The Disappearing Act

For years, we have considered that modern cinema can be broken down into a series of accurate but perhaps now archaic classifications--the murder mystery, the film noir, the western, the romantic comedy, the drama, the dramedy, and the action adventure to name a few. In the last week, I have come to the conclusion that slowly and methodically, over the last decade, Christopher Nolan has been fashioning an entirely new genre of filmmaking. It's difficult to say exactly what we should call this new genre and perhaps because it's still quite the novelty, it shall remain nameless, to say the least. For now, I'll call it the riddler.

Here's the thing--and I've been saying this to myself a lot over this last week (coincidentally the same time period since I first saw Inception...wink)--there are two types of filmmakers. Those that like to mind fuck you. And those that like to mind fuck you with a purpose. Nolan is the latter because he knows and anticipates both the inherent skepticism and the cognitive nature of the human being. He knows that in asking you to solve his riddles, you will ultimately start questioning your own behavioral patterns, your moral compass, and your nostalgic tendencies. He wants to know what you have to offer, what you have to contribute to this place. If anything. I would go so far as to say that he treats you as another plot device, another dimension of what he's trying to do, that you are, in fact, just as much of an enigma as the 'projection' on screen.

I've noticed a pattern of behavior in an artist before--but this is the first time in awhile that I genuinely believe I'm on to something. The evolution of Nolan's career is a calculated course of best laid plans. It's no coincidence that Memento, The Prestige, The Dark Knight, and Inception all bear striking similarities when it comes to the allure of the invisible, the intangible, the uncertain, and the unknown.

With Memento, Nolan tangoed successfully in the nonlinear narrative and the reason it worked so well is because he never gave us a true or detailed look at the life that Leonard was missing--his life with his wife. In fact, at the beginning of each sequence, we never know what led to the mess at hand. He worked us backward--and worked us over.

In The Prestige, Nolan creates a very volatile group of stage magicians and artists who steal, lie, and cheat in pursuit of secret behind an illusion. Again, the focal point of this film is about the quest for something that renders one human being powerful and one human being (the viewer of the trick) blind to what preceded the illusion itself.

The Dark Knight's most fascinating and memorable character was The Joker. I'm sure most of you have seen the film once, if not more. Think about this for a moment. When did you ever see Heath Ledger alone in his own private life? You never saw where he lived, ate, slept, dreamt--where he existed as a person. That was most certainly intended by Nolan. By not showing you the personal and private side of the villain, he'll always be more intriguing, and more impenetrable. In doing this, he is asking us to use our imagination. While we may not identify with The Joker's actions and behavior on screen, we still want to know his intricacies and want to validate his (our?) existence by peering in on those details. Sure, it's voyeuristic. But it's also human nature--and like I said before, Nolan is a master at these nature walks.

Lastly, and certainly not least, with Inception, his dreamweaver, his masterpiece, I think Nolan was rounding out the decade (and beginning the next?) with his take on the elusive and transient disposition of our subconscious. What we care about most in this movie is the relationship that may or may not have existed with Mal and Cobb. We never see the happier times like the birth of their children or their seemingly unblemished marriage. We see the discussions of the happier times, the architectural shrines to those memories, and the painful imagery that proves nostalgia, like everything else, has an expiration date. The reason we care about navigating Nolan's dreamscapes is to find the life that was worth remembering--even though we aren't even sure if Cobb can remember it? If it's real to begin with? He is asking us for empathy, for an understanding of an ethereal existence that now haunts an audience of people who never partook in that existence.

It's wanting what you can't have, what you don't have, what you've never had. That, right there, is a part of life, a part of the psyche, and an ubiquitous and unfortunate flaw of mankind. But it's raw. It's real. After all--wanting to recover from anterograde amnesia, pining for a magician's secret, wanting to identify with a freak who's 'ahead of the curve,' and hoping to witness true love before its demise--these are all forms of wanting what you can't have--of great expectations.

Nolan didn't invent this desire. He just capitalized on it by artfully performing the inception himself. He knows the idea of something else is a dangerous idea, that it rests there deep inside each of us, like a plague, waiting to infiltrate the body, the heart, and ultimately the mind. He's simply predicating his work on the fact that this curiosity, unlike so many things, is timeless.

Perhaps this time around, he is the master magician--saturating a pre-existing notion, nurturing it until it comes to the surface of our daily consciousness, and then making us think we came to the conclusions on our own. Keyser Soze would be proud. After all, at the end of the day, while making us believe we are the detectives, the architects, the seekers of manifest destiny--while allowing us to believe wholeheartedly in the apparitions of those we never knew or even touched--is it possible that the best trick he ever pulled was convincing us that he (it) didn't exist?