Interstellar Movie - Parenting Quote

[lbnuke]

I recently watched Christopher Nolan's new movie Interstellar twice in a few days. It usually takes me two or three times watching a movie to best grasp the themes and catch the key lines, events, etc. During my second time watching the film, the following scene and quote really stood out to me:

 

"Once you're a parents, you become the ghosts of your children's future."

 

Since coming to FDR and learning more about peaceful parenting, child developmental cognitive science, and child psychology, I have radically changed my expectations with regards to being a parent and the role that I have as a father. 

 

I have a month old daughter at home, as well as a 5 year old son. Culminating all that I've learned since my son was born I can see why, psychologically, people are drawn to ghosts, angels, demons, and gods in their adult lives. When we see angels portrayed in movies, or even ghosts for that matter (they're all the same), the experience is quite similar to what an infant is going through. Large, fuzzy figures that make muffled noises at a distance and only upon approach do these figures start to sharpen to become people, and only at a close, intimate distance, do faces appear that the child can then recognize and find comfort (or pain) in seeing. 

 

The parallels between how a child perceives the world from its first consciousness in the womb through to self realization and the religious/spiritual experiences that adults portray in their literature and film are staggering. My daughter loves just looking up at my face (although bearded) and staring, while I make small noises and do my best to ensure her security, warmth, comfort, and feeding. If only others could understand that our connection with these angles, demons, or gods comes not through the spiritual, but is a fundamental representation of our own experience as growing cognitive beings, I think there would be a lot of progress towards parenting peacefully, objectively, and intimately. I guess that angels, demons, and gods ARE the ghosts of those peoples' pasts, i.e. their parents (or caretaker, authority figures, etc.) from past experiences that are pre-cognition and locked in the sub-conscious brain.

 

As for me, I want my children to know my future ghost as loving, calm, patient, thought provoking, and protective, while recognizing and honoring their individuality.

 

Anyone else have any thoughts? Anyone see Interstellar and get something else out of the movie that may have stood out to you?

[Hubot]

  I think you're right, the film is mainly about the bond (or lack thereof) between parent and child (father and daughter more specifically). I recently watched the film and it moved me couple of light years. You essentially summarized the film in the quote. Here's my own interpretation:

 

  Film starts with a slightly atypical dysfunctional family, a former alcoholic (I'll offer the proof later) father as the single parent somewhere in Redneckistan. Mother has either just left or is really dead because of drug abuse. The home environment is increasingly toxic and stifling (dust) for the children. Cooper can't really handle the dullness of being a father and working a low paying shitty job to provide for his family, he wants to take a trip out there (better life through chemistry). After a while the grandfather will be the only parent left, since Cooper needs to go to rehab (or to a hospital for the mentally ill). The chief psychiatrist, prof. Brand, relies heavily on the chemical solutions in treating patients.

  For the actual trip to the space I have two different explanations: 1. Cooper gets “treated” for his mental illness with a cocktail of chemicals, he'll get drugged out his mind. 2. Cooper escapes the rehab and starts using again (alcohol, meds, meth) and never becomes sober again, the space trip takes him to the outer limit of human existence. Murph wants to make sense of all this, she ends up taking a job at the same facility. She wants to heal her wounds by trying to cure the patients from addiction/”mental illness”. This offers also an escape from putting the responsibility of her shitty childhood on her father. She comes back to the scene where her father left her, she wants to understand it and tries to find some sign of hope in the scene, sign of parental love in her memories (=book shelf).

  In the meantime, her father takes his last trip with his user “friends”. His “friends” include even an equally irresponsible woman, prof. Brand's daughter who's also an addict. Brand (the female one) sleeps around with a dozen of different men, she goes on bad trips with them. Usually these trips ultimately end in death for the men. Once she goes on a trip with Cooper himself, Cooper never recovers after this last high, he can't get out of the black hole ever again. In his last breath, he regrets leaving his family, but it's way too late to do anything about it anymore.

  From this moment on Cooper only lives in the memories of other people, in a n-dimensional library (n>4) where you can easily travel back and forth in time (and space). After years of introspection she recognizes the source of the stifling dust in her childhood home: it was her family all along. Consequently prof. Brand is exposed as a liar; he wants to escape his own responsibility of making her own daughter a drug addict - he only offers complex medical causes for the addiction instead of looking at the more obvious causes at home. Now it all makes sense, she cracks the code of her early experiences and with this new-found confidence she tries to spread the truth even to her brother. But her brother chooses not to listen and chooses to repeat the family pattern in his own behavior.

  In the end scene the father returns to Murph, Murph is dying and she's the second last person who still harbors Cooper as a memory. He is luckily completely foreign to Murph's own family, and the memory of him and his legacy fades away in Murph's own family tree. The only person left in the world who still remembers him is the addict daughter of prof. Brand. This is the last place where Cooper now goes to die.

[Mister Mister]

Wow that's fascinating Hubot, I'll have to mull that over.  The sci-fi seemed so far-fetched, especially how at the end he breaks the rules of space and time to reach out to his daughter that he abandoned, I had a feeling this was less about science and more about a delusional, dissociative, avoidance of the pain of neglect and abandonment.

Just wanted to add, did anyone else think it strange how the daughter seems to be so much more important to him than the son?