Christopher Nolan’s Universe (Part Three)

This is the third and final part of a series on the cinematic work of Christopher Nolan

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All of Christopher Nolan’s films to date carry within them at least two levels on which one can enjoy and appreciate them. Each and every one of them works on the level of entertainment. Even if, as with Memento, and to a degree with The Prestige, they keep us asking “What the hell is going on?” We remain hungry to get an answer.

When Nolan was a kid he first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey:

I think I had been warned that it wasn’t going to be like Star Wars, but when you look at the Discovery passing, each one of those miniature shots was deeply fascinating to me. It’s just such a primal atmosphere – the bit in the beginning with the cheetah, his eyes glowing, the image of the star child appearing on the screen at the end, and being baffled by it, but not in a frustrated way.  There’s a level of pure cinema, of pure experience that’s working there. 2001: A Space Odyssey is the movie that first showed me that movies can be anything.

Nolan knows that whatever mysterious scenarios he gives us, they will stand or fall on whether or not they entertain us. With the majority of us they do – the box office is evidence enough of that. But that is not all they do. Nolan does not tell us what to think or what we should think, but if we pay attention to what he is doing they will make us think, and perhaps think even as deeply as he does.

Three of his films are deeply personal. A fourth is also so but in a different way from the other three. This is his study of the heroism of which ordinary people are capable. In it he is retelling a version of an epic event which none of us should ever forget – the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. That event has a special resonance for Nolan. His grandfather Francis Thomas Nolan was a navigator on a Lancaster bomber and was shot down over France in 1944, after surviving forty-five previous missions.

Of the dramatic final scene in Dunkirk, Nolan says:

That scene at the end is a very important moment to me and one that I really wanted to make work. I think because of the absence of overt heroics elsewhere in the film, it packs an enormous punch…. I don’t think it would have been possible for me to portray a World War II pilot in anything other than heroic terms. World War II was always something that was incredibly important to my father. He used to tell me stories about the air raids. So that was very much a part of my dad’s history that he would relate to us, and so, while it wasn’t something I was conscious of at the time, when I look back on it, I feel like inevitably at some point I was going to want to tell a World War II story in some way.

However, it is in the three science fiction works which he has directed that we really enter deeply into the personal and spiritual world of Christopher Nolan.

The relationship each of us has with our dreams puzzles all of us. We find ourselves asking about our dreams, “Where did that come from?” Dreams have always featured in literature, art and cinema since its beginnings. It is not for nothing that Hollywood is known as “the dream factory”.

A list of dream themed works of art could begin with the great and beautiful medieval religious poem, The Dream of the Rood, down through Kubla Kahn, Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and now into Nolan’s puzzling and magnificent adventure, Inception.

The origin of Nolan’s Inception goes back to his school days and has had many different forms. It finally came together and took its final shape as a story about the abiding power of family and the dangers of dream-induced delusions which threaten to destroy lives and often succeed doing so. In approaching Inception – I would not dare attempt a synopsis – what we need to realise is that Nolan is not attempting to give us a treatise on dreams but is simply using the powerful imaginative dream scenario he creates to help us keep our feet on the ground.

After the success of The Dark Knight the family went on holiday to an island off the Florida coast. He watched his youngest sons, Rory and Oliver, making sand castles. That image was enough to trigger and reignite the whole project and is in the heart of the movie. He came home, dug out the draft ideas he had been working on seven or eight years earlier. This time he said, I think it will work.

“It was like, Oh, of course, and then I finished the script very quickly after that. The script finally worked, because suddenly you understood the emotional stakes. I hadn’t known how to finish the script emotionally. I think I had to grow into it.”

The permanent values of family, children, love for the real precious world over any delusional forms which may attempt to draw us into their web, even the memories of loved ones no longer with us, is what Inception is about.

Interstellar does not take us too far from the same territory. Its origin story is remarkable and involves his long term musical collaborator, Hans Zimmer, and a conversation about fatherhood which they had in a London restaurant. After the conversation Nolan asked Zimmer to compose a theme for him on that very topic. He brought it to Nolan some time later. Nolan liked it and then said, “I suppose I’d better make the movie now.” A bit bemused, Zimmer replied, “Well, yes, but what is the movie?” Nolan then gave him a synopsis of his epic conception of our fight for survival in the face of the ‘end times’. Now bewildered, Zimmer protested, “Chris, hang on, I’ve just written this highly personal thing, you know?” “Yes, Nolan replied, but I now know where the heart of the movie is.”

He suggests that Interstellar can be read as a ghost story. “That notion of the parent as a ghost of the child’s future. That was in the fable that I gave him (Zimmer), because I wanted him to write music that was the emotional heart of that story. It’s about the parent revisiting the child as a ghost, and struggling to then be free.”

“I very much related to the dilemma of somebody who is having to go off and do this thing, leave his kids, whom he dearly wants to be with, but really wants to go do this thing,” he says. “My job is something that I absolutely love. I consider myself unbelievably lucky to do it, but there is a lot of guilt involved in doing that – a lot of guilt. I have a daughter who is the same age as the character…. As my kids were growing up, I had this desire to hang on to the past. You become quite melancholy about how fast it’s going. All parents talk about it, all parents experience it. So Interstellar came from a very personal place.

Interstellar comes down very firmly behind the idea of the emotional connection between people. That’s why I wanted the Dylan Thomas poem Rage, rage against the dying of the light. That is exactly what I’m talking about. You rage because the lights are dimming. Time certainly is the enemy, quite specifically so in Interstellar, an insidious force, one that can play tricks on you. I don’t think there was ever any question that I could or would let time win. For me, the film is really about being a father. The sense of your life passing you by and your kids growing up before your eyes. Very much what I felt watching Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, an extraordinary film, which did the same thing in a completely different way. We all deal with this. There is a positive side to it. I think that’s where some of the optimism in the film comes from.

A sticking point for Shone was what he considered a deus ex machina in the plot. Five dimensional beings play a key role in resolving the pain and problems of the astronauts and Cooper. For Shone these pass all understanding and do not ring true. I think that this is possibly where the world view of both men encounter irreconcilable difficulties and the impact of Nolan’s Christian/Catholic upbringing shows itself. Although he confesses that he is not a practicing Catholic, clearly the resonance of Christian belief is there.

Shakespeare may or may not have been a practicing Catholic. But there is little doubt that all his sensibility was Catholic. It was probably no easier to be one in his age than sadly it might be for a busy Hollywood director in our age. Nevertheless, Shakespeare had no problem dramatically getting Hamlet, encountering his father’s ghost, to call on Angels and ministers of grace to defend him! Nolan responds to Shone’s scepticism:

I think you’re missing the narrative point, which is that jumping into black holes is the ultimate act of faith. Cooper is caught by creatures who you know exist, and you’ve been wondering who they are for the entire film. Who are they? It’s first said in the first act. It’s all up front. Who put the wormhole there? And so they’re not a deus ex machina; they’re specified right from the beginning, whether you like it or not.

Nolan grew up knowing about the reality of divine providence and the existence of angels, good and bad. Interstellar gives you all that – and much more – to think about.

Finally there is TENET, the “troublesome” one. But it is not troublesome. On one level it is a superbly produced spy story to match the experience of watching the most sophisticated pyrotechnics of the best Bond productions. However, that is not its real value. There are two strands running through the story.

The first is probably a sad reflection on the troubled conscience of Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s latest film, the genius behind the Atomic Bomb. Nolan read about the wrangling of those people with this thing they unleashed. “How’s that going to be controlled? It’s just this most monstrous responsibility. Once that knowledge is out there in the world, what can you do? You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.”

He further reflects on how he grew up in the post nuclear age. “We’ve grown up in the shadow of the ultimate destructive knowledge… To know something is to have power over it, generally, but what if the reverse is true, if knowing something gives it power over you?”

TENET is about two forces imagined to be from the future, the one trying to get control of the ultimate algorithm for “inversion” – Nolan’s imagined invention – which can turn the world upside down, inside out, The other trying to negate it.

“To know its true nature is to lose,” says Dimple Kapadia’s character. “We’re trying to do with inversion what we couldn’t do with the atomic bomb – uninvent it. Divide and contain the knowledge. Ignorance is our ammunition.”  How prescient was Nolan in this, now that we are all worrying about what that force – which just a few years ago was in the future and is now present among us – Artificial Intelligence.

The second strand in the story is the battle Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), the villain Sator’s estranged wife, is fighting to get back her son who is being kept from her by her husband. The denouement of the film requires you, I think, to again accept Nolan’s understanding that there is “a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will”.

At the end of TENET, John David Washington’s Protagonist looks on as Kat meets her son at the school gate. The Protagonist’s professional partner, Neil, (Robert Pattison) in a voice over says mysteriously, “… but it’s the bomb that didn’t go off … the danger no one knew was real.…” He then adds, again somewhat mysteriously, as the Protagonist, whose name we never know, watches Kat and Max walk away and the boy offers his mother his hand, “That’s the bomb with the real power to change the world.”

What “bomb”? Motherhood? Family? Selfless human love and affection?

TENET grossed $58.5 million in the United States and Canada and $306.8 million in other territories, for a worldwide total of $363.7 million. With a production budget of $200 million, it is Nolan’s most expensive original project. Its relatively poor performance must surely be partly attributed to its untimely release to cinemas just as the pandemic panic was fading. Its complexity is a bit daunting but it is well worth the effort required to dig into that complexity.