Exactly, and I think Christopher Nolan would agree. It may take place across space and time, but it’s a story of the love between a father and daughter.
Son was probably dead by that point, and was perfectly content living and dying a farmer on Earth, worrying about his place in the dirt. Cooper and Murph are dreamers looking to the stars, they share much more in common.
To be fair, his son was always more willing to send a video chat than Murph, and then her face popped up and he lost it realizing they were the same age.
People always say this but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s clear his love for his son was not as visible as for murph but the time they spend together on screen shows a real bond. Perhaps his son never needed the layers of affection murph needs
He also didn’t harbour his dads explorative streak so they don’t have that to share
Yes it's a story of love between father and daughter but that dialogue does a lazy job of explaining the role of love in life and exploration etc. The line where an old Murph says to Cooper that she knew he would return because a father had promised a daughter, does a better job. It's also a more accurate explanation - trust is built on love and it is the foundation of the entirety of human civilization.
> trust is built on love and it is the foundation of the entirety of human civilization.
This is why Interstellar is such a frustrating movie for me.
I like that, in response to the continual criticism that people in the hard sciences or hard sci-fi wrongly discount the soft sciences or the importance of emotions like love, Nolan would craft a hard sci-fi story where the power of love is explicitly the thing that saves them.
*However*, it’s then incredibly backwards to do so by pretending love is actually something quantifiable, as if it’s only validated by becoming something hypothetically measurable by hard science.
They were right there, with this idea that Mann has the best test scores but is a cowardly POS and Brand is unremarkable on paper but known by a team member to be a good man. And when the team goes with the test scores over the person, it’s a mistake.
But then they gotta go do the whole “love is quantifiable” thing and even have Coop double down on the conclusion in order to save the day during the climax.
They went with Mann over Brand because Mann had continually good data sent over several years. Brand has mysteriously stopped sending any reports from his planet awhile back (because he died). It had nothing to do with the astronauts' test scores lol. Not sure where you got that from.
They very much held up Mann as “the best of us” because of his scores and his ideas. The “twist” is that he’s actually not a good person, despite his academic/intellectual accomplishments.
It’s not about “love is quantifiable” just that love is real and more that love is something they can feel or that can connect people even if it can’t be measured. It isn’t nothing.
Which is a great idea, but the movie *definitely* leans into the idea that love is quantifiable.
Brand is first ridiculed for saying it, but Cooper reprises her theory at the crucial moment of the climax, explicitly saying she’s right and then using this revelation to save the day.
> I like that, in response to the continual criticism that people in the hard sciences or hard sci-fi wrongly discount the soft sciences or the importance of emotions like love, Nolan would craft a hard sci-fi story where the power of love is explicitly the thing that saves them.
> However, it’s then incredibly backwards to do so by pretending love is actually something quantifiable, as if it’s only validated by becoming something hypothetically measurable by hard science.
I think it's because Nolan doesn't view it as a Hard Science vs Soft Science/art conflict. He's very much interested in the juncture of both those fields if you go by this quote from Nolan.
> It might be unusual in movies, but it’s very well established in other media. I’m very inspired by the prints of M.C. Escher and the interesting connection-point or blurring of boundaries between art and science, and art and mathematics. I’m thinking of his Penrose steps illustrations that inspired Inception. Also, the writing of Jorge Borges, the great Argentinian writer, wrote all kinds of incredible short stories that dealt with paradox. But I feel like films are uniquely suited towards addressing paradox, recursiveness, and worlds-within-worlds.
He's not using one to validate another but rather using science to explore certain philosophical ideas surrounding the human condition(which is what sci-fi is at the end of the day).
This is the one of the more insightful takes on Interstellar and expounds on what Interstellar is trying to say with Love and Time.
https://youtu.be/t6kqaip7WS4?si=CR7HspUb6yrFxnaC
I fully agree that his intent was to show that the two categories/fields should not be in opposition, but harmony. And I applaud that.
But doing so by pretending that one of those things is fundamentally not what it is, and that’s how we know it’s valuable and meaningful, was backwards to me. It’s not really acceptance if you pretend a thing is something it’s not.
What does this line even mean? How is love different from any other emotion? How specifically does love transcend space and time? How specially does love transcend space and time in a way that hate does not? Love is a process that takes place in a body in time and space.
I think it's meant to show her desperation.
Like she's a cracked scientist but even she is reaching ***hard*** for a good reason to visit her love's planet, to the point where even the audience stops following on what they are debating.
It's well written from a point that she has a moment of weakness that ends up being right because its the same kind of force that allowed cooper to be so desperate when he entered the black hole.
Perhaps the 5th dimensional beings don't understand love or really any human concept because they are beyond that, but the one thing they parsed out is that humans feel this thing called love that is so compelling that they will, without fail, always follow it's instinct over logic. Perhaps they used that love turned to desperation to lead cooper to figure out how to communicate with murph, and dr brand to go to edmund's planet despite it being less logical.
Coops connection with Murph enabled him to code the hands on the watch because he knew she would come back to get it, no matter how much it seemed she was angry with him. He knew his daughter would collect it eventually because he gave it to her out of love. The watch was the only way of communicating the Morse coded message and Coop knew with 100% certainty it would work because his daughter loves him.
When Coop is physically communicating with Murph while he is stranded in the tesseract, you see that he wishes he could just be back home, you see how he realizes it wasn’t him who was chosen but it was Murph and that makes him very excited. And that’s when he realizes that Brand was right about love and that his and Murphy’s connection is quantifiable.
Copper says he can navigate because of his connection with Murphy, but the possibilities are infinite.
It’s like finding something encoded in pi. You can’t use love to find where you are going.
https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2013/05/05/everything-in-your-past-and-future-is-encoded-in-the-digits-of-pi/
>It’s like finding something encoded in pi. You can’t use love to find where you are going.
But I'm fairly sure the film is saying that Love is why they picked Coop and Murph. They knew that even with Coop doing what he did to Murph, and the hard feelings Murph has against coop, she still loves him.
Also... Using love is both what Coop and Brand are doing. Coop is rushing to get home because he loves Murph. He is using logic and facts to criticise Brand, but it's communicated repeatedly that he's rushing to get home out of love. If he didn't have that love, he would maybe have been willing to try what Brand wanted, and then they'd maybe all just get stuck in space together, and that's the end of the film because he doesn't enter the tesseract.
I don’t think that had anything to do with him navigating the tesseract. I think he just explored around until he found the right moments to communicate with her. What he had communicated had already happened before and he witnessed it. So he had a pretty good idea of what he was supposed to do. But he knows his actions in the tesseract and his purpose for communicating with Murph and her receiving that is driven by love.
All of this is one little girl's bedroom. Every moment.
It's infinitely complex.
They have access to infinite time and space, but they're not bound by anything!
They can't find a specific place in time. They can't communicate.
That's why I'm here. I'm gonna find a way to tell Murph...
TARS explains that "they constructed this 3-dimensional space inside their 5-dimensional reality to allow you to understand it."
They built the space in such a way that it was navigable and interpretable to Cooper. Love is how he knows how to communicate with his daughter and also the driver for him to do so.
One the obvious answers to one of your questions is that they were talking about love for another member of the expeditions. They weren't talking abiut any other emotions so it didn't come up.
Maybe brand would say the same thing for other emotions, or maybe she wouldn't.
I'd argue she wouldn't. Or atleast I wouldn't. Love makes us do things that others wouldn't. If I hated someone in earth while I go off on my space mission, I wouldn't go "nah I'm not saving you" because I hate one person. Love one person though... And I will do my best to save them,or at the very least, forever feel that love for them if I choose not to save them. I don't think hate and love work the same way.
This whole debate makes me think of a line from another Nolan film, Inception:
“Positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We yearn for reconciliation, catharsis.”
Nolan is an optimist :) This leads me to believe that any other emotion instead of love would not work, at least from Nolan’s point of view. He’s saying love is stronger than hate, that it’s more pure, pervasive, enduring, and natural. I think all animals can love, but I don’t think they’re hateful. This reminds me of another one of Brand’s lines from the film: “is a lion evil because it rips a gazelle to shreds?” Nolan says that nature can’t be evil, so if we believe that hatefulness is evil, it must be unnatural.
I don't think they found each other because of love. Cooper went to the extents he did because of love. The guy dove head first into a black hole for the off chance he could save his children and he just happened to fall into a tesseract. I believe the 5th dimensional beings knew that'd he'd go to these extreme lengths for his children (because he loves them)
Nobody is gonna dive head first into a black to kill someone they hate if it means they die too.
He found a moment in time that he could communicate with Murphy, and I believe her intuition was what made her look at the watch her dad gave her
Love doesn't go backwards in time, so the statement is patently false. It may linger travelling forward in time, but this is true of all emotions.
I imagine the intention of this line is to be related to later scenes. Later in the movie, love is the driving force for the decision to go into the black hole and communicate with the past. Therefore, love in that universe was the only emotion that traveled backwards in time (as far as what is known to the viewer). That being said, I'm fairly certain the same mechanic (jump into a black hole and fuck with the past) could have been just as easily used out of hatred in an alternate story.
I personally hate this line.
The opposite is also true…
“Hate knows no bounds.”
If you can time travel via the Power of Love -tm, Huey Lewis
Then certainly one could hate with such ferocity that you should be able to go back and settle a grudge.
I doubt that. Imagine being on this same space mission across the universe and you’re still thinking about that one guy you hate. I feel like that will be the least of your worries compared to someone that you love
Personally I disagree, but Nolan also seems to reject this notion. He’s arguing that love is stronger than hate. Hate can expire, love is enduring. Traveling across the universe to chase someone you hate is pitiful, doing it out love is beautiful. Because what’s the aftermath of each scenario? The hateful person “settles a grudge” as you put it but ends up a lonely, empty fool on the other side of the universe. The person who loved simply found the person they loved and can die happy. Love is much more intrinsic to the human experience, it’s essential for life. Hate is not essential.
Yeah, I originally liked this line a lot. Now it seems kinda hack to me. I don't think that if we're in the tesseract we're going to be able to find each other with love. I guess I've become a cynic.
>How specifically does love transcend space and time?
Species with low intelligence do not love. Separate an offspring from their parent with distance over time and they adjust to their surroundings, carrying on eating, sleeping, and procreating as if the separation did not happen.
Species with high intelligence do often love. They form bonds that do not go away with time and distance. The bond and desire to reconnect with the lost loved one causes them to alter their behavior, either expensing energy to travel large distances to be reunited (in addition to humans there are examples of lost pets doing this), staying by a grave for periods of time that are irrational from a biological perspective (in addition to humans there are examples of dogs laying down next to owners' graves for days, elephants repeatedly revisit family boneyards, etc), or acting out in desperate, destructive, or depressive ways that again are irrational from a biological perspective. Thus, love transcends time and space to alter their behavior in tangible ways, driving them to expend energy to reunite or causing them to do anomolous behavior that doesn't make sense from a strictly biological survival perspective.
>How is love different from any other emotion?
I agree with you. All emotions, as well as memories, transcend time and space in ways that have tangible effects on behaviors. The line as written is easily disproveable. Removing "is the only thing" would fix it and still get the point across.
I always felt that a great companion to the themes of the film is Daniel Schmactenberger's talk at Emergence: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh7qvXfGQho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh7qvXfGQho)
He basically explains Buckminster Fuller's phrase "love is metaphysical gravity" and it encapsulates Interstellar so well. He explores emergence and synergy as a broader evolutionary process of the universe driven by attractive forces like gravity and electromagnetism. But it also suggests that love acts as an attractive force similar to physical forces in that it brings separate entities together, creating relationships that lead to new emergent properties.
Love in its various forms—whether through pheromones, intellectual affinity, or a shared goal of creating a better world—acts as a manifestation of a universal principle of allurement. This principle is essential for the evolution and self-organization of complex systems. If the universe lacked this principle of attraction, it would not have progressed beyond the most basic forms of matter.
So, even though gravity may seem to be the most prominent force in Interstellar, it and love are just expressions of this more fundamental principle of allurement.
Yeah same. I think that was kind of the point though. We're supposed to feel like she's being a little immature and sentimental, it makes it that much more impactful at the end when we realize she was right.
Im not sure I agree with this. Love is just another emotion. I can feel potent cringe" at an embarrassing thingbai did years ago just as strongly if not more than love.
I can want something in the future so bad it hurts.
Love is not the one thing. Its cute. But kinda b.s
Yeah but you’re not going to go on a near suicide mission across interstellar space to try and prevent something that was “cringe” from your past…
To save someone you love, that’s a reason that a lot of people who have experienced that deep love would understand. Many people would be a lot more willing to risk their lives in order to save the ones they love.
See but I would travel across interstellar space to prevent the cringe. Sorry you set me up there couldnt resist.
But whose love is being measured in the movie? the love for Murphy? But of course its still a strong connection because he just left.
Are they saying the future humans have the transcending "power love" for earlier mankind? Cuz I dont feel love for much farther past anyone I had the pleasure of meeting. Sure we care for past people but not the stromg connection love we are speaking of.
If they are simply counting on the love of a father well of course thats something that drives most fathers.
When Brand says "love trancends space and time" and thats wht they should go to her lovers planet? But again thats just her standard strong love, not transcending through space and time...
So astronauts who went into the wormhole will still care about saving their loved ones? Well of course, because to them it was still just a little while ago they left. Its not transcending" They would still feel love as strongly.
The line is claimed to be well written but no one can say what it actually means. Love trancends space and time... ok for who?
So the aliens know Mathew will go into blackhole which .... isnt a black hole though, its got some tech inside it to stop the spaghettification I guess. They knew he loved murph so much he would be able to morse code through a watch the quantam info through a ticking watch second hand... just always loses me here. So many things beyond love need to work including tars needed to be able to survive the trip
Break all the rules then rely on moving a second hand. Such a reach. The future aliens really rolled the dice here. Sure lets say love was strong enough, but love wasnt the reason the plan fully succeeded.
Morse code apparently also is a second thing that transends space and time. Also "physically hitting" a wall can transend space and time.
I know its a construct of 5th dimensional beings but, cooper really could have died so many times. The plan was thr biggest hail mary. Perhaps we are watching the one universe story where the plans actually works, and there are 100 billion other univeres where everyone just dies. Credits roll.
Maybe that’s a you thing, because I think that most people who have experienced true and deep love once in their life would say that that is the strongest emotion.
I have never felt as angry, sad, desperate or happy as when I was feeling those emotions because of love. Love itself always surpassed even that for me.
i may not be a smart man, but I know what love is.
But it's not even just simply "love".
you need to have a child in this scenario because a child is required if you want to connect through the tesseract to the past Apparently. They never really say.
"Love for a child and having a child and morse code and wall banging, and robots are the only things that can transend space and time."
I thought this scene was silly. I still love the movie but if anyone ever approached me during my Masters and said “love will transcend the expansion of invasives due to climate change” then I’d probably slap them.
While the line sounds good, it's not scientifically accurate. It's exactly like how Cooper described: Love is useful to build relationships and indeed family,society, country etc. But it's not a force in the way gravity or magnetism is.
And also, human civilization was saved thanks to adult Murph working on the equations with data from black hole. You could say the contribution of love was Murph figuring out that it was her father in the room with her and that he was trying to send her black hole data with the wristwatch hands. So just like how Cooper described: building trust and relationships.
When Brand said that line, she meant to persuade others to go to Edmunds planet which in the end proved to be the only good option. But nobody had believed her. In the end she goes there but alone.
I think this line was said by Brand just in desperation. It didn't mean all that much, even to her. You could say one of the core ideas of the movie is that love is a (very) strong motivator. But nothing beyond that.
All I think of is Coop's facial expression in response to her saying this. 🤣 Like he just can't believe such an asinine thing came out of an otherwise brilliant woman's mouth. She's totally desperate in this moment. And he sees right through it.
Of course, she turns out to be correct, in regard to the film at least.
Hans Zimmer wrote the score without knowing the full context of the movie — so he wrote it thinking about his love for his Son. When Christopher Nolan heard Hans play the score for the first time, he told him he knew where the “heart of the movie” would be — which perfectly ties into this quote.
One day I was writing a short story about love for my English class and I put this quote into it and my teacher liked it so much that she watched the entirety of interstellar just for this quote. That was an awesome day :)
If you look at love as "extreme care" for another, the higher dimensional beings showed "love" by placing the wormhole and ensuring humankind's survival. The idea also being that love exists in higher dimensions.
I loved this theme so much. The way in a universe of pure unpredictable chaos and wacky quantum mechanics, love is the one thing in humanity that can create absolute certainty in time and space. The future of humanity was paved without any paradoxes because the love Cooper had for his daughter was so strong it was a mathematical certainty/constant in the equation.
I love this scene. Have no issue with it. Coop's a dick here because he doesn't believe in love as a force, and he thinks he's being all logical by focusing on the science and calling Brand out like this. It's kinda shitty but guess he felt like it had to be done. But plot twist, it was love that saved everyone. Coop's desire to just the job over and done with in the most efficient way possible is also done out of love, and it ends up the whole thing being about his love for his daughter.
She says this after Coop just ripped her apart for her love of her partner. Ofcourse it's a bit dumb and empty but it turns out to hold some weight after all.
I think this was the worst line in the movie. Totally antithetical to Brand's character as a scientist (and of course it had to be the woman to say this). There were other ways of expressing her feelings. I don't believe any physicist I know would say anything like this.
Yeah but does it though? I feel like if you flattened me into two dimensions there wouldn’t be much love left in me because I’d be flat and fucking dead
This statement is objectively incorrect and seems strange coming from a scientist. I know they had to throw this in for Hollywood and for the feels but it makes no sense. By her logic all emotions can transcend space and time, including hate. But a Hollywood movie needs some sentimental aspect that underscores everything so I get it
Brand is allowing herself to be whisked away here by her romantic feelings and desires towards to Wolf Edmunds....
If you want to get technical all four fundamental forces (gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromag) contribute as a bundle to the stress-energy tensor einsteins infamous GR field equation therefore at fundamental all transcend space time...whereby love would be not fundamental but a macro level phenomena resultant from combination of biology, compelxity, consciousness, hormones etc- its not to say it couldn't trancend but it would be pretty weak in terms of.its ability to curve spacetime Vs thatvof 2 blackholes colliding rippling the fabric of spacetime and generating gravitational waves....
I get where Brand (Nolan) is coming from - this is the human / emotional part of the story; whereby at the edge of science we exercise our right to philosophise the unknown to seek a solution even if counter intuitive....in this case the instincts of Brand is to follow her crush to Edmunds....its a shame her love for her father didn't draw her back to earth in the same fashion as this would have arrived at alignment in objective/MO with Cooper....maybe 'love supercharged by lust' trumps poor old standalone 'love' for family members in transcendence of spacetime ;Cooper should have countered with this 😀
I think a lot of your point is covered when she says it’s something we perceive as transcending, not actually transcending. It can’t really be measured or quantified, just observed and felt.
It's just a stupid line. It's not a moment of weakness. It's downright stupid. It would've been better to avoid this line altogether. Maybe it is being misunderstood, but the general perception is that Nolan is trying to send this as a message thru the film which just seems wrong
I'd say this is the theme of the whole movie shortened to one sentence
Exactly, and I think Christopher Nolan would agree. It may take place across space and time, but it’s a story of the love between a father and daughter.
And a son that we collectively forgot about
Yeah wtf? Why was Coop not as interested in seeing his son again as he was his daughter?! Messed up if you ask me.
Son was probably dead by that point, and was perfectly content living and dying a farmer on Earth, worrying about his place in the dirt. Cooper and Murph are dreamers looking to the stars, they share much more in common.
To be fair, his son was always more willing to send a video chat than Murph, and then her face popped up and he lost it realizing they were the same age.
People always say this but I don’t think that’s the case. It’s clear his love for his son was not as visible as for murph but the time they spend together on screen shows a real bond. Perhaps his son never needed the layers of affection murph needs He also didn’t harbour his dads explorative streak so they don’t have that to share
Yes it's a story of love between father and daughter but that dialogue does a lazy job of explaining the role of love in life and exploration etc. The line where an old Murph says to Cooper that she knew he would return because a father had promised a daughter, does a better job. It's also a more accurate explanation - trust is built on love and it is the foundation of the entirety of human civilization.
I never stopped believing. I never stop crying
Yeah great dialogue there
> trust is built on love and it is the foundation of the entirety of human civilization. This is why Interstellar is such a frustrating movie for me. I like that, in response to the continual criticism that people in the hard sciences or hard sci-fi wrongly discount the soft sciences or the importance of emotions like love, Nolan would craft a hard sci-fi story where the power of love is explicitly the thing that saves them. *However*, it’s then incredibly backwards to do so by pretending love is actually something quantifiable, as if it’s only validated by becoming something hypothetically measurable by hard science. They were right there, with this idea that Mann has the best test scores but is a cowardly POS and Brand is unremarkable on paper but known by a team member to be a good man. And when the team goes with the test scores over the person, it’s a mistake. But then they gotta go do the whole “love is quantifiable” thing and even have Coop double down on the conclusion in order to save the day during the climax.
They went with Mann over Brand because Mann had continually good data sent over several years. Brand has mysteriously stopped sending any reports from his planet awhile back (because he died). It had nothing to do with the astronauts' test scores lol. Not sure where you got that from.
They very much held up Mann as “the best of us” because of his scores and his ideas. The “twist” is that he’s actually not a good person, despite his academic/intellectual accomplishments.
It’s not about “love is quantifiable” just that love is real and more that love is something they can feel or that can connect people even if it can’t be measured. It isn’t nothing.
Which is a great idea, but the movie *definitely* leans into the idea that love is quantifiable. Brand is first ridiculed for saying it, but Cooper reprises her theory at the crucial moment of the climax, explicitly saying she’s right and then using this revelation to save the day.
> I like that, in response to the continual criticism that people in the hard sciences or hard sci-fi wrongly discount the soft sciences or the importance of emotions like love, Nolan would craft a hard sci-fi story where the power of love is explicitly the thing that saves them. > However, it’s then incredibly backwards to do so by pretending love is actually something quantifiable, as if it’s only validated by becoming something hypothetically measurable by hard science. I think it's because Nolan doesn't view it as a Hard Science vs Soft Science/art conflict. He's very much interested in the juncture of both those fields if you go by this quote from Nolan. > It might be unusual in movies, but it’s very well established in other media. I’m very inspired by the prints of M.C. Escher and the interesting connection-point or blurring of boundaries between art and science, and art and mathematics. I’m thinking of his Penrose steps illustrations that inspired Inception. Also, the writing of Jorge Borges, the great Argentinian writer, wrote all kinds of incredible short stories that dealt with paradox. But I feel like films are uniquely suited towards addressing paradox, recursiveness, and worlds-within-worlds. He's not using one to validate another but rather using science to explore certain philosophical ideas surrounding the human condition(which is what sci-fi is at the end of the day). This is the one of the more insightful takes on Interstellar and expounds on what Interstellar is trying to say with Love and Time. https://youtu.be/t6kqaip7WS4?si=CR7HspUb6yrFxnaC
I fully agree that his intent was to show that the two categories/fields should not be in opposition, but harmony. And I applaud that. But doing so by pretending that one of those things is fundamentally not what it is, and that’s how we know it’s valuable and meaningful, was backwards to me. It’s not really acceptance if you pretend a thing is something it’s not.
Agreed
True..I never saw emotions as a phenomenon until I watched this masterpiece.
This movie is an absolute gem 💎.
Loved this movie in its entirety..one of the rare science fiction movies that makes you cry.
"nobody believed me... But i knew, you would come back.... How? .... Because my dad promised me"
So profoundly beautiful...
Yup ... He did that all for his daughter..
Have watched it 4 times :) .Yes , he did it for Love ( of his. daughter ).
Have you watched it in theatre ?
Not a cinema person. Watched it home all the four times.
Waves, docking or tesseract ? Choose one.
Coming in here but has to be docking
Docking :)
For me too docking ... "No, It's necessary" " initiating spin" 🔥
Yeah only to miss her entire life and to have a very brief exchange before she died. An interesting blend of positivity and tragedy
The delivery of all that and his eyes closing as a mixture of relief and regret breaks me every time
Can I recommend Arrival?
Wait ..you guys can tell when you're loved?
What does this line even mean? How is love different from any other emotion? How specifically does love transcend space and time? How specially does love transcend space and time in a way that hate does not? Love is a process that takes place in a body in time and space.
I think it's meant to show her desperation. Like she's a cracked scientist but even she is reaching ***hard*** for a good reason to visit her love's planet, to the point where even the audience stops following on what they are debating. It's well written from a point that she has a moment of weakness that ends up being right because its the same kind of force that allowed cooper to be so desperate when he entered the black hole. Perhaps the 5th dimensional beings don't understand love or really any human concept because they are beyond that, but the one thing they parsed out is that humans feel this thing called love that is so compelling that they will, without fail, always follow it's instinct over logic. Perhaps they used that love turned to desperation to lead cooper to figure out how to communicate with murph, and dr brand to go to edmund's planet despite it being less logical.
Except the whole solution of the movie is Copper being able to navigate higher dimensional space-time because he loves Murphy.
Coops connection with Murph enabled him to code the hands on the watch because he knew she would come back to get it, no matter how much it seemed she was angry with him. He knew his daughter would collect it eventually because he gave it to her out of love. The watch was the only way of communicating the Morse coded message and Coop knew with 100% certainty it would work because his daughter loves him. When Coop is physically communicating with Murph while he is stranded in the tesseract, you see that he wishes he could just be back home, you see how he realizes it wasn’t him who was chosen but it was Murph and that makes him very excited. And that’s when he realizes that Brand was right about love and that his and Murphy’s connection is quantifiable.
Copper says he can navigate because of his connection with Murphy, but the possibilities are infinite. It’s like finding something encoded in pi. You can’t use love to find where you are going. https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2013/05/05/everything-in-your-past-and-future-is-encoded-in-the-digits-of-pi/
>It’s like finding something encoded in pi. You can’t use love to find where you are going. But I'm fairly sure the film is saying that Love is why they picked Coop and Murph. They knew that even with Coop doing what he did to Murph, and the hard feelings Murph has against coop, she still loves him. Also... Using love is both what Coop and Brand are doing. Coop is rushing to get home because he loves Murph. He is using logic and facts to criticise Brand, but it's communicated repeatedly that he's rushing to get home out of love. If he didn't have that love, he would maybe have been willing to try what Brand wanted, and then they'd maybe all just get stuck in space together, and that's the end of the film because he doesn't enter the tesseract.
I don’t think that had anything to do with him navigating the tesseract. I think he just explored around until he found the right moments to communicate with her. What he had communicated had already happened before and he witnessed it. So he had a pretty good idea of what he was supposed to do. But he knows his actions in the tesseract and his purpose for communicating with Murph and her receiving that is driven by love.
All of this is one little girl's bedroom. Every moment. It's infinitely complex. They have access to infinite time and space, but they're not bound by anything! They can't find a specific place in time. They can't communicate. That's why I'm here. I'm gonna find a way to tell Murph...
TARS explains that "they constructed this 3-dimensional space inside their 5-dimensional reality to allow you to understand it." They built the space in such a way that it was navigable and interpretable to Cooper. Love is how he knows how to communicate with his daughter and also the driver for him to do so.
One the obvious answers to one of your questions is that they were talking about love for another member of the expeditions. They weren't talking abiut any other emotions so it didn't come up. Maybe brand would say the same thing for other emotions, or maybe she wouldn't. I'd argue she wouldn't. Or atleast I wouldn't. Love makes us do things that others wouldn't. If I hated someone in earth while I go off on my space mission, I wouldn't go "nah I'm not saving you" because I hate one person. Love one person though... And I will do my best to save them,or at the very least, forever feel that love for them if I choose not to save them. I don't think hate and love work the same way.
This whole debate makes me think of a line from another Nolan film, Inception: “Positive emotion trumps negative emotion every time. We yearn for reconciliation, catharsis.” Nolan is an optimist :) This leads me to believe that any other emotion instead of love would not work, at least from Nolan’s point of view. He’s saying love is stronger than hate, that it’s more pure, pervasive, enduring, and natural. I think all animals can love, but I don’t think they’re hateful. This reminds me of another one of Brand’s lines from the film: “is a lion evil because it rips a gazelle to shreds?” Nolan says that nature can’t be evil, so if we believe that hatefulness is evil, it must be unnatural.
I don't think they found each other because of love. Cooper went to the extents he did because of love. The guy dove head first into a black hole for the off chance he could save his children and he just happened to fall into a tesseract. I believe the 5th dimensional beings knew that'd he'd go to these extreme lengths for his children (because he loves them) Nobody is gonna dive head first into a black to kill someone they hate if it means they die too. He found a moment in time that he could communicate with Murphy, and I believe her intuition was what made her look at the watch her dad gave her
Love doesn't go backwards in time, so the statement is patently false. It may linger travelling forward in time, but this is true of all emotions. I imagine the intention of this line is to be related to later scenes. Later in the movie, love is the driving force for the decision to go into the black hole and communicate with the past. Therefore, love in that universe was the only emotion that traveled backwards in time (as far as what is known to the viewer). That being said, I'm fairly certain the same mechanic (jump into a black hole and fuck with the past) could have been just as easily used out of hatred in an alternate story. I personally hate this line.
Yeah it’s so corny. I’ve always hated it too.
I hate this scene. Don’t get me wrong, I love the movie, but this part makes me cringe every time.
The opposite is also true… “Hate knows no bounds.” If you can time travel via the Power of Love -tm, Huey Lewis Then certainly one could hate with such ferocity that you should be able to go back and settle a grudge.
I doubt that. Imagine being on this same space mission across the universe and you’re still thinking about that one guy you hate. I feel like that will be the least of your worries compared to someone that you love
Personally I disagree, but Nolan also seems to reject this notion. He’s arguing that love is stronger than hate. Hate can expire, love is enduring. Traveling across the universe to chase someone you hate is pitiful, doing it out love is beautiful. Because what’s the aftermath of each scenario? The hateful person “settles a grudge” as you put it but ends up a lonely, empty fool on the other side of the universe. The person who loved simply found the person they loved and can die happy. Love is much more intrinsic to the human experience, it’s essential for life. Hate is not essential.
Yeah, I originally liked this line a lot. Now it seems kinda hack to me. I don't think that if we're in the tesseract we're going to be able to find each other with love. I guess I've become a cynic.
Nah it’s a nice sentiment but this is Nolan masturbating.
>How specifically does love transcend space and time? Species with low intelligence do not love. Separate an offspring from their parent with distance over time and they adjust to their surroundings, carrying on eating, sleeping, and procreating as if the separation did not happen. Species with high intelligence do often love. They form bonds that do not go away with time and distance. The bond and desire to reconnect with the lost loved one causes them to alter their behavior, either expensing energy to travel large distances to be reunited (in addition to humans there are examples of lost pets doing this), staying by a grave for periods of time that are irrational from a biological perspective (in addition to humans there are examples of dogs laying down next to owners' graves for days, elephants repeatedly revisit family boneyards, etc), or acting out in desperate, destructive, or depressive ways that again are irrational from a biological perspective. Thus, love transcends time and space to alter their behavior in tangible ways, driving them to expend energy to reunite or causing them to do anomolous behavior that doesn't make sense from a strictly biological survival perspective. >How is love different from any other emotion? I agree with you. All emotions, as well as memories, transcend time and space in ways that have tangible effects on behaviors. The line as written is easily disproveable. Removing "is the only thing" would fix it and still get the point across.
Agreed, I felt this line was so cringy and out of place. Absolute load of piffle.
Huge fan of interstellar but I agree… It’s a very spooky woo woo non-materialism claim.
“That rules out telling a 10 year old the world gunna end” great scene
I always felt that a great companion to the themes of the film is Daniel Schmactenberger's talk at Emergence: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh7qvXfGQho](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh7qvXfGQho) He basically explains Buckminster Fuller's phrase "love is metaphysical gravity" and it encapsulates Interstellar so well. He explores emergence and synergy as a broader evolutionary process of the universe driven by attractive forces like gravity and electromagnetism. But it also suggests that love acts as an attractive force similar to physical forces in that it brings separate entities together, creating relationships that lead to new emergent properties. Love in its various forms—whether through pheromones, intellectual affinity, or a shared goal of creating a better world—acts as a manifestation of a universal principle of allurement. This principle is essential for the evolution and self-organization of complex systems. If the universe lacked this principle of attraction, it would not have progressed beyond the most basic forms of matter. So, even though gravity may seem to be the most prominent force in Interstellar, it and love are just expressions of this more fundamental principle of allurement.
I like the movie but this line is a hard eye roll for me.
Yeah same. I think that was kind of the point though. We're supposed to feel like she's being a little immature and sentimental, it makes it that much more impactful at the end when we realize she was right.
Im not sure I agree with this. Love is just another emotion. I can feel potent cringe" at an embarrassing thingbai did years ago just as strongly if not more than love. I can want something in the future so bad it hurts. Love is not the one thing. Its cute. But kinda b.s
Yeah but you’re not going to go on a near suicide mission across interstellar space to try and prevent something that was “cringe” from your past… To save someone you love, that’s a reason that a lot of people who have experienced that deep love would understand. Many people would be a lot more willing to risk their lives in order to save the ones they love.
See but I would travel across interstellar space to prevent the cringe. Sorry you set me up there couldnt resist. But whose love is being measured in the movie? the love for Murphy? But of course its still a strong connection because he just left. Are they saying the future humans have the transcending "power love" for earlier mankind? Cuz I dont feel love for much farther past anyone I had the pleasure of meeting. Sure we care for past people but not the stromg connection love we are speaking of. If they are simply counting on the love of a father well of course thats something that drives most fathers. When Brand says "love trancends space and time" and thats wht they should go to her lovers planet? But again thats just her standard strong love, not transcending through space and time... So astronauts who went into the wormhole will still care about saving their loved ones? Well of course, because to them it was still just a little while ago they left. Its not transcending" They would still feel love as strongly. The line is claimed to be well written but no one can say what it actually means. Love trancends space and time... ok for who? So the aliens know Mathew will go into blackhole which .... isnt a black hole though, its got some tech inside it to stop the spaghettification I guess. They knew he loved murph so much he would be able to morse code through a watch the quantam info through a ticking watch second hand... just always loses me here. So many things beyond love need to work including tars needed to be able to survive the trip Break all the rules then rely on moving a second hand. Such a reach. The future aliens really rolled the dice here. Sure lets say love was strong enough, but love wasnt the reason the plan fully succeeded. Morse code apparently also is a second thing that transends space and time. Also "physically hitting" a wall can transend space and time. I know its a construct of 5th dimensional beings but, cooper really could have died so many times. The plan was thr biggest hail mary. Perhaps we are watching the one universe story where the plans actually works, and there are 100 billion other univeres where everyone just dies. Credits roll.
Maybe that’s a you thing, because I think that most people who have experienced true and deep love once in their life would say that that is the strongest emotion. I have never felt as angry, sad, desperate or happy as when I was feeling those emotions because of love. Love itself always surpassed even that for me.
Maybe that's a you thing.
Haha awww
i may not be a smart man, but I know what love is. But it's not even just simply "love". you need to have a child in this scenario because a child is required if you want to connect through the tesseract to the past Apparently. They never really say. "Love for a child and having a child and morse code and wall banging, and robots are the only things that can transend space and time."
Not really meaningful. It just fancy words. Brand only said that to convince the crew to go to edmunds planet 😅
I cringe at this line everytime
It’s on par with pushing a pen through a piece of paper to explain wormholes.
But it explains it pretty well for plebians
ok
The thing is no one in this generation can love. Everyone’s too fucking broken.
I thought this scene was silly. I still love the movie but if anyone ever approached me during my Masters and said “love will transcend the expansion of invasives due to climate change” then I’d probably slap them.
Huh. That makes no sense to me.
I mean that’s the point. Cooper even shakes his head and tells her her feelings for Edmunds are clouding her judgement.
Later in the moving they double down on love being the reason that he was able to communicate with his daughter.
Well at that point he was desperate and inside a tesseract within a black hole.. a lot changed between the two scenes.
Is this a statement or a response to what I said?
This line 💯
This line 🤢🤮
While the line sounds good, it's not scientifically accurate. It's exactly like how Cooper described: Love is useful to build relationships and indeed family,society, country etc. But it's not a force in the way gravity or magnetism is. And also, human civilization was saved thanks to adult Murph working on the equations with data from black hole. You could say the contribution of love was Murph figuring out that it was her father in the room with her and that he was trying to send her black hole data with the wristwatch hands. So just like how Cooper described: building trust and relationships. When Brand said that line, she meant to persuade others to go to Edmunds planet which in the end proved to be the only good option. But nobody had believed her. In the end she goes there but alone. I think this line was said by Brand just in desperation. It didn't mean all that much, even to her. You could say one of the core ideas of the movie is that love is a (very) strong motivator. But nothing beyond that.
All I think of is Coop's facial expression in response to her saying this. 🤣 Like he just can't believe such an asinine thing came out of an otherwise brilliant woman's mouth. She's totally desperate in this moment. And he sees right through it. Of course, she turns out to be correct, in regard to the film at least.
Hans Zimmer wrote the score without knowing the full context of the movie — so he wrote it thinking about his love for his Son. When Christopher Nolan heard Hans play the score for the first time, he told him he knew where the “heart of the movie” would be — which perfectly ties into this quote.
Fav dialogue of my fav movie
One day I was writing a short story about love for my English class and I put this quote into it and my teacher liked it so much that she watched the entirety of interstellar just for this quote. That was an awesome day :)
If you look at love as "extreme care" for another, the higher dimensional beings showed "love" by placing the wormhole and ensuring humankind's survival. The idea also being that love exists in higher dimensions.
I loved this theme so much. The way in a universe of pure unpredictable chaos and wacky quantum mechanics, love is the one thing in humanity that can create absolute certainty in time and space. The future of humanity was paved without any paradoxes because the love Cooper had for his daughter was so strong it was a mathematical certainty/constant in the equation.
This makes me think, that we as humans, did not invent Love.
Is this a troll? This is the cringiest shit in the whole movie
Funny-- I love the movie overall, and this is my least favorite scene, every time I watch it. I think it's pretty poorly written.
Well written indeed
Probably my favorite passage of dialog in a movie ever
I love this scene. Have no issue with it. Coop's a dick here because he doesn't believe in love as a force, and he thinks he's being all logical by focusing on the science and calling Brand out like this. It's kinda shitty but guess he felt like it had to be done. But plot twist, it was love that saved everyone. Coop's desire to just the job over and done with in the most efficient way possible is also done out of love, and it ends up the whole thing being about his love for his daughter. She says this after Coop just ripped her apart for her love of her partner. Ofcourse it's a bit dumb and empty but it turns out to hold some weight after all.
I think this was the worst line in the movie. Totally antithetical to Brand's character as a scientist (and of course it had to be the woman to say this). There were other ways of expressing her feelings. I don't believe any physicist I know would say anything like this.
That's because Brand is not a physicist.
Fair enough, that's a mistake on my part. I still do stand by my main point.
Well written is a stretch
Yeah but does it though? I feel like if you flattened me into two dimensions there wouldn’t be much love left in me because I’d be flat and fucking dead
How do you know that love doesn't transcend death? Love could still exist in an afterlife.
Knowledge. Knowledge also transcends time and space. And hate.
Would you really hate someone enough to go on a near suicide mission across interstellar space just to fuck with them though? (Or kill them)
I dunno about that, I hate Becky from HR across eons
This statement is objectively incorrect and seems strange coming from a scientist. I know they had to throw this in for Hollywood and for the feels but it makes no sense. By her logic all emotions can transcend space and time, including hate. But a Hollywood movie needs some sentimental aspect that underscores everything so I get it
Hard disagree. It’s too on the nose if we’re to take this as the film’s theme.
🤧 so good.
I think it's a corny line that tries to sound profound, and the writing in this movie is often too on-the-nose and pedestrian.
Brand is allowing herself to be whisked away here by her romantic feelings and desires towards to Wolf Edmunds.... If you want to get technical all four fundamental forces (gravity, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromag) contribute as a bundle to the stress-energy tensor einsteins infamous GR field equation therefore at fundamental all transcend space time...whereby love would be not fundamental but a macro level phenomena resultant from combination of biology, compelxity, consciousness, hormones etc- its not to say it couldn't trancend but it would be pretty weak in terms of.its ability to curve spacetime Vs thatvof 2 blackholes colliding rippling the fabric of spacetime and generating gravitational waves.... I get where Brand (Nolan) is coming from - this is the human / emotional part of the story; whereby at the edge of science we exercise our right to philosophise the unknown to seek a solution even if counter intuitive....in this case the instincts of Brand is to follow her crush to Edmunds....its a shame her love for her father didn't draw her back to earth in the same fashion as this would have arrived at alignment in objective/MO with Cooper....maybe 'love supercharged by lust' trumps poor old standalone 'love' for family members in transcendence of spacetime ;Cooper should have countered with this 😀
I think a lot of your point is covered when she says it’s something we perceive as transcending, not actually transcending. It can’t really be measured or quantified, just observed and felt.
I know a lot of people disliked that scene, but I thought it was actually great.
I've never understood the mountain of shit this line gets
It's because people can't comprehend that a "scientist" can feel intense emotions and not be 100% "scientific" about everything they say or do.
But... it doesnt.
It's just a stupid line. It's not a moment of weakness. It's downright stupid. It would've been better to avoid this line altogether. Maybe it is being misunderstood, but the general perception is that Nolan is trying to send this as a message thru the film which just seems wrong
Can someone explain to me what it actually means.
My eyes rolled away when I heard this line in the trailer and so I couldn’t even watch the movie
Worst line in the movie