Christopher Nolan's Useful Lies
 

The comments thread for Christopher Nolan's Useful Lies.

Good read. I think Stephen King had it right in his memoir/manual On Writing, where he wrote: "Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around."

Art is the justifiable lie.; necessary, even. It embellishes the world with meaning and lends a depth of nobility to the banal procession of life's struggles.

I see humankind as the storytellers of nature, and have always been fascinated with the subject of art as the justifiable lie. Your thoughtful essay immediately resonated with ideas I've long held about the power of fiction to not merely reflect truth, but to warp it and even create it.

Hopefully you'll appreciate the similarities in our consideration of the matter, and again I compliment you on your lucid exploration.

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I agree. My viewpoint on art as a writer (and a Christian) is that we, made in God's image, can and rightly should also tell stories and invent "worlds" even as God invented and created this world and its stories/histories.

It is our re-creation of His own acts of creation that give art its meaning and usefulness.

With that starting point, I see so many avenues and directions to go (with writing, art, film, music, etc.).

But these thoughts are a bit tangential, I know.

Very much appreciated, Deadite. Thanks for taking the time to read it.

Great reference to On Writing, which I also read and really enjoyed. I really like King's orientation there; there are a lot of implications to it, both about what writing is and what it should not be. There's a sort of swipe in there at a certain type of artist, I think, but in a way that doesn't belittle the art itself, just people's perspective on what it should be. One gets the impression King's thought quite a lot about this.

And I agree, we're definitely born storytellers, and it's interesting to trace the implications of that, too, metaphysically and otherwise. I'm sure we'd differ a little on that, but the mere fact of the thing is undeniable. There's something about stories that we respond to on a very, very deep level.

Still scratching my head a little on where Nolan comes down on the questions he's posing. I made my best guess there, and it's clear this is a running theme. It'll be interesting to see if we get a more definitive answer in The Dark Knight Rises next year.

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One small point about your essay, dude: It's spelled "ruse" not "rouse."

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P.S. Same sentence has a typo of "causes" too. (Shall I just proof the whole thing? LOL)

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All fixed up.

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Apologies for nerding out there. I could barely pull myself away from the essay to post that. I admire your big-picture thinking (pun intended) about Nolan's pictures.

Great stuff! A ton to chew on as I re-watch some Nolan flicks...

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Thanks for the read. I enjoyed it and look forward to more....hopefully.

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Very interesting stuff; now that you mention it, the "useful lie" is a theme Nolan uses frequently. Never picked up on that, thanks for the essay :)

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Really interesting read! He really puts a lot of thought into his works.

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Best director working today :yup:

Wow, that was a terrific read. Believe it or not I actually had the idea to write something similar on Nolan, except I was going to explore multiple themes rather than just 'the useful lie' one. Though while I only thought about it, you actually wrote it. Great stuff, man. I'm a bit embarrassed and envious that you wrote this before I attempted to do my one :-(

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Well, I wrote 90% of 15 months ago and then just got sidetrack, so I gave you as long as I could. :laugh: I'm sure there's a lot more, as you've alluded to, so I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on some other themes in his work.

I did think about writing something much longer about it that explores each of the examples in depth, and still may. Not sure yet.

I think come December we should watch each of Nolan's films month by month as we get to July, which can also act as a sort of count down to The Dark Knight rises. We can do it in reverse order because, y'know, we can :). So say we start with Following in december, Memento in January and so on and on. Each month we can have a full discussion about those films and such. Anybody here who would be up for that?

There was an essay I read years ago that would serve almost as a prelude to your essay, Yod. It tells of Leonard Shelby as the ultimate pragmatist. In fact, just googled it and here it is

http://www.christophernolan.net/memento_re1.php

The interesting thing about this and your essay is how both have highlighted whether or not lying is a bad thing. Who says it's wrong to lie when one lie can save or prevent harm from oneself or others? You've acknowledged how many of his character's lie for different reasons, some with good intentions, some without. One thing that sticks though is his characters seem to sacrifice something in order to get that lie across. Will explain in more detail.

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Interesting essay, and nicely executed. Thumbs up.

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cool guy! love him! lol lol lol

Someone on another site pointed out to me that Christopher Nolan said something in a recent interview that really jibes with the theory at the end of this essay. When asked about Gotham being seeming peaceful after Harvey Dent's apparent death, he said:

Looking pretty good for the theory that the Useful Lie must inevitably backfire. It looks like Nolan's coming down on the side of Augustine and his critique of Republic.

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And the evidence mounts! Along with Nolan's own words above, we have the following from Drew McWeeny's (non-spoilery) review of The Dark Knight Rises:

Lookin' good, especially considering I started writing the essay a full two years ago. Maybe Nolan's examination of this question is deliberate, and maybe it's just something that interests him enough that it keeps seeping into his work. But either way, it can't be a coincidence, and it's pretty clear that the rest of his work told us the nature, tone, and thrust of the final Batman film long before it was even formally written. Awesome.

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Really good read.

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An absolutely terrific essay. I think it cracked the code. Nolan is definitely not that interested in subjectiveness and alternate realities, as many reviewers point out, as in the morality and the psychological burden of deception and self-deception.

He seems particularly intrigued by the distinction between 'bad' lies and 'good' inspirational lies. Inception's themes are mostly about the how his beloved film industry works, injecting lies (stories) into the minds of the audience in order to, hopefully, inspire them. On the other hand, Nolan seems to be puzzled about the power of lies and the residual guilt it leaves on the liar, who must sacrifice part of himself to protect the lie, if the goals are dear to him. Shelby, Dormer, Borden, Angier, Wayne... all men who must 'live' their lies, at great cost, to prevent them from falling apart. And Nolan lives this as well... a magician of sorts who won't ever talk about his tricks, maybe fearing their power to amaze will vanish.

I'm not entirely sure he has these big dilemmas figured out. In his movies he seems to err on the side of truth and learning to cope with reality. But I think most of the time he's just settling for one of two possible conclusions. He chooses to uphold the truth because this is Hollywood, not because he's sold on its merits. I think that, in his mind, the jury is still out on how moral and beneficial lies can really be. And he keeps on looking for a story that shows us a perfect, non-evil deception.

Also, I think you can do some reverse-engineering to understand which themes stem from Chris Nolan's mind, and which one come from his brother's. Jonah Nolan's 'Person of Interest' tv show has many tropes that are common to the Nolan brothers movies... the 'dead loved one' motivation, altruistic acts driven by personal guilt, a debate on the virtues of vigilantism, the personal toll ideals have on protagonists 'on a mission', the blurred distinction between crime and law-enforcement (a really corrupt police force), how reliable the Law really is, etc.

... but in Person of Interest there's little to no dilemma about the usefulness, morality or psychological dangers of deception and self-deception. None. There are many psychological burdens, but none comes from lying.

I think Chris Nolan is the one more interested with the power and threat of lies, and the rest of the topics are more in line with with Jonah's interests.

And I wouldn't rule out it has something to do with that third Nolan brother, Matthew Nolan, convicted on charges of murder and also a suspect in a cheque fraud case. I believe some of this story topics are so recurrent and passionate in the Nolan brother's work they could be traced to their personal life, not just their philosophical stances on art-making.

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This is from movie critic Jim Emerson's blog:

(TDKR SPOILERS AHEAD)

<<In "TDKR," Batman's reputation is redeemed. And then he achieves his destiny as a false martyr. He gets his Bat-statue in City Hall, and he gets his personal life back. The argument (from Alfred, anyway), is that Bruce Wayne has done enough; he's sacrificed much of his life to the greater cause, even if he did not literally sacrifice his life in the nuclear explosion from which he saved Gotham. So, Batman's -- and, by extension, Bruce Wayne's -- newly redeemed status is based on a big lie, another deception, that allows him both public glory and an escape to private freedom and blessed anonymity. Like the magic tricks in "The Prestige" or the dream architecture of "Inception," heroism is an illusion, a con designed to fool a willingly gullible audience. "You want to be fooled," claims Cutter (Michael Caine) in "The Prestige.">>

And movie critic Bilge Ebiri says:

<<And when you think about it, Batman's final sacrifice is a reversal/redemption of Harvey Dent's "sacrifice" from "The Dark Knight." Gotham has been told that Dent died a hero at the hands of Batman, setting an example of rectitude and nobility that has been used to enact new laws that have kept criminals off the streets. This has eaten away at the heart of Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman), not just because it's a lie, but also because it has established a false sense of hope. In some ways, it's almost as bad as Bane's prison - just as the prisoners live in a world where they're confronted every moment by a freedom that doesn't exist, the citizens of Gotham live in a world justified by a sacrifice that never happened. Batman's final sacrifice is a correction of that lie, and it replaces that false hope with a genuine one.
Of course, we could call this sacrifice a lie, too, since Bruce Wayne does get to live. But in both The Dark Knight and in this film, Nolan goes out of his way to represent Bruce and Batman as two distinct characters. (There's a notable scene in the earlier film, when Batman shows Morgan Freeman's Lucius Fox the elaborate, very illegal, and deeply unethical citywide sonar he has created out of Gotham's cellphones; pointedly, even though Fox knows his identity, Bruce does this dressed as Batman, complete with his deep, growly "Batman voice," establishing the fact that when Bruce is in the Bat-suit, he is for all intents and purposes a different person.) This is also where The Dark Knight Rises' references to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities play out most poignantly, since that novel ends with one character sacrificing himself so that another, his lookalike, may live on in happiness. Make no mistake, the hero's death at the end of "The Dark Knight Rises" is very real. And it is perversely "hopeful"- with all the ambiguity that implies.>>

I considered them relevant to the essay. Nolan is still fixated on the merits of lies.

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Good stuff. :up: I think the first quote is missing a lot of the stuff the second nails, in that Bruce's sacrifice isn't really another lie; he actually is sacrificing his own incarnation of Batman. And I agree that this sacrifice sort of fulfills the invented sacrifice of Harvey Dent.

Great quotes, thanks for posting them.

Thanks. :) Really glad you liked it. And I agree; for all the talk of him making impersonal movies, it'd probably be more accurate to say he just makes a very specific type of personal movie. If his characters seem similar, it's because almost all of them are wrestling with the same inner conflict.

Yes. The liar always pays part of the price for the lie. And he does seem to (sometimes) make the distinction between lies, which is why TDKR was such a great test case...because there was just a tiny bit of ambiguity in how he'd answered the question before.

That's a really interesting thought...that he keeps siding with the truth because he can't find a lie good enough to justify itself! I suspect, if he's honest and consistent, this will always be true, but I wouldn't rule out that he may make a film that goes the other way at some point. Though if he does, let me be the first to predict that it isn't as successful as the ones he's made so far.


Jonah = Jonathan, I think. But yeah, tons of similar themes, even down to the corrupt police force (though I expect Carter's going to start making a difference there as the seasons go on).

Regarding Person of Interest: so far, there hasn't been much guilt, no. But we're just one season in. I'll be shocked if, as the seasons go on, the show doesn't continually raise the spectre of the machine falling into the wrong hands, and Finch's resulting guilt from that. In lots of ways Person of Interest is Batman in TV form; it's just operating on a different time scale, and has split the protagonist into two people: Finch is the Bruce Wayne half (wealth, gadgets, concern for how the power is being used), and Reese the Batman half (unemotional, bending the rules, appealing to force).

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Thanks for the read, Chris. Looking forward to more stuff of yours.

Excellent essay. I am thankful especially for the philosophic parts.

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How did I miss this?Hehehe,nice work,it was very enjoyable read,I hope you will make more! :)

Stumbled on this thread by accident, and I noticed this bit. Worth pointing out that this stuff from over two years ago, about Finch's guilt and culpability over both creating the machine and hiding it from the world, did end up being a major theme in season 3 (and now into season 4), as predicted. He even revealed (or so he thought) its existence to the world in an effort to absolve himself.

In fact, this week's episode featured the machine explicitly telling Finch that "sometimes it's better not to know," and the flashbacks dealt with early versions of the software trying to deceive him. There was a fair bit of talk about the machine being dangerous because it saw only objectives (usefulness), and was willing to lie to achieve them.

It remains to be seen if the show comes down on the same side as the elder Nolan's films, of course, but it's definitely asking the same questions.

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And another bump, to point out that...

"a Comment"

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:p

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Very good read!

That bit about The Prestige made me look at the movie in a new light, although I still don't like it that much as the whole clone thing was way too over the top and out of character for what was happening throughout the scripts.

Any more articles like this one?

Re: Christopher Nolan's Useful Lies
 

Thanks. :)

Yeah, there's a handful of others in the Essays section. Not all thematic analysis', but I think they have a similar feel, in that they all try to extrapolate the big picture stuff.

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There's one clear example of the "useful/noble lie" in Dunkirk as well.

To think of it, the whole film is again built around a "useful lie", but this time it certainly isn't condemned.

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Quick bump to note that, after seeing Tenet last night, I realized this morning that it, too, contains a "useful lie" as a major plot point (maybe more than one).

Interesting stuff.


I don't think it's a coincidence that my preferred Nolan films seem to be the ones that I feel have more adequetely handled the "useful lie" device. In that, I mean that they are the films that more explictly show the more negative consequences: Memento and Prestige (my very favorites) are essentially tragedies, after all, and the engineered deception is at the heart of the characters' suffering. More intriguingly is Inception, a film that has frustrated me due to its reputation being so dependent on its intricate FX and the plot mechanics around the 'dream-within-a-dream' structure - all of which I consider little more than an elaborate macguffin. Beyond all of that gee-whizadry, I felt the real emotional core of the film was Mal, and the direct indictment of not only her own chosen self-delusion, but the involuntary inception of delusion, and Cobb's guilt and culpability for this intimate transgression (similar to the harm caused by Joey Pants in Memento, Borden on his wife, etc.). I wrote about this aspect of Inception quite a bit at the RT forum, and it always baffled me how little attention was paid to the fact that this is what the film was about, rather than figuring out the puzzle complexities of some dream-structured corporate espionage shenanigans.


Less popularly, I'm not a tremendous fan of Nolan's Batman films. I mean, they're fine, and actually my favorite among them is Begins. I think its positing of the moral dilemma of the vigilante is the most successful of the series. Here, the useful lie (or 'myth') is Batman himself, and why his compulsion to moral authority gives him a more legitimate authority than some other utilitarian sociopath. In this sense, the lie is still a burden and one Batman, presumably altruistically, chooses to suffer. As much as they try, I don't feel that the sequels add much thematically to this basic conflict. Worse, there are elements there that seem to me quasi-fascist, or at least Randian-objectivist, but I won't go into that here because it's honey for internet Poohs. I'll just say that the added complications of the useful lie in the sequels have diminishing returns for me.


More so with Interstellar. The useful lie here felt completely contrived, almost obligatory, as if the Nolans realized that they needed one somewhere and squeezed it into the script. Which is a shame since, unlike a lot of the film's detractors, I don't have any issue with its more emotional message, but, even more than Inception, I thought that its focus on metaphysical mechanics distracted from, rather than enhanced, its central theme.


Anyway, it's a nice essay, and I definitely find Nolan more philosophically fertile than, say, such dormitory epistles as the Matrix films.

Did you wire this Yoda? It’s very well done and makes me view his films in a new light.*
And I’ve always been a fan of his work.

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Aye, that and everything else in the Essays area, which is admittedly not updated very often. I usually come up with ideas and let them stew for quite a while.

I've got another that's been 80% done for months, hopefully I'll get that finished (which really just means it's taking too long so I need to lower my standards a little) soon.

Looking forward to it. What’s the topic?

Good stuff re: Mal. I've been meaning to rewatch Inception and when I do I'll try to watch it with that in mind to see how it feels.

I love his other films (the ones that play footsie with the idea of the useful lie as some sort of sad necessity) a lot more than you do, but I still agree with what you're saying here. As emotional experiences, or just as straight narratives, the ones that display the useful lie for the long-term tragedy that it is are his best-realized films. The ones you mentioned are ones where the mechanics seem to flow from the tragedy, rather than being the point of the story themselves. It's admittedly a really subtle difference, but it doesn't feel subtle, it feels profoundly different.

The Prestige is, for all its twists and turns and high concepts, feels raw, honest, and emotional the whole way through, and so does Memento. And Insomnia, as well, even though that's an adaptation. In all of these he lets his protagonist function as an addict who lies to satisfy something, rather than a hero making some good faith attempt to wield a power a little too big for them, which is what the other films mostly feel like.

Fair warning: "honey for internet Poohs" is a line I'll probably have to steal.

Anyway, as much as I love his Batman films, and as smug and satisfied as I was to have used this philosophical throughline to predict some of what happens in The Dark Knight Rises, I agree its message on this front was muddled and the third installment left me pretty cold (even though I can see why he made the choices he did). I think maybe Nolan struggled with the idea of having to totally repudiate the core idea of the second film, so he kinda pulled the punch a little. But the opportunity was there, instead of...



Totally agree. That was weird, to have both the "cool, it happened again, this is definitely a thing" reaction, followed by the realization that it either didn't make the film better, or made it worse.

Yeah, and I like to judge these things on a curve. A lot of people like to talk down to it because it's not <insert something profoundly challenging and philosophical here>, as if that's the right comparison. The right comparison is Transformers, for crying out loud, because Nolan's got mainstream audiences lining up for this mind-bending stuff.

This is the kind of thing my brother and I dreamed of growing up: that maybe one day all the "wouldn't it be cool if...?" ideas were brought to life by skilled directors with massive budgets, insane concepts depicted and explored at the highest level of the craft. I think it's something to be thankful for, and excited about.

The current (probable?) title is:

Reading This Will Stop the Robot Apocalypse

I need to rewatch that one. I saw it shortly after the Norweigian original, which I personally found colder and more subtley disturbing. The only distinct memories I have from Nolan's is that I didn't like the tone as much and that Al Pacino always looks like he smells like wet ash. (Not the only film I've made the latter observation.)


The former plan is definitely superior, and would be the appropriate conclusion of the ethics of police authority (surveillance) in DK. It reminds me of Dirty Harry, in parallel conjunction with the sociopathic killer (as Batman is with Joker) as a means test for the limitations of law and liberty. But in the follow-up, Magnum Force, Harry is contrasted instead with renegade cops, still a mirror of himself, and both, but from a 90 degree angle. It would also fit nicely with a possible Legends-based uberarch, which Zack Snyder at least hinted at in Man of Steel, but as much as I'm tepid on Nolan's Batman, I kinda hotly loathe Snyder's DC input, so no harm no foul I guess.


I thought the appropriation, however superficial, of Occupy memes was boneheaded enough at the time. But, speaking of Tale, the appropriation of the French Revolution by the current American left is even dumber, so I give Nolan points for prescience.


"Better than Transformers" is a solid back-handed compliment though, but Nolan deserves a better one than that. Since I'm mean, the only one coming to mind is "the Aryan Shyamalan", and that's not fair at all but I can't stop laughing.