This is a re-edited essay I wrote as part of my UCL Film Studies Masters’. It’s a long one but well worth a read to anyone interested in Nolan’s unique style, and the film of course is where my blog takes it’s design inspiration.
Full Spoilers Ahead!!!
The Prestige (2006) stands as one of Christopher Nolan’s lesser-known films as its $109 million box office is modest compared to some of his other blockbuster hits. However, I contend The Prestige stands as Christopher Nolan’s seminal film both in highlighting the possibilities of his complex style and non-linear storytelling, and understanding one of his key thematic concerns surrounding the deconstruction of self.
The film follows the rivalry of Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) with fellow magician Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), whom Angier accuses of killing his wife Julia (Piper Perabo) by tying a knot she couldn’t undo during an escape trick causing her to drown. The film then follows this rivalry’s escalation through acts of sabotage until Borden unveils his new seemingly impossible trick “The Transported Man”, in which he walks into one box and then walks out another apparently “Transported” between them. This prompts Angier to become obsessed with understanding and outdoing this trick first by hiring an actor to mount his version “The New Transported Man”, and then travelling to Colorado to commission scientist Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) to build him a machine which he then uses to perform what he calls “The Real Transported Man”.
Borden, angry that Angier has outshone his act, ventures beneath the stage during one of Angier’s performances to find him drowning in a tank below the stage. This leads to Borden being convicted and executed for his murder. However, two final revelations re-contextualise Angier’s performance, the pair’s rivalry, and the entire film. The first is that Tesla’s machine has been cloning Angier each night leaving one version of him to complete the illusion of transportation, while the other is dropped through a trapdoor and drowned. The second is that Alfred Borden is in fact a front created by twin brothers living the same public life who would switch between the roles of Borden and his ingenieur, who is the engineer behind a magician’s tricks, Fallon. This was all done so they could one day perform “The Transported Man”. This leaves both Angier and one Borden alive leading to a final confrontation between them in which Borden shoots and kills Angier.
This is the film’s chronological narrative but Nolan, in his quintessential style, presents his film non-linearly as he interweaves four narrative threads which will be examined in greater detail shortly. This allows Nolan to present sequences out of chronology adding a further layer of mystery to his film, and presenting it as its own form of magic trick. This in turn allows Nolan to explore and deconstruct the film’s most important illusion which is not “The Transported Man”, but instead the illusion of identity as singular and fixed. How Nolan goes about this is extremely complex, but Freud’s writings on the uncanny and the double offer an apt framework for examining how. Firstly, Freud’s work on the uncanny can be applied both to The Prestige’s presentation of magic and to the film’s narrative structure. This helps to unpack how both function and reveals their reliance on audience repression to do so. This provides a foundation, or rather sets the stage, for Nolan’s fracturing of identity via the film’s acts of doubling, and exploration of it as an inherently performative act similar to the showmanship of the stage.
The Uncanny in Magic
The integral role the uncanny plays in magic, as presented in The Prestige, is established during the opening voice-over of Angier’s Ingenieur John Cutter (Michael Caine), who describes magic’s second act of the turn as when “The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary”. This reflects Freud’s description of the uncanny as occurring by ‘effacing the distinction between imagination and reality’, which he directly connects to the ‘uncanny effect [of] magical practices’ (Freud,1919:15). However, what connects them even further is their shared reliance on uncovering the repressed. Freud states that ‘An uncanny experience occurs either when repressed infantile complexes have been revived…or when the primitive beliefs we have surmounted seem once more to be confirmed’ (Freud,1919:17). This confirmation of primitive beliefs serves as the basis for magic’s appeal as well, as it produces the uncanny effect of resurfacing an ‘old, animistic conception of the universe’, and implies the existence of something supernatural beyond our frame of comprehension (Freud,1919:12). Angier’s dying speech to Borden underpins this reality, as he says “The audience knows the truth. The world is simple. It’s miserable. Solid all the way through. But if you could fall them even for a second. Then you could make them wonder”. This establishes magic’s appeal as allowing audiences to briefly give up their rigid and rationalist conceptions of the world and return to a limitless animistic one.
However, uncovering the suppressed also means magic must only evoke the uncanny in brief instances. Otherwise, it would shatter its audience’s orthodoxies and confront them with realities their acts of repression prevent them from comprehending. As Angier tells Tesla “If people actually believed the things I did on stage they wouldn’t clap, they would scream”. We even see this in the audience’s reaction when Angier sabotages a Borden’s bullet catch and shoots of two of his fingers, as the audience first reacts in shock but then starts cheering. This shows their constant need to believe in the illusion rather than face reality. Likewise, we see this when Angier presents his “Real Transported Man” using Tesla’s machine to a theatre owner. The theatre owner stutters “It’s very rare to see…real magic”, and tells him “You’ll have to dress it up a little. Disguise it. Give them enough reason to doubt it”. This demonstrates that an audience’s ability to enjoy magic is predicated on its presentation as illusion, as any genuine challenges to their predominant worldview would prove incompatible with their repressive nature. Indeed, the film relates this attitude to acts of repression by highlighting the different reactions of the film’s children to its adults when presented with the same tricks.
Freud writes the other origin of the uncanny relates to ‘infantile complexes’ and resurfacing ‘an actual repression of some definite material of ourselves’ (Freud,1919:17). In these terms the uncanny, and thereby magic, works by subverting not just our ‘belief in [an] objective reality’ but our entrenched belief in ourselves which we develop into adulthood. This explains the ability of children to comprehend the film’s magical illusions in a way adults cannot. One such illusion is the vanishing bird where a dove is crushed and hidden up the sleeve of a magician to be replaced by another dove disguised as the original. When Borden first meets his wife Sarah (Rebecca Hall), her nephew reacts to the trick with tears as he cries out ‘He killed it!.. He Killed it!’, and then later asks of the reappeared bird ‘But where’s his brother?”. The child is able and willing to see past the uncanny illusion to its crushing avicidal reality in a way his aunt Sarah is not.
Borden and Sarah’s daughter Jess (Samantha Mahurin) behaves similarly as she can see past and cope with the Bordens’ reality as twins; unlike her mother who commits suicide because she cannot. This is shown during one scene where Jess overhears a raging argument between a Borden and Sarah before she is comforted and carried off by Fallon. Crucially, the film reveals that the Borden arguing is not the one in love with Jessica and Samantha’s father, as he even tells her he is not in love with her today. This means the Fallon who carries her off is her biological father. The fact that Jessica feels comfortable enough to allow this Fallon to carry her off means she can see past the illusion to tell which is which, or perhaps even to realise both men act as her father in some way. This all highlights the importance of the uncanny in understanding magical illusions within The Prestige. The film demonstrates that magic is reliant on evoking the uncanny by channelling repressed instincts to briefly re-establish the possibility of a past animistic world, but that in doing so it cannot radically challenge the audience’s orthodoxies about their current one. The audience is more invested in the illusion than it is in the possibility of actual magic.
The Uncanny in Narrative
However, the uncanny is not simply evoked through The Prestige’s diegetic magic, but through the narrative structure and design of the film itself. This helps Nolan style the film as an illusion, and in doing so illustrates the inherently constructed nature of the film frame to his audience. Freud outlines how experiencing the uncanny feels at once familiar and unfamiliar by drawing on its German etymology in the phrase Heimlich. This simultaneously means ‘that which is familiar and congenial…[and] which is concealed and kept out of sight’ (Freud,1919:4). This further explains the role of the repressed as simultaneously ‘new or foreign, but…familiar and old’, and means Nolan can evoke the feeling using non-linear storytelling (Freud,1919:13).
David Bordwell breaks down The Prestige’s storytelling into four separate threaded timelines consisting of a diegetic present which bookends the film, and shows Cutter presenting an illusion to Borden’s daughter Jess, and then three earlier timelines of the ‘recent past’ of an Angier’s drowning and Borden’s trial, the ‘more distant past’ of Angier in Colorado securing Tesla’s machine, and ‘the most remote days’ of the magician’s escalating rivalry (Bordwell,2019:26). Most importantly, as Bordwell highlights, these narratives are not paralleled but embedded within a ‘nested plot structure’ which uses two diaries written by Angier and Borden to travel between them. Angier’s diary as read by Borden in ‘the recent past’ frames and enters the more distant past in Colorado, where Angier reading Borden’s diary then takes us to the remotest past. Recognising this structure is important not only as it is re-used in Nolan’s subsequent films like Inception (2010), and to a lesser extent Dunkirk (2017), but because it also allows for a smooth re-ordering of chronology, and a repetition of visual motifs which stokes feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity throughout the film.
The film’s opening montage in fact intercuts three sequences from three of its timelines. This includes a shot of top hats in a forest which opens the film in the Colorado timeline, Cutter performing a trick for Jess from the diegetic present, and the fateful performance of Angier’s transported man from the recent past, which ends the montage on a shot of an Angier drowning in the tank. These shots all return at the film’s close and thus bookend it with a sense of the uncanny. They appear to us first as both unknown and new images, but also known as the film signals their importance to its subsequent narrative by Borden asking us in voice-over ‘Are you watching closely?’. Similarly, at the end, their re-appearance marks them as familiar, but the new context with which they are imbued renders them again unfamiliar.
Visual and auditory motifs from these scenes are also embedded throughout the film, thus perpetuating a general feeling of the uncanny. The forest of the top hats for instance returns just a few scenes later as Angier ventures through it on the way to Tesla’s lab in Colorado. This presents us with a visually familiar setting, both scenes even share a thin veneer of fog, but in an unfamiliar context. Moreover, we see the top hats once again mid-way through the film as it is revealed they are products from Tesla’s cloning machine. This again stokes the uncanny by presenting a familiar image but shot differently, imbued with new information, and being shown to us out of sequence as it marks the first chronological, but second cinematic appearance, of the hats. The birds seen during Cutter’s opening magic trick similarly return as it emerges they are from Borden’s workshop and linger in the back of many scenes there. During Sarah’s suicide Nolan even highlights them by cutting from her hanging body to one rattling its cage, in turn rattling his audience through uncanny sensations at a pivotal moment.
The uncanny is perhaps best evoked through Tesla’s machine, which we first and last see during Angier’s final performance. However, it also appears twice between this, first when inspected by Cutter and the judge in Borden’s trial, and second when Angier takes ownership of it in Colorado. In both these instances the machine is boxed up and thus not visually familiar, but Nolan still evokes the uncanny through other means. Firstly, he emphasises the box’s presence both times by filming it using a long shot which emphasises its scale against the remaining mis-en-scène. He then very gradually pushes in on the box as each scene progresses. Crucially, Nolan also reintroduces the film’s reverberating score which is first heard during the film’s opening sequence, thereby establishing an audible bridge connecting them. Their sequential appearance also stokes the uncanny as these two scenes mark the machine’s first and last chronological appearance, yet are in the midst of the film’s narrative, and are themselves out of order with the last chronological appearance taking place first and vice versa.
The fundamental nature of The Prestige’s world even strengthens the uncanny for, as Freud writes, an author can evoke it through his ‘world of representation’. He does this first presenting his audience one of ‘common reality’ but then ‘multiply[ing] it far beyond what could happen in reality’. This is what Nolan does as he first presents us a world of decipherable illusions, but then introduces elements of the supernatural or futuristic with Tesla’s cloning machine. However, while Freud argues this can only be achieved by presenting the audience with a false ‘sober truth and then…overstepping the bounds of possibility, Nolan does the opposite (Freud,1919:18). He establishes the bounds of his world early on when Cutter says of Tesla’s machine “This wasn’t built by a magician this was built by a wizard. A man who can actually do what magicians pretend to do”, and reiterates this later when Angier visits a field of wireless light bulbs created by Tesla and calls it “Magic. Real Magic”. Rather than duping his audience, Nolan presents them with the facts early on as he blends both the real and unreal from the very beginning, in turn stoking the uncanny even further.
This structural evocation of the uncanny is central to The Prestige not only by mirroring its diegetic magic, but also by spotlighting the film’s inherent construction, and thus its status as the product of an author. This reflexive act, as has been widely discussed critically, subverts classical cinematic conventions and, in Stuart Joy’s words, makes ‘the spectator…an active participant in the construction of the film’ (Joy,2020:84). However, by evoking the uncanny as part of this, Nolan ensures the nature of this construction can be understood on a more instinctual level even by those not so well-versed in the language of cinema. Moreover, it also ensures his filmmaking continually returns both the film and its audience to the realm of repressed sensations associated with the uncanny. This helps underpin his central thematic exploration of fractured and performative identity.
Fracturing Identity
The basic challenges The Prestige’s doubles pose to identity as unique and observable have been well covered, including by Kwasu David Tembo who writes the Borden twins challenge identity by ‘eschew[ing] all organic expressions of a singular self’, and Kevin S. Decker who discusses how Angier’s cloning breaks his existence as a ‘single linear, conscious[ness]’ (Tembo,2015:203, Decker,2017:87). However, The Prestige’s doubles also subvert identity far more generally. This is something which Nolan emphasises through the visual construction with which he presents the Borden twins as one, and through a critically ignored set of doubles in the pairing of Angier and his hired actor Root. Freud writes that doubles induce the uncanny only when they present ‘regression to a time when [an individual’s] ego was not yet sharply differentiated’ as in the ‘very early mental stage’ of development. This connects the double to Freud’s id, which represents ‘reason and common sense’ and ego, which represents ‘instinct’ and ‘passions’ (Freud,1923:25). By continually evoking it throughout his film Nolan associates his doubles not only with the uncanny but in turn links them to this dichotomy of id and ego. Indeed, during the few scenes where the Borden twins can be told a part their different personalities reflect Freud’s psychological schema.
In one such scene a Borden demonstrates a bullet catch trick to Sarah, and the film clearly establishes he is not the one in love with her as she tells him she is pregnant to which he responds “We should have told Fallon”. This suggests the other Borden is the father and thus in love with her, and Sarah even confirms this when she tells him today is one of the days when “You’re more in love with magic than me”. Having established this, Nolan then highlights this Borden’s impulsiveness as instead of assuaging her fears he can’t resist telling Sarah how “dangerous” the trick is and how “people…get killed”. This distinction is established again when the Borden waiting to be executed and apologises to his brother disguised as Fallon for what happened to Sarah and for not leaving Angier “to his damn trick”. This establishes him again as the one not in love with Sarah and whose rashness escalated conflicts with Angier. These men thus serve as cinematic parallels of Freud’s id and ego, and the conflicting identities which reside in all of us. Even their respective roles as either the public-facing Borden or clandestine Ingenieur reflects this. Cutter states the ingeniuer’s job is to “construct the apparatus necessary for performing [illusions]” and this reflects Freud’s positioning of the id as an internal ‘psychical’ foundation ‘upon whose surface rests the [public] ego’ (Freud,1923:24).
Furthermore, beyond just representing a bifurcated identity, the ease with which the Bordens switch between their roles as Borden and Fallon represents the solubility of these identities. Freud writes ‘the ego is not sharply separated from the id’ allowing for ‘disruption[s] of the ego’. At their most pathological these result in “multiple personalit[ies]”, but can more generally produce ‘conflicts between…various identifications’ (Freud,1923:24,30,31). The two Bordens represent this as their visual distinctions are predominantly effaced thereby framing their conflicting personalities as the internal battle of a single man. Whenever a Borden and a Fallon are in conversation the Fallon is always marginalised or omitted from the frame, which styles their conversation as a monologue. This happens during one conversation by a carousel, where a Borden does all the talking while the camera remains fixed behind a silhouette of the Fallon. It is then achieved even more skillfully later when they are trying to figure out the secret to Angier’s “Real Transported Man”. The camera remains fixed with a Borden at its centre who does all the talking while a Fallon hunches over a desk, and Nolan even cuts the scene with slightly altered versions of this same shot. This implies the existence of Fallon’s response in the liminal moments between frames while still visually presenting it as if Borden is talking to himself.
Furthermore, during a line of voice-over from Borden’s diary, which outlines the Bordens’ anxieties over whether to trust Angier’s mistress Olivia (Scarlett Johansson), it appears as though we hear both men when they say “I think she’s telling the truth. But I cannot trust her”. These discordant statements appear to represent the two men’s different thoughts, and there is even a clear auditory pause between them. However, their presentation within the diary of one man makes it impossible to distinguish the provenance of either statement which further presents them as an internal conflict. Thus, the Bordens go beyond simply challenging identity as sole and unique to represent its malleability and the internal conflict contained within it. This is done by visually cohering their different characters into a singular figure. The film actually delays the twins’ revelation till far later than in the original book presumably so that Nolan could keep their visual unity for this purpose (Olson,2015:55). The Borden waiting to be executed even demonstrates his conflicted identity when Angier reveals to him that he is still alive, as he reacts first with pugnacity declaring “What, you think this place can hold me, Angier!” and then suddenly desperation as he pleads “They’re gonna bloody hang me! You can stop this now!’. This further demonstrates the divide which can exist within one person.
The relationship between Angier and Root, the double he hires for “The New Transported man’, has scarcely been discussed critically perhaps because they are not represented as exact facsimiles in the film. However, Hugh Jackman playing both roles means they are visually identical which Nolan uses to further the film’s fracturing of self. After rehearsing his part of the trick for Angier, Nolan begins to rotate the camera around both men in a medium closeup as Root tells him “Did you think you were unique Mr Angier? I have been Ceasar, I played Faust! How difficult could it be to play the great Danton”. This statement alone challenges Angier’s unique status. However, Nolan then dissolves the visual barrier between them by breaking cinema’s 180-degree rule. This occurs when the camera reaches behind Angier’s right shoulder and clearly depicts Root stage left. This is the left side of the stage if one were looking towards the audience. In this moment, Nolan cuts the scene so that the camera is now behind Angier’s left shoulder with Root positioned stage right. Nolan literally transports both men into each other’s positions, and the film demonstrates this further with Cutter, who begins the scene standing behind Angier, now behind Root.
Stuart Joy has previously written about the challenges The Prestige poses to the ‘coherence of [its] filmic space’ to make the audience aware of the ‘limitations of the enframed image’. Joy argues this is often achieved by denying conventional reaction shots or cutting away from scenes, like Borden’s first performance of “The Transported Man”, before they are finished (Joy,2020:89). However, here Nolan goes further to rupture the frame and filmic space entirely in order to demonstrate the interchangeability of both Root and Angier. This technique, which Nolan would use again with Batman and Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), literally interchanges them. Moreover, the continuity provided by Root’s unbroken dialogue shows the ease with which this can be done, and challenges any concept of identity as unique and unchanging.
As their relationship develops both men even reflect the id and ego as Root, once he realises his indispensability means he “can make demands”, becomes increasingly unruly and in need of restraining. This reflects Freud’s words that the ego must ride the id like ‘a man on horseback [and] hold in check [its] superior strength’. (Freud,1923:35) The Prestige’s doubles problematise identity not just through their extreme manifestation in the form of clones or twins sharing one life, but more poignantly through their depictions as mirrors of the more routine conflicts which permeate the self. Furthermore, the function of these doubles as elements in magical illusions also connects them to the world of showmanship. This in turn establishes the importance of performance to the self as well.
The Self as a Performance
The Prestige also highlights how illusion of identity as a unified whole is dependent on performance as represented by the fact that it is only through onstage routines that the film’s various doubles become unified. This is shown through Angier and Root whose “New Transported Man” involves Angier walking behind a door before falling underneath the stage, while Root is levered up to appear walking through another door on the other side of the stage. This creates not only the illusion of a transported man but the illusion of a singular man at all, and presents a unified identity as an act. The level of theatricality involved is also demonstrated by a top hat’s role in the trick, as Angier throws one before disappearing which is then caught by Root. This hat is the symbol which binds them together, and its status as the magician’s iconic accoutrement further entrenches his identity as the act of the showman.
The two Bordens also embed this showmanship in everyday life as they live their act. A Borden even tells Sarah’s nephew “The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything”. This highlights that the self is only accepted by others when constructed as a pretence, as the truth which lies beneath it impresses no one. This is something which Angier reiterates regularly when he says “No one cares about the man in the box”. This depiction of self can again be traced back to Freud who writes the ego is ‘that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world’, and is thus ‘the projection of a surface’ (Freud,1923:25). In other words, the ego is a public-facing identity constructed for the audience of social norms and societal expectations.
Furthermore, these performative acts are not just restricted to the stage as shown through Borden and Angier’s diaries. These diaries would traditionally present their authors’ ‘inner consciousness’, but here are performative acts with each man’s diary revealed to have been written for the audience of the other (McGowan,2012:116). Borden’s diary was written to trick Angier into travelling to Colorado in search of the solution to his transported man, while Angier’s diary was written to taunt Borden by revealing how he framed him for his murder. These diaries subvert the very notion of an authentic self by presenting even one’s innermost thoughts as a performance. This demonstrates how the construction of self is always done with an audience in mind.
Tesla further demonstrates this as, contrary to assertions which position him as the film’s conscience by warning Angier against using his machine, his acts of caution are just acts (Decker,2017:85). His first attempt to ward Angier off the machine is immediately followed by his declaration that “I have already begun to build it Mr Angier”, thus showing his willingness to furnish Angier with something he believes will destroy him. Similarly, his second warning is merely a note accompanying the now handed-over machine which Angier correctly states “is as unheeded as he knew it would be”. The film establishes that Tesla’s conscience is as illusory as a magician’s trick. It is simply part of an identity constructed for an audience, whether that be the public, Angier, or even himself. Nolan even draws visual parallels between Tesla and the magicians when he cuts from a shot of him to an advert for Borden’s “Transported Man” under his stage name of ‘The Professor’. This suggests that Tesla “The Professor” is an act which sits alongside Borden “The Professor”. In the end, identity and performance are inextricably intertwined.
Conclusion
The Prestige’s central illusion is the illusion of self and of identity as singular and uniform. This is the trick we are invited to unravel during the film’s opening when Borden asks us in voice-over ‘Are you watching closely?’. The film itself encourages us to do via its evocation of the uncanny as defined by Freud. This relates its magic to human repression and foregrounds the film’s style to encourage the audience to recognise their position as spectators to its cinematic tricks. This provides the basis from which Nolan challenges the notion of an authentic self. He does this firstly by fracturing the concept of identity using doubles and then cohering their differences within visual wholes. This mirrors the inherent conflicts of personality which exist in the individual, as defined through Freud’s id and ego, while also showing the fluidity with which an identity can move across them. The film then goes on to depict how a fully unified whole can only come into being through acts of showmanship, establishing how singular public-facing egos are creations for an audience.
This conception of selfhood can be found in many of Nolan’s films; including The Dark Knight and its competing identities of Bruce Wayne and Batman, along with their subsequent duality with Joker, and in Oppenheimer (2023) where Oppenheimer must reckon with his role as father and subsequent critic of the atomic age. The Prestige even ends with one final challenge to the audience regarding not just their own performative identities, but their role in encouraging the performance of others. As the camera pans over the images of top hats which opened the film, and then the bodies of drowned Angiers, Cutter’s voiceover tells us “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 work it out”. These words confront the audience’s own complicity in desiring to see people’s performance, and thus propagating the existence of illusory selves, as to paraphrase Cutter ‘[We] want to be fooled’.
Bibliography
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