NYTimes | Bloggers have noticed the religious symbols in the movie. There are
those 12 apostles, and there’s a Noah’s ark. There is a fallen angel
named Dr. Mann who turns satanic in an inverse Garden of Eden. The space
project is named Lazarus. The heroine saves the world at age 33.
There’s an infinitely greater and incorporeal intelligence offering
merciful salvation.
But
this isn’t an explicitly religious movie. “Interstellar” is important
because amid all the culture wars between science and faith and science
and the humanities, the movie illustrates the real symbiosis between
these realms.
More,
it shows how modern science is influencing culture. People have always
bent their worldviews around the latest scientific advances. After
Newton, philosophers conceived a clockwork universe. Individuals were
seen as cogs in a big machine and could be slotted into vast
bureaucratic systems.
But
in the era of quantum entanglement and relativity, everything looks
emergent and interconnected. Life looks less like a machine and more
like endlessly complex patterns of waves and particles. Vast social
engineering projects look less promising, because of the complexity, but
webs of loving and meaningful relationships can do amazing good.
As
the poet Christian Wiman wrote in his masterpiece, “My Bright Abyss,”
“If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar
or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is
obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do
not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that
communication. ...”
I
suspect “Interstellar” will leave many people with a radical openness
to strange truth just below and above the realm of the everyday. That
makes it something of a cultural event.
