Christopher Nolan

[PfR73]

I hope that they'll finally fix that editing issue which jumbled all the scenes around. Every copy of the film I have has that same error on it.

Memento Easter Egg - Chronological Order

[FrauBlucher]

Video essay on The Prestige.

[FrauBlucher]

I have a question. Not sure someone can answer but here it goes. The Blu-ray for Memento has been released by 4 different companies in the U.S. First up was Sony, then Lionsgate, followed by Warner Brothers and finally Samuel Goldwyn Films last year. Can anyone explain why the hot potato treatment?

[Jigvell]

I recently re-watched all of Nolan's films and this is my ranking (shorts excluded):

The Prestige
The Dark Knight
Memento
Batman Begins
Inception
Following
Interstellar
Tenet
Dunkirk
The Dark Knight Rises
Insomnia

I must say that he is much better director than writer. When he writes films with his brother the results are always much better.
Also I don't think that we will ever get that again, but change in the budget would be nice. All these megaspectacles... Something small without explotions would be welcomed. Well after Oppenheimer

[yoloswegmaster]

BFI will be showing 7 of Nolan's films on IMAX 70mm in the lead-up to Oppenheimer.

[ford]

I recently re-watched all of Nolan's films and this is my ranking (shorts excluded):

The Prestige
The Dark Knight
Memento
Batman Begins
Inception
Following
Interstellar
Tenet
Dunkirk
The Dark Knight Rises
Insomnia

I must say that he is much better director than writer. When he writes films with his brother the results are always much better.
Also I don't think that we will ever get that again, but change in the budget would be nice. All these megaspectacles... Something small without explotions would be welcomed. Well after Oppenheimer

Dunkirk and Interstellar nowhere near the very top? Madness.

[Jigvell]

Dunkirk and Interstellar nowhere near the very top? Madness.

People often complain about Nolan's certain coldness when it's comes to his characters. I can agree with that in the case of Dunkirk (even though the film is about the event, not specific people).
In the case of Interstellar, he forced the family drama/love/separation so hard that it kept hitting me over the head too much
His obsession with time is becoming also quite annoying. After watching Tenet, friend of mine said: Next film of his will be three hour long shot of him sitting in front of the cuckoo clock masturbating
But I don't consider either Dunkirk or Interstellar bad. I would rate them both 7,5/10.

[Aspect]

Dunkirk and Memento at the very top for me. Everything else I can give or take. I'm still baffled by the love for Interstellar, which struck me as painfully maudlin.

[therewillbeblus]

People often complain about Nolan's certain coldness when it's comes to his characters.

I've long argued the opposite: Nolan is an artist with primarily emotional concerns, and his films often resemble the psychology of a western mind: huge intellectual ideas built around a core of simple vulnerable emotion, protecting it, and that need to be engaged with in order to peel back the onion layers and earn that growth of discovery. That's why Inception is his best film: It's clever, interesting, narratively engaging, works as a blockbuster and as an intimate adventure story where emotional catharsis is the treasure on the map. Any coldness to his characters seems to be a superficial trick that's ultimately disproven by the film's end, often times revealing 'warmth' to his characters' experiences as the key motivation the work was constructed around

[Mr Sausage]

People call anything cold if it deals in concepts. Mostly because people get led astray by an unexamined concept of their own, the so-called head/heart division. That anyone could watch a Nolan movie and consider it emotionally sterile is baffling. Nolan’s need to tie his conceptual apparatuses to some concrete emotional experience or other is so strong, he’ll even do it to the detriment of the film (Interstellar, Tenet). Dunkirk is an emotional movie from top to bottom, whether it’s the smaller stories of bravery and kindness in the face of danger among the civilian boats, or the larger paean to resilience and tenacity in the face of loss and despair. The movie is one long emotional experience. If anything, the added intellectual thrill of watching its intersecting timelines dovetail actually serves, among other things, to prevent the film from dipping into overt sentimentality.

And look how often his stories centre on loss and grief: Memento, The Prestige, Interstellar, Inception, the Batmans. Makes me wonder if people are so unused to big concepts in movies that it’ll dominate their whole experience if they encounter it.

[tenia]

I think it's several Nolan movies that are dominated by their concepts (to the point they're overtaking how the emotions can be projected to the viewer) (I've already talked at length about how Inception felt very cold to me despite its core film-noir love story), but I'm baffling so what do I know.
EDIT : I also remember in Tenet how quite early in the movie, John David Washington's character is explained by a scientist how the Bad Russian Guy has found a way to invert entropy, and his reaction is like "m'kay". Hard to be excited about exactly how huge and world-shaking this could be when that's how the main character reacts to this.

[Mr Sausage]

Surely there’s a difference between feeling cold towards a movie, and a movie itself being cold.

Also, why does no one complain about David Cronenberg this way? Most of his best films are dense with concepts, but light on emotion. There is nothing like Cronenberg’s detachment in Nolan’s pathos-laden work.

[tenia]

I suppose it's like for Haneke movies : nobody is challenging them on this matter because the movies aren't "sold" as anything else. What people are told is what they get on screen. Same goes for these Cronenberg movies (though I suspect people with more knowledge about his filmo might argue that actually, most of Cronenberg movies aren't that low on emotions - I in any case woudn't call Shivers, Rabid, Fast Company, The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash, eXistenZ and A History of Violence cold like this).

Whereas when I'm told that Inception has a strong burning-fire passion couple as its core and the couple felt to me like robots for most of the movie, there's a difference between what I was told and what I felt getting on screen, and that's why I'm shuffled by it and not the Hanekes and Cronenbergs.

It's something I felt Interstellar handled better, but not Tenet. As for Dunkirk, I get what you mean, but I do think the overall execution of the movie doesn't leave that much space to characters and emotions to hatch fully.

[Mr Sausage]

I find it hard to believe this is exclusively an effect of marketing. Or that by and large Christopher Nolan movies are marketed as or widely thought to be deeply emotional experiences. That we’re having this conversation at all suggests the opposite.

Also, there is a difference between a movie being cold, that is, detached or clinical in how it presents emotion, and being inauthentic in the emotions it’s presenting. One thing we’re doing when we call an artwork sentimental is saying its emotions are inauthentic; what we’re not saying is that emotions are largely not present.

Also, as to Inception, the wife’s name is Mal, making it pretty unlikely the movie is centring itself around some kind of passionate love story.

[Jigvell]

I think it's several Nolan movies that are dominated by their concepts (to the point they're overtaking how the emotions can be projected to the viewer)

I can agree with that. It happened to me with Tenet.
Viewer is so focused on his world-building that characters feel like blank/empty devices thar are there to only give us exposition (and therefore we don't care about them enough).

[tenia]

Also, as to Inception, the wife’s name is Mal, making it pretty unlikely the movie is centring itself around some kind of passionate love story.

Inception's Mal and Cobb seemed quite typically written as characters of a film-noir movie, with Mal the femme fatale from who the male character can't move on and gets obsessed with. It'd be hard to buy his obsession if she was some kind of one-nighter, and the movie actually takes quite some time to show us (others would say "take the viewers by the hand through it in a very point-by-point way") the time they spent together and how bonded they used to be.

That Nolan chose to name her Mal would actually probably be an argument in favor of how irrepressibly litteral and logical he has to be instead of being more perceptive and freeflowing (I'd be surprised to see Nolan pass as P rather than J in a MBTI test), but past this, it makes sense in how he referenced the character (dooming femme fatale), not necesserally what her sentimental relation was with Cobb. (tl;dr : her being named Mal doesn't prevent her and Cobb having had a strong and deep love story, it's just a too on-the-nose name in respect to the archetype she's representing).

I can agree with that. It happened to me with Tenet.
Viewer is so focused on his world-building that characters feel like blank/empty devices thar are there to only give us exposition (and therefore we don't care about them enough).

You write "Viewer is so focused on", but I don't think the movies' structures are innocent in that. I think that's the difference between me and Mr Sausage's POV on the matter, and what I meant about Dunkirk : the way the movie is built gets in the way of the characters feeling more fleshed out and emotions having more space. So it's not so much that we (viewers) aren't used to movies with concepts like this, but that at some point, the concept can truly takes more space than it should, detrimentally to other stuff like emotions or psychology.

Anyway.

[therewillbeblus]

That Nolan chose to name her Mal would actually probably be an argument in favor of how irrepressibly litteral and logical he can be instead of being more perceptive (I'd be surprised to see Nolan pass as P rather than J in a MBTI test), but past this, it makes sense in how he referenced the character (dooming femme fatale) rather than what her sentimental relation was with Cobb. (tl;dr : her being named Mal doesn't prevent her and Cobb having had a strong and deep love story).

Her function works in the service of the story because she represents a part of Cobb that he’s desperately clinging to and that is aggressively destroying him, but it’s important to note that a) memory is inherently skewed, as are our ideas of people from the past, b) she is a personification of an idea (or IFS -'internal family system' part) of Cobb, not indicative of Mal’s literal multidimensional personality when she was alive (this is made explicitly clear in the film's dialogue), c) our internal psychological parts are all trying to protect and serve us in some way, even if they’re misinformed and actually harming us (i.e. an anxious avoidant part that prevents us from engaging in significant social progress needed to make a relationship work because of the perceived risk might argue that it’s protecting us from that risk, even if it’s doing so under the negative core belief that ‘if I try I’ll fail’ and remaining static will be detrimental to the relationship - to that part’s myopic view, at least we won’t be vulnerable).

I don’t see Mal as wholly “logical” though. Like many mixed emotional-cognitive parts, she can present that way - as a foil to Cobb's grieving man breaking down - because she’s adopting an attitude that’s cold on the surface but emotionally-driven underneath. I think this is pretty obvious by how her ‘character’ acts with Cobb, but it’s a good representation of Nolan’s iceberg model of filmmaking and of our psychologies in general: what you see on the surface isn’t ‘it’. I don’t know where Nolan would fall on a personality test, but this dynamic isn’t about Mal’s intrusive thought tormenting Cobb with logic… it’s emblematic of a debilitating emotional experience occurring within his psyche. And just because Nolan constructs a complex world indicative of the mind to play around in, doesn’t change his narrative or thematic focus as emotional. After all: regardless of all the big concepts, psychology isn’t just a logical sandbox… if anything, I’d argue it’s the opposite: cognitive parts exist on the surface to protect endless emotional depths we rarely engage with inside. Whether or not Nolan is more comfortable engaging with heady ideas shouldn’t be indicative of his personality though: he’s clearly aware of and interested in mining emotional depths, and far enough along in his own work to acknowledge the struggle in accessing these to his satisfaction with available tools. If he was coming at this from a cold, logical place, the film would play out much differently - either as a) the emotional part being usurped by the logical one, causing the narrative to just dissipate and the movie to end prematurely; or b) Cobb would be pitched as a weaker, less interesting, and less valuable character to the logic, and be uprooted as the lead in his own movie. But the film isn't geared at showing us how Cobb and his grief are illogical and not worth spending time with across 2.5 hours and, what, five continents? Most all western people I see in therapy present as cognitive-heavy, since we’ve relied on these dominant parts of us to navigate the world, and yet we’re all very driven by emotions. So Nolan’s mental strategies and default schematic engagements are really no different than the average western person’s, he just owns it

[tenia]

But then, one could very much say that Haneke's movies aren't cold, he just owns the average western person's mental strategies. Yet, I don't think it'll change people's mind about him being cold towards his characters.

So again, there's what the movie contains, I understand this, but there's how it's dealing with it as a movie, in terms of style, storywriting and direction. I mean : even within Nolan's movies, it's very likely some of them would more spontaneously described as rather cold but other not (for instance, I placed some nuance between Inception and Interstellar and Dunkirk, I would probably consider The Prestige as not cold at all, and I don't think Memento is either).

And that's fine to some extent. It's okay for some movies to have this style. It just needs to be fitting.

[therewillbeblus]

I added some text to the end of my post before you posted yours that I think addresses this - given who the main character is here, how he figures into the narrative and the result of it, and how logic/cognitive processes don't usurp the narrative in particular, it's hard to argue that coldness. Mal represents the coldness - a defense mechanism that will make this all go away - and yet we still remain on a looonnnggg journey combatting this, witnessing Cobb's agony all the way, because a) Nolan doesn't endorse this worldview, and b) he feels warmly towards his lead character. The message is that resilience is not in letting go completely and becoming 'logical', which would suppress the value in being alive, but working through that and 'letting go' in a more emotional way, which is expressed in the film's final moments.

[Mr Sausage]

That Nolan chose to name her Mal would actually probably be an argument in favor of how irrepressibly litteral and logical he has to be instead of being more perceptive and freeflowing (I'd be surprised to see Nolan pass as P rather than J in a MBTI test), but past this, it makes sense in how he referenced the character (dooming femme fatale), not necesserally what her sentimental relation was with Cobb. (tl;dr : her being named Mal doesn't prevent her and Cobb having had a strong and deep love story, it's just a too on-the-nose name in respect to the archetype she's representing).

It’s the opposite of literal. She’s symbolic. You admit it yourself in your last sentence when you say she’s “representing” something. And what she represents—guilt, loss, trauma, a mind trapped in its own maze of emotions—is emotional more than conceptual. Using symbols to represent emotions isn’t cold and conceptual; it’s poetic.

I agree, the naming is blunt. Just like naming Elliot Page’s character Ariadne is blunt. The movie overdetermines some of its parts out of a fear of being confusing. It’s this overdetermined quality that makes you feel the stories are inelastic.

You write "Viewer is so focused on", but I don't think the movies' structures are innocent in that. I think that's the difference between me and Mr Sausage's POV on the matter, and what I meant about Dunkirk : the way the movie is built gets in the way of the characters feeling more fleshed out and emotions having more space. So it's not so much that we (viewers) aren't used to movies with concepts like this, but that at some point, the concept can truly takes more space than it should, detrimentally to other stuff like emotions or psychology.

Dunkirk is a big ensemble movie about a big event. It’s in the nature of those movies to lose some of the focus and intimacy you get in less panoramic stories. It has nothing to do with any so-called coldness in Nolan’s typical style. Not least because the film is not about the large movements of history and their meaning, but about how the individual reacts to big events and what that says about human (and national) character. It’s a traditional story, just approached in a novel and flashy way.

I don’t know, I’ve read a lot of high-concept sci-fi that’s heavy on ideas but light on emotion and character, and Nolan’s work doesn’t resemble them in the slightest. So I can’t figure what any of you are on about.

[therewillbeblus]

I agree, the naming is blunt. Just like naming Elliot Page’s character Ariadne is blunt. The movie overdetermines some of its parts out of a fear of being confusing. It’s this overdetermined quality that makes you feel the stories are inelastic.

Also, in many of these kinds of therapeutic modalities that Nolan's film reflects, we often have clients 'name' their parts in order to get a tangible sense of how to work with and explore them, but these parts and their definitions are almost always elastically defined if someone sticks with the work for long enough. It's also an intrinsic barrier to talk-therapy and navigating these nebulous internal emotional parts, in that we translate them through cognitive constructs. Inception strikes me as an incredibly realistic depiction of what someone familiar with these abstract therapeutic modalities would create as a projection of how their understanding of their mind works. It's like Inside Out, only using a sci-fi-James Bond-blockbuster skeleton instead of an animated kids fantasy movie format to communicate mature themes of emotional processing

[Mr Sausage]

I can buy that, tho’ Nolan has had a tendency to overdetermine things for much of his career. A good early instance was his choice in Memento to repeat exact framings and camera setups each time a specific location was shown. In the commentary he says this was a deliberate choice to help the audience orient itself no matter how twisty the structure became. It works, I think, but at the cost of a predictability and even blandness in the visuals. And I think this speaks to what bothers tenia about Nolan’s work: Nolan plays around with structure, yet his films rarely feel playful. The films don’t exactly feel like they could go anywhere, because you always feel you’re being directed somewhere specific and guided there by endless signposts. And that’s fair: the movies are not freewheeling; they’re as controlled and manipulated as a David Fincher movie, if more open-ended in their conclusions.

Now by and large, I think it works. Nolan’s best films use genres like noir, and psychological afflictions like guilt and trauma, to suggest trapped, mazelike conditions that suit his controlled, overdetermined style. His narratives are rarely about people who are free, open, self-determining people. If they were, the style might clash; but mostly he sticks to narrative and emotional situations that suit a controlled manner. That said, I think tenia’s criticism, that Nolan’s overdeterminations make for cramped and stuffy experiences, is valid. I disagree (for one thing they usually leave plenty of space open for interpretation), but it is a more interesting criticism than Nolan tends to get. Nolan is often ill-served by his negative critics.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I think I was trying to say something similar but I guess in a different, more therapeutically-specific way. I agree that he adopts certain orienting holds, which are helpful tools since we often need some tangible constant in order to stay invested in the story/therapeutic work, and delve into less concrete/comfortable material. I don't think his efforts for keeping his audience oriented are always effective in his films - the temporal engagement across the three sections in Dunkirk's sections can feel muddled (I didn't experience this with frustration, but I 'get' the complaint), Tenet's ideas are carefully explained but also communicated with oversimplification in a way that doesn't always match their complex execution - but this only supports to the need for Nolan to provide these orienting markers. He's conscious of our needs as a viewer, and is also not going to compromise his vision of merging intellectual and emotional concepts. Such bold ambitions are bound to fumble here and there, or yield consequences where one element stands out more than another (i.e. the theoretical narrative components will overwhelm the emotional core and misinform a diagnosis that Nolan is only interested in X), but this is a particular risk he wagers when committing to allow us to follow along using 'overdetermining' methods - that we will see him as cold and logical, when his organizational constructivism isn't mutually exclusive from emotional intelligence or warm aims. It's a tool (therapeutic, artistic, schematic) to lucidly evoke these ideas and feelings.

[tenia]

And I think this speaks to what bothers tenia about Nolan’s work: Nolan plays around with structure, yet his films rarely feel playful. The films don’t exactly feel like they could go anywhere, because you always feel you’re being directed somewhere specific and guided there by endless signposts. And that’s fair: the movies are not freewheeling; they’re as controlled and manipulated as a David Fincher movie, if more open-ended in their conclusions.

Not sure I'll do better than this, but yes, it’s something along those lines. Not exactly though, I don’t mind controlled movies, but I often feel Nolan movies are supposedly the equivalent of some kind of sand-box or open world video game but in the end, they’re rail shooters. Inception in particular feels like this, supposedly a very stimulating movie but which is continuously dumbed down by the screenwriting, which isn’t nice for the movie’s audience which can feel as never trusted to be smart and attentive enough so it HAS to be guided all along, down to the on-the-nose naming of characters (and explanatory scenes) (in this regard, Tenet was better IMO).
This, to me, doesn’t help the emotions to be projected to the audience. It feels like the movies are continuously talking to my brain, including when they should stop for a moment so that the heart takes the relay. I don’t have this issue with Fincher movies, including Gone Girl or Millennium.

As it is, I don’t think it’s an issue per se for Nolan. To be fair, he’s a gifted filmmaker, and I vastly prefer this than someone who’s not able to offer this kind of movie environment.

But too often, I feel like his movies also want to be more emotional than such a style allows it to be. Sometimes, it’s fine : I think that Memento is very efficient at this, despite the style described by Mr Sausage. But too often, I feel like the “exercice de style” takes over, eats up too many space and screen time, and in the end, leaves too little space for viewers to stop thinking and start feeling.

That’s where it clashes, and where I feel the expectations (from advertising, for instance) aren’t enough in line with what ends up on the screen (and why I think Paprika is so much better than Inception).

[Mr Sausage]

Despite the rigorous style of narrative structuring, I’ve always appreciated how committed Nolan is to ambiguity. One of my favourite examples is the special edition DVD of Memento from the early 2000s. Nolan’s commentary ends three completely different ways, each one giving a mutually exclusive interpretation of the ending reveal.

It makes perfect sense he would adapt a novel by Christopher Priest, one of literature’s most committed practitioners of narrative and epistemological ambiguity.