bitterness at him for leaving, she still carries memories of him — so poignantly shown in the movie by the fact that she’s almost always wearing his jacket years after he’s gone. She thinks about him still, fondles the watch he left her lovingly and remembers him deeply.
She connects this her childhood bedroom, to the last specific memory of her father, to when they were last together in our dimension. Murph does this in such a tangible and robust way that the love she carries in her heart transcends time and seemingly dimensions.
And this is what Cooper latches onto — love — and uses as the bridge through which he communicates with his daughter Murph. The watch that Cooper left her, and which she came back for, simply because he, her father, gave it to her, is what he confidently codes the data garnered from the 5th dimension into. Murph interprets this data, and applies it to science, saving humans on Earth.
How often have we experienced this wondrous and inexplicable connection? How often have we thought of someone, fondly and deeply and suddenly have them phone us? How often have we cried tears of grief after the loss of a loved one and as if by magic, see apparitions of them, or even smell their distinct scent wafting by us? How often have we had dreams of loved ones guiding us through an awkward situation, at the very time we are undergoing that exact situation in real life?
“You’re Mum used to say something to me I never quite understood. She said, now we’re just here to be memories for our kids.” — Cooper, Interstellar.
Interstellar shows how love is bound to time, through sentimentalism, grief and the eventual acceptance that our loved ones exist after death, can see us, and even communicate with us in paranormal ways from their dimension. I always remember my Mum whenever I wear her favorite scarf or cook the meal she loved to cook most or watch the TV program she loved to view or read her letters to me. I always remember my Dad, a veteran of the army, whenever I watch World War II movies, or read books on strategy, which he loved to do.
Interstellar shows us that there’s hope, despite our end always looming in the distance, our mortality ever calling to us. It shows us that time is our enemy, and that we are constantly struggling against it. But it also shows us that we can memorialize as best as we can all that will eventually be lost, and in the meantime live our best lives, so that we can be fond memories for those who come after us.
Take many pictures with your children for one day it’ll be all they’ll have to remember you. Write letters to your children for one day those words will be all they’ll have to cling to. Spend time with loved ones, as much as you can, tell them you love them with abandon; because one day, those will be their memories of you. Make that move, no matter how much it scares you; one day you won’t be here to make it. Travel to places you’ve only dreamed of. Help in situations that require your assistance. Do what makes you fundamentally happy. Live.
The one thought that gives me comfort is that this temporal frontier, time, which we don’t yet know how to explore nor escape, nor understand, may one day be conquered by our children in exciting and awe-inspiring ways. Who knows, our children may reach out to us across the dimensions, even maybe through time travel, and show us what beautiful lives they’re living thanks to our collective legacies. I’m an optimist at heart, and this is what I choose to believe will happen.
