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My bad. I meant Edmondson’s planet.
Yes, it’s a stretch. Do you think scientists routinely factor love into their decisions to study things or the conclusions they draw? Just like I expect a physician to diagnose a patient with diabetes based on blood glucose levels and other probative signs, I expect a character like Brand to select planets based on how hospitable they are.
Not on where their lover is located.
I think love is powerful enough that it has impacts on people all the time. You don’t think a physician may act somewhat differently in diagnosing someone they love as opposed to a random person who walked into the doctor’s office? Why not?
Sure, this bias is well recognized and has implications on medical ethics. When love comes against judgement, it can cause bad decisions to be made.
The problem with Brand’s character is not just that she succumbed to this bias unapologetically despite it being against the interest of mankind on its face. We, the viewer, are also supposed to see this bias as more powerful and authentic than reason is. People who value a scientific approach will find this a laughable idea, as it makes no sense.
Maybe the issue is that you are looking for rational scientific method approaches in a movie about love ;). I don’t see it as a flaw that love is held up as a powerful and necessary counterweight to reason - in fact I see that as a valid way to look at the world (I am not for hyper-rationality).
And as mentioned, interestingly enough Brand is right. And the scientific arguments she makes are valid as well. Cooper wants to go to Mann’s planet because its closer - meaning he can get home and save his kids, which is also a decision based on love, no? Of course at this point they don’t know that Plan A is a sham.
In the end, we just disagree about fundamental ways to view the world. And I think Nolan was creating a movie for those who see the world more like I do - that emotional forces, especially love, can be and at times are, just as powerful and valid as reason and logic.
Nobody is arguing that love is not a powerful motivator. What we are saying is that just because it is powerful, that doesn’t mean it transcends the laws of physics.
By the way, I just thought about this argument that sorta rebuts Dr. Brandt’s statement of love transcending time:
I feel love for my mother, who died in 1980. But when I die, that love stops, and is gone. My love for her will not outlast my death. If love “transcends” time, why should this love end with my death? (I don’t believe I will roam the planet as a ghost.)
The entire ending of the film (and the ‘ghost’ in the beginning which ties into it) is about transcending the laws of physics. Different dimensions that we can’t consciously perceive right now. If you look at Brand’s quote, she openly speculates that perhaps love is a dimension we can’t perceive right now and that’s the reason for its power over us. She’s not fully making a scientific claim (other than perhaps it may be, we don’t know) - more of a philosophical one.
As for love for others dying when you die… well that depends on what you believe, doesn’t it? That wouldn’t even including a semi-transference - telling your children about your love for someone.
TARS doesn’t feel love. (It’s a robot.) Yet it functioned in the tesseract. (Although Cooper couldn’t see it. But the radio waves definitely traveled between the two.) I don’t think Cooper’s “power of love” was enabled him to perceive his daughter in her past. My speculation is that the tesseract had a “user friendly” “plug & play” feature that was able to “read” what was on Cooper’s mind (his desires, needs, whatever), and presented him with those time threads as options.
I don’t think that fundamental disconnect is actually there. Do you view emotion and logic as opposing forces? I don’t. To me emotion and logic are both parts of a complex decision-making process that we as humans utilize. The same way we utilize both smell and taste to determine the suitability of food, emotions and reasoning are best when they work together to determine a suitable course of action. Our emotions tie into our reasoning, and our reasoning impacts our emotion. A question like “Should I still love him if I’ll never see him again?” illustrates that intertwined – tortuously intertwined! – process.
In such a world view, there is no need for love to be a separate cosmic force affecting us from the outside, the way gravity is. It is just another motivator to be integrated into the decision-making process of a well-balanced adult.
To be sure, different people weigh different motivators differently. Some may place love above lust, or greed above love, or altruism above all, whatever. There is nothing inherently illogical or unreasonable about that process; individuals develop different values and weightings depending on their upbringing and possibly their genetics.
I’m not saying that the scene was too emotional and not logical enough. I’m saying that it just failed to move me on both an emotional and logical level, because there was no corroborating storytelling leading up to that point. The Brand character was not presented as a woman who emphasizes love above her other values, or really one who operated with her heart out much at all.
But you are not Brand. And Brand did nothing to convince the audience, beforehand, that she was like you. If you took her place and acted this way from the get-go, we would have no trouble believing you, and perhaps even agreeing with the main point of your speech: that love is all-powerful and seemingly all-encompassing. You could certainly be forgiven for calling it a “transcendental” force, because it certainly feels that way.
But when the Brand character says it, it takes on a different connotation altogether because of who her character was portrayed to be up until that point: a rigid, hardass spacetime scientist. It’s ok for her to feel, even strongly – that’d only be mildly surprisingly, but hardly unbelievable. But she’s not saying “I feel strongly about this person. And I have a hunch that it’s going to be all right.” She is saying, quite literally, that love is a supernatural force, not a mere human motivator. She is saying it permeates spacetime and controls us from the outside, like gravity, and that her partner is somehow communicating with her through love-waves. THAT is a huge statement for any scientist to make, not because scientists are unfeeling logical monsters, but because scientists are also human and already know the tremendous impact love has on our psyches without needing to be supernatural and extra-dimensional. For her to elevate love beyond that already-lofty status, there needed to be some sort of great revelation, emotion, evidence, change of heart, SOMETHING more than just a short, unexpected pontification. Of course love is powerful; but what makes a scientist believe it to be a trans-dimensional force?
I know that her belief seems like a given to you, and that’s fine. And even if Brand herself believed that, that’s fine. All in all, it’s probably a pretty common belief. But where this whole thing falls apart is where we the audience are just expected to know Brand feels this way, despite the way she was portrayed up until then.
It’s as jarring as, say, Juliet pulling out a 4-page cost-benefit analysis to measure the social efficacy of engaging in intimate relations with Romeo. It’s just not fitting for their character, even if certain members of the audience think “Oh, that’s totally how love should be!” The problem isn’t that people view love differently, but that it’s difficult to believe Brand, specifically, felt that way.
As for Cooper and the rest of the movie, it didn’t need to portray love as a transdimensional force – and I’d argue that it really didn’t, aside from her speech. It is a movie about love, I would agree, because love is a motivator for the characters. They carry their motivations with them the same way they carry their skin with them, through wormholes and hellholes, without wondering which dimension it’s from. Love just happens and is already plenty powerful as a given; trying to give it an extra-physical origin just makes it bizarre, the same way The Force as magic is totally acceptable, but The Force as tiny midichlorians in your bloodstream feels totally contrived.
So I’ve heard this it’s not who her character was and we don’t have anything that indicates that she was portrayed completely differently… but where do you base that on? How much have we gotten of her personality before then? How do you know she’s just only a “rigid, hardass spacetime scientist”? Her father may be, but nothing seemingly indicates that the younger Brand is aside from some of our assumptions about what scientists are supposed to believe. It’s just an assumption we make. That being said, Cooper is as much of a scientist as Brand is. We just have seen his love for his kids. I don’t think that because we haven’t seen younger Brand express a longing means that her character was completely different.
Already by that point, we KNOW that Brand’s biologist believes in “they”, supernatural beings of kindness or whatnot. We know that she reached out her hand to touch the “they”. In many ways, she sounds like a true believer of the “they”. If she already believes that “they” are working in interdimensional space, why is it so weird that she entertains the idea that love could be a transcendental force.
To be fair, we see no evidence shown in the film that love is acting as a force of nature all on it’s own, do we?
Believing that alien life (not a mystical “they”) set up a wormhole that appeared out of nowhere doesn’t bear any relationship to belief that love is a transcendental force. Just like believing in the existence of alien life doesn’t mean someone is going to believe in astrology, superstition, or ghosts.
FWIW, here is the quote (in context):
She’s not articulating scientific fact. She’s not even explicitly saying that it is controlled by something other. She’s saying its something powerful and not able to be understood that may have some meaning. She’s not saying she knows what that meaning is, but perhaps these longings and this love is something more than simply biochemical reactions. She isn’t saying that Edmonsen is sending her love waves. She’s saying her excitement for seeing him, even though she thinks he is likely dead, may be something more powerful or more complex that she can consciously perceive.
And this is, I remind you, coming from someone who has already observed “they” and touched hands with it while going through the wormhole. The idea of things existing on higher dimensions that cannot be perceived is already an essential part of the story and the narrative by which NASA is doing this thing to begin with.
They believed in a mystical “they”. Younger Brand in particular.
What evidence do you have that they believed they were dealing with a mystical entity rather than an alien race who had mastered space-time?
They never mentioned aliens? Brand thought she saw “they” while going through the wormhole and reached out and touched it (turned out to be Cooper going through the ending of the tesseract)? If aliens, why not call it aliens?
What evidence do you have that they believed they were dealing with an alien race rather than a mystical entity?
It’s a NASA mission, dude. When NASA hears hooves in outerspace they think alien horses, not supernatural zebras.
There would be little point to baking all this highly complicated physics stuff into the plot if the main characters were supposed to believe in supernatural beings.
So… no evidence then?
Now is the math / science really accurate - 1 hour on a planet can be 7 years on Earth?
Well, if the planet was orbiting Sirius, it’d be one year to seven years, so I guess it’s possible.