Christopher Nolan is an internationally renowned film director, best known for his Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight (2005-2012), his films Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and most recently, Tenet (2020). A trait many of his films have in common is the manner in which the stories are told. Nolan loves to immerse his viewers into new worlds where anything is possible, such as traveling through dreams, time, and outer space. Although his films Inception, Interstellar, and Tenet bring the characters on an adventure, his film Memento (2001) brings his viewers on a mysterious adventure by following a man, Leonard, who suffers from short-term memory loss. This adventure, as well as his other renowned films, uses the classic modernist techniques of storytelling in order to explore the self-identity of a character. These classic techniques are fragmented and non-linear narration as well as a stream of consciousness style. He also focuses on this psychological process of short-term memory loss and the mistrust it causes in Leonard’s life. Christopher Nolan’s tendency to use these modernist techniques shows that his general goal is to spread the message that the world can be pulled out from underneath us at any given moment. Nolan conveys in his modernist works of film that everything we think we know may not be true, and our identity is clearly embedded in our reality. Christopher Nolan’s usage of modernist techniques shows that if we do not have a grasp of our reality and lose ourselves in a Bootstrap Paradox, we have no free will.
As mentioned above, Memento is not the only instance in which Christopher Nolan makes the viewer question what is real. In Inception (2010), Nolan brings viewers on an adventure in which the characters travel through dreams. This introduces the question of what matters more: our perception of reality, or our actual reality (Eberl & Dunn, ix). This is a hallmark question which is raised by various forms of modernist art. Nolan’s works Interstellar (2014) and Tenet (2020) also raise this question through the usage of time travel and space travel. Allowing the viewers to travel time and space in these films encourages them to question what realities are real, and what aren’t–including the possibility of themselves not being real. These questions prompted to the viewers are compelling in that they are existentialist in nature, and complicated by the paradoxes of memory loss, time, space, and dream travel.
While watching Memento, the viewers see Leonard’s story unfold in a disorganized, non-chronological manner–a hallmark of modernist storytelling. Although there is dramatic irony in that the viewer knows more about the story than Leonard himself, this is not the point of the film. It can be concluded that “the subjective truths that the characters embrace are, in the end, more important than any objective facts” (Hoffman 126). The reason that the truths the characters embrace are more important is because these are what drive the story forward, and these decisions are how they define themselves. At the end of Memento, the viewer finally is told the remaining facts of Leonard’s story. The remaining facts are from Teddy, in which he tells Leonard, “I gave you a reason to live, and you were more than happy to help. You lie to yourself! You don’t want the truth, the truth is a fucking coward. So you make up your own truth” (177). Teddy has explained to Leonard that the real killer is already dead and that because he doesn’t remember killing him, he tries to find different people who could have killed his wife. Teddy elaborates and tells him that he makes up his own truth, meaning that he is too afraid to continue his life without his purpose of vengeance. The truth he creates is identifying a new killer and spending his future days trying to kill that person. Leonard says, in his voiceover: “Do I lie to myself to be happy? In your case, Teddy… Yes, I will,” (179). Teddy’s death is how the film begins, and this ending shows us how Leonard targeted Teddy as his next victim. Although Teddy is not the true killer, this is how Leonard chooses to proceed with his mission. Finding the killer is his purpose, and if he doesn’t remember killing the person, he will keep going. He doesn’t know what the real truth is because he can’t trust anyone else around him. Nolan’s purpose in allowing the plot to unfold like this is to make the audience question the order of the events in the story and if Teddy is telling the truth or not as well. This theme and conclusion of still questioning the truth is modernist, and this is why Nolan utilizes this technique of unconventional storytelling.
Leonard’s free will is not present in Memento because he has no control over who he is because of what he has made his mission out to be. Leonard wakes up with tattoos on his body telling him what to do, and because he does not remember what happened the day before, he just listens to what his past self told his future/current self to do. He does not trust anyone but himself, and this gets him into the “Bootstrap Paradox,” the theory that describes when something starts in thin air, then causes an infinite loop (Hauser & Shoshany 1). His memory loss causes him to trust no one but himself, but he is not to be trusted because he lies to himself.
Memento is not Christopher Nolan’s only film in which the order of events confuses the audience and focuses the story on identity. In Tenet (2020), the audience first learns that this film involves time travel per Priya’s warning when she says to The Protagonist that “this conflict runs backwards and forwards simultaneously,” (Nolan 23). Immediately, the audience is introduced yet again, to Christopher Nolan’s unconventional time bending films, and soon the tumultuous unfolding of the tale. As the story unfolds, the audience observes at about halfway through, that time literally starts to move backward, from the same locations that the beginning of the story took place. The events in this story happen and unhappen. This is seen when Neil walks into a room with bullet holes on the walls and demands what happens. The Protagonist responds, “It hasn’t happened, yet,” (Nolan 46). The events of this story are destined to happen because they already happened–the characters have little choice in the matter. This introduces the question of free will. The Protagonist, and the rest of the individuals in this world, do not have free will because of the nature that these events have no concrete beginning, middle, or end. Things happen, then time continues to move while physically moving backward. Coupled with the confusing nature of the story plot and the blurred line of reality and fantasy, the audience scrambles to learn what is real.
Tenet (2020) also is modernist in Nolan’s unique usage of characterization. In addition to the time-traveling aspect of the film, Nolan utilizes the fourth wall in a compelling manner. Priya explains, “To get anywhere near Sator would take a fresh-faced protagonist,” (Nolan 22). Her wording here is compelling because of how this naming overlaps with Nolan’s audition process. He hired an actor who was unfamiliar to the fresh eye, and he quite literally named the character “The Protagonist”. Priya touches his face and murmurs to him, “Fresh as a daisy,” (Nolan 22) meaning that The Protagonist is the fresh face is their only hope. Allowing a main character to break the fourth wall in such a way by referring to someone as a protagonist, guides the audience to question what is reality and what is fiction.
In examining Tenet and Christopher Nolan’s usage of modernist techniques, the definition of “tenet” is important to consider as well. Although “Tenet” is the name of the CIA mission that this movie is about, it is also named this for purposes of symbolism. Merriam-Webster defines the term as “a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true: especially: one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession” (Merriam-Webster). The title of this film being “Tenet” is ironic because it is so difficult to pinpoint exactly what is occurring in the film due to the time inversion. These are all methods to confuse the audience and take the free will away from the characters in the stories.
Christopher Nolan does not only tell stories without chronology, he also tells stories that bring the viewers on journeys throughout space and different faces of consciousness. Inception (2010) brings viewers on a journey of traveling through dreams. Dom Cobb tells Ariadne, “Building dreams out of your own memories is the surest way to lose your grip on what’s real and what’s a dream” (Nolan 65). When he says this, the viewers are learning how the dream traveling works. Whomever’s dream a person is “in” is the “architect”. The architect of the dream is the person who has to forge everything within it, and being inside this dream feels very real. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Dom Cobb, is a father, and while he dreams, he is unable to see his kids’ faces. When he sees his children, he is using memories of them, and this is how he loses sense of what is a dream and what isn’t. Because it is hard to know for sure if he is dreaming, the characters have a few tools to clear this blurred line. Dom has a totem, his spindle, which normally topples over because of the laws of physics, but in his dreams, it continues to spin endlessly. Another key that is used for the audience is that when Dom Cobb is remembering his children, their faces are never shown because they are in a dream a majority of the time. The film ends with Dom finally reuniting with his children, whose faces are visible, but when the screen pans out, the audience is shown his spindle, which is still spinning after he walks away and only wavers slightly before the screen goes black and the film reaches its end. Dom Cobb thinks he is finally out of his dream because he can see and touch his kids, but the audience is left to wonder: Is he still in the dream? Having to question reality like this is a hallmark of Nolan’s modernist tendencies, which is seen in Tenet, as discussed. If they are not sure if their life is reality, then where are they really?
Christopher Nolan takes his characters through space travel in his film Interstellar (2014), and also bends the rules of chronology. Interstellar follows Cooper, portrayed by Matthew McConaughey, a former NASA pilot, to save Earth’s population from famine by finding a new planet to live on. In accomplishing this journey, Cooper must travel through a wormhole–a very dangerous and time stretching mission. Each location they visit is in a different position to the wormhole and from the Earth, so with each moment, time moves differently for those on Earth and those in space. In the short amount of time that Cooper is on the water planet, 23 years have passed on Earth. In addition to the time-stretching of traveling through the wormhole, there is another moment of destiny that occurs when Cooper enters a black hole. He finds himself in an infinite kaleidoscopic hallway in which he sees infinite iterations of his daughter’s bedroom. He realizes that he is behind his daughter’s bookshelf and that he can communicate through time with her by pushing books to the floor by using gravity. This introduces the “Bootstrap Paradox” because this event happens in the beginning of the film. Beginning of the film, Murph tells her dad that she has a ghost in her bookshelf “knocking books off” (Nolan 3). Everything that happened when Murph was a child, before he left for space travel, was because of what he did in the bookshelf. Furthermore, Cooper tells Murph that she is named after Murphy’s Law, a physics theory that means “whatever can happen, will happen” (Nolan 6). This is ironic because “The Bootstrap Paradox Theory” describes the notion that something appears out of thin air and causes an infinite loop (Hauser & Shoshany 1). Cooper causes his daughter to have an interest in the ghost in her shelf, and he ends up being the person to discover that he is that same person but from the future. Cooper’s current self is his future self at the same time, and portraying this concept is modernist in the way that the viewers do not know what is real, and as a result of this, question the characters’ realities and if they are even real.
When observing the Bootstrap Paradox and how it can affect the characters in a story, it is vital to fully understand the paradox and how it works. As discussed, this paradox theory describes the situation in which something appears randomly then causes an infinite loop (i.e. What came first–chicken or the egg?). There are several conjectures of which physicists have tried to determine that there are ways to solve these paradoxes. The Novikov conjecture states that there is only one history and it can never be changed (Hauser & Shoshany 25). This conjecture is compelling regarding Christopher Nolan’s films because the Novikov conjecture “does not leave any room for free will” either (Hauser & Shoshany 25). In Nolan’s films, the characters each find themselves fighting while stuck in the paradox, but it is not solved, rendering the attempts as failed. This ability to fight the paradox gives an “illusion” of free will because as much as they want to fight against it, they cannot actually change anything because it already happened (Hauser & Shoshany 25). This is something that is seen in all the films discussed above. In Memento, Leonard tries to find out who killed his wife, and because his memory resets every day, he is in a loop of sorts. When Leonard learns that he actually already killed the murderer, he is in denial, so he picks a new suspect and hunts them down, as he does with Teddy. Again, viewers see the illusion of free will in Inception, as Dom Cobb travels through dreams. He thinks he has it figured out in the end and he is finally with his kids, but it is unknown if he is actually still in his dream. Because his dreams were centered around his memories, they were very vivid and believable. Although he can make his own decisions, Dom is placed in an unfortunate position where he does not have the ability to distinguish fact from reality because his dreams were so immersive. The Protagonist in Tenet literally has no free will because everything is predetermined for him. He is waiting for these events to happen, even though he does not know what is going to happen. Interstellar portrays the story of a man who jumps into a mission to save the world with his own decisions but then later realizes that his experiences already happened in the past and puts his story in motion. He learned that wormholes can help him travel in time and also communicate through time and space. This loop was infinite and his lack of free will is shown in that there is no definitive beginning to his loop.
These stories are all told without chronology, and they happen in worlds where most things that happen are not possible, but this is what Christopher Nolan does. His goal in telling these stories is to show worlds that are new and obscure, so the characters and viewers can navigate through them. Through a Bootstrap Paradox, characters become lost, and they cannot find their ways back home because their realities are not possible, and they are no longer connected to their true human selves. Without a reality, there is nothing to tie our identities to, and this is Nolan’s purpose in his creations. If we can keep a concrete idea of what our lives are, then we are tethered to it. If the world is pulled out from under us, then we can have something to come back to. Christopher Nolan is a modernist, and although it is odd for modernists to be so young, Nolan utilizes the techniques masterfully to create films which encapsulate the mystery of the world and what realities are real. The mysteries of all of the possibilities of consciousness are meant to be explored, and Christopher Nolan does this with modernist techniques.
Annie Baker-Bauer
May 8, 2022
Works Cited
Hauser, Jacob, and Barak Shoshany. “Time Travel Paradoxes and Multiple Histories.” Physical review. D 102.6 (2020): 1–. Web.
Inception. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Syncopy Inc., 2010.
Interstellar. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Syncopy Inc., 2014.
Memento. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Summit Entertainment, 2000.
The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan, edited by Jason T. Eberl, and George A. Dunn, Lexington Books, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csustan/detail.action?docID=4884228.
“Tenet.” Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tenet. Accessed 8 May 2022.
Tenet. Directed by Christopher Nolan, Syncopy Inc., 2020.
All photos retrieved from IMDb.com