by Gabe Paganucci
The most distinguishable aspect that properly discerns the voice of the auteur, Christopher Nolan, within his films is his ability to start with a concept and build upon it relentlessly. To put it simply, Christopher Nolan’s movies spiral into masterpieces through thorough manipulation of the concept on which the film is based. The most basic example of this is the film Insomnia (2002), which follows Al Pacino as a cop attempting to solve a mystery in a town where the sun never sets. The film examines the physical toll sleep deprivation can take on a person, and the pinnacle of that cost comes when Al Pacino accidentally shoots his partner instead of the criminal he’s pursuing.
However, it’s in films like Tenet (2020) and Inception (2010) that Nolan pushes concepts to their absolute limits. In both films, a technological prospect is introduced and explained lightly, and then the film evolves that basic concept in the most creative possible fashion. Inception introduces the concept of entering people’s dreams and climaxes with the characters going five dreams deep in an effort to plant an idea in Cillian Murphy’s character’s subconscious. Ironically, Nolan said in an interview that the inception for the film Inception came from his years in university studying film, where he’d experimented with lucid dreaming because the film also serves as a clever metaphor for filmmaking where films can be utilized in a propagandistic fashion to seed an idea in audiences while each of the characters represent a key person in a film crew. Tom Hardy is the actor, Elliot Page is the set designer, etc. Tenet is where Nolan is the most unapologetic in his incessant complexity. At any point in the film there are a variety of characters who are moving in opposite directions in time. The film even utilizes this concept in a militaristic fashion by taking an actual battle strategy and implementing his science fiction concept into it, creating the temporal pincer maneuver. The concept of dreams in Inception is also used to create a sense of ambiguity in the ending when the audience is left wondering whether Leonardo DiCaprio’s character is still in a dream due to the conflicting clues of his lack of a wedding ring and the spinning top. This film also enacts a trademark Christopher Nolan twist that still fits within the limits of the concept he introduced.
The twist element in Nolan’s films is not as blatantly overused as in an M. Night Shyamalan movie but still a key landmark in a select few of Nolan’s films. The twist in Tenet is that the woman the protagonist was trying to protect was Robert Pattinson’s character’s mother. The film The Prestige pushes the premise of a magic trick to its peak while also incorporating a key twist within the concept. Nolan does this by incorporating an actual trick into the script by having Christian Bale play two separate characters, and the trick comes when one of them dies and is revealed to be a twin. The film is riddled with hints and clues that allude to this twist without giving anything away on the first watch, which embeds the concept into the film as a storytelling element.
In Dunkirk (2017), the concept Christopher Nolan is experimenting with is also a storytelling element, but this facet is more grounded in reality. In Dunkirk, Nolan dramatizes real historical events using them as high points and climaxes within the story he’s telling. For example, he employs the iconic “We’ll fight them on the beaches” speech by Winston Churchill as a resolution point for our war-scarred heroes who have been through hell up to this point. Also, the moments where Tom Hardy’s character makes a last-minute save with zero fuel in his tank and when the British citizens arrive in their pleasure boats to rescue the soldier are both junctures that wreak cinematic grandiose akin to certain instances in Avengers: Endgame (2019) yet they are still real historic events. The same is done in Oppenheimer. Interstellar (2014) also analyzes time in the same vein as Tenet but plays with it as the emotional crux of the film and a storytelling device the way Dunkirk uses historic events to titillate the amygdala of audience members. In the film [Interstellar], Matthew McConaughey’s character must enter a black hole for a mission where time warps around him, and in an incredibly well-acted scene, he has to watch his daughter grow up in minutes through video recordings sent to his spacecraft. The well-known Einstein theory that time is relative is used here as a way to birth sorrow and despair in the audience and empathy for the protagonist. This innate fascination with unyielding conceptual manipulation can be traced back to Nolan’s earliest work, Following(1998). The film begins with the concept of the protagonist following people to feed some abstract need to fascinate himself but then Nolan pushes that concept when the protagonist meets a character who also practices the same obscure hobby but takes it a step further by breaking into their homes and taking things, not as a form of robbery, but as a way to slightly unhinge their lives. This unnecessary examination into strangers’ personal lives is a concept that also experiments with morality, which present-day Nolan is no stranger to exploring in dramatic depths.
In the film The Dark Knight, (2008), Nolan presents the concept of morality as a tightrope that characters have to walk across as they are tested in mentally complex ways. For example, there’s a scene in the movie where The Joker puts bombs on two boats and gives the trigger mechanism of each bomb on the opposite boat. One of the boats contains a handful of convicted criminals and the other is filled with just regular citizens. One of the prisoners steals the detonator and disposes of it while the citizens insist they should detonate the other boat to save themselves. It’s this type of moral quandary that Nolan pushes upon the audience to get them to question their morality. Memento (2000) is the perfect encapsulation of Nolan’s trademarks as it includes a twist, deals with morality, and pushes the storytelling premise to its limits. Nolan’s fascination with time is on display yet again, but is used in a nonsensical, nonlinear way in order to drive home the desperation of the protagonist. Guy Pearce plays a character with extreme short-term memory loss and uses habits, tattoos, and discipline to find and kill the man who raped and murdered his wife, John G. Nolan explains the film’s approach to storytelling in an interview with The Lord Louis Show. He illustrates the film’s timeline using a chalkboard, explaining that the black and white scenes are moving forward in time while the scenes in color are moving backward in time until they eventually meet at the climax of the film. The film’s twist comes when the murderer Guy Pearce’s character is looking for is revealed to be the man, Teddy, who’s been pretending to be his friend for the majority of the film. The film deals with morality through Teddy’s attempts to convince Guy Pearce’s character that he’s killed a lot of people that Teddy has talked him into believing are the killers. The ambiguity of this scene is in itself the apex of the premise of the story because, as an audience member, we can never be sure if Teddy was telling the truth and if Guy Pearce’s character would even remember that he’d finally gotten revenge. In conclusion, Nolan’s films are a conscious train of methodical thought. When reading one of his scripts, you can see the birthplace of the idea in the first couple of pages that will drive the entirety of the story. Whether it’s a storytelling element, a form of technology, a question of morality, a certain disability for a character, or all of the above, you can be sure that they will be properly examined, played with, and pushed to their absolute limits in the ceaseless spiral of emotional turmoil that is Christopher Nolan’s brain.
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