Nolan Notes (Death of the Soul)

Nolan Part 2: Death of the Soul

Preface:

Knowledge of the psyche a necessary component of the Method.

Interpretive lens—

modified Jungian perspective, justified both by what is true of depth psychology (the Jungian “map” of the mind) and by the fact that Nolan deliberately incorporates Jungian tropes into his films (underscored by direct references, e.g., in Batman Begins). But notice that in this reference (by the Cillian Murphy MKUltra psychiatrist) to Jungian archetypes, it’s in a bid to mask the fact that Falcone’s condition is not organic insanity but deliberate, drug-induced psychosis.

While Jung’s overall spiritual outlook is not Christian, it’s also not altogether incompatible with Christianity. In the Orthodox world, the late Kallistos Ware and the hosts of the Lord of Spirits podcasts (Frs. Andrew Stephen Damick and Stephen De Young), for example, rather freely use Jung.

1. Dead/murdered/tortured woman as dead/murdered/tortured soul (and mirroring the trauma and psychological fragmentation of the protagonists)

a. Following

The unnamed protagonist of the film—the “Young Man,” i.e., the proto-artist—is a “failed writer” who can’t understand people. He especially can’t understand women. On his wall is a poster of Marilyn Monroe, and the only important female character in the film is a femme fatale named “the Blonde.” So, at best, Nolan is evincing a very undeveloped conception of the feminine here.

Jung broke the development of the anima into four stages: Eve, in which the dominant feminine figure is primarily fascinating for her sexual allure; Helen, in which beauty predominates; Mary, in which the feminine becomes most strongly associated with compassion; and Sophia, in which the feminine represents wisdom.

Nolan is very much witnessing to the Eve stage here, and even a rather dark, Lilith version of it. In the last act, this woman is bludgeoned to death by Cobb with a hammer. And where this film ends, with brutal violence against a woman, against the feminine itself one may say, is where his next films begins.

b. Memento

Here also the wife is an amorphous figure, the more so for her near invisibility in the film. She is a murder victim like the Blonde but not a femme fatal. There’s an intimation of the Helen archetype, or some more refined conception of the feminine, but it’s been killed, nay, brutally raped and murdered.

Anima means “soul,” and the images by which a man relates to his inner feminine are images of his soul. Nolan rarely depicts feminine characters without overtones of death and violence. We’ve suggested that, in Memento, Leonard is a stand-in for the viewer, and as such he has inherited the trauma of his wife, of his soul. By the late 90s, every true cinephile—to say nothing of the culture at large—was suffering from trauma, from a battered soul.

In his book 16 Maps of Hell, Jasun Horsley picks up on an expression that Hitchcock used, which he in turn picked up from the French playwright Sardou: “torture the women.” This is what Hitchcock and his successors are doing by deliberately traumatizing the viewer, torturing the women within, torturing the soul (remember what Bane says to Batman: “not of your body…of your soul”).

At a basic level, they torture the soul the way that Cobb in Following maliciously interfered in the lives of the people into whose homes he broke into (homes being a metaphor for inner subjectivity), finding out what they fear and love and fucking with them accordingly. At a more sophisticated level—because that Cobb was a psychopath at an inchoate stage—the cultural programmer induces mass trauma in order to reprogram the values and behaviors of a population. Like Leonard, the traumatized viewer—who has lost his identity—is highly susceptible to suggestion and manipulation, in other words, to cultural programming.

c. Insomnia

The plot here revolves around a writer’s murder of a young girl. Again, an artist, or pseudo-artist (because he’s a “bad writer,” like the Young Man in Following) kills the soul. The other important female character is masculinized and portrayed by an actress at that point best known for playing a woman posing as a cowboy.

d. The Prestige

Julia, Angier’s first love interest and the original assistant, wore a blue butterfly hairpin. The butterfly is a traditional symbol of the soul. Note that Borden was potentiallyresponsible for her death, suggesting that the artist was an abuser of the psyche even before commercialism and cultural engineering entered the scene.

After her death, though, Angier’s loses his soul. The other love interest, the Scarlett Johannsen character, he treats as a pawn and sacrifices to his game with Borden. Nothing is really sacred to him except “the looks on their faces.”

Borden’s wife, not knowing that she’s married two people at least one of whom mistreats her, commits suicide, anticipating the suicide of Cobb’s wife in Inception.

e.  Inception

Cobb’s mental manipulation of his wife, incepting in her the idea that the world is not real, led to her suicide. Yet the main idea that Inception incepts in the viewing public, picking up on films like The Matrix, Dark City, and The Thirteenth Floor, which directly inspired Nolan’s screenplay, is the gnostic notion that the world is a kind of simulation. Another testimony to the diabolical cynicism that emerges from close viewings of this film.

At any rate, this tortured anima who has become his psychological nemesis must be killed yet again, internally now, for the heist to go off.

The ending to the film all by itself is a kind of torture of the soul. The neo- or para-gnosticism that pervades films like Inception has a strained relationship to the Platonic tradition similar to ancient Gnosticism. But in Platonism, the soul longs, desires, to behold the truth and return to its origin. By keeping the psyche in a suspended state and lulling it to sleep by suggesting that it doesn’t matter whether Cobb has returned to reality or not—with this ending, Nolan is adding insult to injury and deepening the trauma of the original incepted idea.

Maybe touch on the other idea being incepted, namely, “be yourself,” the “red pill,” inversion.

f. Tenet

Interestingly, in this film the most important female character, the Russian billionaire’s troubled wife, is driven by concern for her son. So there are intimations of the Mary stage of the anima.

[Transition to 4. human nature/sentimentality at this juncture???]

Yet Nolan evidently has the most thorough contempt for her position: she’s willing to see the world destroyed to save her son. This film lionizes Specter, not “the human spirit.” Nolan departed from “the human spirit” with Interstellar.

It’s also notable that she’s in the clutches of a manipulator-abuser like Andrei Sator, which bears comparison to someone like Sarah in The Prestige, who is drawn into a doomed relationship that spells her personal doom. So to the extent that Nolan’s women aren’t dead, blank, or occasionally masculinized, they are damaged.

2. Trauma and the superhero/supervillain

The murder of the feminine perhaps finds its most poignant expression within the Nolan corpus in the first act of Batman Begins, when young Bruce Wayne’s parents are murdered by a destitute burglar. The shattering of the mother’s pearl necklace symbolizes the brutal severing of the feminine principle within the protagonist, the rape and murder of his fragile soul. Thereafter, as long as he lives and enacts the trauma of that awful night, he cannot relate properly to actual women.

But he doesn’t relate properly to the masculine either. In Nolan’s Batman films, the Thomas Wayne character almost represents the archetype of the Good: he is the gentle god who dies courageously for the sins of those he tried to save. Possibly the most moving moment in any Nolan film is Thomas Wayne’s death. With both consummate wisdom and love, he maintains equanimity even in the midst of the deepest psychological crisis, his death throes, to reassure a son he knows will be traumatized by the event, telling him not to be afraid. Thomas Wayne died like he lived, sacrificing himself for others.

Thomas Wayne was an exemplar of justice, and just as Bruce tries in vain to be courageous by fighting his fear with fear, he tries in vain to emulate his father’s perfect example of justice. Ra’s is the shadow father figure, who purports also to embody a higher form of justice than Bruce/Batman but who in fact is simply the logical extension of Bruce/Batman’s own trauma-warped sense of justice. This justice is fanatical and apocalyptic and will burn the world down to root out injustice and renew the world. But despite his trauma, Bruce resists the seduction of Ra’s, even if he can’t intellectually justify his balking at Ra’s extremism.

In the end, Bruce recovers moral clarity—and hence, reasonableness (like Gordon)—by the same means that he restores his relationship to the feminine: he takes off the mask and gives up his trauma-generated alter and returns to humanity, becoming a true human. This is really the inverse of the message one gets from, say, the Marvel movies and from the run of superhero swill saturating the culture for the last 15+ years. The “superhuman” is presented as the ideal, the overcoming of our “mere” humanity to become our true, superpowered selves that have been held down by cultural repression and control. The reality behind this false ideal is lodged in the supervillain, who is superpowered because the option of being human is no longer accessible to him—he’s trauma incarnate. The arc in Nolan’s Batman films supports the opposite outlook: the superhero is in fact a traumatized, dysfunctional half a person, and only by shedding our traumas and embracing our humanity can we be fully human and attain the best possible world for ourselves (mental health) and for society (justice). The superhero is in fact a symbol of trauma-induced arrested development. Bane in his final scenes is exposed as a child, the pathetic, traumatized tool of an evil femme fatale who is also the product of trauma.

Most superhero story arcs validate the Nietzschean notion that suffering and pain (read trauma) lead to organism-transcending growth. Nolan said that the respective themes of his three Batman films were fear, chaos, and pain. By the third film, Bruce is physically and mentally weaker than he was before. Trauma has not made him a god; it has nearly deprived him of the opportunity to be a man. Trauma does not make superheroes or super-cultures that express the secret designs of nature more fully and exquisitely than the run-of-the-mill herd animal; it creates infantilized monsters like Bane who, in spite of their trauma-enhanced powers, both physical and mental, are basically cripples.

3. Guilt and moral compromise: a psycho-autobiography of a compromised filmmaker?

The famous conflict between art and commercialism. The “commercial artist” as a sell-out. But a great many artistic film projects conceived in the minds of maverick auteurs requires extensive monetary and technical resources to bring to life, and hence art frequently meets with crass commercialism in Hollywood.

Nolan seems to have given up on being an art director at some point during or immediately after making Following. He expressly stated that Memento was his bid to make a commercially successful film, even though its conceptuality, genre (neo-noir), and Nolan’s debut effort disguised it as an art film. So if Nolan was compromised like the Al Pacino character in Insomnia, his was a very different sort of compromise than the usual sell-out artist who adapts his filmmaking to the exigencies of the market.

a. Insomnia

The opening credit sequence features blood staining white fibers, symbolizing purity lost. The image is explained toward the end of the film when the Pacino character explains to the Maura Tierney character how he framed a suspect.

The relationship between the Martin Donovan and Al Pacino characters vaguely hearkens to the Young Man-Cobb relationship in Following. Donovan represents the conscience of the Al Pacino character, who is guilty of planting evidence on a suspect he knew or strongly suspected to be guilty of heinous crimes. The quasi-accidental killing of Donovan is the attempted murder of Pacino’s conscience. But just as the act was not really deliberate, so its consequences are not final. Al is suborned into abetting the killer (Robin Williams) but he can’t sleep. He does redeem himself, but he is too stained to go on—he rescues his integrity at the expense of his life and thereby sends the right message to the plucky young detective.

This scenario, incidentally, is notably different from that in the Norwegian film on which this one was based, where the detective is unredeemable and gets away with it. There is no moral conflict; it’s just a character study of a sick man chasing another sick man.

Insomnia, in my estimation, does not employ the Method to any significant degree. It was not a terribly ambitious project, other than the fact that it cast an aging Robin Williams against type. It’s a genre film in a tired genre. Was it a test, not only of Nolan’s competence with studio money and big-time actors but of his willingness to compromise himself artistically and otherwise in order to get access to the Method and make the sorts of cerebral, highly conceptual films he is known for?

The abiding interest in understanding and manipulating human nature in Nolan’s first two films points to his obsession with understanding how to mess with the minds of audiences in a Hitchcockian way. The Method is what he was approximating and what he wanted access to.

Inception

Again, Cobb agrees to the heist because he has no choice: the elites have dirt of him. His dead “soul” (anima) testifies against him.

The Prestige

Angier’s willingness to kill animals; Caine says he was testing him.

Angier: “I thought you said I’d have to get my hands dirty.” Cutter: “Maybe some day you will. I just had to know you were willing.”

Remember that Tesla experiments on cats, going up the food chain, as it were.

4. People as basically driven by emotion/sentimentality but in an inscrutable way

Nolan is refreshingly un-Freudian in this sense. In the initial break-in scene in Following, we notice a sculpture on the mental of two people having sex. But this is merely background, as are the valuables; what people really treasure—what really gets at who they are—are their monetarily worthless mementoes that they keep hidden in a box, a box within a box (the apartment, the walls of their inner subjectivity) as it were. Note that in his adaptation of Insomnia, he abstracted from all the sexual deviance of the protagonist in the Norwegian original.

Such sentimental objects figure prominently in Memento and Inception as well.

Nolan still does not understand human nature but one does not need to fully understand it to manipulate it, as they don’t need to understand everything about the inner core of the Cillian Murphy character to use his strained relationship with his father to incept him. Nolan’s handling of the inner dynamics of human nature is at once superficial and manipulative. But occasionally, as in Inception(Cobb’s relationship to his dead wife), he understands enough to truly touch a nerve.

By Interstellar Nolan has developed a good deal of contempt for this sentimental human nature. In his version of evolutionary esotericism, human nature with its defining sentimental qualities are merely a bridge to a superhuman nature—and this sentimentality must be deceived and led along. In Following, in Memento, in The Prestige, and in Inception, while all these films evince a deep alienation from the feminine, there is also present a longing for it. That is gone by Nolan’s later films.

In Tenet, the woman’s attachment to her son, even the point of preferring his safety and well-being to the very existence of the world, is brushed off and treated with short shrift anyway. Nolan appears no longer to have time for such nonsense.

MISCELLANEOUS

Theme of being trapped under water: Inception, Pacino under the logs in Insomnia, the Prestige

The old antagonism between art and commercialism (Borden and Angier) is not transcended by the Method (Tesla). Rather, the commercial angle, being about money, is really about power, just in a pettier sense. The desire to manipulate audiences that animates filmmakers like Nolan, above and beyond any ambition to make “great art,” reveals itself as a mask for the power drive, just as Angier was, deep down, addicted to power above all else.