Time, Narrative, and the Art of Being Present: How "Interstellar" Bends Our Perception of Time
The Continuing Tesseract of Aristotle's Poetics
Have you ever emerged from a great film—or, for that matter, a full day of film festival screenings—feeling like you've lived several lifetimes in just a few hours? Or found yourself lost in a story so completely that time seemed to bend around you? Welcome to the second installment of our year-long exploration into the nature of storytelling, time, and how we engage with stories.
The series title, Be There Now, playfully inverts Ram Dass's transformative work Be Here Now, highlighting a fascinating paradox at the heart of storytelling: while mindfulness teaches us to ground ourselves in the present moment, a great film or novel asks us to exist in multiple temporal spaces simultaneously. This tension between presence and transcendence points to more complex ideas about how our minds process time and story.
Why Time Feels Different When We're Lost in a Story
Recent neuroscience has uncovered something remarkable about how our brains process time: novel experiences can slow down our subjective sense of time’s passage. When we encounter something unexpected or unique—" oddball” events—our sensory cortex and hippocampus engage more deeply, creating more potent memory imprints that make moments feel longer and more expansive. Scientists call this the “oddball effect,” and storytellers like Christopher Nolan have been evoking its power long before we had the brain scans to prove it.
When we experience fear or anxiety, time also seems to slow—likely an evolutionary adaptation that prepares us to react swiftly to threats. Conversely, engaging in joyful, creative or immersive activities often makes time feel as though it’s speeding by or has passed without any awareness of its duration. These mechanisms come into play when a film seamlessly draws us into its emotional and intellectual world.
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar provides an excellent case study. Consider the scene where Cooper watches decades of accumulated video messages from his children. In objective time, the scene lasts only a few minutes, yet for Cooper—and us—time stretches and warps under the weight of longing and regret. By merging intense emotion with a novel situation through acute of film cutting, the film leverages precisely those neural mechanisms that distort our sense of time.
The Ancient Science of Storytelling: Aristotle’s Poetics
Two thousand years before neuroscientists began mapping how stories affect our brains, Aristotle wrote Poetics. His insights align surprisingly well with modern neuroscience, particularly regarding how narratives manipulate our perception of time and reality.
Aristotle identified several key components that work together to create compelling stories:
Plot (Mythos): The backbone of events. Aristotle emphasized unity—a clear beginning, middle, and end.
Character (Ethos): The agents of the story whose actions and moral choices shape events and themes.
Thought (Dianoia): The ideas and questions that give the narrative intellectual depth.
Spectacle (Opsis): The visual and emotional elements that captivate the audience.
Melody (Melos) and Language (Lexis): The rhythm, musicality, and expression that heighten emotional resonance.
Aristotle believed these elements mirror how our minds naturally process and make meaning of experience. They also profoundly influence our subjective sense of time, especially if a storyteller masterfully blends suspense, awe, and emotional stakes.
How Interstellar Plays with Time
Nolan’s Interstellar ingeniously deploys Aristotle’s principles while pushing narrative boundaries—particularly in its manipulation of time and emotion.
Still from Interstellar
1. Plot (Mythos)
Structurally, Interstellar follows what Aristotle would see as a classical four-part model (Setup, Complicating Action, Development, and Climax/Epilogue). The film begins with Earth’s impending blight (Setup), leading Cooper to join a desperate space mission (Complicating Action). As the story advances, time fractures across parallel lines—Cooper in space versus Murph on Earth—escalating tension and pathos (Development). The tesseract sequence becomes the emotional and narrative Climax that finally reunites father and daughter.
Yet Nolan’s “puzzle box” style complicates Aristotle’s ideal of neat, linear unity. Wormholes, relativistic time dilation, and intercut storylines create multiple timelines that we, as viewers, must piece together. Despite this, the film maintains an underlying unity: Cooper’s promise—“I love you forever. I’m coming back.”—is the emotional throughline that anchors the labyrinthine plot in a single, overarching purpose.
2. Character (Ethos)
For Aristotle, moral and ethical choices drive a narrative. In Interstellar, Cooper sacrifices the comforts of family life to try to save humanity. At the same time, Murph, feeling abandoned, pours her anger and brilliance into solving the gravitational equation to rescue those on Earth. Their actions shape the film’s emotional spine. Even across galaxies, father and daughter remain locked in a moral and emotional bond that transcends space-time.
Still from Interstellar
By prioritizing the father-daughter relationship, Nolan addresses criticisms that his films can be “cold” or overly cerebral. Interstellar integrates genuine pathos: a heartfelt exploration of how love—particularly parental love—can endure vast stretches of time.
3. Thought (Dianoia)
Aristotle also highlighted the intellectual dimension of storytelling. Interstellar grapples with the big questions: Can love be a force like gravity? How does the survival instinct mingle with our longing to connect? What happens when cosmic-scale physics tangles with human emotions?
Nolan collaborated with Nobel physicist Kip Thorne to ground the film in plausible science, but he also indulges in speculation—wormholes, black holes, and advanced future humans. This blend of fundamental science and imaginative “rule sets” encourages viewers not just to feel but to think deeply about free will, cosmic evolution, and the nature of time.
4. Spectacle (Opsis)
Aristotle warns spectacle should serve the story rather than overshadow it. In Interstellar, though, visual grandeur is integral to the film’s narrative. The towering waves on Miller’s planet, the swirling majesty of the black hole Gargantua, and the dust-choked landscapes of Earth all function as more than set dressing. They viscerally demonstrate time’s mutability and humanity’s fragility. When Cooper and his crew spend an hour on Miller’s planet—equal to seven years on Earth—our sense of alarm and awe intensifies the drama rather than diluting it.
5. Melody (Melos) and Language (Lexis)
Hans Zimmer’s organ-driven score provides a musical heartbeat that rises and falls with each revelation and emotional beat. Zimmer’s use of the organ—often associated with cathedral spaces—lends a cosmic, almost spiritual resonance to the film, aligning with Aristotle’s view that music can heighten the emotional pitch of a narrative.
Meanwhile, the script balances straightforward exposition (explaining physics and wormholes) with poetic flourishes, such as Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” This rhetorical repetition becomes both an emotional refrain and a thematic echo of humanity’s refusal to succumb to extinction.
The Visual Language of Time
Beyond the plot and characters, the film’s stunning cinematography exploits our brain’s response to novelty. Those otherworldly spectacles (massive waves, spherical wormholes, a four-dimensional tesseract) trigger the “oddball effect,” demanding heightened attention. Combined with the emotional weight—Cooper’s agony at missing decades of his children’s lives—these moments stretch or compress our subjective experience of time.
What This Means for Storytellers
By aligning Aristotle’s Poetics with modern neuroscience, Interstellar illustrates how stories can literally warp our perception of time—both inside the narrative and in our own viewing experience. The film seamlessly merges emotional depth with cosmic puzzles, leveraging novelty, awe, and familial bonds to engage our brains more powerfully.
For creators and audiences alike, this is a potent reminder that innovative storytelling—when grounded in strong human emotions—can generate deeply impactful audience experiences. It also offers insight into why some stories remain so engrossing: they tap into our neural wiring, transforming chronological hours into what can feel like entire lifetimes.
Join the Conversation
How have potent stories shaped your own experience of time? Have you felt time slow down during an intense narrative moment or speed up when utterly absorbed? Share your thoughts in the comments about instances in Interstellar (or other films) where time seemed to warp or bend around the emotional stakes. Which scenes triggered that potent blend of novelty and emotion for you?
Looking Ahead
This is the second installment in a year-long series exploring the intersection of time, narrative, and human consciousness. Next week, we’ll explore how static media—like painting and photography—embody narrative in fundamentally different ways than film and and other time-based media. By challenging our assumptions about how the world may or could be constructed (and the potential narratives that may take unfurl in such worlds) these visual arts remind us that narration can take vastly different forms between media.
Until then, consider rewatching Interstellar with Aristotle’s principles in mind. Note how mythos (plot), ethos (character), dianoia (thought), opsis (spectacle), melos and lexis (music and language) play out within the narrative. Also, note how Nolan’s puzzle-box storytelling uses cosmic backdrops to amplify the most human of emotions: love, duty, and a longing to connect across time.
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So interesting to break down time, space and perspective as tools of storytelling. Since I am author of the YA time travel adventure series, Edge of Yesterday, I love this deep dive into craft and history and science and literature/film!