A theme that is seen throughout all of Christopher Nolan’s movies is that cinema as a shared narrative can be a hugely powerful cultural force
Many of his films reference film itself
In Inception, the crew resembles a film crew
Many of his films could be called meta cinematic, but he is very careful about avoiding meta cinematic images in his work
For example, in Batman Begins, Nolan chose to have Bruce and his parents go see the opera before his parents are murdered, instead of going to see a movie (Zorro) like in the original comic books
Christopher Nolan: “We didn’t have young Bruce going to see Zorro because a character in a movie watching a movie is very different than a character in a comic book watching a movie…it creates a deconstructionist thing that we are trying to avoid.”
Over and above everything, his cinema is immersive
He walks the line between being immersive and meta cinematic
He hides in plain sight
The Prestige exemplifies Nolan walking the line perfectly between being immersive and meta cinematic
For example, the opening scene, which is a title card (The Prestige) over a ton of top hats laying around that look the same
If you already know this movie, the title card serves a literal function as well, as the top hats are literally the prestige
The other symbolism is in the number of hats, all identical, duplicates, multiplicity, further reinforced by the next scene of all identical yellow canary birds, a key to understanding this film and its tricks
Michael Cane does a voiceover of this scene explaining the three steps of a magic trick, the pledge, the turn, and finally, the prestige
This sets up the movie’s structure
Where is Michael Cane’s voice coming from? He is not narrating, and it’s not an inner monologue, and then after flashes of scenes from the future, he picks up the last line in a courtroom as if the whole voiceover was actually a testimony
But, this bird scene is actually the last scene of the entire movie
Nolan reverses the temporal relationship between the voiceover and the scene under it, and this kind of displacement is the key mechanism for the whole movie
The Prestige is all about a trick that moves an object through time and space instantaneously
This is what film editing does, cutting between short distances and continuous times
Nolan has described learning the power of this by watching Terrence Malic’s The Thin Red Line, where Malic cuts to memories simply without blurs or wavy lines or any effects, and the powerful effect this can have on the viewer
Nolan exploits this power to the fullest, cutting between multiple different nested memories, setting up those devices with the two journals, but once those are established, he cuts between them at will and without warning
The complex narrative structure is totally subservient to the story Nolan wants to tell, it is necessary to keep the twist and turns unknown
Even after Nolan has given us all the clues, we remain at his mercy until the final scene
Note: We remain at his mercy even beyond the final scene, as the “real” ending or the real interpretation of the ending of some of his movies like The Prestige and Inception is widely debated.