Things In Interstellar You Notice After Watching More Than Once

If you're a fan of Christopher Nolan's 2014 sci-fi  space epic Interstellar, you'll probably want to  

watch it more than once to make sure that you get  everything out of it. So let's transcend space  

and time once again as we discover the details  that are only clear after multiple viewings.

The convergence point for the entire  decades-spanning story in Interstellar is  

Murphy's childhood bedroom. There's a poltergeist  chucking books off her bookshelf and toying  

with the physics of gravity and magnetism.  Ten-year-old Murphy, played by Mackenzie Foy,  

doesn't appear to be afraid of the apparition.  Instead, she's mostly curious. Luckily, she's  

being raised by a father with a scientific mind  who has no room for superstition. Cooper, played  

by Matthew McConaughey, instructs his daughter to  not just label it as a "ghost" because she doesn't  

know what it is. Instead, he directs her to  study it and come to a scientific conclusion. Her  

instincts end up being accurate all along, and her  first line of dialogue hints at the final outcome.

The opening moments of Interstellar feature a  brief tumultuous moment from Cooper's days as  

a pilot. His aircraft spins out of control and  the Gs amp up before he suddenly snaps awake,  

safely at home in his bed. Standing over him  is his daughter, who looks at him and says:

"I thought you were the ghost."

Later, by the end of the film, we find out  just how accurate this statement really is.

Christopher Nolan is fascinated with the  intricacies of time, particularly the paradoxes  

created by toying with timelines. Interstellar  creates scenarios where time stretches and  

squeezes based on its characters' galactic  locations. They unknowingly trigger various events  

that lead them to the NASA base where Cooper  signs on to pilot a mission to save the world.  

Coordinates to this base arrive courtesy of  the "ghost" in Murphy's room. The directions  

are given in binary form by altering gravity, so  billowing dust settles strategically on the floor  

to spell out a message. The ghost ends up being  Cooper himself from inside the tesseract within  

the massive black hole known as Gargantua. But  where did this whole chain of events begin?

As we find out later, the instructions  for how to find the NASA base were given  

to Cooper by Cooper himself. However,  in order to get inside the tesseract  

and give himself these directions, he  needed to have already received them,  

thus creating a paradox for which there is no  answer. The notion of an unanswerable question