“Imagine what we'd do with the real illusion.
We'd have the greatest magic act anyone's ever seen.”
What makes a person who they are?
Is it a soul?
The sum of their experiences?
Or is it something else— something hiding in plain sight?
“It takes nothing to steal another man's work.”
“Yeah.
It takes everything.”
This question lies at the heart of The Prestige,
Christopher Nolan’s 2006 movie about two warring magicians
who risk everything to become the undisputed master of their craft.
But Robert Angier and Alfred Borden’s costumes,
disguises, and fake names
don’t just befuddle all the characters in the story:
“Make-up, glasses, wigs.
We don't use any of it for the show,
but I've seen it hidden backstage.”
“It's misdirection.
He leaves those things lying around
to make you think he's using a double.”
Like a talented illusionist himself,
Nolan blurs the line between appearance and reality
until we, the viewers, are left to wonder who exactly is who.
“A brother…
A twin.”
And the point of all this is that
we emerge questioning our own understanding of identity.
This theme is arguably the most consistent thread
running through Nolan’s entire filmography,
“I never cared who you were—”
“And you were right.”
and it’s also a central question
in the long history of philosophical thought.
Is our identity based on some immutable essence?
Or do we only become ourselves through the roles we play?
“I killed those people.
That’s what I can be.”
“No.”
Here’s our take on how The Prestige illuminates Nolan’s feelings
on who we are and how we connect with the world around us—
and how this may be the film’s most impressive reveal.
“Are you watching closely?”
You’re watching The Take.
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First, let’s clear up what we see (or think we see) in The Prestige.
The story begins with Angier and Borden working as “shills”
for a more established illusionist.
"Bind her feet, around the ankle."
Angier’s wife, Julia, is part of their act,
miraculously escaping from a water tank.
But one night, the trick goes wrong.
Julia drowns—and Angier blames Borden.
“Which knot did you tie?”
“I keep asking myself that…”
They turn on each other
and become rivals.
Their competition becomes even more heated
when Borden debuts the Transported Man,
an astounding trick in which Borden seems to disappear into one wardrobe,
then immediately emerge from another.
“It was the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen.”
Obsessed with performing his own version of the trick,
Angier first hires a double,
then sends his assistant, Olivia, to steal Borden’s secrets.
But after Olivia falls for Borden, she leads Angier astray
with a fake diary planted by Borden.
“His notebook.”
“You stole it?”
“Borrowed it, for tonight.”
The diary leads Angier to believe that Borden is using technology
acquired from inventor Nikola Tesla.
And Tesla does end up building Angier a machine—
one that makes an identical clone
of whatever, or whoever, steps inside it.
“What you're about to witness is not magic.
It's purely science.”
Angier uses it to debut his new, improved Transported Man act.
“It's very rare to see... real magic.”
Confused at how Angier is pulling off his illusion,
Borden goes backstage at his rival’s act and is shocked to watch Angier drown.
Borden is caught snooping, mistakenly accused of murdering Angier,
and hanged for his enemy’s murder,
“Abracadabra.”
even though Angier isn’t actually dead,
and even visits Borden in prison (as his original identity, Lord Caldlow).
“Caldlow.
Yes I am.
I always have been.”
But then, there’s yet another twist:
Borden is revealed to have an identical twin brother.
To maintain their illusion, the two had been sharing a single identity—
even the same wife and family.
“Cutter knew.
But I told him it was too simple.
Too easy.”
“Simple maybe but not easy.”
So the surviving Borden returns
to exact his final revenge against Angier.
And in the end, he at last understands his rival’s secret:
every night Angier was cloning himself, then killing his duplicates.
“I pulled you out of the tank.”
“All I wanted to do was prove that I was a better magician.”
Throughout all this tricky business of clones and identical twins,
The Prestige frequently asks us to ponder:
Who is the real Borden?
“No, Alfred, stop.
This isn’t you.
Stop performing!”
And who is the real Angier?
“How difficult could it possibly be to play The Great Danton?”
These questions echo a millennia-old argument about our very understanding
of what defines us as individuals.
Philosophers like Plato and René Descartes
believed that every human contains a soul or essence—
but not everyone agreed.
“I’m not sure I follow.”
Enlightenment philosopher David Hume
believed humans are merely a “bundle of perceptions”—
that we are simply what we see, hear, and feel.
“If you’re talking about what you can feel,
what you can smell, what you can taste, and see,
then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”
John Locke proposed that “psychological continuity”—
being consciously aware of your actions from one moment to the next—
forms the basis of personal identity.
But in The Prestige, Nolan puts forward his own take on this classic debate:
our identity is defined by the function we perform.
“Freddie?”
“Well, that's my name!”
“Not at home.”
“Well, I'm not always at home.”
We see a basic version of this idea when Angier visits Tesla.
They discover that Tesla’s mysterious machine
has made dozens of clones of Angier’s hat.
“Don’t forget your hat.”
“Which one is mine?”
“They are all your hat, Mr. Angier.”
While Tesla’s reply may just seem like a witty retort,
it’s actually a profound statement about identity—
one that sums up the film’s and Nolan’s thoughts on the matter.
For Tesla, they are all Angier’s hat,
because they can all just as easily function as Angier’s hat
“So where did my top hat go?”
“Nowhere.”
With this one moment, The Prestige plants the suggestion that,
like Angier’s hat,
who we are is determined not by any fixed soul or essence,
but by our function.
“Were you the one who went into the box,
or the one who came back out?”
“We took turns.”
We eventually learn there are two men who share the identity of Alfred Borden,
each alternating between being “Borden”
and being Borden’s stage engineer, Fallon.
“He lives his act, don't you see?”
Nolan does grant that there are essential differences
between these two people.
Even when Borden is speaking, talking, functioning just as he always has,
his wife, Sarah, suspects that he’s almost a different man
from one day to another.
“I love you.”
“Today you don’t mean it.”
Indeed, each of the two men fall in love with different women:
Olivia and Sarah.
“You married her, you had a child with her--”
“Yes, yes, a part of me did.
But the other part didn’t.
The part that found you.
The part that’s sitting here right now.”
Yet they are still parts of a single, functional composite,
united by their function as Alfred Borden,
“We each had half of a full life.”
two sides of the same coin,
much like the two-headed one Borden presents to Sarah’s nephew.
“The secret impresses no one.
The trick you use it for is everything.”
When Angier, Olivia, and stage engineer John Cutter
debate how Borden’s Transported Man works,
Cutter is convinced that Borden is using his own double.
“Then, it’s a double that comes out at the end.
It’s the only way.”
Angier and Olivia disagree.
“The same man comes out of that second cabinet, I promise you.”
“It’s the same man.”
But in a sense, all three are right.
Cutter is correct in that a second man comes out of the cabinet.
But because “Borden” is a shared identity,
Angier and Olivia are correct that they’re also the same man.
Crucially, neither twin is revealed
to be the “true” Borden, or the “real” Fallon.
“We were both Fallon, and we were both Borden.”
Borden belongs to whoever is fulfilling his function at a given time.
As if Borden’s shared identity isn’t confusing enough,
it turns out that “Robert Angier” is an invented persona.
It’s a pseudonym,
adopted by a wealthy British elite named Lord Caldlow.
“I promised my family I wouldn’t embarrass them
with my theatrical endeavors.”
On top of this guise, Robert Angier adopts another one:
his onstage persona, The Great Danton.
“It’s sophisticated.”
“It’s French.”
In other words, he’s a British man of means
who becomes an American magician
who reinvents his act with a French-sounding persona.
Robert Angier is an identity that is all appearance and function,
with no single, unchanging essence.
“I couldn’t fathom to live my whole life
pretending to be someone else.”
“You are pretending to be someone else.”
“I don’t think changing a name compares.”
“Not just your name.
It’s who you are and where you’re from.”
The film highlights this idea by framing the earlier search
for Angier’s lookalike as a search for Angier himself.
“Take a good look.
Let's get out there and find me.”
When this leads to an actor named Gerald Root,
“When I get done with him he could be your brother.”
“I don't need him to be my brother.
I need him to be me.”
Root's ability to function as Angier means he is Angier.
“You can go back to being yourself now, Root.
A nothing.”
“I'd rather be him, for now.”
When Angier first takes a closer look at Root,
Nolan’s camera circles them,
leaving the viewer disoriented and unsure which is the real Angier.
By jarring the viewer’s perception, Nolan underlines that
there is no inherent difference between the two men.
“Did you think you were unique, Mr. Angier?”
Robert Angier is not a single man, using multiple identities.
It’s a single identity, using multiple men.
Once again, Angier’s hat comes into play—
now acting as a conduit for the identity of Robert Angier.
In his New Transported Man act,
Angier throws his hat to his double, then disappears beneath the stage.
And without the hat,
the man below ceases to function as Robert Angier.
“No one cares about the man who disappears,
the man who goes into the box.
They care about the one who comes out the other side.”
Similarly, a rubber ball transfers Alfred Borden from one man to another,
“Thank you.
Just a rubber ball… no.
Not normal.
Not a normal rubber ball.
It’s magic.”
both onstage and off.
“Go live your life in full, now, alright?
You live for both of us.”
But what about the clones?
Once Angier begins duplicating himself in Tesla’s machine,
how do we know which is the “real” Angier?
Again: “They are all your hat, Mr. Angier.”
Because each clone functions as Angier, each clone is Angier.
All of the clones could claim equal rights to the Angier identity.
But whichever one survives
and continues to function as him out in the world
is the so-called “real” Robert Angier.
“You're still alive.
How is it you're still alive, Robert?
I saw you on a slab for God's sake!”
The “realness” of the clones
adds a gravity to the magician’s nightly sacrifice
that makes it all the more terrifying and awe-inspiring.
“You did terrible things.”
He’s actually killing himself, just to bring awe to his audience.
He even does it in the most emotionally painful way imaginable,
by replicating the way his wife died.
"Julia!
Julia!"
So in the end, Nolan uses all this questioning of identity
as a metaphor for what the artist does:
surrender themselves totally,
for the sake of that one perfect illusion.
“But if you could fool them, even for a second,
then you can make them wonder.”
The theme of identity-as-function
can be found throughout Christopher Nolan’s films,
to a degree that you can argue it’s one of his work’s defining ideas.
“No one cared who I was til I put on the mask.”
In 2000’s Memento, Leonard Shelby,
a man suffering from anterograde amnesia,
“Since my injury I can’t make any new memories.”
struggles with the psychological continuity that Locke proposed
as fundamental to personal identity.
“You don’t know who you are.”
“I’m Leonard Shelby.
I’m from San Francisco--”
“That’s who you were.
That’s not what you’ve become.”
Without a stable, independent sense of self,
Leonard is defined solely by his single-minded search
for his wife’s killer.
“You’re living a dream, kid.
A dead wife to pine for, a sense of purpose to your life.”
As Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote in his classic book,
Man’s Search for Meaning,
“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state
but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal…
the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.”
“I have to believe that my actions still have meaning.”
And Nolan’s film agrees,
showing us that this purpose is fundamental to Leonard’s existence—
ultimately, more so than any objective reality.
If he lets that purpose die (even by solving the murder),
that would mean letting himself die as well.
“My wife deserves vengeance.”
Nolan’s Batman trilogy offers perhaps the clearest illustration
of how function forms the basis of identity.
“Don’t you want to know who he was?”
“I know exactly who he was.
He was the Batman.”
In Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne feebly tries to explain
that his wealth isn’t who he really is.
“Inside, I am…
I am more.”
“It’s not who you are underneath.
It’s what you do that defines you.”
How he behaves, as Batman, is who Wayne really is.
We see this again in the sequel, The Dark Knight,
when Batman flexibly adapts his outward persona
to serve his city’s needs.
“I’m whatever Gotham needs me to be.”
And in the third film, The Dark Knight Rises,
even when Commissioner Gordon learns the name of the man
beneath that assumed identity,
“Bruce Wayne?”
to Gordon, that changes nothing.
“No one’s ever going to know who saved an entire city.”
“They know—it was the Batman.”
The same goes for the trilogy’s villains.
There’s no secret identity or essence to the Joker
beyond the role he plays,
“No matches on prints, DNA, dental.
No name.”
which is why the "real" origin story to how he got his scars doesn't matter.
“Speaking of which, you know how I got these scars?”
“No—but I know how you got these.”
The Dark Knight also finds Nolan returning to the metaphor
of the double-headed coin through Harvey Dent,
who also becomes two men with different essences
sharing a single identity as the villainous Two-Face.
“You’re a lucky man, but he’s not.”
“Who?”
“Your driver.”
And in The Dark Knight Rises, the masked mercenary Bane
shrugs off any notion of identity outside of action.
“It doesn’t matter who we are.
What matters is our plan.”
Nolan also explored these ideas in 2010’s Inception,
presenting a world where appearance and reality
are so indistinguishable it’s pretty much impossible
to tell dreams from so-called “real life.”
“Dreams, they feel real while we're in them, right?
It's only when we wake up
that we realize something was actually strange.”
Tom Hardy even plays an identity forger named Eames,
whose ability to function as someone else in a dream
allows him to become them.
Nolan even gets at this idea in 2017’s Dunkirk,
in which Tom Hardy once again spends most of the film behind a mask,
reduced entirely to his function as a fighter pilot.
These dozens of thin, dark-haired young men
who are nearly identical in their uniforms
have been stripped of individuality,
reduced to interchangeable pawns in the fog of war.
“He's shell-shocked, George.
He's not himself.
He may never be himself again.”
In The Prestige, sometimes
the trick lies in concealing the fact that there is no trick.
“I'm sure beneath its bells and whistles
it's got some simple and disappointing trick.”
“The most disappointing of all, sir: it has no trick.”
The mind-bending twists of Nolan’s story
similarly leave us dizzy,
and convince us that there must be some hidden truth
about who Angier and Borden really are.
But all this is misdirection.
If our function defines us, then there is no illusion—
no trick that, when exposed, would reveal who we really are.
“You’ll see no trickery.
No trickery is employed.”
The basic idea that there is no fixed, pre-existing self
is at the heart of Existentialism,
the philosophical movement centered on the idea that,
in the words of Jean-Paul Sartre, “existence precedes essence.”
As Friedrich Nietzsche (a key forerunner to existentialism) put it,
“‘The doer’ is merely a fictitious addition to the doing; the doing is all.”
Or in Batman’s words,
“It’s not who I am underneath, but what I do that defines me.”
And while this discussion might seem cerebral or abstract,
there’s a concrete lesson here.
Each of us has a set of beliefs about who we are deep down—
that we are fundamentally good people, for example,
even if others don’t always recognize it.
But Nolan’s films would suggest
that we are good people only insofar as we do good things.
“Do you?
Think I'm a good person?
Deep down?”
“That's the thing.
I don't think I believe in ‘deep down.’
I kinda think all you are is just the things that you do.”
For example, unless we’re making sustainable choices in our homes
or supporting environmental causes, we’re not really environmentalists.
We can only identify as activists
if we’re out there performing the functions of activism—
protesting, donating, signing petitions—
not just posting a spicy tweet and calling it a day.
“If you want change, you can't just sit around.
You have to go out and do it.”
We can believe that we’re warm and caring,
but if we don’t fulfill that role for the people in our lives,
then, sorry to say, that is not who we really are.
Thus Nolan’s philosophy offers a challenge
to put our beliefs about ourselves into action.
“I'm going to show the people of Gotham
their city doesn't belong to the criminal and the corrupt.”
This might sound a little daunting at first,
but is it not actually liberating?
As the existentialists emphasized,
we’re free to create our own meaning in life.
“Nothing is impossible, Mr. Angier.”
So rather than being bound to some preordained script
of who we must be, we get to choose—
and changing our behavior allows us to change who we truly are.
“The magician takes the ordinary something
and makes it do something extraordinary.”
And that is the most impressive trick of all.
“I love you.”
“See?
Today it's true.”
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