When it comes to the films of Christopher Nolan, his characters may seem straightforward,
but their stories and the way he tells them can be anything but. Nolan's filmography is
littered with confusing moments, so here are some explanations to help you understand them
better.
Nolan's 1998 debut feature Following centers on a character who calls himself Bill, who
is obsessed with following people.
"I followed anybody. I just wanted to see where they went, what they did."
Bill finds himself involved in a grander conspiracy after following a burglar named Cobb. Throughout
the film, Bill accompanies Cobb on burglaries and becomes entwined in a plot involving a
woman known as the Blonde and a criminal called the Bald Man.
Things get out of hand after Bill ends up killing a man, but when he turns himself in
to the police the twist is revealed: Cobb has actually been working with the Bald Man
and has been planting evidence throughout the film to set Bill up to take the fall for
Cobb's killing of the Blonde. She, as it turns out, has been blackmailing the Bald Man, so
Cobb kills her. Everything from the burglaries to Bill's alias pins the murder of the Blonde
on Bill. It's a classic noir twist with a bit of Nolan's personal touch to it.
Nolan's 2000 film Memento centers on Leonard Shelby, a man who can't form new memories
thanks to an injury sustained during an assault that left his wife dead. Since the assault,
he's relied on notes and tattoos to keep track of the information he feels is important for
him to "remember."
Memento depicts Leonard's hunt for the man responsible for his wife's death using a unique
framing device, starting at the chronological end of the story, then gradually working its
way backward. Each scene in the film chronologically precedes the one which plays out before it,
so that the climax at the end of the film actually occurs in the middle of Leonard's
revenge story, while its beginning plays out only in flashback.
The nonlinear narrative can be hard to follow, but it's easier to grasp if you can put the
story back in chronological order. Leonard actually found his wife's attacker and exacted
his vengeance long before Memento's chronological starting point, but he quickly forgot it had
happened. Afterward, Leonard's cohort, Teddy, began sending Leonard after a series of other
men.
"You didn't remember. So I helped you start looking again, looking for the guy you already
killed."
Upon discovering Teddy's deception, Leonard leaves himself clues that indicate that Teddy
is the killer, and he eventually shoots him, just as he has all of his previous targets.
The revelation completely upends our understanding of the story and drastically recolors the
character we've been following.
In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne isn't the only man taking up a mantle bigger than himself.
It's also done by one of his greatest enemies, Ra's al Ghul. Or is it Ducard? Ra's is seemingly
killed when Bruce escapes the League of Shadows in the film's first act, only for his old
mentor Ducard to resurface later claiming he's the mastermind and Ra's al Ghul is merely
a smokescreen. So does that mean that there is no real Ra's al Ghul? Well, not exactly.
In The Dark Knight Rises, we learn that Ducard has been known as Ra's al Ghul throughout
his life and operates as the leader of the League of Shadows. However, much like Batman,
Ra's al Ghul is a symbol bigger than one man. Ducard himself notes that the League of Shadows
has been active for centuries. It must always have a leader and that leader is Ra's al Ghul,
a symbol worn by many men throughout the ages, including Ducard.
The Dark Knight Rises ends with Bruce Wayne sacrificing his life to save Gotham City,
passing on the mantle of Batman to a new bearer. There's a funeral and everything, but no body
to bury. However, there's a twist when Alfred sees Bruce and Catwoman in a European cafe
some time afterward. Since Bruce has died in a nuclear explosion and Alfred alludes
to a similar scene as a fantasy earlier, viewers must wonder whether this is real or just all
in Alfred's head.
However, all signs point to this being real and Bruce having escaped death. Much of the
evidence lies in the revelation that The Bat's autopilot was fixed by Bruce, who earlier
implied that he had to fly it manually to get the bomb out of the city. There's no way
he wouldn't know it had been fixed, implying that he used the autopilot to fake his own
death.
In The Prestige's second act, ambitious magician Angier becomes obsessed with replicating a
trick performed by his rival, Borden, called The Transported Man, in which Borden seems
to teleport himself from one location to another. Angier travels to America to meet with Nikola
Tesla, who builds him a machine that allows Angier to perform the same trick. The machine
works by creating an exact copy of the person who enters it and teleporting one of them
a short distance away, while the other is drowned in a tank underneath the stage. It's
never specified whether the machine transports the original Angier to safety and drowns the
clone, or transports the clone and drowns Angier.
Not even Angier himself knows which version of himself gets killed each night. Since both
versions of Angier believe themselves to be the "real" version, he has no way of knowing
which is the original and which is the copy.
"It took courage to climb into that machine every night not knowing if I'd be the man
in the box."
Every time he steps onstage to perform his version of The Transported Man, Angier takes
his life in his hands. By the end of The Prestige, he has no idea whether he's the original Angier
or a copy of a copy of a copy, and neither do we.
In The Prestige, after stealing Borden's journal and reading that Tesla is the key to his Transported
Man trick, Angier heads to America to work with Tesla on what becomes the cloning machine.
However, as the film reaches its finale, we find out that both diaries are frauds, written
with the intent of misleading each magician.
"Tesla is merely the key to my diary, not to my trick."
It makes you wonder how Angier's collaboration with Tesla ended up being so fruitful if Borden
simply intended to send Angier on a wild goose chase. It turns out that Tesla's invention
is an unintended wrinkle in Borden's plan. His intent was simply to send Angier overseas
looking for something that wasn't there, wasting both his time and money in the process. He
never dreamed that sending Angier to Tesla would actually result in Tesla inventing a
machine that would literally create copies of Angier, enabling him to emulate his trick
after all.
To help distinguish dream from reality in Inception, each character in Cobb's crew carries
a totem, the most prominent being the spinning top Cobb carries with him at all times. If
he spins the top and it collapses, he's in the real world. If it never stops, it's a
dream. The film's ending sees Cobb reunited with his family. He spins the top but instead
of waiting for the result, he rushes to see his children. The top spins, and wobbles a
tiny bit, but the film cuts to black before it falls.
Until that moment we have every reason to believe Cobb is back in reality, but is he
really? Despite the fact that Nolan himself won't answer definitively, there are context
clues that point to Cobb being awake. The best evidence is the presence of his children.
Throughout the film, we're shown that Cobb can't remember their faces. In the ending,
he can see them. It may not be a conclusive answer, but it's enough to convince us it's
real.
One of the most potentially confusing mechanics in Inception are its "kicks," or physical
disruptions that wake people from dreams, which factor heavily into the movie's action-packed
third act.
By this point in the film, Cobb and his team are three dream levels deep, meaning they're
in a dream within a dream within a dream, and it will take a synchronized series of
kicks in all three layers to jolt them out of it. In each level of the dream, time moves
more slowly than in the level above, so while hours pass in the third level, only seconds
go by in the first. Because of this, the team coordinates the kicks by timing them to a
song, which can be heard playing at varying speeds in each of the levels.
However, in the film's climax, Cobb decides to go even deeper into the dream to rescue
a fallen team member, rather than riding the synchronized kicks back to wakefulness. So
while the kicks work to rouse the other members of the team, Cobb is left behind to continue
dreaming, having missed his kick. Instead, he has to wake himself up from deep within
the dream.
Early on in Nolan's 2014 film Interstellar, protagonist Cooper's young daughter, Murph,
complains of a ghost haunting her room, throwing books around, and seeming to leave her messages.
It's later discovered that it's not a ghost but a gravitational anomaly creating patterns
that lead Cooper to a NASA base, which sets him off on his journey through space.
Toward the end of the film, we finally find out what the ghost really is.
"It was me, Murph. I was your ghost."
After entering a black hole, Cooper finds himself in a place where the dimension of
time is made tangible so he can understand it. Using gravity, which is the only thing
capable of bridging dimensions, Cooper is able to send messages to Murph in the past,
including the data that can save humanity from destruction. The gravitational anomalies
aren't divine or alien. They're Murph's father defying the boundaries of time and space to
reach his daughter.
The plot of Interstellar hinges on a wormhole that was positioned near Saturn 48 years prior
to the start of the film, but Amelia Brand and her father, John, never consider that
it might be naturally occurring. Rather, they assume that some form of advanced intelligent
life constructed the wormhole for altruistic reasons, allowing humanity a chance to survive
following the slow destruction of Earth. Although they draw no conclusions about who "They"
might be, the implication is that "They" are some form of alien life who've taken a benevolent
interest in humanity.
However, at the end of Interstellar, when Cooper finds himself inside a tesseract that
allows him to communicate with his daughter as a child, he realizes that he and the Brands
have been wrong about "Them" for the whole movie. "They" aren't aliens at all. Instead,
they're the humans of the future, who have advanced far beyond the humans of the present.
"They" have learned to transcend time using gravity, which is how they constructed the
wormhole and how they allowed Cooper to send a message to his daughter, who in turn uses
the information she receives to save humanity. This creates a causal loop, in which humanity
is saved by themselves in the future, who in turn only exist because they were saved
in the past.
The real events of the 2017 film Dunkirk took place over the course of a week, but Nolan
uses a nonlinear series of intersecting stories to depict the events in the film. The twisting
narrative maximizes tension, but frustrated some viewers who had trouble following the
chronology.
Dunkirk's three stories focus on characters experiencing the historic evacuation on land,
in the air, and at sea. The story taking place on land, titled "The Mole," takes place over
the course of one week of the evacuation. Another, titled "The Sea," takes place over
the course of the last day of the Dunkirk evacuation. Finally, "The Air" takes place
only over the course of an hour on the last day of the evacuation. Nolan himself has said
he structured it this way to better depict the experiences and perspective of the soldiers
and citizens in each story segment.
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