Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages (2019)

Chapter Five Pathos and the Puzzle Box Nolan’s formal project runs the risk of seeming cerebral and bloodless. Memento established his reputation as a wily artificer, an architect of labyrinths. When people needed a clear-cut example of “puzzle films,” a trend and term that emerged in the 1990s, they often turned to Memento. Perhaps to forestall the objection that his films were promoted hyperintellectual, Nolan consciously each new project as having an emotional core. For example, heist films tend to be “glamorous and de liberately superficial,” so Inception needed more. I wanted to deal with the world of dreams, and I realized that I really had to offer the audience a more emotional narrative, something that represents the emotional world of somebody’s mind. So both the hero’s story and the heist itself had to be based on emotional concepts. That took years to figure out. Nolan’s detractors would reply that if you take years to figure out the emotional basis of your story, you aren’t exactly keen on feelings. Nor will they be assuaged by his comments, in a DVD commentary, that to make Interstellar “relatable” with a “human element” he tried “incorporating an organic, people-based methodology into every aspect of the film” The very formulation is pure Nolanesque. It should be apparent that I don’t think that even if Nolan were utterly heartless it would be a fatal flaw. There are some “cold” artists (Beckett, Nabokov, Balthus, Nolan’s much-admired Kubrick) who remain of interest and value. More exactly, Nolan’s films project a lot of emotion of certain sorts. He regularly relies on the “cogni tive” emotions of curiosity, suspense, and surprise, as well as feelings of appreciation for grasping formal patterns. These emotions are central to mystery and thriller fiction such as detective stories and film noir. In addition, his work showcases some types of what psychologists call “paradigm scenarios” that trigger affective bursts—aweinspiring landscapes or city vistas that give a sense e fears of falling, chase scenes that activate a survival re of soaring, cliff-hanging scenes that evo sponse, and bursts of aggression (The Joker, Bane) that inspire revulsion and the impulse to flee. In addition, Nolan indicates that he expects his performers to warm up his plots. The lead actors he sort of puzzle box emotionally for the audience and in Memento and Inception “had to open guide them through it” His films have benefited from fine-grained performances that express a greater range of emotional states than might seem dictated by the geometry of the narration. Guy earce in Memento and Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige sharpen and nuance the situations that Nolan has contrived. And against he rather flat affect of the mission team in Inception, Leonardo diCaprio’s Cobb projects strong feelings of guilt. What the critics seem to find lacking are the warmer emotions that come from friends and family. It’s true that the sort of scenes that fill so many of Nolan’s films don’t automatically conjure up the passions of melodrama. The protracted briefings of Inception aren’t paradigm scenarios for sentiment; the film tries to offset them with vivid scenes of Cobb and Mal during their shared dream delusions and her vertiginous suicide, bu hese still require a level of abstract understanding. (Are we in dreamland or in flashbacks?) Even what should be an emotionally charged scenario, he death of a loved one, can seem a plot device. Jonathan Nolan teases his brother: “Pretty much every film of yours has a dead wife in it. Dead wife. Dead girlfriend. Dead fiancée.” To which Christo Pathos and the Puzzle Box Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages + 40