Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages (2019)

Some friends have suggested that videogames having affinities with Inception include Assassin’s Creed II, Miegakure, and Shadow of Destiny. See also Kirk Hamilton’s “Inception’s Usability Problem.” Chapter Five: Pathos and the Puzzle Box The opening quotation about Inception’s “emotional concepts” comes from Robert Capps, “Q & A: Christopher Nolan on Dreams, Architecture, and Ambiguity,” Wired. The comments about a “peoplebased methodology” are in the Special Features Bluray of Interstellar, Chapter One, at about 7:00. The brothers discuss actors and dead women in Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, “Preface: Dreaming/Creating/Perceiving/Filmmaking” Inception: The Shooting Script (San Rafael, CA: Insight, 2010), 11, 13. The J.B. Priestley book whose title is out of frame in the opening shot is Literature and Western Man (New York: Harper, 1960). Paradigm scenarios as ways of recognizing and responding to emotions were first proposed by Ronald de Sousain The Rationality of Emotion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 182-203. His ideas are applied to film in Carl Plantinga, Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 80-91. Murph’s bookshelf has created a flurry of Internet speculation. Nolan himself has identified several personal associations. Among the most unexpected is one from an author who found her book there, but had no clue why. Me neither, except the title, Out of the Blue, suggests something coming from the sky. In The Science of Interstellar (New York: Norton, 2014), 59, Kip Thorne reports that Nolan insisted on the time disparity on Miller’s planet. Thorne explains the gravitational anomalies that allow Cooper to communicate with Murph on pp.202211, 262-272. For a discussion of many of the time-travel paradoxes involved in Interstellar, see David Kyle Johson’s “Interstellar, Causal Loops, and Saving Humanity.” Chapter Six: The Art Film as Event Movie James Naremore’s discussion of Kubrick as an artist of the grotesque is developed in On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007). Nolan’s remark about avoiding the conventions of the war film are Nolan, Dunkirk: The Complete Screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 2017), xix-xx. He discusses aken from Christopher catching lines of action at different points on p. xxii. This conversation also considers the reasons Nolan omitted GHQ scenes (mentioning A Bridge Too Far) and adds comments about Hitchcock, early sound filming (some mistakes here), and The Thin Red Line “maybe the best The screenplay is fairly close to the finished film ilm ever made,” xiii). until the climactic bombing of the minesweeper; at that point, the onscreen editing doesn’t completely match what’s on the page. The remarks about he entire time structure not being apparent to everyone come from James Mottram, The Making of Dunkirk (San Rafael, CA: Insight, 2017), 125. Even though the film is in Nolan’s sense “all climax,” it also falls quite nicely into our four-part structure. think the midpoint comes when Tommy and his mates head to the blue trawler, starting a typical Development section. For more on block construction, especially in the work of Tarantino, see this blog entry. s the name of Dawson’s boat, the Moonstone, an homage to Wilkie Collins’ 1868 mystery novel? Collins tells the story through different character viewpoints and skips back and forth in time, using replays that gradually explain what’s going on. Conclusion: Midcult Auteur? Dwight Macdonald’s 1960 essay is available in Masscult and Midcult: Essays Against the American Grain. A PDF is online here. seems to have relaxed his demands a bi acdonald in later years, He praised 814, softcore modernism for eer sure, as Shakespearean in its vivacity. “The general structure—a montage of tenses, a mosaic of time blocks-recalls Intolerance, Kane, and Marienbad, but in Fellini’s hands it becomes light, fluid, evanescent. And delightfully obvious.” The essay is reprinted in Dwight Macdonald on Movies, pp. 15-31. I consider the achievements of “middlebrow modernism” in another period in Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, co References and Further Reading Christopher Nolan: A Labyrinth of Linkages * 66