Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages (2019)

Introduction How to Innovate You want to go see a film that surprises you in some way. Not for the sake of it, but because the people making the film are really trying to do something that they haven’t seen a thousand times before themselves.... I give a film a lot of credit for trying to do something fresh—even if it doesn’t work. You appreciate the effort to a degree. Christopher Nolan Paul Thomas Anderson, the Wachowskis, David Fincher, Darren Aronofsky, and other American directors who made breakthrough films at the end of the 1990s have managed to win either popular or critical success, and sometimes both. None, though, has had as meteoric a career as Christopher Nolan. As of fall 2018, his fi billion at the global box from cable television, platforms. On IMDB’s as populist a measure as we can find, The Dark Knight (2008) current! nearly two million votes, while Inception 2010), ms have earned over $4.7 office, and at least as much DVD, and other ancillary ist of the top 250 movies, y ranks number 4 with at number 14, earned over 1.7 million. Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, and Peter Jackson each have three films in the poll’s top 50. Nolan is the only director to have five. Remarkably, many critics have lined up as well, embracing both Nolan’s blockbusters and his more offbeat productions, like Memento (2000) and The Prestige (2006). From Following (1998) onward, his films have won between 76% and 94% “fresh” ratings on the aggregating website Rottentomatoes.com. Even Insomnia (2002), probably his least-discussed film, earned 92% “fresh.” Nolan is now routinely considered one of the most accomplished living filmmakers. Yet some critics fiercely dislike his work. They regard it as intellectually shallow, dramatically clumsy, and technically inept. People who shrug off patchy plots and continuity errors in ordinary productions movies. The vehemence of the attack is probably have dwelt on them in Nolan’s o his elevated reputation. Havhigh, he has farther to fall. oO in part a response ing been raised so I admire some of Nolan’s films, for reasons I hope to make clear. I have some reservations about them too. Yet I think that all parties will agree that Nolan seeks to be an innovative filmmaker. Some will argue that his innovations are feeble, but that’s beside my point here. His career offers us an occasion to think through some issues about creativity and originality in popular cinema. Taking this stance suggests that it can be useful to look at the artistic history of films apart from our urge to rate goodness and badness. We can consider The Birth of a Nation a pernicious film while still examining its ambitious formal organization, its powerful use of technique, and its influence on other filmmakers. The Jazz Singer is nobody’s idea of the greatest film ever made, but it played an important role in establishing synchronized-sound movies as anew mode of cinema, and so its use of sound and its subsequent place in film history are worth examining. Some judgments about Nolan’s films are threaded through what Kristin and I write in the pages that follow, but those are largely secondary. We concentrate more on analysis than evaluation. Put it another way. One critic might ask, “What makes Nolan an excellent filmmaker?” Another might ask, “What makes him a bad filmmaker?” We're asking another question: What, on present How to Innovate Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages * 4