Interstellar (film): Gravity of Hearts

So, Interstellar is another of the Nolan brothers' films that I absolutely loved from the first time I saw it. I thought the themes were awesome, I thought the acting was awesome and endearing, and I thought the sweeping scope of the "scenery" (the vastness of space and the power of the black hole) were awesome.

My interpretive reading is actually relatively simple on this one. I loved a number of thematic statements, especially the one about becoming "ghosts" for our kids (and the whole thing of the reversal of father and daughter as old woman and young man was mind-blowing and heart rending when it comes to her not wanting him to have to see her die), but my main interest for here lies with that black hole and gravity as a concept as the thing that brings him to his  daughter Murphy when she first discovers the ghost, fulfilling that awesome line about being ghosts for our children.

That endearing scene is the material texture of what I mean by the "gravity of hearts," but my main idea is going to be more philosophical and symbolic. There was once a band in Pittsburgh named the Affordable Floors (or just the Floors for short), and I used to go see them all the time in my young intense 80's kid semi-punk days. And they had this one song called "Blackout" that had a line in it that went: "Desire is only chemistry, and love a form of gravity." My reading of Interstellar is that it reverses that second half: love is not just a form of gravity; gravity is a vestige of love.

To understand what I mean here by "vestige," I have to give the source of my use of that term, which is the 13-century Franciscan St Bonnaventure. The Dominicans, who were the counterparts to the Franciscans and often thought of as there quasi-opponents (I don't buy that, but they definitely had their differences), were much more focused on Aristotle's thought than on Plato's, so while they (the Dominicans) would definitely appeal to Augustine and took him as authoritative, because Augustine is very much an arch-Neoplatonist, they did not appeal to him anywhere near as much as did the Franciscans, who were much more platonic in their thinking than Aristotelian.

Ok, so all that long historical windup and its labyrinthine grammar was just to explain that a Franciscan like Bonnaventure was very into Augustine and cited him a lot and took his thinking as his starting point a lot. Here the particular thing that he takes as a starting point is Augustine's "psychological models" of the Trinity, which are based in the idea of humanity as being made in the "image" of God. For example, and as the most fitting example for this post, just as in human love there is the lover, the beloved, and the love between them, so in the Trinity, there is the Father, the Son whom he loves, and the Spirit of the love between them. Where Bonaventure goes from that jumping off point is his own idea of "vestiges." He says that not only do we find the image of God in humanity; we also find "vestiges" of the Trinity in all the material world, triadic structures that are sort of "fingerprints" left by the Trinity in creating the material world. So, for instance, all material body's are classified by weight, number, and measure, a triadic structure that is a Trinitarian "fingerprint," a "vestige" of the Trinity.

My whole main point with Interstellar is that it uses gravity as a vestige of love as core to reality. Perhaps the best singular defense of the idea that love is a core of reality for the film is Anne Hathaway's argument for love as a different kind of logic but still a valid logic by which to make the choice of which planet to shoot for. But I think the main instantiation of my reading of love being symbolized by gravity is still that it is going into the crushing gravity of the black hole that brings him to being his daughters ghost and finding the way to get back together with her before she dies.