It is pretty clear that his movies are meant to explore the existence of psychological phenomena and are not a statement in of themselves. In that way, I don't think they are meant to be interpreted.
I don't think I have seen an answer here that actually challenges this question - from my experience, I have yet to see a neural network actually learn representations outside the range in which it was trained. Some papers have tried to use things like sinusoidal activation functions that can force a neural network to fit a repeating function, but on its own I would call it pure coincidence.
On generalization - its still memorization. I think there has been some proof that chatgpt does 'try' to perform some higher level thinking but still has problems due to the dictionary type lookup table it uses. The higher level thinking or agi that people are excited about is a form of generalization that is so impressive we don't really think of it as memorization. But I actually question if our wantingness to generate original thought isn't as actually separate from what we currently are seeing.
In a similar vein, I was using DraftKings to play draft fantasy football I think two years ago. Spent $20 but split the bets between ten games and chose the players I would play against. For all ten games, I lost but the other players all used the same team. Makes you think.