Interstellar - 11 Hidden Messages You Might've Missed
A look back on Christopher Nolan's 2014 film.
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
That means two things in this movie.
One, obviously, is to fight against death —and extinction as a species.
The other is a metaphor for Gargantua, the film’s giant black hole.
I’ll prove that to you, along with the existence of ten other hidden messages within 2014’s Interstellar.
NOTE: If you want to watch the video component to this essay (it’s way cooler), click the link right here.
1. The Meaning Of “Rage Against The Dying Of The Light”
About midway through Interstellar, Romilly mentions Gargantua is a “gentle” singularity.
Upon a quick google search, I found there’s no such term as a “gentle singularity” among astrophysicists, so why would Romilly use that word specifically?
Because gentle represents the gentle from the poem.
“Do not go gentle into that good night.”
Good night as in a black hole, since the night is dark and black. It makes even more sense with the second phrase “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
They say many times in the movie that not even light escapes a black hole. Light literally goes there to die. So Dr. Brand’s favorite poem is both a battlecry for the human race AND bad advice at the same time.
We all know the very thing that Cooper has to do is enter the black hole and go into the gentle singularity that is Gargantua to solve the Gravity Equation and save the human race.
The poem is not just about survival.
2. Lovers vs. Realists
Dr. Mann, which is a telling name by the way, says that “Our survival instinct is our greatest source of inspiration.”
But that’s kind of wrong, isn’t it?
Cooper is on this mission to save his children. The love he has for them is HIS greatest source of inspiration. Miss Brand falls in this camp as well. About halfway through the movie she speaks on how the love she has for Edmunds is pulling her to see him again — kind of like gravity.
So we have two camps.
Lovers vs. Realists.
Believers in love— this ethereal force you can’t explain with sheer science.
And realists — those more inclined to trust science and what they can see.
The lovers, or dreamers of this movie are Murph, Cooper, and Miss Brand.
The realists of this movie are Tom, Dr. Brand, and Dr. Mann.
They represent two different ideologies.
The realists are more robotic and focused on what needs to be done.
The dreamers are driven by emotions and intuition and love. You could say the realists are more pessimistic about human nature, and the dreamers are more optimistic.
TARS says that humans are emotional beings and therefore don’t like it when you’re 100% honest with them — something that Murph battles with later in the movie when she’s told the human race needs to know there’s no hope.
She says: “No, that would only cause a panic.”
She knows that emotions are what makes us human.
“That yearning to be with other people is what makes us human,” says Dr. Mann in the film.
Yeah, I mean kind of. But that only sounds like half of it— like Dr. Brand’s gravity equation.
Love is the missing part of Dr. Mann’s worldview. We want to be with other people, sure, but love and emotion is what makes us human as well.
Dr. Mann is apparently the “best of us” as stated by Miss Brand. But that turned out to be wrong, didn’t it? Hold that thought.
They made it a point that the crew of the Endurance needed to have little to no ties to earth. They needed to do what was best for the mission and by extension the human race. They needed to not let their humanity get in the way of the goal.
But it’s funny because the humanity of the Endurance Team is actually what helps them accomplish their mission. Doyle, instead of saving his own skin, orders TARS to save Miss Brand on Miller’s Planet before dying. Cooper sacrifices himself by going into the black hole, and, because of that, saves the human race. Romilly waits for the crew for decades to get back.
And why?
Love.
3. Love Solves The Gravity Equation
So what makes us human, anyway? Is it that we’re emotional, irrational beings who decide to love? Or is it our base instincts, like our instinct to survive?
Mann thinks that we see our children’s faces just before dying, and that that’s purely for survival purposes, and the movie actually shows this to be true later on as Cooper is dying.
But as Miss Brand explains earlier, “We love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that?” — you can’t ALWAYS explain love with science. So Mann’s rationalization of love comes up a little short.
Love is the reason why Cooper and Murph solve the gravity equation.
Cooper goes into the black hole in a last ditch effort to save his daughter. He does it for love. Murph ends up finding the answer because she trusts her intuition, and believes her father loves her and wouldn’t abandon her. Love was the missing ingredient to solving the gravity equation.
4. Gravity
Gravity in and of itself is a massive visual motif in the film.
Whether it’s baseball — a game that literally needs gravity to be played, tidal waves — known to be caused by gravity, the spinning of the ship to create artificial gravity, dust — a rather interesting way to show gravity happening in real time, and finally Gargantua, the object with the biggest gravitational pull in the movie.
So, what does it mean?
Well, gravity is an invisible force that attracts two objects together.
Isn’t love kind of the same thing?
“Love is the one thing that’s able to transcend time and space.”
-Miss Brand
In the movie, they also mention that gravity can do the same thing.
During the mission Cooper feels this pull to go back to his children. He eventually sees Murph again, because love pulled them back together, like gravity.
5. Natural vs. Unnatural
Murph mentions that she has a “ghost” at home, and is convinced it exists despite her father and brother’s teasing.
Like gravity and love, ghosts are invisible.
There’s lots of talk about natural vs. unnatural in this movie. At the baseball game, for instance, Murph’s grandfather says “Popcorn at a ballgame is unnatural. I want a hot dog.”
Ghosts are supernatural beings, right?
Believing in them doesn’t make sense, but then again love doesn’t make much scientific sense all the time either. Like Miss Brand says “maybe we should trust that, even if we can’t understand it.”
6. God
I can’t help but feel this movie has something to say about religion, too.
Besides Dr. Mann having 11 followers, he also mentions the laws of nature prohibit a naked singularity. Naked, like Adam and Eve in the garden. The best evidence we have for religious overtones, though, is the infamous “handshake” between Miss Brand and Cooper.
The first time we see it, it looks like a ghost in the ship.
The second time we see it, from Coopers point of view, he is bathed in light, and the visuals strongly invoke the famous Adam and God painting in the Sistine Chapel.
Layer on top of that the heavy use of organs in the movie, and yes, there’s very much a connection between this movie and God, whether it was intentional or not.
What does it mean?
It makes the most sense to bring back the Dreamers vs. Realists idea. Realists wouldn’t believe in God because it’s tough to prove it scientifically.
Dreamers would, because they believe in forces they can’t understand, like love.
7. Visual Representations Of Time
Obviously shapes are everywhere in this movie, whether it’s the tesserect in the film’s finale, a rubix cube on Murph’s bedside table, the centrifuge, the spherical worm hole, or the circular black hole.
I want to focus on the centrifuge for a second. Small centrifuges are used to separate various components of a liquid. Large centrifuges can be used to create artificial gravity. Circles and spinning, in general, is something that comes up time and time again. On Miller’s planet, Cooper needs to spiral down towards the surface to shave speed. The wormhole is located near Saturn, a ringed planet. Coopers’ watch is what ultimately gives Murph the second half of the gravity equation and in perhaps the most dramatic part of the film, Cooper needs to connect to the Endurance while spinning at 60+ RPM.
Time is one of the more obvious themes in the movie directly spoken about by the main characters, and the Endurance is a visual representation of time raging on. Throughout the movie the crew is battling against it, whether on the surface of Miller’s planet or when Cooper nearly runs out of oxygen on Mann’s.
It is always their adversary, it seems, and it makes sense that in the finale of the film, Cooper must experience heavy G-forces in order to connect to the endurance and save the human race. He must literally have endurance to win and save humanity, and the spinning ship is just a visual motif for time — something we all will succumb to eventually, and something the human race would’ve succumbed to if Cooper hadn’t been able to take control of the ship.
8. The 5 Elements
The 4 elements seem to be everywhere in this movie: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air.
Miller’s planet is literally ALL water. Mann’s planet is full of ice. When they go to sleep in their cryo beds it fills with water, and the very crops they grow to survive need water.
Murph represents fire. When Dr. Brand arrives at Coopers house, he says she is a “bright spark” and that perhaps he should “fan the flame.” She has red hair, which makes the fire connection more obvious. In the famous poem we hear time and time again, it says “old age should burn and rage at close of day.” They burn the crops to prevent blight from consuming the harvest, and to solve the gravity equation Murph needs to start a fire to buy time.
In the black hole, do you remember what Cooper sees first? Dust and sparks.
Speaking of dust, let’s talk about EARTH. Dust is a beautiful representation of gravity because you can literally see it floating down to earth right in front of you. In the black hole a cloud of dust is the first thing Cooper sees, that and fire.
Air. Whether it’s oxygen, atmosphere, air thrusters that direct the ship, or air thrusters that direct a spacesuit, air is present in this movie visually and in spoken word.
But there’s very much a fifth element at play here, too. In case you didn’t know, the ancient greeks originally invented the idea of the four elements, but there was also a fifth called aether.
Aether was thought of as the material that filled the universe above the terrestrial sphere. Like space.
In Greece they thought the aether was literally the stuff that the gods breathed, filling the space where they lived. And it was used in many scientific theories to help explain the force of gravity or the traveling of light. Today we think of aether as invisible. “It’s in the aether” we sometimes say to describe a thought or something we may have forgotten.
For a movie that talks a lot about invisible forces like love and gravity, aether fits right in.
What does it mean?
Well, they’re the 4 elements of nature. Nature is neither good or evil, it just is. It doesn’t matter whether huge tidal waves manifested on Miller’s planet, huge dust storms manifested on earth, or that Cooper nearly died because of a lack of oxygen.
Water also helped the crops grow on earth, fire helped transport the Endurance through space, and air helped guides their transport ship to connect to the Endurance.
These elements can either help or not help, but they’re not evil.
It’s binary — another common theme in the movie.
9. Murphy’s Law
Murphy’s law is originally looked at as a bad thing in this movie. “Whatever bad thing that can happen WILL happen eventually.” But maybe it’s not bad. Maybe it’s all RELATIVE, like Einstein’s theories.
Early in the movie Murph, Cooper, and Tom get a flat tire while driving into town. Tom blames it on Murphy’s Law. They start trying to fix it when all of a sudden a drone flies by overhead. Murph and Cooper immediately jump in the car to chase it while Tom says “WHAT ABOUT THE FLAT TIRE?”
Sure, maybe it was originally a bad thing that happened, but the flat tire allowed them to stop in that place and spot the drone flying overhead. If they never stopped, they might be miles down the road and never had a chance to see there was a drone in the air. Perhaps the flat tire wasn’t a bad thing after all.
10. Sleep
Throughout the film, sleep is referenced so many times, whether it’s the cryo beds, Murph taking a nap in Miss Brand’s office, or Cooper waking up at the beginning of the movie from his nightmare.
When we sleep, we fade to black, don’t we? It ties into the “don’t go gentle into that good night” theme, but it also ties into the themes of time as sleeping in the cryo beds allows the crew to stop ageing and sleeping in general causes us to lose track of time and reality.
11. Robots
TARS and CASE are the main robot characters in the film, but they’re spotted elsewhere, too, whether it’s the Indian drone that flies down near Cooper’s farm, the harvesters on Cooper’s farm, or the robot that causes Cooper to crash in the first scene of the movie.
What’s funny about the robots are that they have distinctly human voices. They don’t sound robotic at all, and sometimes they’re more human and self-sacrificing than characters like Dr. Mann.
They’re also a good representation for what humans tend to like or put up with. Cooper is able to program into TARS the level of sarcasm he wants, and he’s also able to program in how honest it is, too. It’s interesting that the robots in this film are able to show us a lot about our own humanity.
Interstellar is chock full of meaning, motifs, messages, and stunning visuals. When I saw it for the first time 9 years ago, I didn’t know what to make of it, honestly. But upon watching with a notepad and pen, and reading into every detail, the movie makes a whole lot more sense than I originally thought.
This is just my interpretation, honestly. It could be drastically different from yours, and I’d love to hear in the comments what YOU thought of what you saw, and if there are any themes I might’ve missed.
I’d also love for any suggestions on movies I could do in the future.
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At the end of the movie, Cooper finds himself back where he started, sitting in his old home pondering the future of the human race.
In the final moments, he feels a tug to go see Miss Brand again. If he’s learned anything lately, he knows that following his intuition is the right course
So he begins another mission for the same reasons he blasted off in the Endurance for some 80 years ago.
Love.