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| Warner Bros. |
While exploring the idea of augmented realities, and the impact stories have on us, specifically in regards to film, one name immediately came to mind: Christopher Nolan. No doubt everyone is familiar with this man’s work, if not his name as well, already. What some may not realize is the intriguing commentary Nolan provides us on the art of storytelling through many of his films. After studying the plots and conclusions in particular of his films, I came to the realization that each builds on the other. Although the Batman series may be the exception to this trend, the rest of his movies certainly play a part in what I will reveal to be a commentary on how we choose to understand reality.
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| Summit Entertainment |
Nolan is perhaps the most exciting film director working in Hollywood in this day and age. In 2000, he brought us a story, based on a short story written by his brother, Jonathan Nolan, called Memento. This little film mesmerized audiences with its reverse chronological narrative that also included a chronological one differentiated by the use of black and white and color photography. It earned praise all across the board and even a spot on many top lists of the decade due to this ingeniously devised plotline. With the major success of Memento, it is easy to forget Nolan’s first film which he wrote, photographed, co-edited and produced, and directed. This was Following, released in 1998 at a mere sixty-nine minute running time, but with a hefty plot. Like Memento, it follows a non-linear storyline involving a man who follows strangers around London to try and find inspiration for a novel he is writing. The rest of the film sees the man getting involved with a stranger, named “Cobb”, who in turn manipulates him into being framed for crimes Cobb committed. Following set the stage for Nolan’s twisting, mysterious, non-linear storylines.
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| Warner Bros. |
Two years after Memento he made Insomnia, a remake of Norwegian murder mystery film, starring Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank. Although it is not as famous as his other films, it was still given credit for being a smartly written, psychological thriller that put more power in Pacino’s career. It was at this point that one could easily recognize the darkness connecting Nolan’s movies. Memento emphasized how much obsession and revenge can manipulate reality even at the consent of an individual. Insomnia follows the same idea of warping reality, but this time to avoid taking responsibility for a violent act and how it drives Pacino’s character over the edge.
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| Warner Bros. |
Next, Nolan was given the reins to bringing back Batman in 2005. Bringing new life to a comic book character recreated over and over again would be a major challenge for any filmmaker. Yet, Nolan chose to not only start the whole franchise over with a new origins story, he gave it a darkness that only he could give. Needless to say, Batman Begins was a major success and brought actor Christian Bale into the spotlight as well. Naturally, Nolan was lined up to direct and co-write the script for a Batman sequel with his brother Jonathan and writer David S. Goyer. The Dark Knight opened in 2008 to critical acclaim across the board, especially for actor Heath Ledger’s shocking turn as the sadistic Joker. Nolan delved even deeper into darkness, expressing a keen interest in the concept of ‘chaos’ as presented by the Joker at the end of the film. Ledger earned an Oscar post-mortem for his portrayal. Once again, Nolan will be delivering a third Batman film scheduled for release in 2012 titled The Dark Knight Rises.
But in-between the two caped-crusader films, Nolan took a break to film The Prestige in 2006, a story of two competing magicians each trying to out-due the other in a twisting, turning plot. The film was based on a novel by English writer Christopher Priest of the same name. Nolan went to lengths to ensure his film debuted in the U.S. before Priest’s novel was released state-side since he had made changes to the plotline. Priest saw the film three times himself and was very enthusiastic about what Nolan had chosen to do with it. In the film, Bale returns to play one of the magicians, Alfred Borden, pitted against Robert Angier, played by Hugh Jackman. While the film was praised for its cinematography (for which it earned an Oscar nomination) and the majority of its intriguing storyline, critics were largely disappointed in the ending. Here are a number of critics’ responses as seen on Rotten Tomatoes:
“…one of those pictures where the journey is more important than the destination.”
“…until an explicably awful revelation at the end,..”
“…but once the presto moment of The Prestige is revealed, you’re left with nothing but shattered illusions.”
“…the ultimate ‘reveal’ in the movie is a little too tricky for its own good.”
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| Warner Bros. |
Perhaps the most important quote of the lot is “Not only does it tell you how it’s all done, it takes so long about it that you’ve got time to look up its sleeves and work it out for yourself.” As for myself, I greatly enjoyed the film and challenge of trying to work it out myself. Before the ending, I had figured most of it out. It seems obvious to me that Nolan intended for the audience to be able to see what’s coming. Why else would he drop hints along the way? But the ultimate reveal-all at the end does put an end to speculation and gives the audience no chance to figure it out on their own. Every great mystery film challenges the audience in this way and the fact that critics, and the audience over all were disappointed with the ending either shows a failing on Nolan’s part as a storyteller or on our end as an overly-critical audience. However, it’s at this point that we need to remember the first line of the film narrated by Bale’s Borden as the camera focuses on a pile of identical, black top-hats in the woods: “Are you watching closely?”
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| Warner Bros. |
This line reminds us of the movies focus: magic tricks. It is a phrase you’re likely to hear a magician say at the beginning of a trick, in more or less words. Borden holds the secret to an incredible ‘disappearing man’ trick that Angier simply must have. He obsesses over it and does all he can to find out Borden’s secret. Through a series of events that lead to violence done to each man on the part of the other, the film ends with the explanation of how Borden did his trick and how Angier managed to come up with his own version. As some critics pointed out the result of Angier’s trick is more fantastical than the rest of the film and some did not like Nolan’s decision to leave a storyline that had been largely grounded in reality before. Still, if you take into account the structure of the plot in regards to a magic trick it doesn’t make a lot of sense. A magician does not often reveal the mystery behind his trick, But Nolan does.
To put this into context, let’s take a look at the explanation of the structure of a magic trick given to us by the character of Cutter, played by Michael Cain, at the beginning of the film:
“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige"."
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| Warner Bros. |
The most important part of this quote that is repeated as the final lines to the film is “Now you’re looking for the secret…but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.” Here lies the irony of the film and magic tricks. Although the film is structured like a trick and we are puzzling over “The Turn” (in the film’s case, the twists leading up to the ending), waiting for the moment when we clap and wonder how it was done, it does precisely the opposite of a trick. It shows you how it was done. Where’s the appeal in that? There would be no trick and purpose for leading the audience on through this mystery just to reveal it to them. No magician would ever make a living this way. He has to maintain a devotion to secrecy. Borden himself puts this idea into words when he shows a little boy how to do a coin trick: “Never show anyone. They'll beg you and they'll flatter you for the secret, but as soon as you give it up... you'll be nothing to them.” We see how devotion to secrecy ruins Borden’s life in the film as it causes his wife to commit suicide and his twin (who he employed for the disappearing man trick) is hanged for murder. “The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything.” As can be seen in the critical response, the secret did indeed fail to impress.
So why did Nolan choose the ending he did? Did he know it would disappoint so much? I think he knew exactly what he was doing. These lines repeated throughout the movie clearly establish the danger of revealing one’s secret. In a way, Nolan performs a trick on the audience. He dangles the mystery in front of us and we wait for it to be whipped away. We want to marvel at it. Instead, he drops it in our laps and we don’t know what to do with it. What can you wonder at and discuss when the solution is right there?
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| Warner Bros. |
While we contemplate this it is important to recognize the role and experiences of the magicians in the story. The competition between the two makes perfect sense since any artist has their own competition and strives to come up with something better and more astounding than before. It is when the competition becomes violent and things get out of control that the stakes are raised. Angier shoots off one of Borden’s fingers during one of Borden’s tricks. Then Borden sabotages one of Angier’s tricks that mangle a woman’s fingers. Next, Angier kidnaps Borden’s assistant, Fallon, and threatens his life in exchange for the secret to Borden’s trick. Borden then infiltrates another of Angier’s tricks which ends in Angier seriously breaking his leg. Through all of this a woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, is the object of each man’s warring affections. The obsession for mastery of the audience and trying to find the best trick is comparable to people in Nolan’s profession. Of course, violence and death may not ensue, but the same competition is there, and it is important that each director maintain his style and keep his audience waiting for each of his movies to debut. At the same time, it is important that a director be able to adapt, change, and experiment in styles to try and find a larger audience. We see Angier do the exact same thing as he tries to find ways to perform his own disappearing man act. In light of this, the ending of The Prestige becomes clearer. Nolan recognizes the need for an artist to keep his name and proverbial ‘secrets’. The deep hurt that Borden and Angier experience with the death of Borden’s twin and Angier himself resembles the same blow an artist would see done to his business if his secrets were revealed. But why does Nolan do this at the end of the film when he’s aware it easily disappoints?
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| Warner Bros. |
As I said before, to understand one of Nolan’s films, you have to understand them all. And in the case of The Prestige, Inception, released in 2010, sheds the most light on the other. Inception is described on Rotten Tomatoes as “Smart, Innovative, and thrilling…the rare summer blockbuster that succeeds viscerally as well as intellectually.” The intricate dream world Nolan creates combined with the impressive action scenes, mind bending visuals, and crisp cinematography makes for the perfect movie. Most importantly, it challenges the audience “intellectually” as stated before. The rules and structure of the dream, the multiple layers, and the act of ‘inception’ itself, planting an idea in someone’s mind inside a dream, requires the audience to pay close attention at all times. The last hour or so of the film is literally nonstop action, and to top it all off, the ending cuts out before the audience gets an answer to the most burning question: is Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) still dreaming? Or was the entire movie a dream? Or did the dreaming start at a certain point and then continue till the end? The questions the ending raises are very similar to dreams themselves. As Nolan said in an interview, “…as soon as you’re talking about dreams, the potential of the human mind is infinite. And so the scale of the film has to feel infinite. It has to feel like you could go anywhere by the end of the film. And it has to work on a massive scale.”
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| Warner Bros. |
This ‘infinite’ quality of the film reflects its thesis which rests on questioning reality. Cobb, the head of the team hired by a wealthy business man, Saito, to perform inception on the owner of a competing corporation, is plagued by the possibility that what he believes to be reality is actually a dream. At one time, Cobb and his wife Mal (played by Marion Cotillard) were living in a dream and Mal hid the one thing that could remind her that this life was a dream, her ‘totem’, a spinning top. This top would keep on spinning and never fall over if it was spun in a dream. Finally, Cobb knew they had to leave the dream and he performed inception on Mal, planting the idea in her mind that this world was all a dream. Unfortunately, that idea lasted into the real world when they woke up, and Mal believed they were still dreaming. She committed suicide, hoping Cobb would follow her and ‘wake up’ since dying in a dream wakes up an individual in the real world. Cobb was blamed for her death and he was forced to leave the U.S. If he completes the inception at hand, Saito promised he would be able to lift the charges allowing Cobb to return to his two children. Because of this troubled history, Mal continues to appear in any dream Cobb takes a part in as she is a part of his subconscious which he cannot control. Towards the end of the film, this phantom of Mal tries to convince Cobb to remain with her in what she says is ‘reality.’ She asks him, “You keep telling yourself what you know, but what do you believe? What do you feel?” Cobb responds that all he feels is “guilt” for planting the idea in her mind that everything was a dream. At the end of the film, when Cobb and his team have completed the mission and returned to reality, Cobb is finally able to see his children again. To ensure himself that this is all not another dream, Cobb spins the top. However, he is so overcome with the sight of his children that he turns his back on the still spinning top, and it is still spinning as the screen goes black and the end credits begin.
It is a shocking ending, to say the least, and we can only ask ourselves what Mal asked Cobb: “what do you believe?” Everyone has their own theory for explaining whether or not Cobb actually saw his children again or if he was still dreaming. There are a handful of possibilities for each case, and Nolan leaves it up to audience to decide for itself. Yet, a theory can only go so far within the bounds of the dream world Nolan created. For instance, Cobb spins the top multiple times throughout the film to make sure he’s not dreaming. Therefore, we know that each of these times shows he’s not dreaming. Another factor is the presence of Cobb’s wedding ring. Whenever Cobb is in a dream his ring is absent, in the real world, it is there. By following these consistencies, it is possible to formulate our own hypothesis to show how Cobb was still in a dream at the end, or how he was not.
While Nolan lays out the rules for the dream world for us through each character, there are still points where the characters break these rules. For example, one rule Cobb explains is the subject, the person they are trying to perform inception on, must never know that he is dreaming. And yet Cobb breaks this rule as a ploy to try and trick Robert Fischer, played by Cillian Murphy, to cooperate with him and his team. Even when we think we may have it figured out, Nolan throws a wrench into the works and expands the mystery. So while the ending is set up as a mystery for us to figure out on our own using clues from the film, there’s still enough room for all sorts of possibilities. Just as Cobb breaks the rules of inception and dreaming in the film as a means to an end, we are given the liberty of proverbially ‘breaking’ rules and making our own as a means to forming an explanation for the ending.
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| Warner Bros. |
Nevertheless, along with any explanation we believe is right comes the possibility for other answers to be right as well. Mal in the dream tells Cobb he’s the one who is wrong and must convince himself otherwise. Still, Cobb is determined to not let this ‘phantom’ of his wife convince him to accept an unreality. In the same way, once we establish our own answer to the riddle of Inception, we have to hold our ground against other answers. It takes some effort to write-off the other possibilities and stick to our own. When we come to this point of interpretation of Inception, or any other story for that matter, we are hypothetically doing exactly what Cobb does at the end of the film: he turns his back on the top. Cobb reaches a point where he can’t question reality anymore and must choose his children and the comfort and joy they bring. In regards to this moment, Nolan says
"I put that cut there at the end, imposing an ambiguity from outside the film. That always felt the right ending to me — it always felt like the appropriate 'kick' to me… The real point of the scene — and this is what I tell people — is that Cobb isn't looking at the top. He's looking at his kids. He's left it behind. That's the emotional significance of the thing.”
I would even go as far as to say this is the “emotional significance” for any interpretation we make. Nolan’s explanation of the ending makes it clear that what we regard as ‘reality’ is up to us. He explains the attraction to this idea in an interview when he says "…that era of movies where you had The Matrix, you had Dark City, you had The Thirteenth Floor and, to a certain extent, you had Memento, too. They were based in the principles that the world around you might not be real.” Inception and all of the movies Nolan mentions seem to reinforce the idea that we, as an audience, are obsessed with the idea that ‘reality’ is trivial and, in the end, a personal choice. Cobb makes the personal choice to ignore the thing that could reveal reality to him. Do we do the same?
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| Warner Bros. |
As the screen cuts to black at the end of Inception, the mystery leaves the theater with us. In a way, Nolan has performed ‘inception’ on the audience. He has planted the idea in our minds that it could have all been a dream. We continue the story, give it more life, and complicate it even more as we invade the internet with blog posts and our theories about it. This type of storytelling as an art form ignites such excitement in us because it allows us to interpret it as we will. It’s a process as old as philosophy itself. We are given a question, see a sign, or some other phenomena, and inevitably ask “why” and “how.”
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| Warner Bros. |
Now hopefully the connection with The Prestige is clear. The Prestige does not leave us mystery and the option of interpretation. We follow the mystery and see the clues, and at some point we figure it out ourselves before the ending where we inevitably find the answers to all our questions. And if some details were vague to us before, the ending sheds light on them all; whereas the details of Inception shed light on the end as a means of raising theories/questions, not a solution. Why does it work this way? Cutter’s quote at the end of The Prestige explains it all: “We want to be fooled.” Plain and simple. What would be left to us to enjoy if all of life’s mysteries were explained? We can’t even fathom what that would mean. Art and storytelling seems to be the only way we can deal with the fact that we can’t bear to see the top continue to spin, out of our control.
This hypothesis brings us nicely to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. In this work, Nietzsche explains how life boils down to chaos and the inevitable end of death. The only way to cope with this sobering fact is to cover it up with art. Humanity has a need for illusions and to continue the ultimate illusion of life having meaning. In the same way, stories are the best when they allow us to continue the illusion that they are under our control and we get to decide, within the bounds of only a few guiding plot points, what is true. Therefore, Nietzsche says “All these facts clearly bear witness that our innermost being, the common substratum of humanity, experiences dreams with deep delight and a sense of real necessity.” Furthermore, he says “…I imagine that many persons have reassured themselves amidst the perils of dream by calling out, “It is a dream! I want it to go on.” I have even heard of people spinning out the causality of one and the same dream over three or more successive nights.” This is exactly what Inception exhibits within the film with the example of Cobb and Mal’s dream world they create together and the effect the ending has on us. On the other hand, it is precisely what The Prestige refuses to do, something I believe Nolan is perfectly aware of. Comparing the responses to the end of Inception and The Prestige make it clear what type the audience prefers. Nietzsche uses a quote from Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea to make this point:
“Even as on an immense, raging sea, assailed by huge wave crests, a man sits in a little rowboat trusting his frail craft, so, amidst the furious torments of this world, the individual sits tranquilly, supported by the principium individuationis and relying on it.”
As human beings living in a world comparable to a tumultuous sea of chaos and death, Nietzsche believes we rely on art to create an illusion of meaning and the means by which we stay afloat. Of course, not every story told must end in a mystery so that we may satisfy our need to interpret it ourselves. But not every story deals with issues as threatening as reality.
Memento, for instance, ends with the main character, Lenny (played by Guy Pearce), accepting the fact that he had consciously changed facts to give his life meaning because it had no purpose outside of getting revenge for his wife’s murder. But most important to notice is that he manipulates reality once again to continue the illusion. The extent to which we are able to manipulate reality in the world of augmented realities and art gives us a sense of control. Yet, are we really in control? To what extent are we being controlled by these things? We tend to associate ‘being controlled’ with ‘the media’ (a nameless, faceless entity) and ‘technology,' and that these things are controlling us against our will and without our knowing. When we try to break it down and determine exactly how we are letting ourselves be controlled we threaten to shatter the illusion that gives life meaning; the same kind of ‘meaning’ Lenny needed in Memento. The same kind of meaning Cobb chose to ignore in Inception. The same kind of meaning we find so disappointing in The Prestige. If we explore these illusions too far it won’t be temporary ‘disappointment’ like in the case of The Prestige, it will be unquenchable fear at the realization of nothingness beyond the realities we’ve created to form our proverbial ‘little rowboat.’ At this point, all one really has is faith.
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| Warner Bros. |
The last words of Angier in The Prestige, before his death, firmly establishes this underlying notion in Nolan’s work and what he believes to be the reason behind the ‘trick’ of storytelling:
[To Borden] “You never understood why we did this. The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special... you really don't know?... it was... it was the look on their faces...”
ending of The Prestige
ending of Inception (no embedding code available)
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