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On the surface, The Prestige is about two rival magicians in 19th century England, one American and the other British. However, as the individual looks beyond the surface of the film, we discover something more: obsession, rivalry, and ultimately, questions surrounding identity. These are the pieces of the puzzle that Christopher Nolan and the production team choose to focus on throughout this spellbinding thriller.
It leads the audience to discover something new every time they watch it. It's a film that's not to be taken lightly and one that you have to be watching closely because every detail adds up to an ending that both impresses and mystifies viewers at the same time.
This video continues my Christopher Nolan marathon, where I create content on every film in the director's filmography, including Tenet when it releases later this year. During the build-up, I will also be keeping you up to date with news and information surrounding Christopher Nolan's latest film. To stay up to date with all of these videos, subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications. Also, if you enjoy it, remember to leave a like rating.
Without further ado, let's dive into how Christopher Nolan applies particular themes in The Prestige. The Prestige deals mostly in secrecy, the obsession it causes, and in the end, reconciliation. Christopher Nolan crafted a film which, to some audiences, can be seen as a reference to the magic of movies. It's strange, but I also look at Inception with this very notion of belief, the way a film can transport us into a narrative that we believe and one that disguises its true meaning. In turn, it can then be successful to all audiences, and Nolan has done this consistently throughout his original films during his career.
But what Nolan does in The Prestige, which connects both of these types of audience notions of the film, is through his representation of characters with recurring themes. So far in this series, we've talked about Nolan's use of the troubled protagonist, his appliance of subgenres, and his film techniques to pull this off. In The Prestige, the themes of identity, rivalry, and obsession also relate heavily to Nolan's other work. But in his 2006 film, he finds a way to link the narrative and his filmmaking techniques compellingly to these important messages. They are messages that we all relate to as human beings, and it can help us look at the process Nolan went to in crafting a film which has remained timelessly relatable.
In The Prestige, the plot follows Robert Angier and Alfred Borden. At first, Angier is a much more outgoing magician, a showman who seems to have everything. He's found success coming to England as a magician and even has married a woman known as Julia. Angier. Borden is the complete opposite. He's a talented magician, but one who seems to have grown up simply in England. He has found his passion as a magician and worked his way up to his success. He is not married or in any relationship as the film begins, but it's interesting to note just how the lives of these two men change.
While Borden seems to obsess about perfection with his craft, Angier does not seem to worry as much at first. The two men seemingly changed lives as the bulk of the plot unfolds, and the beginnings of its wheels start to turn when an accident causes Julia to die on stage during a failed magic trick. The tragedy is what begins to divide the two men who were friends and partners in their craft, as they accuse one another of different reasons for the event. The two men decide to launch their own careers. Borden begins to develop his own trick known as The Transported Man and finds great success with this, but it also creates a growing level of rage within Angier, one which begins the turn of his identity. He cannot stand that his former partner is finding success while he finds himself not as successful.
For much of the movie, Angier strives to emulate Borden's spectacular version of The Transported Man trick, where he disappears and reappears instantaneously on the other side of the stage. Eventually, Angier manages to not only match Borden but to surpass him.
While the rivalry between Angier and Borden takes the shape of each man trying to be the better stage magician, at its core, their dispute revolves around anxieties about identity. Where both characters have a double subplot. Perhaps the most interesting meta thing is how these great rivals mirror each other, which is especially reflected in their obsessive but heartless relationships with their wives and lovers. At the cause of this is the growing desire for the other's being. It's this desire which pushes the men to keep secrets and punish each other in what becomes an increasingly vicious feud that results in multiple deaths and much unnecessary suffering.
To try and one-up Borden, Angier hires Olivia, an assistant, and Gerald Root, an impersonator. He used in his own version of The Transported Man. As John Cutter, Angier's stage engineer, tells him, this is the only way he knows how to do this trick, and Angier becomes obsessed and will not accept it in comparison to how he believes Borden does the trick. He decides to send Olivia over to Borden's world and hopes to receive some intelligence from it all, but in the process, she ends up falling in love with a half of Borden and complicating the events all the more.
Part of Angier's jealousy was Borden finding love and marrying Sarah. However, the introduction of Olivia into Borden's life eventually drives Sarah to suicide. Additionally, Angier's obsession and loneliness take him to Colorado Springs and Nikola Tesla, who he believes helped Borden develop his Transported Man based on misleading and manipulative writings by Borden in his journal.
It's great to see Nolan once again pull off his trademark approach of manipulating narrative time. With the various intercutting of all these different sequences, it is fascinating to see the two men read Cutter's journals, despite the fact that they are trying to mislead and manipulate the other into failure. But as the wheels of this plot continue to turn, we learn about Borden's own stage engineer, Fallon, and his daughter, Jess. Angier eventually attempts to adopt Jess after he fakes his death and places the blame directly on Borden. However, Borden is able to survive throughout all of Angier's trickery with the simple disguise of his twin brother.
Magic comes naturally for Borden, living a half-life with his twin, whereas Angier literally had to sacrifice himself in order to succeed. By the film's end, Borden is able to pursue magic and live a full life with his daughter, but he'll never be the best. Angier went out on top, but he also died doing it.
When it comes to reflecting on how The Prestige tackles its themes, the subordination of physical reality to the fallible perception of the mind is central. The magic performed throughout the movie is, as both the film's and the act's audience are aware, only illusion. A philosophically relevant part of the movie is a line spoken by Cutter, which both opens and ends the narrative. He says, "Now you're looking for the secret, but you won't find it because, of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled." Searching for the secret behind the illusion is an admittance of the fallibility of our perception. Our senses were fooled, and this leads to the unsettling realization that physical reality, which strikes as factual, is actually a matter of our perception, and as such, is difficult to know.
In fact, as Angier essays near the end of the movie, the audience knows the truth: "The world is simple. It's miserable. Solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you got to see something really special." The notion of magic seems like it is the hope or the acceptance that a mysterious and unknowable power works on a plane invisible to us. But in a way, the idea of magic is also an undeserved affirmation of our own sensory expertise. When invoking the idea that there is a force beyond our senses, magic is also claiming that our senses are infallible at perceiving what is presented to them. According to this idea, magic is not illusion that capitalizes on our ability to misperceive what is right in front of us, but merely an action that operates on a plane separate from human senses.
This is where the question of identity becomes the primary importance of The Prestige's ending. The message that Nolan leaves the audience with is the impossible nature for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place, or one and the same thing in different places. All conflict, obsession, and rivalry within The Prestige's narrative is rooted in a crisis of identity, wherein two men occupy a single identity. The Borden brothers live their lives as if they were the same man, but the tug of their independent identities tears their life and those of the ones they love apart. Each brother is in love with a different woman, but the inconsistent affections of Alfred Borden lead to the loss of love for each of the brothers. Their effort to present a single identity to the world is the kind of sacrifice Borden repeatedly claims to be the only possible source of any great trick. But in The Prestige, while getting a natural portrayal of this, Nolan also seems to show how magic is consistently portrayed as monstrous.
The film highlights the potentially troubling nature of the duplicate and repeatedly suggests that there is a horror associated with doubling, he expertly explores and conveys the tone of the terrible turn in events that may follow from duplication, not merely of hats, but of human beings. It questions whether the original identity of someone could be removed, and would anyone be able to tell the difference? As Angier reveals his fear by stating, "Would I be the man in the box or The Prestige?" He shows us that he's acknowledged a difference between the two Angiers, but every night Angier was The Prestige, we perceived that he and his clone were perfectly identical in mind, body, experience, and consciousness. He never recognized himself as the one in the box, although it seems that was almost certainly his original self. At the moment of the axe crash, Angier and his second self are almost certainly of the same identity, but every passing second separates them through their experience. If the drowned Angier were allowed to live, he would certainly be unable to maintain a shared identity with his twin, as experience would change them from each other.
The way Nolan parallels this to Borden with his real twin double gets us thinking even deeper about all the questions of identity, along with who we individually are in regards to true self. It questions the way we perceive reality and attain what we believe as an original identity that functions through its own consciousness. The rivalry and obsession surrounding the conquer of another man's achievements could lead us to inner madness and eventually the loss of an individual identity. It's a relatable concept, but also a powerful one, which is disguised by the magical trick of the film itself.
Through a compelling script, cast, production, and story, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige presents a case of psychological illusion. It plays with the expectations of the audience and makes us amazed at the twists and turns of it all. The testing of the themes and identities of the characters is something that makes this film timeless. People are always trying to outdo their rivals, and none of that has changed since the 19th century. As the wheels of this narrative continued to turn, the instinctive humanity of both men is revealed, and the fragile nature of life itself comes upon the audience. With our expectations shattered and revelations ascending, we are brought into the inner lives and minds of these men like no other film has done before. It is a testament to Nolan's methods of pushing modern imagination in a narrative which could have been just a historical reflection. Even if it does heavily reflect the rivalry between Tesla and Edison, it also gives us new ideas to think about long into the future.
But let me know down below what you find intriguing about Nolan's usage of these prominent themes in The Prestige. My next video in this Christopher Nolan marathon continues with The Dark Knight, the film that solidified Nolan's imagination in capturing a global audience, all while testing their perception of what on the surface could have been just another traditional superhero movie. In particular, I will be discussing how Nolan approaches terror through realism and ultimately creates a film which heavily resonated with the audience of that time period. I will be doing two videos on The Dark Knight, including its comparison to Michael Mann's Heat. These will be released sometime over the next week or so, alongside much more content on the director's extended filmography coming over the next month. To stay up to date with this series, along with all the latest news on Tenet, subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications. Also, if you enjoyed this video, remember to give it a like rating. Anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed it. I've been Cortex, and as always, make some noise.
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