Christopher Nolan

[colinr0380]

I still think that the biggest overarching theme of Christopher Nolan (as important as the playing around with time aspect, which is how he puts his theory into practice on screen) is that push and pull between characters who create extremely baroque and labyrinthine sleight of hand situations (even entire worlds in Inception's case) to purposefully obscure an otherwise easily graspable situation from being fully understood (whether to dupe others, or just yourself) versus other characters who cathartically power through all of that, burning everything down (literally in the case of the Jessica Chastain character in Interstellar, which fascinatingly equates her more complex - and arguably far worse because they are premeditated - actions of burning her brother's crops down as a form of Accelerationism being intercut with Matt Damon's panicking astronaut (the anti-Martian!) simultaneously doing the same thing off world as a simpler to criticise 'bad guy') to leave a simple black and white, goodies and baddies, right and wrong situation again. But that distilled dichotomy is just as much of a manufactured fantasy as the over elaborate fantasy worlds were.

Part of the thrill of building the house of cards is the inherent seething, almost unconscious, desire to see it all destroyed. All that you worked so hard for, all that you strived to keep whole? All of your notions of how the world operates and even your individual moral structures? Architecture, relationships, modes of thinking. All of it can be razed to the ground in both a moment of irretrievable, devastating loss and a catharsis of being able to move on from the scorched earth left behind in the wake of that action. Maybe Nolan is the ultimate declutterer?

There feels to be a strong anarcho-nihilist streak in all of Nolan’s work. Which is probably why he made one of the iconic versions of the Joker character. But you don’t particularly need to have an erudite psychopathic nihilist as a pre-requisite. The person destroying everything could have a single specific revenge motive that makes them blinkered, or think what they are doing is for the best in the long run, or be a coward, or just a dum-dum in general to still achieve the same destructive effect (I keep coming back to Matt Damon’s relatively tiny but with an outsized impact supporting character in Interstellar, who amusingly is kind of all of these aspects rolled into one!). And sometimes they’re just fooling themselves to get through life, as in Memento.

Although I do sense a bit of sadness there towards what is going to be lost in the process (usually some kind of fundamental deeper truth) rather than a purely unadulterated celebration of destruction as being a necessary (or indeed desirable) end goal, even if that's usually where it leads and where the films often have to build to as their climax (which may be where the playing with time element comes in, as Nolan's way of trying to escape from that end point, or approach it from a different direction entirely). That's where the tragic aspect of Nolan's films lies, I think, because he appears to care more about the beautifully elaborate artifices that human beings construct to trick themselves that they have meaning, agency and impact, and a creative role to play, in the world (even if that leads them to clash up against other head in the sky idealists with their own agendas, who are more often than not no more than reflections of themselves from a more distant time) more than celebrating those who have no vision except to destroy and drag others back down to earth again. And I think that Nolan also particularly celebrates the human ability (the tenacity) to keep rising from the rubble and begin tidying, ordering and building the world back up even if it will inevitably all crash down around them all over again at some unforeseeable future point. I think it is telling that almost all of Nolan's films have the climactic, cathartic moment of tying everything up neatly, but then show characters beginning to plot their next moves all over again in the final moments. Beyond the blunt full stop of death for individual characters, on the grander scale there is never really an ending, just a continuing cyclical process.