The Cosmic Relationship Conjecture: A Reappraisal of Christopher Nolan’s Films

Image Credit: charlieanders2 on Flickr

Bits and pieces of the thoughts below were put in written form starting from 2014 or so. I had shared my views in several conversations with fellow film enthusiasts over the years. With the release of each new film from Christopher Nolan, I found that I had something to say and loosely put down my thoughts in my notes. Until now, I have not felt the motivation to put together my (sometimes mental) jottings over the years in a coherent form. Now, I feel, is as good a time as any other to do so, not only because it timely – with Nolan almost certainly being awarded the highest laurel by his Hollywood colleagues later today, surely accompanied with salmon and potato salad – but also because it a good juncture in time to look at the quite remarkable – and also, in my view, quite unexpected – trajectory of his filmography in the last decade or so. Needless to say, this article is riddled with spoilers, so continue reading at your own risk.

(But how about Inception? Yes, I still stand by every word I had written in that review 13 years back, though I would certainly phrase some of my criticisms differently – I was just a schoolboy!)

Nolan started going in this new direction as early as The Dark Knight Rises, though it was not quite obvious to me upon the first watch. The film seemed strangely anomalous and haphazard, with some of its apparent deficiencies calling attention to themselves, which seemed to be quite inconsistent with my idea of Nolan as a filmmaker trying to show off his intellect to the audience with very precise – if convoluted – logical framework and clockwork precision of the narratives. Nearly all his previous films were emblematic of these tendencies, although the exquisitely built house-of-cards narrative often fell apart on closer inspection (take for instance, the contrivances in the Joker’s elaborately designed plan in The Dark Knight). In Rises, however, some of the plot holes were so prominently on exhibit that the film looked, uh, quite risible. It took me a while to appreciate that such glaring inconsistencies might have been left there somewhat “on purpose” because the maker’s attention was elsewhere. (I put the quotes in the previous sentence because I think it is often difficult to be certain about someone’s artistic intentions, even for the artist herself/himself). 

Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

For a director so enamoured of literalism, as is evident in his previous works, it was quite a pleasant surprise to find him exploring symbolic trajectories at the expense of strict logical coherence. Take Bruce Wayne/Batman’s escape from the pit for instance – why would a person be locked away in a prison of such a ludicrous kind? How would the Batman return to his city when it is completely isolated from the rest of the world? Why would the entire police force of a city be sent to underground tunnels at the same time? The only conceivable answer to all the previous questions, at least to me, is that these do not matter and the sole purpose of these contrivances is for their maker to concentrate on the bigger picture – i.e., the ascent of a middle-aged has-been from the abyss he has created for himself. The film actually makes full sense even when it makes no sense. 

It is also worth making a comment on the politics of this film, in particular in relation to those Nolan made previously. Up until this point at least, Nolan seemed to be more interested invoking the zeitgeist as opposed to adhering to some coherent set of principles. Consider for example, the flip-flop between positions (whether you agree with them or not) espoused in the endings of Insomnia and The Dark Knight, and how this position is overturned again in The Dark Knight Rises (one of the reasons of my frustrations with Nolan’s early work).  In this film, the Nolan brothers (Jonathan Nolan co-wrote the script) appeared to be inspired more by classical literature (A Tale of Two Cities is cited both implicitly and explicitly) than by contemporary political events – which lends the film a sense of timelessness. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the film is somewhat prescient in anticipating the shifting landscape of public discourse.

All this is not to say that my admiration for the film was unqualified. Nolan still favoured belaboured exposition instead of trusting his images to convey his meaning – the gravity of the Batman’s sacrifice had to be diminished with a ludicrous “And that’s the detonation!” (or something like that) as though the audiences could not “get” that. All said and done, for all its flaws, I would be hard pressed to recall another mainstream film among its contemporaries which is as emblematic of its era – the same holds true for The Dark Knight as well.

Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

The Dark Knight Rises gave me some food for scepticism about my previously held thoughts about Nolan – Interstellar, on the other hand, converted me into a complete believer. Not only did the overall aesthetics in Nolan’s films show a noticeable shift from this point onwards – not coincidentally, with Hoyte Van Hoytema replacing the long-time Nolan collaborator Wally Pfister as the cinematographer – the overall focus of his narratives shifted dramatically. Under the (very glossy) cover of high-concept science fiction, this film was consciously putting forward in full public view the anxieties and insecurities of its maker, as all great works of art do. The film was Spielbergian in its unabashed embrace of sentimentalism – and actually happened to do it better than Spielberg in his heyday. (A related aside: the film was initially supposed be directed by Spielberg before Nolan took over.)

The essence of the film lies not in its admirable semi-realistic treatment of actual physics (apart from its ending, more about which later), but in the filial bond at the centre of the movie. For a filmmaker so infatuated with detailed expositions, the complete omission of the backstory of what made earth uninhabitable was a step in the right direction. All the contrivances in the film are at the service of the central pillar of the narrative. Take the explorers’ journey to the first planet outside the black hole for instance, where they meet with an unpleasant surprise waiting for them. If the science, namely gravitational time dilation, was actually taken seriously by the characters in the film, they would have done all the calculations that would have prevented them from going to the planet in the first place. However, the characters’ lack of experience with general relativity not only results in a thrilling action sequence in the middle of the film but also leads to perhaps the single most emotionally resonant sequence in all of Nolan’s filmography, suitably aided by Hans Zimmer’s haunting score. I am referring of course to the extraordinary sequence of Matthew McConaughey receiving more than two decades worth of messages from his family with the camera fixated on his sobs for a good minute or so – I would be hard pressed to think of a better metaphor of the personal costs of an individual in pursuit of a career (even if the "career" in this case has to do with saving humankind).

Many films have been cited as inspiration for Interstellar, but I believe the appropriate companion piece for this film is M. Night Shyamalan’s masterpiece Signs. In very different scenarios, both the films are about the struggles of a widower (let's not venture into the topic of dead wives in Nolan’s filmography) with faith in the face of the threat of extinction of his family – the only thing in his world with any meaning. In the end, both the films say, Everything Happens for a Reason and there is no such thing as pure chance. However, I must say that even with my lack of religiosity, I find Shyamalan’s invocation of god in Signs more palatable than the strictly atheistic-materialistic outcome here. The wristwatch with the randomly moving hands is actually Morse code sent by your father who has plunged into a rotating black hole in a different galaxy with direct view of your bedroom (!) and this code simultaneously solves quantum gravity and saves humanity? How nice. In any case, there is a chuckle to be had when the secret formula for saving humanity turns out be 10D supergravity action in the string frame. If you are not a string theorist, it’s OK if you are unmoved by this. (Another aside: the title of this article was conceived nearly a decade back in relation to Interstellar – it refers to the (strong) cosmic censorship conjecture, since the lead character jumps into a rotating black hole. Sorry, enough physics for this paragraph.)

Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

It was clear from Interstellar than Nolan was slowly gravitating towards pure cinema, but I was really unprepared for the act of extreme audacity that was Dunkirk. Here was a director who could proceed with his patented formulas of success (sci-fi, intense psychological dramas and what-not) and he chose to make a $150 million experimental film that would not have been out-of-place in the arthouse circuit, save its scope and ambition. He eliminated all his usual flaws in narrative construction in a single stroke – he got rid of the narrative itself. This was a war movie to end all war movies. This film did not even have a heroic protagonist for audience identification, let alone an adversary to root against. Yet again, Nolan forgoes any backstory to land his audience directly in the middle of the action.  In an age of inanities that have debased the meaning of cinematic experience, this film was particularly striking for its singular focus on making its audience experience the present moment. It is not such a surprise that the film does not elicit any particularly strong emotional reaction, because there was nothing to anchor our emotions to apart from the sensory treat offered by the immediacy of the images and the rich soundscape, with all war-movie tropes neatly upturned along the way for good measure. This film might already be film-school material for all I know, with its innovative cross-cutting (which served a somewhat lesser purpose in Inception) and formal experiments with cinematic time. Each viewing has been as rewarding for me as any other. 

Image Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures

Nolan’s next film, Tenet, was as much of a bold experiment as Dunkirk was, if not more. However, in combining this experiment with a bare-bones narrative and his not-so-secret fondness for pulpy thrillers, he ended up winking at his audience in more ways than one and violating many sacred tenets of filmmaking with a fascinating outcome. Unfortunately for him, this experiment ended up alienating most of his loyal audiences (at least anyone with whom I have had any conversation on this movie) expecting the clever plot mechanics that characterised his early work. The key to this film, in my view, lies in Nolan’s very commendable off-screen efforts to preserve celluloid as a medium – which to him is synonymous with the art of cinema itself. In the same vein as Dunkirk, Tenet is an exercise in pure cinematics, with a restoration of the primal meaning of the cinema – descending from the Greek word for motion, “kinesis”. And what a dazzling exercise it is! 

In spite of my aforementioned inhibitions with analysing authorial intent, let me imagine how Nolan might have conceived Tenet: the idea must have taken root at some point in an editing suite, where films play out as much in the forward direction as backwards. With his fascination for all things related to time, he must have wondered if temporal inversion has as much power to engage the audience in a darkened movie theatre. At some point during the making of Interstellar, Kip Thorne must have told Nolan about a crazy idea (one of the many) from his doctoral supervisor, the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler. This idea, which goes by the name of “one-electron universe” posits that all the different particles in the universe are the one and same particle – only half of them are travelling back in time! Nolan must have realised the immense cinematic potential of this idea and worked his way (forwards and backwards) from there on.

Viewers need not have despaired over the fact that they did not understand the film – the film was, pardon the repetition, about the experience itself and not meant to be understood. The key set-piece in the film involving a flight between the same person, going forward and backward in time, is as meticulously conceived as it is exhilarating. (Talk about fighting the demons within you!) John David Washington as the Protagonist is one of the most interesting, well, protagonists in the Nolan universe – who takes it all easy despite having to shoulder the responsibility of the arrow of time of the Universe. Nolan, too, I daresay, takes it easy and has fun with the material for a change. The opening set-piece establishes the James Bond-like ethos of the film (The Dark Knight Rises, too, had begun with a nod to James Bond). The on-screen chemistry of Washington and Pattinson gave the film its many light moments. In a wink to his critics, Nolan also subtly inverts his dead-wife trope, with the dying husband responsible for all the ills this time around. It is a pity that a film of such visceral intensity found so little love.

Image Credit: Universal Pictures

When I learned that Nolan’s next film was going to be an Oppenheimer biopic, I was slightly apprehensive. Since I have read quite a bit about Oppenheimer and other scientists of his era, this sounded like a regression – a return to the familiar terrain for Nolan. There being so much in common between Oppenheimer and some of Nolan’s previous protagonists, I wondered what new he could say. And was I wrong! In spite of these commonalities, Nolan upended all biopic tropes and gave his most impressive contribution to cinema so far – I agree with Paul Schrader’s assessment of Oppenheimer being the most important film of our times. I might have to write more about this magnificent film more elaborately at a later point.

As if anticipating the question I posed in the previous paragraph, Nolan puts his audience in the shoes of his protagonist as a new device. It is a WWII film like no other – if Dunkirk had no point of audience identification, it is present in Oppenheimer with such ferocious intensity that it becomes seriously discomfiting, thanks in no small measure to Hoyte Van Hoytema’s extraordinary photography. (It was not surprise to me when I later learned that Nolan wrote the “Fission” part in the screenplay in the first person.) Given the subject matter, I was concerned that one of the most dreadful events of the twentieth century might be offered as a spectacle with little room for reflection or introspection. The first-person nature of the narrative (thankfully, without any voiceover), however, obviated this worry and even the inevitable spectacle of the test that Oppenheimer witnesses is reduced in potency by its careful positioning in the middle of the film. The victory speech that follows is staged as a frightening horror film with thunderous silence from the fellow filmgoers in the two continents that I saw the film in.  Here was a man who had to spend the remainder of his living days knowing that this time, he could not take the poisoned apple back no matter how much he wished.

The real preoccupation of the film, quite unexpectedly, lay in the minutiae of personal interactions and in the inherent politics of such interactions. (Nolan’s perception of academic politics is surprisingly authentic.) Nolan’s illustration of various contrasts could be considered humorous if it weren’t so horrific – particularly shaking was the masterful staging of sequence in which the decision to terminate the lives of hundreds of thousands of people is predicated on the whim of someone who had his honeymoon somewhere. Nolan’s brutal, unsparing approach makes this a deeply relevant film for our times, with catastrophic threats against humanity being bandied about. While Nolan does repeat some of his old tropes (the dead wife is transposed to a dead girlfriend), his approach feels quite fresh – this is essentially the first time I have seen Nolan entertain the idea that sex life can be a window to a person’s soul.  The ending of Oppenheimer could have been many things – I am quite amused that the central mystery involves Oppenheimer’s conversation with an old, long-past-his-prime physicist. Einstein’s final explanation to Oppenheimer is a gem of writing. 

I eagerly look forward to seeing what Nolan does next, for he is become an Artist, a creator of (cinematic) worlds.