Interstellar and the Cosmic Power of Love

A number of weeks ago, I hosted a movie at my beloved local independent cinema, Images. As a small part of a fundraising campaign to renovate and refit the theater, Images Cinema asked a handful of community member superfans to curate a film and invite friends. I chose the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, starring Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and others, because it is thrilling and visually stunning, I wanted to see it on the big screen again—and because my twelve-year-old son agreed to watch it with me. Most of all, I wanted to experience the film in community, because it poses a question that has stayed with me ever since my first viewing in a Boston cineplex years ago: what if love is the center of the universe? Watching the film with a packed room of neighbors and friends, including two rows of middle schoolers, I was reminded that the film’s scientific quest is also deeply mystical.

Matthew McConaughey’s character Cooper leaves his children Murph and Tom behind on a climate-ravaged Earth to join a desperate mission to save the human race by charting a livable planet to colonize. At first glance, the premise sounds like an Elon Musk space-fantasy project—raising the danger of interpreting the film as if Earth were disposable and the march of colonization could simply continue off-planet. And yet, as I’ve written about many times in this newsletter, apocalyptic, world-ending scenarios for me primarily reckon with how we live now rather than in the future. The film’s powerful themes of love, loss, and space travel inspire me not to escape reality, but to live a more loving life amid it—all while trusting that the universe itself might be guided by love. Cooper is driven by a sense of duty to humanity and by the thrill of adventure to accept a last-ditch mission, but it’s love for his family, and Murph in particular, that fuels his grief and eventual heroic quest to return.

At first, Cooper remains firmly on the side of reason, convinced that science can save humanity. But as the journey unfolds, the logic of science begins to clash with the boundless quality of love. Their ship, the Endurance, visits one planet, only to lose a crew member, be crushed by 4,000-foot waves, and discover upon return to their base ship that, due to the gravitational pull of a nearby black hole, 23 years have passed though they spent only three hours on the planet. Two more planets remain for the team to visit, but their fuel resources will only last for a trip to one.

Photo by NASA Hubble Space Telescope on Unsplash

A choice needs to be made. Anne Hathaway’s character Amelia Brand wants to visit another planet named “Edmunds,” after an astronaut who traveled there. Edmunds’s planet appears to transmit hopeful data about potential habitability—but Brand is also biased because she is in love with Dr. Edmunds and hopes he might still be alive. Cooper chooses instead to visit a planet where Matt Damon’s character Dr. Mann has been living, but it turns out to be frozen and uninhabitable. When they wake Dr. Mann from decades of cryo-sleep, his behavior quickly becomes murderous. His mission failed, and he has gone insane. Cooper’s love for Murph becomes the thread that connects them across space and time, exemplified in a stunning sequence at the end through a four-dimensional cube called a tesseract. Nolan explores scientifically, on a big-budget adventure screen, what is also inherently a mystical insight: that love might transcend space and time, and connect us even when we feel galaxies apart.

Dr. Brand perceives something that Cooper does not yet: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends space and time.” Cooper has chosen to leave his family behind hoping to save humanity. Dr. Brand wants to go to Edmunds’s planet because of her love for Edmunds. Cooper, however, chooses logic. Science and love are set as conflicting, yet after the disastrous visit to Dr. Mann’s planet, Brand is vindicated. Now, with fuel reserves low and the mission’s failure imminent, Cooper chooses to sacrifice himself to give Dr. Brand one more chance to reach Edmunds’s planet. Cooper sheds weight from the Endurance ship by detaching himself in the smaller Ranger ship, just in time for Dr. Brand and the Endurance to use the black hole’s gravitational pull to gain the speed needed to continue.

Dr. Brand slingshots toward Edmunds’s planet and Cooper heads into the black hole (along with a robot named TARS). But instead of death, the black hole sends Cooper into a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube with space for Cooper, a three-dimensional being, to communicate across time to Murph. Throughout the film, we’re introduced to a concept of “Them,” future humans who communicate through space-time to guide the characters. “They” constructed the tesseract for Cooper to communicate to Murph. With TARS’s help, he figures out a way to relay NASA’s coordinates, and pass on information retrieved from within the black hole—new codes that will help Murph solve the scientific problem of gravity and save the future of humanity.

The science here is fun and complex. Kip Thorne, the scientist who advised Christopher Nolan, later wrote a book entitled The Science of Interstellar. He explains the idea of a tesseract as a cube in four dimensions, the physics of black holes, the possibility of beings from the future who created the tesseract, and more. I find the science fascinating, but what moves me about this film is that science doesn’t explain everything. In the end, it’s the love that Cooper has for Murph that sets in motion the science to work. It’s the love that Dr. Brand has for Edmunds that convinces her that his planet is the best habitable one. And it’s not love without reason—it’s love and logic combined, with the humility to know the limitations of logic and the transcending power of love.

The Franciscan scientist and theologian Ilia Delio is one of my intellectual heroes, because she boldly insists that our theology must keep pace with science. She insists that the meaning of Christ must be an evolutionary, loving reality. One of Delio’s mystical heroes is the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who affirmed Love as the center of the universe: Love “is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mysterious of the cosmic forces…. The physical structure of the universe is love.”

But what could this mean? For Delio, following Teilhard, it is the energy of union amid ever greater complexity within the unfolding universe. I don’t pretend to understand this very well, but if evolution is a process of ever greater complexity and unity—whether adapted traits in animals, consciousness itself, or the ongoing expansion of the universe—then one way to describe that energy is to call it love. Here’s a quote to read slowly from Delio: “If love is the principal energy of life, the whole within every whole, and evolution has direction in the unfolding of consciousness, then it is not difficult to see that evolution is the movement toward greater wholeness and consciousness—that is, the rise of love.” From a mystical perspective, then, it is not too much to say that love is the force that holds the universe together.

Love holding the universe together may seem like a lofty concept, and it is, but we don’t need to survive a black hole to discover it. Instead, it’s as accessible as showing up at my local movie theater on a Monday night, sharing a bowl of popcorn with friends, and experiencing an epic space thriller across generations.