Are you watching closely?
Did you ever see a play from before Shakespeare? Anything from Sophocles through Marlow will do. No matter how you love Faustus, or what lessons we take from Oedipus Rex, there's something decidedly odd in the narrative structure of these works. In ways both subtle and obvious, they are alien to us.
...
He wrote the note himself.
The hillside is covered in hats.
He pulls the top from his pocket and spins it.
...
In his book Everything Bad is Good for You, Stephen Johnson points up the moment when television changed. Take a look at any of the shows running on Nick at Night. Watch an episode of Mannix or Hawaii 5-0. You'll find there's just one plotline, a handful of characters, and very little that isn't wrapped up in the space of an hour. That's not to say these shows are not entertaining, but none of that entertainment comes in the form of any kind of challenge. Honestly, there's more mental exertion and hidden meaning in an hour of Spongebob. Then something happened...
Hill Street Blues
A fire guts the house; Furillo conducts a separate investigation into Buntz's alleged cocaine theft; Henry works with an odd detective (Steven Keats) to nab a serial killer; LaRue knows a back way into a gangster's vault that a reporter (Charles Brill) hopes to open on TV. Daniel J. Travanti, Dennis Franz, Joe Spano. LaRue: Kiel Martin. (TV Guide, January 15, 1981)
In many of his novels, Phillip K. Dick flirted with the meaning of "reality." That theme pervades books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and A Scanner Darkly. Nowhere is this idea more central than in the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The novel features a drug that can be taken to escape into a dream world -- a more colorful alternative to a humdrum existence. Early in the book, the main character samples this drug, and discovers that the nature of the dream is not in his control. Both time and his own identity begin to slip away...
Eldritch seated himself nearby, rested his artificial arm on his bent knees, and idly swung his stick from side to side, scrutinizing the gluck, which had still not departed. "When we get back to our former bodies... You'll find that no time has passed. We could stay here fifty years and it would be the same."
There are a thousand artists who can do great work within the confines of a medium. And then someone comes along to show that the boundaries are not where you thought they were. They discover how to apply the mathematics of perspective within the flat space of the canvas, or a new twist to the narrative form that turns a series of scenes into a plot. And that changes things, not just for them but for other people working in their medium.
For the last decade, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has been creating visions that tamper with the notions of time and reality in film. In Memento, Nolan took the normal course of narrative, cut it into overlapping slices, and fed it back to the audience in reverse order. Keeping that structure cogent was a terrific accomplishment, but Nolan did more. He used the unique structure of the film to inform us about the characters and situations that would have not been possible had the film been presented in a more conventional way. His altered time stream wasn't a gimmick, it was leveraged to make a film that couldn't otherwise exist.
In The Prestige, Nolan did a variation on the same trick. The film opens near the end of the narrative, but the viewer then lacks the information to interpret what they are seeing. The story then backtracks along two main narratives, telling the story of competing magicians at the end of the 19th century. As the story begins to fill in the gaps, that initial glimpse of the ending becomes a noose tightening around the narrative. Both characters have flaws. Neither is completely the villain or the hero. And both are willing to make sacrifices the scope and nature of which are unclear almost until the closing frame.
Reading this some are sure to say, "surely you're not going to compare Christopher Nolan to Shakespeare." To which I say, I think I already did that. Is Nolan's impact on film equal to that of the Bard? No, of course not. Is he even the first to juggle order and scale on screen? Nope. But he has does something very special: he's shown that those boundaries can be broken in a film that still appeals to a broad audience. He's walked into the middle of the summer blockbuster wasteland and demonstrated that box office dollars can be measured in the pleasure of wrestling with a narrative challenge, not just in the size of explosions (not that Nolan's own the Batman films are lacking for pyrotechnics).
with Inception, Nolan has once again challenged summer moviegoers to do more than crunch popcorn. There's less twisting of narrative order in the latest film. Instead the film deals with the passage of time and the meaning of reality. In some ways, it's an experiment in relativity. At one point in the film, there are events happening in four different versions of "reality," all of them ticking along at different rates of time and all of them racing toward one critical moment. And just as critical, at several points in the film, it's unclear what "level" we are on. Clues are planted that may mean that we neither enter nor exit the film on the ground floor of reality.
Personally, I don't think Inception is quite so rewarding of repeated viewing as some of Nolan's other films, but it is still refreshing to see that summer entertainment need not equal brainless entertainment. Christopher Nolan is changing the form of general entreatment in a way that is going to affect not just his films, but what people expect from films in general. And right now, you can see the boundaries being broken.
Are you watching closely?