{"id":19375,"date":"2012-08-19T15:01:47","date_gmt":"2012-08-19T20:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=19375"},"modified":"2012-08-27T21:52:50","modified_gmt":"2012-08-28T02:52:50","slug":"nolan-vs-nolan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2012\/08\/19\/nolan-vs-nolan\/","title":{"rendered":"Nolan vs. Nolan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

Paul Thomas Anderson, the Wachowskis, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, and other directors who made breakthrough films at the end of the 1990s have managed to win either popular or critical success, and sometimes both. None, though, has had as meteoric a career as Christopher Nolan.<\/p>\n

His films have earned $3.3 billion at the global box office, and the total is still swelling. On IMDB\u2019s Top 250 list<\/a>, as populist a measure as we can find, The Dark Knight<\/em> (2008) is ranked number 8 with over 750,000 votes, while Inception<\/em> (2010), at number 14, earned nearly 600,000. The Dark Knight<\/em> Rises<\/em> (2012), on release for less than a month, is already ranked at number 18. Remarkably, many critics have lined up as well, embracing both Nolan’s more offbeat productions, like Memento<\/em> (2000) and The Prestige<\/em> (2006), and his blockbusters. Nolan is now routinely considered one of the most accomplished living filmmakers.<\/p>\n

Yet many critics fiercely dislike his work. They regard it as intellectually shallow, dramatically clumsy, and technically inept. As far as I can tell, no popular filmmaker\u2019s work of recent years has received the sort of harsh, meticulous dissection Jim Emerson and A. D. Jameson have applied to Nolan’s films. (See the codicil for numerous links.) People who shrug at continuity errors and patchy plots in ordinary productions have dwelt on them in Nolan\u2019s movies. The attack is probably a response to his elevated reputation. Having been raised so high, he has farther to fall.<\/p>\n

I have only a welterweight dog in this fight, because I admire some of Nolan\u2019s films, for reasons I hope to make clear later. Nolan is, I think all parties will agree, an innovative filmmaker. Some will argue that his innovations are feeble, but that\u2019s beside my point here. His career offers us an occasion to think through some issues about creativity and innovation in popular cinema.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Four dimensions, at least<\/strong><\/p>\n

First, let\u2019s ask: How<\/em> can a filmmaker innovate? I see four primary ways.<\/p>\n

You can innovate by tackling new subject matter<\/strong>. This is a common strategy of documentary cinema, which often shows us a slice of our world we haven\u2019t seen or even known about before\u2014from Spellbound<\/em> to Vernon, Florida<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You can also innovate by developing new themes<\/strong>. The 1950s \u201cliberal Westerns\u201d substituted a brotherhood-of-man theme for the Manifest-Destiny theme that had driven earlier Western movies. The subject matter, the conquest of the West by white settlers and a national government, was given a different thematic coloring (which of course varied from film to film). Science fiction films were once dominated by conceptions of future technology as sleek and clean, but after Alien<\/em>, we saw that the future might be just as dilapidated as the present.<\/p>\n

Apart from subject or theme, you can innovate by trying out new formal strategies<\/strong>. This option is evident in fictional narrative cinema, where plot structure or narration can be treated in fresh ways. Many entries on this blog have charted possible formal innovations, such as having a house narrate the story action<\/a>, or arranging the plot so as to create contradictory chains of events<\/a>. Documentaries have experimented with a film\u2019s overall form as well, of course, as The Thin Blue Line<\/em> and Man with a Movie Camera<\/em>. Stan Brakhage\u2019s creation of \u201clyrical cinema\u201d would be an example of formal innovation in avant-garde cinema.<\/p>\n

Finally, you can innovate at the level of style<\/strong>\u2014the patterning of film technique, the audiovisual texture of the movie. A clear example would be Godard\u2019s jump cuts in A Bout de souffle<\/em>, but new techniques of shooting, staging, framing, lighting, color design, and sound work would also count. In Cloverfield<\/em>\u00a0and Chronicle<\/em>, the first-person camera technique is applied, in different ways, to a science-fiction tale. Often, technological changes trigger stylistic innovation, as with the Dolby ATMOS system now encouraging filmmakers to create sound effects that seem to be occurring above our heads.<\/p>\n

I see other means of innovation\u2014for instance, stunt casting, or new marketing strategies\u2014but these four offer an initial point of departure. How then might we capture Nolan\u2019s cinematic innovations?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Style without style<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Well, on the whole they aren\u2019t stylistic. Those who consider him a weak stylist can find evidence in Insomnia<\/em> (2002), his first studio film. Spoilers<\/strong> ahead.<\/p>\n

A Los Angeles detective and his partner come to an Alaskan town to investigate the murder of a teenage girl. While chasing a suspect in the fog, Dormer shoots his partner Hap and then lies about it, trying to pin the killing on the suspect. But the suspect, a famous author who did kill the girl, knows what really happened. He pressures Dormer to cover for both of them by framing the girl\u2019s boyfriend. Meanwhile, Dormer is undergoing scrutiny by Ellie, a young officer who idolizes him but who must investigate Hap\u2019s death. And throughout it all, Dormer becomes bleary and disoriented because, \u00a0the twenty-four-hour daylight won’t let him sleep. (His name seems a screenwriter’s conceit, invoking dormir<\/em>, to sleep.)<\/p>\n

Nolan said at the time that what interested him in the script\u2014already bought by Warners and offered to him after Memento<\/em>\u2014was the prospect of character subjectivity.<\/p>\n

A big part of my interest in filmmaking is an interest in showing the audience a story through a character\u2019s point of view. It\u2019s interesting to try and do that and maintain a relatively natural look.<\/strong><\/p>\n

He wanted, as he says on the DVD commentary, to keep the audience in Dormer’s head. Having already done that to an extent in Memento<\/em>, he saw it as a logical way of presenting Dormer\u2019s slow crackup.<\/p>\n

But how<\/em> to go subjective? Nolan chose to break up scenes with fragmentary flashes of the crime and of clues\u2014painted nails, a necklace. Early in the film, Dormer is studying Kay Connell\u2019s corpse, and we get flashes of the murder and its grisly aftermath, the killer sprucing up the corpse.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At first it seems that Dormer intuits what happened by \u00a0noticing clues on Kay’s body. But the film\u2019s credits started with similar glimpses of the killing, as if from the killer\u2019s point of view, and there\u2019s an ambiguity about whether the interpolated images later are Dormer\u2019s imaginative reconstruction, or reminders of the killer\u2019s vision\u2014establishing that uneasy link of cop and crook that is a staple of the crime film.<\/p>\n

Similarly, abrupt cutting is used to introduce a cluster of images that gets clarified in the course of the film. At the start, we see blood seeping through threads, and then shots of hands carefully depositing blood on a fabric (above). Then we see shots of Dormer, awaking jerkily while flying in to the crime scene. Are these enigmatic images more extracts from the crime, or are they something else? We\u2019ll learn in the course of the film that these are flashbacks to Dormer\u2019s framing of another suspect back in Los Angeles. Once again, these images get anchored as more or less subjective, and they echo the killer’s patient tidying up.<\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s reliance on rapid cutting in these passages is typical of his style generally. Insomia<\/em> has over 3400 shots in its 111 minutes, making the average shot just under two seconds long. Rapid editing like this can suit bursts of mental imagery, but it\u2019s hard to sustain in meat-and-potatoes dialogue scenes. Yet Nolan tries.<\/p>\n

In lectures I’ve used the scene in which Dormer and Hap arrive at the Alaskan police station as an example of the over-busy tempo that can come along with a style based in \u201cintensified continuity.\u201d<\/a> In a seventy-second scene, there are 39 shots, so the average is about 1.8 seconds\u2014a pace typical of the film and of the intensified approach generally.<\/p>\n

Apart from one exterior long-shot of the police station and four inserts of hands, the characters\u2019 interplay is captured almost entirely in singles\u2014that is, shots of only one actor. Out of the 34 shots of actors\u2019 faces and upper bodies, 24 are singles. Most of these serve to pick up individual lines of dialogue or characters\u2019 reactions to other lines.\u00a0The singles are shot with telephoto lenses, a choice exemplifying what I called the tendency toward \u201cbipolar\u201d lens lengths in intensified continuity–that is, either very long lenses or fairly wide-angle ones.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fast cutting like this need not break up traditional spatial orientation. In this scene, there are a couple of bumps in the eyeline-matching, but basically continuity principles are respected. As Nolan explains on the DVD commentary, he tried to anchor the axis of action, or 180-degree line, around Dormer\/Pacino, so the eyelines were consistent with his position, and that\u2019s usually the case here.<\/p>\n

The scene\u2019s development and the actors\u2019 line readings are emphasized by the cutting; the lighting and framing remain almost unvarying (though there\u2019s also an occasional slight push-in during an establishing framing). These aren\u2019t innovative choices, having become conventional, gradually but firmly, since the 1970s.<\/div>\n

I can\u2019t illustrate all the shots here, but despite its more or less cogent continuity, the scene seems to me choppy, uneconomical, and fairly perfunctory in its stylistic handling. Nolan makes no effort to move the actors around the set in a way that would underscore the dramatic development. Because of the rapid editing, characters\u2019 lines and gestures are cut off or unprepared for.\u00a0There is no effort to design each shot, \u00e0\u00a0la Hitchcock, to fit the line or reaction of the actor.\u00a0Most shots are excerpted from full takes, all from the same setup. The most obvious example is the setup that pans to show Dormer as he comes in, stops, and reacts to the conversation. Thirteen shots are taken from that setup (not necessarily the same full take, of course, as the last frame here shows).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In Nolan’s recent films, this avoidance of tightly designed compositions may be encouraged further because he’s shooting in both the 1.43 Imax ratio and the 2.40 anamorphic one. There remains a general tendency toward loose, roughly centered framings.<\/p>\n

Somebody is sure to reply that the nervous editing is aiming to express Dormer\u2019s anxiety about the investigation into his career. But that would be too broad an explanation. On the same grounds, every awkwardly-edited film could be said to be expressing dramatic tensions within or among the characters.\u00a0Moreover, even when Dormer\u2019s not present, the same choppy cutting is on display.<\/p>\n

Consider the 23 shots showing Ellie greeting Dormer and Hap as they get off the plane. Again we have full production takes broken up into brief phases of action (it takes five shots to get Dormer out of the plane), with an almost arbitrarily succession of shot scales. When Ellie leaves her vehicle to go out on the pier, the action is presented in nine shots.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We can imagine a simpler presentation\u2014perhaps after an establishing shot, we track with Ellie down along the dock (so we can see her smiling anticipation), then pan with her walking leftward into a framing that prepares for the plane hatch to open. Arguably, the need to show off production values\u2014the vast natural landscape, the swooping plane descending\u2014pressed Nolan to include some of the extra shots. They don\u2019t do much dramatically, and the strange cut back to an extreme long-shot (to cover the change to a new angle on Ellie?) may negate whatever affinity with her that the closer shots aim to build up.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Swedish sleeplessness<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Magic Mike.<\/em><\/p>\n

Want an up-to-date comparison? Steven Soderbergh\u2019s Magic Mike<\/em> has a quiet, clean style that conveys each story point without fanfare. Soderbergh saves his singles for major moments and drops back for long-running master shots when character interaction counts. His cuts are just that; they trim fat. He doesn\u2019t resort to those short-lived push-in camera movements that Nolan seems addicted to. He doesn\u2019t waste time with filler shots of people going in and out of buildings, or aerial views of a cityscape. Soderbergh can provide an unfussy 70s-ish telephoto long take of Mike and Brooke walking along a pier and settling down at a picnic table in front of a Go-Kart track while her brother Adam materializes in the distance.\u00a0In a single year, with Contagion<\/em>, Haywire<\/em>, and Magic Mike<\/em>, Soderbergh has confirmed himself as our master of the intelligent midrange picture. To anyone who cares to watch, these movies give lessons in discreet, compact direction.<\/p>\n

For a more pertinent contrast case, we can go back Insomnia<\/em>\u2019s source, the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name written and directed by Erik Skjoldbjaerg. Here a Swedish detective, vaguely under suspicion for an infraction of duty, comes to a town on the Arctic Circle for a murder investigation. The plot is roughly similar in its premise, but the working out is quite different, and I can\u2019t do justice to it here. Let me mention just two points of contrast.<\/p>\n

First, the cutting is less jagged. Skjoldbjaerg\u2019s film comes in at ninety-seven minutes, about fifteen minutes shorter than Nolan\u2019s, and its cutting rate is much slower, around 5.4 seconds. That means that many passages are built out of sustained shots, particularly ones showing the detective Jonas Engstr\u00f6m walking or sitting in a brooding, self-contained silence. Also, this version finds ways to convey several bits of information concisely, in carefully designed shots. For a straightforward example: We see Engstrom\u2019s eyes open, as he\u2019s unable to sleep, and then he lifts his head. Rack focus to the clock behind him.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Nolan uses several shots to get across a comparable point.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

As for subjectivity, Skoldbjaerg is just as keen to get us inside his detective’s head as Nolan is. At times he uses the sort of flash-cutting Nolan employs, so we get fragmentary reminders of the fog-clouded shooting. But Skoldbjaerg doesn\u2019t tease us with unattributed inserts (Nolan’s flashbacks to Dormer’s framing of a suspect), and he never suggests, via images of the murder and its cleanup, that his detective can imagine the crime concretely. Instead, Skoldbjaerg often evokes his character\u2019s unease through camera movements that upset our sense of his spatial location. The camera shows Engstrom striding into a room\u2026and then swivels rightward to show him in his original location, as if he’s sneaked around behind our back.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Then\u00a0Engstrom turns, and we hear a footstep. Cut to a shot showing that the sound is made by him, walking in another room.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to suggest that Skoldbaerg innovates more radically than Nolan does, though most viewers probably are more startled by these devices than by Nolan\u2019s. I think that the original Insomnia\u2019<\/em>s stylistic gamesmanship owes something to other precedents, going back to Dreyer\u2019s Vampyr<\/em>. What I find more interesting is that Nolan had available the prior example of these strategies from his Nordic source, and he still chose to go with the more conventional, cutting-based options.<\/p>\n

The \u00a0editing-driven, somewhat catch-as-catch-can approach to staging and shooting is clearly Nolan’s preference for many projects. He doesn’t prepare shot lists<\/a>, and he storyboards only the big action sequences. As his DP Wally Pfister remarks<\/a>, “What I do is not complicated.” Comparing their production method to documentary filming, he adds: “A lot of the spirit of it is: How fast can we shoot this?”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Throwing it against the wall<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We can find this loose shooting and brusque editing in most of Nolan’s films, and so they don’t seem to me to display innovative, or particularly skilful, visual style.\u00a0I\u2019m going to assume that his strengths aren\u2019t in the choice of subjects either, since genre considerations have kept him to superheroics and psychological crime and mystery. I think his chief areas of innovation lie in theme and form.<\/p>\n

The thematic dimension is easy to see. There’s the issue of uncertain identity, which becomes explicit in Memento<\/em> and the Batman films. The lost-woman motif, from Leonard\u2019s wife in Memento<\/em> to Rachel in the two late Batman movies, gives Nolan\u2019s films the recurring theme of vengeance, as well as the romantic one of the man doomed to solitude and unhappiness, always grieving. If this almost obsessive circling around personal identity and the loss of wife or lover carries emotional conviction, it owes a good deal to the performances of Guy Pearce, Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, and Leonardo DiCaprio, who put some flesh on Nolan\u2019s somewhat schematic situations.<\/p>\n

You can argue that these psychological themes aren’t especially original, especially in mystery-based plots, but the Batman films offer something fresher.\u00a0The\u00a0Dark Knight<\/em>\u00a0trilogy has attracted attention for its willingness to suggest real-world resonance in comic-book material.\u00a0Umberto Eco once objected that Superman, who has the power to redirect rivers, prevent asteroid collisions, and expose political corruption, devotes too much of his time to thwarting bank robbers. Nolan and his colleagues have sought to answer Eco’s charge by imbuing the usual string of heists, fights, chases, explosions, kidnappings, ticking bombs, and pistols-to-the-head with sociopolitical gravitas.\u00a0The Dark Knight<\/em> invokes ideas about terrorism, torture, surveillance, and the need to keep the public in the dark about its heroes. Something similar has happened with The Dark Knight Rises<\/em>, leaving commentators to puzzle out what it\u2019s saying about financial manipulation, class inequities, and the 99 percent\/ 1 percent debate.<\/p>\n

Nolan and his collaborators are doubtless doing something ambitious in giving the superhero genre a new weightiness. Yet I found The Dark Knight Rises<\/em>, like its predecessor, unable to bear the burden. It seemed to me at once pretentious and confused in a manner typical of Hollywood\u2019s traditional handling of topical themes.<\/p>\n

The confusion comes into focus when journalists, needing an angle on this week\u2019s release, look for a coherent reflection of that elusive, probably imaginary zeitgeist. I think that most popular films don\u2019t capture the spirit of the time, assuming such a thing exists, but simply opportunistically stitch together whatever lies to hand. Let me recycle what I wrote four years ago<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I remember walking out of Patton<\/em> (1970) with a hippie friend who loved it. He claimed that it showed how vicious the military was, by portraying a hero as an egotistical nutcase. That wasn\u2019t the reading offered by a veteran I once talked to, who considered the film a tribute to a great warrior.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It was then I began to suspect that Hollywood movies are usually strategically ambiguous<\/em> about politics. You can read them in a lot of different ways, and that ambivalence is more or less deliberate.<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Hollywood film tends to pose sharp moral polarities and then fuzz or fudge or rush past settling them. For instance, take The Bourne Ultimatum<\/em>: Yes, the espionage system is corrupt, but there is one honorable agent who will leak the information, and the press will expose it all, and the malefactors will be jailed.<\/em> This tactic hasn\u2019t had a great track record in real life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The constitutive ambiguity of Hollywood movies helpfully disarms criticisms from interest groups (\u201cLook at the positive points we put in\u201d). It also gives the film an air of moral seriousness (\u201cSee, things aren\u2019t simple; there are gray areas\u201d). . . .<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not saying that films can\u2019t carry an intentional message. Bryan Singer and Ian McKellen<\/a> claim the X-Men<\/em> series criticizes prejudice against gays and minorities. Nor am I saying that an ambivalent film comes from its makers delicately implanting counterbalancing clues. Sometimes they probably do that. More often, I think, filmmakers pluck out bits of cultural flotsam opportunistically, stirring it all together and offering it up to see if we like the taste. It\u2019s in filmmakers\u2019 interests to push a lot of our buttons without worrying whether what comes out is a coherent intellectual position. Patton<\/em> grabbed people and got them talking, and that was enough to create a cultural event. Ditto The Dark Knight<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since I wrote that, Nolan has confirmed my hunch. He says<\/a> of the new Batman movie:<\/p>\n

We throw a lot of things against the wall to see if it sticks. We put a lot of interesting questions in the air, but that’s simply a backdrop for the story. . . . We’re going to get wildly different interpretations of what the film is supporting and not supporting, but it’s not doing any of those things. It’s just telling a story.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just to be clear, I don\u2019t think the just-telling-a-story alibi is bulletproof. The cultural mix on display in a movie can still exclude certain ideological possibilities, or frame the materials in ways that slant how spectators take them up. My point is only that we ought not to expect popular movies, or indeed many movies, to offer crisp, transparent visions of politics or society. Thematic murkiness and confusion are the norm, and the movie\u2019s inconsistencies may reflect nothing more than the makers\u2019 adroit scavenging.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Subjectivity and crosscutting<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nolan\u2019s innovations seem strongest in the realm of narrative form. He\u2019s fascinated by unusual storytelling strategies. Those aren\u2019t developed at full stretch in Insomnia<\/em> or the Dark Knight<\/em> trilogy, but other films put them on display.<\/p>\n

One way to capture his formal ambitions, I think, is to see them as an effort to reconcile character subjectivity with large-scale crosscutting. Nolan has pointed out his keen interest in both strategies. But on the face of it, they’re opposed. Techniques of subjectivity plunge us into what one character perceives or feels or thinks. Crosscutting typically creates much more unrestricted field of view, shifting us from person to person, place to place. One is intensive, the other expansive; one is a local effect, the other becomes the basis of the film\u2019s enveloping architecture.<\/p>\n

The Batman trilogy has plenty of crosscutting, but as far as I can tell, subjectivity takes a back seat.\u00a0Nolan\u2019s first two films reconcile subjectivity and crosscutting in more unusual ways. Following<\/em> takes a linear story, breaks it into four stretches, and then intercuts them. But instead of expanding our range of knowledge to many characters, nearly all the sections are confined to what happens to one protagonist, and they\u2019re presented as his recounted memories in a Q & A situation.<\/p>\n

Likewise, Memento<\/em> confines us to a single protagonist and skips between his memories and immediate experiences. Again what might be a single, linear timeline is split, but then one series of incidents is presented as moving chronologically while another is presented in reverse order. Again, the competing time trajectories aren\u2019t presented as large blocks but are fairly swiftly crosscut.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In The Prestige<\/em>, dual protagonists, both with a secret, take over the story, but the presentation remains steeped in subjectivity. Now much of the action is filtered through each magician\u2019s notebook of jottings and recollections, translated into voice-over commentary. One character may be reading another\u2019s notebook in which the writer reports reading the first character\u2019s notebook! And of course these tales-within-tales are intercut, with one man\u2019s frame story alternating with the other\u2019s past experience. You can work it all out diagrammatically, as I tried to do in my notes (on right).<\/p>\n

With Inception<\/em>, subjectivity takes the shape of dreaming, and the crosscutting is now among layers of dreams. The embedding that we find in The Prestige<\/em> is now carried to an extreme; in the long, climactic final sequence a group dream frames another dream which frames another, and so on, to five levels. Once again, these all get intercut (although Nolan wisely refrains from reminding us of the outermost frame too often, so that our eventual return to it can be sensed more strongly).<\/p>\n

Kristin and I have written at length about these strategies in earlier entries (here<\/a> and here<\/a>). To recapitulate, Kristin found Inception<\/em>‘s reliance on continuous exposition a worthwhile experiment, and I argued that the lucid-dreaming gimmick was simply a motivational strategy, a pretext for connecting multiple plotlines through embedding rather than parallel action. My point in the first essay is summed up here:<\/p>\n

As ambitious artists compete to engineer clockwork narratives and puzzle films, Nolan raises the stakes by reviving a very old tradition, that of the embedded story. He motivates it through dreams and modernizes it with a blend of science fiction, fantasy, action pictures, and male masochism. Above all, the dream motivation allows him to crosscut four embedded stories, all built on classic Hollywood plot arcs. In the process he creates a virtuoso stretch of cinematic storytelling.<\/strong><\/p>\n

My later thoughts tried to survey the breadth of Nolan’s development of formal strategies. Here’s my conclusion:<\/p>\n

From this perspective,\u00a0Inception<\/em>\u00a0marks a step forward in Nolan\u2019s exploration of telling a story by crosscutting different time frames. You can even measure the changes quantitatively.\u00a0Following\u00a0<\/em>contains four timelines and intercuts (for the most part) three.\u00a0Memento<\/em>\u00a0intercuts two timelines, but one moves backward. Like\u00a0Following<\/em>,\u00a0The Prestige<\/em>\u00a0contains four timelines and intercuts three, but it opens the way toward intercutting embedded stories. The climax of\u00a0Inception<\/em>\u00a0intercuts four embedded timelines, all of them framed by a fifth, the plane trip in the present. For reasons I mentioned in the previous post, it\u2019s possible that Nolan has hit a recursive limit. Any more timelines and most viewers will get lost.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Dark Knight Rises<\/em> hasn\u2019t dulled my respect for Nolan\u2019s ambitions. Very few contemporary American filmmakers have pursued complex storytelling with such thoroughness and ingenuity.<\/p>\n

Nolan has made his innovations accessible, I argued, by the way he has motivated them. First, he appeals to genre conventions. Following<\/em> and Memento<\/em> are neo-noirs, and we expect that mode to traffic in complex, perhaps nearly incomprehensible plotting and presentation. He has called Inception<\/em> a heist film, and what many viewers objected to\u2014its constant explanation of the rules of dream invasion\u2014is not so far from the steady flow of information we get in a caper movie. In the heist genre, Nolan remarks<\/a>, exposition is entertainment. Further, the separate dreams rely on familiar action-movie conventions: the car chase that ends with a plunge into space, the fight in a hotel corridor, the assault on a fortress, and so on.<\/p>\n

But I should have mentioned another method of motivation–one that helps make the films comprehensible to a broad audience. In some cases the formal trickery is justified by the very subjectivity the film embraces. It\u2019s one thing to tell a story in reverse chronology, as Pinter does in Betrayal<\/em>; but Memento<\/em>\u2019s broken timeline gets extra motivation from the protagonist\u2019s purported (not clinically realistic) anterograde memory loss. (We’ve already seen a lot of amnesia in film noirs.) Subjectivity is enhanced by the almost constant voice-over narration, reiterating not only Leonard\u2019s thoughts but what he writes incessantly on his Polaroids and his flesh.<\/p>\n

In The Prestige<\/em>, each magician\u2019s journal records not only his trade secrets but his awareness that his rival might be reading his words, so we ought to expect traps and false trails. And in Inception<\/em>, the notion of plunging into a character\u2019s mind becomes literalized as a dream state. Once we accept the conceit of controlled dreaming, we can buy all the spatial and temporal constraints the dream-master Cobb sets forth. As with Memento<\/em>, Nolan creates a set of rules that allow him to crosscut many different time lines. In each film, the subject matter\u2014memory failure, magicians\u2019 enigmas, controlled dreaming\u2014serves as an alibi for both subjectivity and broken timelines.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Synching story and style<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Can you be a good writer without writing particularly well? I think so. James Fenimore Cooper, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and other significant novelists had many virtues, but elegant prose was not among them. In popular fiction we treasure flawless wordsmiths like P. G. Wodehouse and Rex Stout and Patricia Highsmith, but we tolerate bland or clumsy style if a gripping plot and vivid characters keep us turning the pages. From Burroughs and Doyle to Stieg Larsson and Michael Crichton, we forgive a lot.<\/p>\n

Similarly, Nolan\u2019s work deserves attention even though some of it lacks elegance and cohesion at the shot-to-shot level. The stylistic faults I pointed to above and that echo other writers’ critiques are offset by his innovative approach to overarching form.\u00a0And sometimes he does exercise a stylistic control that suits his broader ambitions. When he mobilizes visual technique to sharpen and nuance his architectural ambitions, we find a solid integration of texture and structure, fine grain and large pattern.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a one-off example. Nolan has remarked that he\u2019s mostly not fond of slow-motion simply to accentuate a physical action, or to suggest some mental state like dream or memory. Inception<\/em> motivates slow-motion by another of its arbitrary rules, the idea that at each level of dreaming time moves at a different rate. Here a stylistic clich\u00e9 is transformed by its role in a larger structure, as Sean Weitner pointed out in a message to us<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Memento<\/em> displays a more thoroughgoing recruitment of style to the purposes of guiding us through its labyrinth. The jigsaw joins of the plot require that the head and tail of each reverse-chronology segment be carefully shaped, because they will be reiterated in other segments. Within the scenes as well, Nolan displays a solid craftsmanship, with mostly tight shot connections and an absence of stylistic bumps.<\/p>\n

He can even slow things down enough for a fifty-second two-shot that develops both drama and humor. Leonard has just shown Teddy the man bound and gagged in his closet, and Teddy wonders how they can get him out. In a nice little gag, Leonard produces a gun from below the frameline (we\u2019ve seen him hide it in a drawer) and then reflects that it must be his prisoner\u2019s piece. This sort of use of off-frame space to build and pay off audience expectations seems rare in Nolan’s scenes.<\/p>\n

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The moment is capped when Leonard adds, \u201cI don\u2019t think they let someone like me carry a gun,” as he darts out of the frame.<\/p>\n

The straightforward stylistic treatment of Memento<\/em>‘s more-or-less present-time scenes, both chronological and reversed, is counterbalanced by the rapid, impressionistic handheld work that characterizes Leonard\u2019s flashbacks to his domestic life and his wife\u2019s death (in color) and his flashbacks to the life of Sammy Jankis (in black-and-white). Nolan shrewdly segregates his techniques according to time zone.<\/p>\n

If anything, The Prestige<\/em> displays even more exactitude. Facing two protagonists and many flashbacks and replayed events, we could easily become lost. Here Nolan doesn\u2019t use black-and-white to mark off a separate zone. Instead he relies more on us to keep all the strands straight, but he helps us with voice-overs and repeated and varied setups that quietly orient us to recurrent spaces and circumstances. Here Nolan’s preference for cutting together singles is subjected to a simple but crisp logic that relies on our memory to grasp the developing drama.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve discussed these stylistic strategies\u00a0in another entry<\/a>\u00a0and in Chapter 7 of Film Art<\/em>.\u00a0More generally, they serve the larger dynamic of the plot, which creates a mystery around Alfred Borden, hides crucial information while hinting at it, invites us to sympathize with Borden’s adversary Robert Angier (another widower by violence), and then shifts our sympathies back to Borden when we learn how the thirst for revenge has unhinged Robert. To achieve the unreliable, oscillating narration of The Prestige<\/em>, Nolan has polished his film\u2019s stylistic surface with considerable care.<\/p>\n

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Midcult auteur?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Trying to specify Nolan’s innovations, I’m aware that one response might be this: Those innovations are too cautious. He not only motivates his formal experiments, he over-motivates them. Poor Leonard, telling everyone he meets about his memory deficit, is also telling us<\/em> again and again, while the continuous exposition of Inception<\/em> would seem to apologize too much. Films like Resnais’ La Guerre est finie<\/em> and Ruiz’s Mysteries of Lisbon<\/em>\u00a0play with subjectivity, crosscutting, and embedded stories, but they don’t need to spell out and keep providing alibis for their formal strategies. In these films, it takes a while for us to figure out the shape of the game we’re playing.<\/p>\n

We seem to be on that ground identified by Dwight Macdonald long ago as Midcult: that form of vulgarized modernism that makes formal experiment too easy for the audience. One of Macdonald’s examples is Our Town<\/em>, a folksy, ingratiating dilution of Asian and Brechtian dramaturgy. Nolan’s narrative tricks, some might say, take only one step beyond what is normal in commercial cinema. They make things a little more difficult, but you can quickly get comfortable with them. To put it unkindly, we might say it’s storytelling for Humanities majors.<\/p>\n

Much as I respect Macdonald, I think that not all artistic experiments need to be difficult. There’s “light modernism” too: Satie and Prokofiev as well as Schoenberg, Marianne Moore as well as T. S. Eliot, Borges as well as Joyce. Approached from the Masscult side, comic strips have given us\u00a0Krazy Kat<\/em>\u00a0and Polly and Her Pals<\/em><\/a> and, more recently, Chris Ware. Nolan’s work isn’t perfect, but it joins a tradition, not finished yet, of showing that the bounds of popular art are remarkably flexible, and imaginative creators can find new ways to stretch them.<\/p>\n

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Box-office figures for Nolan’s films are compiled from Box Office Mojo<\/em>. For detailed critiques of Nolan’s style, see Jim Emerson’s entries archived here<\/a>; Jim’s video essay dissecting one Dark Knight<\/em> action scene is here<\/a>.\u00a0A. D. Jameson’s essays on Inception<\/em> are \u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Nolan discusses the background to Insomnia<\/em> in John Pavlus, “Sleepless in Alaska,” American Cinematographer<\/em> 83, 5 (May 2002), 34-45. My quotation about subjectivity comes from pp. 35-36. By the way, Insomnia<\/em> does create a moment of tense quiet during the longish dialogue between Dormer and the killer Finch (Robin Williams) on the ferry: some sustained two shots give the adversaries time to size each other up (and Pacino gets an occasion to execute some business with an iron pole). Although the setup is broken by some irrelevant cutaways to the passing vistas, perhaps to cover faults in the takes, the sequence shows something of the sustained calm that we find in moments in Memento<\/em> and The Prestige<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Jonah Horwitz for the Wally Pfister link.<\/p>\n

Umberto Eco’s 1972 essay, “The Myth of Superman,” appears in his book, The Role of the Reader<\/em><\/a>. Portions are available here<\/a>. One relevant passage is this: “He is busy by preference, not against black-market drugs nor, obviously, against corrupt administrators or politicians, but against bank and mail-truck robbers. In other words, the only visible form that evil assumes is an attempt on private property<\/em>” (p. 123; italics in original).<\/p>\n

Dwight Macdonald’s 1960 essay is available in Masscult and Midcult<\/a><\/em>. A pdf is online here<\/a>.\u00a0Macdonald seems to have softened his demands a bit in later years. He praised 8 1\/2, <\/em>softcore modernism for sure, as Shakespearean in its vivacity. “The general structure–a montage of tenses, a mosaic of time blocks–recalls Intolerance, Kane<\/em>, and Marienbad<\/em>, but in Fellini’s hands it becomes light, fluid, evanescent. And delightfully obvious.” The essay is reprinted in Dwight Macdonald on Movies<\/em><\/a>, pp. 15-31.<\/p>\n

J. J. Murphy has a detailed analysis of Memento<\/em> in his book\u00a0Me and You and Memento and Fargo<\/a>.<\/em> I discuss the film’s contribution to complex storytelling trends in The Way Hollywood Tells It<\/em>, pp. 74-82, where I also discuss the notion of intensified continuity editing. We analyze The Prestige<\/em>‘s narrative, narration, and sound techniques in Film Art: An Introduction<\/em> (ninth ed., pp. 298-307; tenth ed., pp. 298-306).<\/p>\n

P.S. 19 August:<\/strong> Thanks to Guillaume Campreau-Dupras<\/a> for correcting a film title.<\/p>\n

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PS 27 August:<\/strong> Thanks to the many bloggers and tweeters who linked to this entry!<\/p>\n

The tireless A. D. Jameson has posted another probing critique of Nolan’s Bat-saga, this one concentrating on TDKR<\/em>, \u00a0here<\/a>. While making serious points about Nolan’s use of expository dialogue and the confused politics of the film, the essay also contains some good jokes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 DB here: Paul Thomas Anderson, the Wachowskis, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, and other directors who made breakthrough films at the end of the 1990s have managed to win either popular or critical success, and sometimes both. None, though, has had as meteoric a career as Christopher Nolan. His films have earned $3.3 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[122,56,58,57,54,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-directors-nolan","category-directors-soderbergh","category-technique-editing","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-narrative-strategies","category-readers-favorite-entries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19375"}],"version-history":[{"count":74,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19375\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19496,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19375\/revisions\/19496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}