Hey Wisecrack, Jared again. Now — I don’t know about you, but every time a new Christopher
Nolan movie comes out, I happily shell out my hard-earned twenty-five bucks for a sweet,
IMAX 70mm experience. There are few directors today that can meld thought provoking philosophy
with big budget spectacle; but Nolan? Well, he makes it look as easy as spinning a top.
Now -- instead of focusing on one particular Nolan film, we’re going to take a step back
and look at his entire filmography. Because throughout all 10 of Nolan’s movies, certain
themes keep coming back. In fact, there’s so much to discuss, we’ve pulled the ultimate
Hollywood move: today’s Christopher Nolan video will be the first of three on the director.
Don’t worry, we’re not pulling a ‘Hobbit’ and extending a children’s book into a seven-hour
trilogy. Think of this instead, if you will, as our ‘Lord of the Rings.' There’s
just so much great stuff to say about Nolan, that we have to make three videos in order
to do his work justice. So, sit back in your recliner chair, and welcome to the epic Wisecrack
IMAX 70mm presentation of the Philosophy of Christopher Nolan - Part 1. And of course,
spoilers ahead.
Christopher Nolan’s films can be broken down into three distinct phases: the self,
society, and the universe. The first phase we’ll discuss, The Self, includes Nolan’s
early work: Following, Memento, Insomnia, and The Prestige, as well as Inception. These
films question the nature of personhood: Can we ever truly know someone else? Can we know
ourselves? Can our own thoughts be trusted? Hell — what even is a ‘person?’ To better
understand how these questions develop in Nolan's work, we're first gonna have to learn
a little something about what French philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the Hermeneutics of Suspicion
— or as the cool kids say: HoS. Hermeneutics studies how people interpret texts. Think
of how a biblical verse can be interpreted any number of ways. Christ's crucifixion could
be thought of as an allegorical, moral or even literal story.
Hermeneutics looks at all these different interpretations, focusing on the methodologies
people use to justify their interpretations. And it’s not just biblical text. Legal,
literary, philosophical, pretty much any text you can think of falls within hermeneutics.
Heck — I mean, Wisecrack is basically just one giant site dedicated to hermeneutics.
All we do is interpret text: film, television, literature, video games, you name it. But
Ricoeur questions these so-called “interpretations,” identifying a group of outside-the-box philosophers
committed to drawing out “less visible and flattering truths”. Ricoeur called this
group the “School of Suspicion,” which sort of sounds like an erotic French thriller
starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier; but unfortunately, it’s just three dudes
with facial hair: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud. According to Ricœur,
these figures, and the lineage they inspired, were committed to unmasking “the lies and
illusions of consciousness.” They circumvented self-evident meanings in text, focusing on
what wasn’t said, and the contradictions within — all to decode a true, disguised
meaning. So while religious stories, like Christ's Resurrection, may seem to be about
how man achieves salvation; for The School of Suspicion, these stories disguised a hidden
meaning. Marx stated the true purpose of religious parables were to make "the misery of life
more endurable." Nietzsche unmasked religion as the “refuge for the weak”, giving purpose
to the mentally fragile; and Freud thought religion was an illusion that substituted
one's wish for a “father” with “God”.
Now, yes — Hermeneutics of Suspicion typically only applies to text, but it can be used more
broadly to refer to any so-called interpretation we hold as self-evident. And what’s more
self-evident than, well, — ourselves! Yes, you, YouTube viewer, watching this video with
your 8-tabs open and fidget spinner in hand. What we drink, watch, wear, think, believe
— all inform how we interpret ourselves and others. Much like the HoS, Nolan questions
the conclusions that come from standard interpretations.
He confounds our assumed knowledge, challenging
our presuppositions, to reveal deeper, disguised truths about who the hell we really are. Nolan’s
films are always about that suspicious relation between our subjective reality and the idea
of an objective reality. Now this might sound like idealism to the philosophically-inclined
among you, but we’re not arguing that Nolan dismisses any external reality, but rather
he embraces a critical disposition toward the accepted notions of the self.
Take Christopher Nolan’s debut - Following. The black-and-white indie ‘follows’ Billy, a struggling writer,
who obsessively watches people from afar to get inspiration for his novel. One day, he
follows a well-dressed thief named Cobb (no, not that one), after he robbed a house. Cobb
quickly notices Billy watching; but instead of running away or attacking the stalker,
he invites Billy to join in on his ‘robberies’. See, Cobb is far less interested in stealing
precious items than in the figuring out the lives of people through their possessions.
“Breaking in. Entering someone’s life. Finding out who they really are.”
Both Cobb and Billy interpret and construct their own images of people — Billy by following
strangers around, and Cobb by breaking into people’s homes and rifling through their
belongings. But Nolan immediately questions if these conclusions hold any merit, suggesting
you can’t rely on appearances and possessions to define a person. As Cobb himself says,
when burglarizing a house: "You take it away. You show them what they had." For Cobb, violating
a person’s property forces his victims to re-evaluate themselves. When the possessions
people hold dear are taken away or altered, it, in effect, causes them to question their
identity. Nolan also questions people’s reliance on appearances. Cobb urges Billy
to cut his hair and don his same suits, which Billy immediately does because he wants to
be just like his mentor. But this is all a set-up. The blonde woman is working with Cobb
to frame Billy, the earlier ‘break-in’ and make-over just a long con on the poor
writer. Billy’s own presuppositions of Cobb are revealed to be false, a far more dastardly
intent lurking beneath his friendly smile and mentorship.
“You don’t look like a burglar.”
“Sounds like a compliment.”
Nolan’s suspicion towards using possessions and appearance to define others carries over
to his next feature - Memento. The film’s protagonist, Leonard, suffers from anterograde
amnesia and relies on a series of possessions — photographs, notes, and tattoos — to remind
himself of who the people around him are and whether they can be trusted. Leonard puts
complete faith in these items, depending on them exclusively to guide his actions.
He trusts Natalie because his notes tell him to.
“She will help you out of pity.”
He kills Teddy because, again, his notes tell him to.
“He is the one. Kill him.”
He believes the car parked outside is his because he has a photograph that tells him so.
“My car.” “This is your car.”
“Oh, you’re in a playful mood?”
But of course — these ‘mementos’ aren’t nearly as reliable as Leonard believes.
“You don’t even know my name!”
“Teddy.”
“That’s ‘cause you read it off a f**king picture.”
Nolan, in true HoS fashion, creates drama by throwing suspicion toward the validity of text - in
this case, photographs, notes, and tattoos. How can we trust something we read if the
source itself is questionable?
Truth is — Natalie can’t be trusted.
That car, parked out front, actually doesn’t belong to Leonard.
And Teddy — well, he’s not the guy Leonard should kill at all.
Leonard may say: “Well, I go on facts, not recommendations.
But thank you!”
But if the ‘truths’ these facts are based on are incorrect, then what use are they?
Nolan constantly draws a distinction between Leonard’s subjective reality and the idea
of objective truth.
“Well, what we were trying to do is essentially present an idea
of the tension between our subjective view of the world, the subjective way in which
we have to experience life, and then our faith in an objective reality beyond that.”
In Leonard’s subjective view, he’s a husband avenging the rape and murder of his wife after a break-in.
But as the film reveals, his wife actually survived this initial attack.
It was Leonard who accidentally killed his wife, forgetting he had already given her her insulin shot.
Moreover, Leonard actually already caught and murdered his wife’s rapist over a year ago.
He uses text to trick himself into believing that this idealized revenge mission still exists.
“You don’t want the truth. You make up your own truth. Like your police file.
It was complete when I gave it to you. Who took out the twelve pages?”
“You, probably.”
“No, it wasn’t me. See, it was you.” “Why would I do that?”
“To create a puzzle you could never solve.”
Leonard conditions himself to believe in the lies he’s created
to the point where even his own memories are fabricated. He substitutes the story of Sammy
Jankis for his own, so he doesn’t have to live with the guilt of accidentally murdering
his wife. Nolan, here, extends the Hermeneutics of Suspicion from simple text — Leonard’s
unreliable notes — to Leonard himself, his own false memories.
“Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy, yes I will.”
This suspicion continues into Nolan’s third feature, Insomnia.
Where in Memento, Leonard is an unreliable narrator, who's unable to discern
reality from his own fiction, Insomnia’s chief protagonist, detective Will Dormer,
seems to be the opposite. He’s reliable, intelligent, and perceptive. But if Memento
focused on a broken man attempting to rebuild his sense of self, Insomnia takes the counter
approach, showing how even the most rock solid guy - like say an Al Pacino - can crumble
into self-doubt with just a little push.
"See, madness, as you know, is like gravity.
All it takes is a little push."
Hold up, Ledger. We’ll get to you in Part Two.
Anyway — after Will mistakenly shoots his partner in the fog, the guilt of the event
triggers intense psychological confusion and well, insomnia. He hallucinates his dead partner.
Rooms seem to distort around Will, and everyday noises become blisteringly irritating. Later,
Will hallucinates that he actually did see his partner in the fog and that he deliberately
shot him.
Unlike Memento, Insomnia provides no clear explanation about what is true. Did Will deliberately
shoot his partner? Or was it just an accident? The answer - who knows? Nolan yet again extends
the hermeneutics of suspicion, now questioning reality itself. He implies it’s much
more complicated than just accepting either pure objectivity or subjective idealism. Perhaps
we can’t ever be ‘sure’ of the world around us. By the end of Insomnia, Will doesn’t
even know if he deliberately shot his partner or not.
“Did you mean to shoot Hap?”
“I…I don’t know anymore.”
The Prestige is pretty much Nolan’s ‘greatest hits’
— as he tackles all the hermeneutics of suspicion from his earlier work. The film
is told through a series of journals - many of which are fake, once again casting suspicion
on good ol’ text. All of the film’s magicians use disguises to mask their tricks. The Great
Chung Lin Soo pretends to be a cripple, Alfred Borden wears disguises to mask that he has
a twin, and both Alfred and his ‘frenemy’ Robert Angier repeatedly pretend to be audience members.
Like in Following and Memento, appearances can’t be trusted, and the self is constantly
put into doubt. Even Alfred’s own wife doesn’t know his secret, confused that her husband
could be so loving one day and so cold the next, unaware of the existence of her husband’s twin.
“I love you.”
“Not today.”
“What?”
“Well, some days it’s not true, and today you don’t mean it.”
“I love you.”
“Oh, see? Today it’s true!”
Nolan uses magic to yet again question subjective reality versus the idea of objective truth.
From the audience’s subjective point of view, the bird really does disappear and then
reappear. But in reality -- there were actually two, twin birds, one dead beneath the table,
the other ‘re-appearing’ in the magician’s hand.
“You’re not really looking.
You don’t really wanna know. You want to be fooled.”
Just as Memento’s Leonard prefers
to live in the illusion of his manipulated subjective reality, the audience, too, prefers
illusion over truth. They don’t want to know how Robert literally duplicates
himself each night, murdering his double in a water tank beneath the stage. They’d much
rather live under the lie that Robert disappears and then suddenly reappears on the opposite
end of the theater.
“Well, if people actually believed the things I did on stage, they wouldn’t clap, they’d scream at me.”
As a filmmaker, Nolan views himself like these magicians.
He plays with illusion and misdirection to keep the audience guessing. We know that we’re
watching a movie, a projection on a screen, an illusion; but we don’t really want to
know this ‘truth’ — so we revel in the imaginary world Nolan has crafted. This is
what Nolan ultimately wants: to affect the audience through trickery. For him, the truth,
deep down, is that we prefer the imaginary over reality.
“The audience knows the truth.
The world is simple and miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool ‘em,
even for a second, then you can make them wonder. And then you… then you got to see
something very special.”
Nolan’s suspicion towards reality climaxes in Inception, a film where every single thing
is put into doubt. That guy who looks like Tom Berenger? Well - that’s actually Tom
Hardy. Can’t trust your eyes. That thought you just had? It’s actually been implanted
by Leonardo DiCaprio. Can’t trust yourself. Your children waiting to play outside? Actually,
it’s all a dream. Maybe. Can’t trust anything. Inception’s protagonist, dream-thief Cobb
(no, not that one), can barely discern his reality from dream — to the point where
it doesn’t even matter. In Cobb’s supposed reality, he’s on the run chased by goons
with guns through byzantine pathways. In Cobb’s supposed dream, he’s, well, still on the
run chased by goons with guns through byzantine pathways.
“Chased around the globe by anonymous
corporations and police forces. The way the projections persecute the dreamer. Admit it.
You don’t believe in one reality anymore.”
Nolan deliberately draws this parallel to
showcase how muddled the two are. Put simply, there is no difference between dream and reality
because subjectively Cobb can’t tell the difference. Such is the fate for Cobb's wife,
Mal. She believes that her reality is still a dream and to wake up, she must kill herself.
“She was possessed by an idea. This one very simple idea that changed everything.
That our world wasn’t real. That she needed to wake up to come back to reality.”
But what if Mal’s actually right? What if Cobb has been dreaming the whole time?
“What if you’re wrong? What if I’m what’s real?”
No definitive answer is ever given. Which is exactly Nolan’s point. In the end only
the question remains. That last indelible image, of that goddamn spinning top — spinning
but just slightly wavering — provides no definitive answer as to if Cobb is dreaming
or awake, only further proving that in the end there is no truth, no reality, only the
‘suspicion’ thereof - well, at least until we get to part 3. Through each of Nolan’s
early films, he casts doubt on appearances, on possessions, on others, on ourselves, on
our thoughts, and finally, on reality. But if you can’t trust anybody else, and you
can’t trust yourself and, holy shit, you can’t even trust the reality surrounding
you, then how the hell does society function? How can people come together and form a stable,
working unit given the foundational bedrock is so wonky? This is the question Nolan explores
through his Dark Knight trilogy.
Which we’ll explore... in the next part of our own Wisecrack Nolan Trilogy.
Thanks for watching, guys. Peace.