I watched The Prestige last week for director Chris Nolan and writer Jon Nolan. The Nolan brothers’ Memento is one of my fave movies of all time. Christopher and Jon Nolan must be an interesting pair of brothers: their work shows a Gothic fixation with Man’s inherent unreliability and propensity for the darkest kind of self-deception, obsession and egoistic self-deception.
Although I kind of saw the twist in the Prestige coming, I still was taken aback by the clever playing out of the Nolan brothers’ favourite Gothic theme. It’s one of the most genuinely disturbing endings I have seen in a while. I don’t think you can watch The Prestige for its ‘twist’ alone because the twist is fairly obvious after a while and can be unsatisfying if you don’t appreciate the odd mix of old-fashioned story-telling and sudden introduction of science-fiction that traditionally requires suspension of reality.
Memento was a tribute to the fickleness of memory: how it colours the way we perceive our grievances, moulds our selves and defines the lives we end up living. Memento succeeded at two levels: it was an old-fashioned Gothic story about the dark horror of Man’s capability for self-deception and murderous; it was also an intelligent noir detective thriller. Likewise, The Prestige is both a Gothic study of Man’s dark heart as well as a sci-fi/thriller/drama.
Once you get past the sci-fi device, The Prestige is a film that really gets you thinking about the horror of vengeance and how far we are willing to kill our Selves to get there. Although the ending would have us believe Angiers (Jackman) to be worse, I don’t think Fallon/Borden (Bale) is supposed to be any better.
Angiers kills himself literally and figuratively in his desperate search to be the best magician, to earn the adoring of the crowd. He sacrifices his human identity, his love for his wife and the possibility of love with a new woman. Worse, he knows what he is doing: he chooses blind stage hands backstage so that they cannot see the horror of his sin. Borden/Fallon kill themselves figuratively – they never experience true love for they sacrificed honesty in their relationships with family, friend and lover. They too have blended two lives so well that they lose their identity and no longer know who they actually are anymore.
The recurring questions in the show centre around “Are you willing to dirty your hands?”, “Do you know what sacrifice means?”. After all the clever pyrotechnics of this film have faded away, these questions I think remain far more outstanding. At the bottom of all their self-justification and pain, both Angiers and Borden/Fallon are essentially the same - impulsive, self-destructive, self-mutilating and willing to cheat on their nearest and dearest to get exactly what they want. Even the ‘happy’ ending where Borden/Fallon gets his daughter back is tainted. His daughter – like his wife/mistress - never had him and apparently never will truly have him as long as the wall of deception never drops.
No comments:
Post a Comment