Meshing Structure, Spectacle and Drama - A Polyrhythmic Recipe for Christopher Nolan's Cinema
warner bros“Why do we fall, sir? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up.”
Contrary to the wishes of many, Tenet has not lived up to its expected role as the saviour of cinema. It has been consistently playing to empty auditoria in a desperate fit to reclaim every single dollar available, hoping to break even. The most immediate reason why Christopher Nolan’s latest tentpole failed in its fundamental mission of providing high-octane entertainment to the housebound masses has to do with it being released in the middle of a global pandemic. Despite the filmmaker’s best intentions and wishes of the producers, people were not ready to risk their health and maybe even lives to see Tenet in high enough numbers to ensure the film would recoup its exorbitant budget and turn a profit.
This argument will likely be used to defend the idea of pushing on with the film’s release in producers’ meetings and annual appraisals at Warner Bros; nobody could have known people wouldn’t turn up because the industry has been navigating completely uncharted waters. However, it is equally possible that Tenet’s failure to launch was at least partially influenced by a possibility the film was not good enough to sustain itself in the zeitgeist in the way his more successful movies were. After all, there may be some truth in claiming that had the film been an absolute banger, it would have created considerable buzz in the blogosphere and coerced filmgoers to bravely venture out to see it, but the excitement surrounding its premiere was short-lived at best. In fact, according to Letterboxd statistics and Rotten Tomatoes audience scores, Tenet is the poorest received Nolan film since Insomnia. Therefore, it may be a good time to peek under the bonnet of Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking output and attempt to rationalize why some of his movies immediately ascend to the echelon of all-time pop-cultural classics and become memetic touchstones, while others – like Tenet – fail to do so.
STRUCTURE
One of the most common criticisms levelled at Christopher Nolan revolves around a notion he is a cold filmmaker. This perceived detachment can be explained by his creative interests. In contrast to the vast majority of filmmakers who tend to be drawn to certain thematic obsessions, Nolan’s muse has consistently remained in the sphere of narrative structure. Ever since he picked up a camera, he seemed keen to openly disregard what his stories were about and instead placed firm emphasis on how they were told. This initially took a form of manipulating the timeline of events. His debut feature Following, a story about a group of people stalking strangers and breaking into their houses, was told completely out of order. On the other hand, Memento was told more predictably back-to-front. Admittedly, he wasn’t the first storyteller to do that and he certainly won’t be the last one. After all, the idea of using flashbacks dates all the way back to Homer while openly disregarding the convention of narrative linearity became extremely popular among novelists already in the 19th century.
In all likelihood, this is how Nolan was introduced to this concept, especially given the fact he studied English literature at UCL while gearing up for a lifelong career in filmmaking. As such, this also partially explains the manner in which he ended up sculpting in temporal structure. This might be difficult to explain – or even completely ineffable – but Nolan’s original narratives tend to have a distinct literary flavour; they are products of careful engineering of the type encountered in prose rather than cinema. Had it been the latter, he would have likely drawn more heavily from the likes of Jean-Luc Godard or Robert Altman, which invariably would have imbued his movies with a noticeable scent of nouvelle vague.
However, this was scarcely the case. While it could be argued that Following carried some bizarre vestige of French New Wave in its DNA, as time progressed, Nolan’s approach to narrative non-linearity became firmly entrenched in the notion of taking an otherwise familiar storytelling template and applying a temporal gimmick to it. Memento is a perennial film noir told in reverse order, Inception is a classic heist film composed of nested timelines, and Dunkirk is an archetypal war thriller which applies compression and dilation of time to squeeze three plot lines into its narrative framework.
As a complete aside, Nolan carried the spirit of this convention into his arguably most renowned work, The Dark Knight Trilogy. However, instead of applying a familiar concept to a wacky temporal framework, he would drop archetypal icons of popular culture – superheroes – into dioramas lifted from other movies. For instance, The Dark Knight can be seen as Heat re-enacted by superheroes, while The Dark Knight Rises quite openly draws from Escape From New York.
Nevertheless, A cynically inclined viewer would likely conclude this was the entirety of Nolan’s shtick, but it isn’t the end of the story. The idea of over-engineering simple genre templates and pepping them up to look highfalutin and cerebral might be decoded as a pretentious shtick when examined in isolation. However, Nolan eventually mastered – partly while working on those Batman films – the trick of applying outlandish concepts that are seemingly difficult to grasp as a structural element of the fundamental building block of blockbuster entertainment – the set piece.
SPECTACLE
Although indispensable to what is clearly Christopher Nolan’s signature style, the notion of complicating the narrative isn’t what his movies are mostly remembered for. They are remembered for the scale and ambition of its set pieces and the fact Nolan has been known for insisting on shooting a lot of these big effects-laden sequences in-camera, without relying completely on CGI. Thus, a real jumbo jet was crashed in Tenet, the famous docking sequence in Interstellar used miniature models, genuine Spitfire aeroplanes were employed during the filming of Dunkirk, and a massive rotating set was created for the sole purpose of shooting Joseph Gordon-Levitt's hotel fight scene in Inception. This clearly gives Nolan’s movies tactility which helps the audience lose themselves in the universe of the film.
What elevates Nolan’s set pieces is the idea of embedding them within the parameters of the structural gimmick upon which the whole film is predicated. While ambitious and flashy in its own right, that rotating fight scene in Inception becomes awe-inspiring when contextualized as a nested sub-narrative driven logically by the fact that in the outside universe the characters are currently in free fall. In fact, this is extended even further when one considers the idea that the entire final act in Inception is one gargantuan set piece playing off of its nested universes and the logic of their interactions. When these two filmmaking tools – conceptual manipulation of time and an ambitious set piece engineering – are combined so that the two elements are in phase with one another, the end result is nothing short of spectacular.
Similar results are achieved in Dunkirk as the film reaches its dramatic climax. The film’s overall effectiveness does not stem from the realisation the three sub-narratives arrive at the same point of convergence with different velocities and merge into one exhilarating crescendo, but rather from the idea of letting the viewer partake in the experience. Frankly, the filmmaker isn’t really hiding his intentions within any kind of a puzzle. He spells everything out using on-screen text because he wants the audience to be able to follow along as much as possible. In fact, this has been Nolan’s modus operandi throughout his career and a source of widespread criticism as well. Movies like Inception and Interstellar have been consistently critiqued for being laden with exposition and populated with characters of little dramatic utility whose existence was dictated purely by structural necessity.
DRAMA
It is not exactly true that Nolan doesn’t care about his characters at all. Although he tends to focus on the structural aspects of his craft and assume a more utilitarian approach towards character development, he does care about some of them. Sure, Michael Caine’s character in The Prestige is a glorified explainer whose mission is to lay out exactly what happens and how it happens. Moreover, this role is given to the whole cast of Inception as they take turns explaining what’s going on to the viewer. This is also the case in Interstellar and Tenet.
However, it is equally hard to deny that the central dramatic conflict in The Prestige isn’t its driving force. While the film benefits heavily from its non-linearity that works in service of the final act twist(s), it works predominantly on the basis of the palpable chemistry between Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. Literary and stylized as it is, their snowballing feud is what keeps the movie together. As a result, the structural machinations Nolan is fond of work in tune with a fundamental character-based drama.
Similar effect is achieved in Memento. As the narrative reaches its well-earned climactic ending, the idea of telling the story in reverse becomes more than a gimmick aimed to endear teenagers and young adults. It bolsters the tragic circumstance of Guy Pearce’s character, who is left in an unsettling psychological limbo at the end of the film. Naturally, had the story been told conventionally, this aspect of the story would still have been there available to be mined. A simple mathematical operation of reversing the order in which facts of the story are divulged to the viewer works in service of the character or, more precisely, in service of the audience understanding the horror of the character’s existence. Structure and drama are in phase. They work in tandem.
Now, it is natural to ponder: since some of Nolan’s films have successfully deployed a combination of two out of three of these aspects – some would call them tenets – of his filmmaking craft, e.g. structure and spectacle in Dunkirk and structure and drama in Memento, is there an example where all three work together as well?
POLYRHYTHM
The answer is a resounding yes. Apart from The Dark Knight, which has been referred to by many as the most influential comic book movie of all time, Inception is most often mentioned as Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus. And although it is rarely touched upon, the reason why that is lies exactly in its singular confluence of temporal structure, ambition of its spectacle and the gravitas radiating from its central dramatic core. Without the tragic conflict driving Leonardo Di Caprio’s motivations and his self-flagellating regret over losing his wife, the film would still be an eye-candy and an insanely effective blockbuster. However, its existence grounds this eye-popping spectacle in material reality and tethers it to the viewer who is then dragged feet first onto a veritable rollercoaster of immeasurable proportions.
Arguably, Interstellar belongs in this class as well, even though it has been dismissed by some as a gimmick where 2001: A Space Odyssey has been filtered through Nolan’s shtick. But it nonetheless succeeds in marrying the overarching structural concept rooted in preposterously complex physics with a visually audacious spectacle and relating all of it back to a central relationship between a father who left his daughter behind to save the world for her. Both scientific shenanigans and the set pieces carrying Inception and Interstellar, some of which have become cultural memes in their own right, work so well together because they are given a purpose, agency and stakes by the human drama underpinning their narratives. After all, nobody would care about Cobb possibly spending an eternity in limbo and effectively losing his mind if it hadn’t been tied to the idea of atonement for driving his wife towards suicide or his mission to be reunited with his children. Similarly, in Interstellar, a set piece involving a jaunt to a planet orbiting a black hole which seemed like a few hours to the characters, but really cost them nearly three decades could have been a meaningless set piece on its own. If it hadn’t been grounded by a tragic realization that, in a blink of an eye, Matthew McConaughey’s character missed out on his daughter’s entire life, this sequence – flashy and awe-inspiring as it was – would have been completely hollow and hence forgettable. Inception and Interstellar work so well exactly because Nolan could find a degree of overlap between his structural obsessions, his visual audacity and adherence to fundamental principles of dramatic storytelling.
So, why doesn’t Tenet work? Is it because it isn’t spectacular enough? Is its narrative framework over-engineered? Or is it lacking in dramatic conviction? The answer, sadly, is all three. In addition, none of them seem to reinforce or bolster one another. A useful analogy to illustrate why some of Nolan’s movies work and some don’t involves imagining three cars at a junction, lined up to turn left. All three have their turn signals on and they are all blinking with slightly different frequencies. Occasionally, two out of three cars would blink at the same time. But every once in a while, all three would sync up and blink in unison before seemingly going their separate ways. And this rare occurrence might just be enough to elicit a gasp out of one’s bored-out-of-their-mind adolescent passengers.
It would seem that Christopher Nolan’s filmmaking is a conglomeration of such three different artistic rhythms – structure, spectacle and drama – playing out at their own pre-ordained frequencies. And it just so happens that sometimes they will synchronize for a minute. When they do, the world gets Inception. When they don’t, the world gets Tenet.
