Why are we drawn to things that challenge our intellect and our conception of the world? Why are stories like Inception and Interstellar so successful?
Well, I think, simply put, the answer is wonder.
But it’s deeper than that.
It’s wonder at the storytelling. Wonder at the plot twists. Wonder at the cinematography. At the soundtrack. At the creative mind that outlined these complex stories (I am a pantser and people who can organize and plan ahead like that amaze me.)
However, the greatest factor that causes wonder in these stories is that they tackle subjects that have been mysteries to mankind forever.
Take dreams, for example.
Dreams don’t really make sense. Why do we have them? I’ve listened to atheists try and figure out why. They’ve said that dreams perhaps exist to prepare us for possible real-life events, to train our survival response. As many have put it, they’re a ‘rehearsal’ for things that could happen to us so we know how to respond. And of course there are wackos like Freud who think dreams show the hidden (usually evil) desires of our subconscious, riddled with symbolism that can be deduced by experts. But an honest atheist will admit they don’t know for sure.
Even Christians don’t know. Now, of course, we do know that dreams can’t be explained by purely materialistic causes, because they, like the rest of us, were designed by our Creator. And as for Freud’s odd theories, they can be discounted on numerous grounds, including the one that all his theores tie into his (faulty) basic premise that humans are rapaciously sexual creatures from birth. However, if I may speak from my experience, I’ve certainly dreamed of things that have never so much as crossed my mind, let alone entered my imagination. Sometimes my dreams are so downright horrible and unlike me there can be no explanation save that Satan is trying to scare me or make me hate myself. (And we know Biblically that God sends dreams, so that right off the bat eliminates them as being purely for survival purposes.)
But what are the point of my dreams? The ones where I’m flying or performing awesome martial arts moves sure don’t seem to be preparing me for anything. Neither do the chaos dreams where I’m rocketing from one thing to another without cause. Plus, the idea of dreams preparing me for something would imply that the dreams either are in themselves (or are guided by) some sort of higher intelligence in my subconscious, some thinking, calculating ‘survival instinct,’ which seems just about as wackadoodle as Freud. Some theories say dreams exist to process emotions. And yes, they have some tie to the thoughts and feelings we have right before bed. That’s why I dream about flubbing a speech the night before I have to give it, or have an Australian narrator play-by-playing my dreams after I’ve been binging Aussie Border Patrol vids. But there’s not always a connection. More often than not, there just isn’t. And why do dreams repeat? Why are some seemingly harmless, random, chaotic dreams so terrifying? Why do some people get sleep paralysis and dream of the Old Hag? Why is lucid dreaming a thing, and why are there different levels of it? There are so many questions, and they just can’t be answered by materialistic means. These things are more than random chemical reactions — they’re deeply personalized, and mix familiar in strange in absolutely bizarre ways.
And what about ideas? That’s an entirely other realm of ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s.’ And, like dreams, the materialist conception of our brains being nothing much more than electrons, chemicals, and tissue fails to adequately posit theories, let alone answer questions.
Inception takes this subject full of unknowns and capitalizes on it. It explores something that makes everybody curious and wondering, and that’s one of the reasons it works so well.
It’s things like dreams, things that the materialistic, atheist, evolutionists can’t explain that remind us there’s more to life than what our five senses can detect.
Interstellar moves not outside of the five senses, but out of three dimensions and a linear timeline. (I will say — I found the ending unsatisfying. The part where they said that random future humans had created the time-tesseract-thing that Cooper enters at the end felt like some serious Deus ex Machina. It’s also a paradox, because humanity wouldn’t have survived without Cooper being in that tesseract, but him being in it would require humanity already having survived in order to go back and build said tesseract. Yes, it hurts my brain too. Also, I wanted him to end up with his daughter and have a restored family, which kinda seemed to be what the beginning was promising. But he didn’t really, and also it seemed a bit too convenient that he got spat out of the tesseract right by some human space ships. In terms of an explanation of humans being trapped in our very limited perception of time and space but tasting something outside that, I find C.S. Lewis’s concept of the eldila a better fictional example.)
Nonetheless, I still enjoyed Interstellar. It got me thinking, got my mind moving. The concept was creative (and I also loved the soundtrack.) But it wasn’t just another dumb, thoughtless movie designed to keep you rotting on the couch for a few hours — it actually made you engage.
Getting outside of time is something humans can only barely begin to comprehend, through the use of analogies such as an author being outside of a book, able to move anywhere and be present at any moment whenver she likes. Moving beyond three dimensions is even more mind-blowing. We can grasp the possibility of it mathematically, but no one can even begin to imagine what a four-dimensional thing would look like. Interstellar couldn’t really show multiple dimensions, though it did portray being outside of the timeline through Cooper’s activities in the tesseract.
Just the fact that Inception and Interstellar get me thinking about great mysteries I couldn’t possibly understand lands them a positive score in my book. Entertainment shouldn’t be all mindless. I mean, sure, I’ll take a mindless movie now and then when I’m tired or bored. But we also need entertainment that inspires wonder. That reminds us of the enigmas of our world and the limits we have as humans.
Because that’s how we remember that we aren’t God. That we’re fallen. That we can’t and won’t ever know everything.
Plus, in a way, creating entertainment is in itself a bit of a special mystery. Why are we designed so that marks on a paper or syllables of sound can transmit meaning into our heads? How come musical notes arranged in a certain way can make us swell with emotion? Why are arrangements of color and shape and camera angle and movement and all sorts of other things pleasing to us for their beauty and aesthetics?
That’s something materialism can’t explain either.
It’s kind of like we were designed with specific components too strange and wonderful to be explained by theories that exclude God.
Kind of like we can’t know everything merely by our five senses — we have God-given reasoning capabilities and those can lead us to catch just a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse, of great mysteries that remind us just how limited, falliable, and mortal we are.
Seek wonder in your day-to-day. Inspire wonder, if you are a fellow creative. Let wonder draw you toward the Most Wonderful, Most High God.
Talk to you later.
Cheers!
I once read a book from a very well-known Christian leader. He wrote that God doesn’t speak to us in our dreams anymore. I think we have to be very cautious about saying what God does and doesn’t do. He is limitless and infallible. We are quite the opposite.
Definitely! And we have testimony that God DOES still speak through dreams – the man who wrote Seeking Allah, Finding God is one example.