Previously, from the Oeuvre
Seen:
Batman Begins, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet
Not Seen:
Following, Memento, Insomnia
What's the Deal
Whenever I think of Nolan, I hear, like, a basso profundo gong strike and a rattling perception of time. The Batman movies, of course, aren't as fluid as the others--comic books do time travel, but their modules are linear. Nolan's work isn't cheery--does anybody smile, ever--but it's not exactly morose, either. It's...ontological? Ontology leaves no room for merriment.
The Prestige, 06 December 2021, streamed via imdbTV
I watched this a long while ago (and, for some reason, I don't think I ever met the parallel release, The Illusionist), but I legit don't remember anything except multiple iterations of a man, drowning. So.
There are three parts to a magic trick:
- The Pledge: The miracle gets set up. We see the thing, we hold it in our hands and know it to be real.
We open in the future, I suppose, depending on how you want to orient yourself. Cutter, a magic gadget guy (essentially), is testifying in court. Alfred Borden, a magician, is being charged with murder.
We go back. Rupert Angier, another magician, has been, no, is in Colorado Springs, seeking out Nikola Tesla. Tesla made something for Borden. What was it?
We go back. Borden and Cutter are working together, along with Angier. The lads are a bit scruffy--not boys, certainly, but lacking a certain sense of stability that would indicate they were gentlemen.
They're professionals, all three of them, and their centerpiece tricks are always to make something disappear, then reappear again. With a canary in the cage, they slam a hand down, killing the first canary--secreting it beneath the false floor of the cage--and releasing a second one, live, into the cage when they pull it back up again.
The current act's showstopper is a simple escape-the-tank trick, a la Houdini. Angier's wife, Julia, is bound and dropped into a tank of water. The curtain drops around her and she's supposed to quickly unbind her wrists and slip out of the tank before the revelation. Except, this time, she doesn't get out. Her hands stay tied. She drowns.
Borden had been pushing to use a more complicated knot for Julia's wrists, sure it would be safe. Did he use it despite the protests of the others?
He doesn't remember.
We move forward again. How far?
- The Turn: The ordinary, the thing we had, undergoes transformation into the extraordinary. We know there must be some mechanism, but we don't want to know. We look away.
The act has been broken up. Borden is married to a woman named Sarah; they have a child at some point. Some days he loves Sarah. Others he doesn't.
Angier finds Borden mid-act. What knot did you use? He sabotages the bullet-catch and it ruins Borden's hand.
We, perhaps, go forward. Angier and Cutter are working together, but the crowd is bored of the same old tricks, and the new tricks aren't working as they should.
We go forward. Angier waits upon Tesla. Alley, one of Tesla's associates, brings Angier to a field of incandescence. Lightbulbs extending across a snow-covered field like a grid. There are no wires. The generator is ten miles away.
We go forward. Take a look at the lawman, beating up the wrong guy. We go back. Angier meets Tesla. Wonder if he'll ever know. We go back. He's in the best-selling show.
Borden, a good magician and a bad showman, is doing an act that none of the rest of them can parse. He goes in one box and exits another one. The Transported Man. It's less than half a minute. It's unremarkable. It's impossible. It's the freakiest show.
Angier apes the act, but with a doppleganger and a trick door. It's popular. It's not enough. Olivia, his lover, his partner, he sends her to Borden with a wink and a mission.
One day, Borden loves Sarah. The next, he doesn't. Over and over again. She's unsatisfied living between one life and another; she removes herself from both. Maybe it was never, anyway. Borden tells Olivia he's only ever loved her.
Borden never went to Tesla; Tesla makes Angier a machine regardless. We go forward. Borden watches Angier drown. Borden goes to jail. We go forward. We've always been here.
Angier is alive. Borden is hanged for murdering Angier.
- The Prestige: The frame closes. The magician reveals a return to the ordinary, but the sense of uncanny will linger.
Borden is both alive and dead; he was twins. He was always twins. Borden, the remaining, kills Angier. Look at those cavemen go.
Angier is dead. To be as Julia was. Angier has always been dead. To triumph over Borden. Angier has died, over and over again. No one cares about the man in the box. Angier dies.
Why would you keep the bodies?
Inception, 07 December 2021, streamed via Hulu
I saw this once in the theatre and who among us didn't obsess about that hallway fight for, like, three weeks? DiCaprio might as well have not been there at all, as far as I'm concerned. I mean, he's fine, we all know Leo's a master of his craft and everything, but did I care about his identity crisis?
"In the dream state, your conscious defenses are lowered and it makes your thoughts vulnerable to theft." So comes the idea of extraction--delving into a sleeping mind in order to retrieve secrets oft kept unsaid. It's like Ocean's 11, but with reality.
If it's your dream, it's your rules. Inception, the titular concept, is the ability to not only delve, but to implant.
To make something not just real, but natural to a dream. It's supposed to be impossible.
There's this company, see, where the owner is going to die, and Saito wants them to convince the inheritor, Robert Fischer, Jr, to break up the company.
Cobb's wife is dead. Cobb's children are removed. If he goes home, he gets locked down. Cobb is goddamn crazy, guys, should he really be running this show?
"Well, dreams, they feel real when we're in them, right? It's only when we wake up that we realize that something was actually strange."
"So how did we end up here?"
"Well, we just came from the, uh--"
"Think about it, Ariadne. How did you get here? Where are you right now?"
You need a chemist to lull the body, to keep it only that. You need an architect to create a maze, to keep the dreamer in the dream. You need a forger to smooth out the edges, to make your dream into theirs and back. You need a point man to indicate when you've lost your goddamn mind and do we need to have a serious talk about this, come on.
"I can't let you touch it, that would defeat the purpose. See, only I know the balance and weight of this particular loaded die. That way when you look at your totem, you know beyond a doubt you're not in someone else's dream."
You need a kick to wake you up.
"Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed--fully understood--that sticks; right in there somewhere."
Five minutes in real life is an hour in the dream. They build a dream three levels deep. A week in the first level, six months the second, and the third is ten years. "Who would want to be stuck in a dream for ten years?" "Depends on the dream."
Maybe the dream never ended. Mal never left hers. She's still waiting.
"How do I drop you without gravity?"
Tenet, 08 December 2021, streamed via HBO Max
We live in a twilight world and there are no friends at dusk.
The temporal pincer is what we see on film--they approach from behind and ahead of us. Nothing's ever standing still, though. Tenet wants us to know that they have everything under control. It's a Nolan film: If we don't start confused, why start at all?
We know very well that time is elastic to Nolan--I skipped over Dunkirk, where we experience an hour, a day, and a week interspersed, and Interstellar, where we can go back decades if we run ahead fast enough--and in a way, it's become predictable.
Like M Night Shyalaman can never replicate that initial gasp, He was never there at all, Nolan may surprise us with the first twist, the initial reveal when we see what the trick is. But he's played this hand too many times--we know he plans to double back.
I've never been one to insist on being spoiler-free, because there's some pleasure in seeing a narrative crafted well. If something comes as a complete shock, out of the blue, then the writer was lazy; they don't respect our acuity.
In a lot of ways, that's how it feels with Nolan's narrative tricks. No matter what the mechanism is, we know he's intent on sleight of hand. There's an illusion, the illusion is revealed, but only enough to distract us from the real thing--the future behind the bookcase, a childhood captured in amber, a twin in front of us the entire time.
The problem with the double-twist, when it's the storyteller's trademark, is that bit in the center, the thing that's now, gets lost in the shuffle. We're so busy trying to piece together the puzzle that the story stops existing. What the hell is the Macguffin in this movie? The Infinity Stones? The horcruxes?
So we can't fully relax into the warp and weft of character and conflict; thanks a lot, Nolan. How am I supposed to write fanfiction about semiotics disguised as an action tentpole?
We have the unending thump and tremor of the film score. We have dizzying special effects, editorial wonders, vistas meant to make us gasp. We have the finest actors in the world being paid to look appropriately enigmatic. No wonder Nolan got all het up about same-day streaming in Our Troubled Times. I get it, but it's nonsense.
"I realized I wasn't working for you. We've both been working for me. I'm the protagonist."
Don't think it. Feel it.
The Bottom Line
I dig Nolan's work, but guys. I cannot warn you enough about how bad an idea it is to attempt a Nolan marathon. It's bad for you. It will mess you up for days.
1 comment:
"Ontology leaves no room for merriment."
new favorite quote. deserves to be crosstitched on something
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