Page - 64 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

sion and realizes that she was trying to make him stay because the Poltergeist had told her to do so. As an adult, Murphy looks at all the sketches in her notebook, the signs she had written down, and understands that her father was the “spirit” speaking to her through the bookcase all along. Using gravitational waves, Coop- er transmits the information TARS has collected from the black hole to the older Murphy. Using this information, Murphy is then able to complete Professor Brand’s equation, enabling the evacuation of the earth and the saving of humanity. Cooper in turn realizes not only that the Poltergeist is himself talking to his daughter from a future time, but also that the extraterrestrial beings who opened up the wormhole must be human beings from the future and that they must also have created the tesseract to enable him to communicate with Murphy in order to give her the information required to save humanity. TARS says to Cooper: “They saved us” (02:27:00). “Who the hell is they? And just why do they want to help us?”, Cooper asks in response. The robot does not know exactly but claims that they con- structed this three-dimensional space inside their five-dimensional reality expressly so that Cooper could understand the information and send the message back to his daughter, who has been “chosen” to save humanity. Gravity, the robot claims, can cross dimensions, including the dimension of time, but they must find the exact moment to transmit the data to Murph, when she is old enough to understand it, which they finally do with the aid of the watch Cooper gave her before he left Earth. The idea that man can change the future or influence the future is at the basis of monotheistic faith. The film presents a conception of time that is complex and non-linear, whereas biblical time is linear. In the Bible, time is external to us; it fol- lows a direct course towards the final event, the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth.22 Nevertheless, biblical time is non-deterministic. The prophets as- 22 Leibowitz 2002. Fig. 4: Cooper inside the tesseract, Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, US 2014), 02:27:14. Biblical Narratives in Interstellar | 63www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 53–69