metaphorical landscapes

Just caught up with Interstellar (warning: link contains spoilers and massive pisstake). I prefer to wait several months until the hype dies down on these movies, watch them free from too much cultural noise. It's a typically materialist epic in which the earth rejects the human race, withdraws its food supply, and dumps acres of dust over the American Midwest home of the main characters, prompting them to look for a new planet to live on. 

So, drawn by mysterious signs sent across time and space, the hero sets out to overcome all obstacles, external and internal, before finding himself (SPOILER!) in a place beyond our conventional space-time limitations. Here he is able - through a channel of love to his daughter, who is still back on earth several years before he left (you have to get past the logic) - to lay the path he himself has subsequently followed to where the human race can find their salvation. Which raises interesting questions about current materialist thinking and how it's reaching for meaning beyond limitations imposed by its own viewpoint. 

Focussed exclusively on exterior measurable qualities of the world, and regarding human intelligence as essentially formed by a unique combining of atoms (consciousness is not discussed in the film), these characters are led to construct metaphorical landscapes out of speculative reasoning around theories about the nature of time and space that deny the conventional (Newtonian) frameworks materialism conducts its day-to-day business within. The film ultimately proposes that love (between father and daughter in the key narrative device, but discussed elsewhere in the film as a potential impersonal guiding material force) is the key to our ultimate salvation, trumping, for instance, one character's insistence that the survival instinct is all we have. 

Love is one of the great imponderables for materialist thought. It cannot be explained away by science. Sure, the bond between partners, family members, between tribes, societies, nations, races, species etc, can be analysed in terms of Darwinian natural selection, but none of that explains where that deep conscious self, opened up to purely unthinking benevolence, comes from. The way love is discussed in the film, suggests that discourses outside of the purely materialist and secular are providing the ground for a resolution of the central conflict raised, even if it is just-out-of-reach of conventional explanation.

Pic from here