Literal Symbols in Interstellar

  Right before the school year began, I watched Interstellar for the first time. That movie has stuck with me for many reasons since–its plot is immaculately built to be both surprising and coherent and its writing is gorgeously true to the conversational behavior of humans writ large.

The real reason I’ve fixated on it as a work, though, is its use of symbols.

Interstellar is first and foremost a story–it ticks all the boxes of the archetypal hero’s journey.

What’s so striking is that it’s accurate. To the letter. Every bit of the movie is built not just to be plausible, but outright possible. Space is silent. Black holes look like warped light waves (that are actually a star the last moment before it imploded).

And somehow, these real facets of our galaxies and universe convey a symbolic meaning just from a glance. The wormhole becomes a threshold–the strange planets the trials–the black hole the dark night of the soul and the place of death and rebirth.

To some of my peers in the theater with me, it was hard to piece these elements together sometimes. What I saw was a proselytization of the story just by the introduction of certain concepts.

Interstellar takes what we value as truthful–the scientific world with all of its advancements–and connects it to the real–the realm of myth and narrative.

The result still sends chills down my spine on a regular basis.