I Tried Reverse Engineering Love, Ended Up Learning From A Space Movie & “Stranger Things” Instead.
Warning: The article contains spoilers for the newest season of “Stranger Things”
“Love is…. in the air”
Cliché, yes, but it really is.
It’s all everyone seems to talk about; from dating and marriages, situationships and even heartbreak, the topic never seems to completely leave our lips. So, I did what anyone with a lot of free time would do: I decided to reverse engineer love.
Now you may ask, why love? Why not, let’s say, evolution? Well, that’s partly because I already did with evolution and partly because I really wanted to understand what was behind this phenomenon that everyone is spellbound by. And what I did find was well, pretty interesting.
I learned about the three phases of love –lust, attraction, and attachment– and how the hormones work together to bond individuals.
The Science Of Love
The phase of Lust, or Desire as some like to call it, is one where another individual’s physical or mental qualities activate some pretty complex evolutionary algorithms in your head that tell you: “Yeah, they’re the one you should make babies with”.
Next up is the Attraction phase where dopamine, serotonin and a couple of other hormones begin to really make you addicted to the subject of your affection. It’s what leads to all the sleepless nights you spend thinking about them, spending time with them, and just being utterly besotted.
In the final phase, Attachment, oxytocin & cortisol work hand in hand to ensure that we’re never going to want to leave this person. And that, my friends, is how love, or romantic love, functions.
Because we have no clue exactly how this pathway works, what to trigger, and what to flick, my little reverse-engineering experiment was brought to a quick end.
At this point, you’re probably wondering, “What does any of that have to do with space movies?”. Here’s what.
Love Across Space & Time
Recently, I was re-watching Interstellar, which is one of my favorite movies of all time. Might be because I’m a huge nerd and I loved the concepts of time dilation, gravitational lensing & relativity that were explored in the movie.
This time around however, something else caught my attention: A conversation between two astronauts, tasked with finding another planet that could sustain humanity, and it went something like this:
When I first saw the movie, I was very critical of Ms. Brand here.
“You’re entrusted with the fate of over seven billion people and you’re being guided by your emotions? By your hormones?”, I thought.
But that was because I was only paying attention to the technical side of the movie and not the actual theme. This time, I actually began to understand what she was talking about.
You see, love wasn’t just something that had evolved so we could make babies with each other. Sure, that’s part of it but even more so, it was created so we could actually live.
The bonds it creates and the memories it helps us retain are, in my opinion, the greatest drivers of human society, and they were driving her to find a place where humans could live. A force capable of transcending even dimensions, and speaking of dimensions…
The Strange Thing About Emotions
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard of Stranger Things. The hit TV show tells the story of several individuals whose simple lives in the fictional town of Hawkins, Indiana, are affected by a supernatural rift in their town that opens a doorway into an alternate dimension known as The Upside Down.
I’ve been a fan ever since the show was first released, and while I was indulging in the newest season, I noticed a few interesting things, similar to my observations from my favorite space movie.
It’s a show that heavily explores emotions. In fact, I’d say its main theme was the power of emotions. From a mother’s frantic, protective love for her child to the bond shared between friends as they grow and change over the years. Even the soapy whirlwind romances teenagers often get involved in and the powerful hope that drives a woman across the pacific and into an unknown country to be reunited with the man she loves.
The show isn’t just the positive emotions though. It also explores fear, abandonment, rage, and depression.
I think that was a really strong theme for the fourth season: How depression isolates us, how it combines with anxiety to make us believe things that aren’t real, how it crushes us, and even sometimes, how it takes close friends from us.
In one of the most viral scenes from the season, one of the characters, Max, has Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill played to her in order to free her from the hold the antagonist Vecna has on her in the Upside Down.
While the music was important, it wasn’t really what dragged her out of it. What the music did was remind her of memories, memories of the times she spent with people who loved her, who cared for her. The love in those memories was able to transcend even dimensions and drag her to safety.
It was a theory I finally confirmed after the final episodes were released.
In the climax of the final episode of the season, Eleven, the super-powered, socially awkward badass of the show, channels herself through Max’s memories, battles Vecna, and is initially defeated, and yet, after reassurances from her boyfriend, letting her know how much he loves her, a message that again crosses dimensions, she’s able to make quick work of Vecna in a ten-minute epic showdown that again involves a Kate Bush’s classic.
Emotions are extremely powerful forces, arguably the most powerful forces in the world. They’re able to drive humans, and other organisms, to achieve seemingly superhuman feats, and at the same time, drive us to our weakest and most vulnerable points. It’s also not something we’ve come to fully understand.
Bearing all of that in mind, a key take-away might be to stop viewing our emotions, especially love, as by-products of evolutionary biology alone, and instead, as phenomena that illustrate to us daily, what it really means to be Alive.
