THE PRESTIGE (2006)

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Christian Bale as Alfred Borden & Fallon
Hugh Jackman as Angiers, Lord Caldlow, the Great Danton, Root
Michael Caine as John Cutter
Scarlett Johansson as Olivia
Rebecca Hall (Vicki Christina Barcelona) as Sarah Borden
David Bowie as Nikola Tesla

This is to Batman Begins (Bale/Caine) as Runaway Bride (Gere/Roberts) is to Pretty Woman. When a couple's this cute, you just gotta reunite ‘em for an encore.

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The first trick we see Angiers (Jackman, pictured) pull—and the first time we hear testimony to his mentalism, to his dark arts—is from the shotgun-wielding guard at Tesla’s gate, who claims to have seen Angiers' show. “Seven times. You guessed every object the audience had in their pockets.” There’s something very British about this (fetish for) perfect inference—the Sherlockian ability to deduce, from minor details, high-level patterns & observations. Intellect collapsing the barrier between self and world, perception and reality.
 
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Constant doubling, in the traditions of Vertigo, Mulholland Drive. A hall of mirrors, a matrix of parallel lines: character choices are recycled, and echo one another with minor variations; everyone is a remix of everyone else. It’s not just the twinning and cloning. Husbands die by the same cause as their wives (Angiers, drowning; Burdon, hanging). All characters die tied up in ropes. Over and over with the bondage themes, the power dynamics a deux. Being on top turns the other into bottom. Our women are sacrificial afterthoughts to the mens’ artistic obsessions, trick birds in cages. The men are birds in cages. The birds are interchangeable—the trick to bringing back a “disappeared” bird is to show a new canary. The public’s too far from the stage to tell a difference, and they don’t really care.
 
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The characters are fundamentally masochistic—they each leave obvious improvements to their lives on the table. In Angier’s case, the option to create a single twin and co-exist (like Burton does) alongside him. In the case of the Burdon twins, the constant rotation between characters Burdon and Fallon, which wreaks havoc in their romantic lives. Then, at the film’s end, Burdon and Angiers tally the score of their rivalry by who gave up most in service of their craft.

Each of the characters wants a magic trick to be more than it is—to go beyond human limits of the possible. This is what drives their masochist streak. When man attempts to master domains in which the quality of performance is subjective, unverifiable, squishy, he turns to proxies which guide him—turns these proxies into a fetish. Here the formula is an input/output machine. Some optimize for quantity, Burdon and Angier optimize for sacrifice. They're producing constant facsimiles; their artform is constantly reduced by its audience to cheap entertainment; they're trying to transcend limits, what's thought possible or precedented. The only way they know how to pull off this feat is incredible sacrifice—maxing out inputs, crippled fingers crossed it'll pan out in the product. The more it costs you, the better the trick. At the same time, it’s Angier’s masochistic desire for the sublime, for real awe—beyond the secret—that leads him to reject the possibility of Burton using a double. "Too simple," too obvious—which drives him to Tesla, makes him finally commit the ultimate sacrifice—trading his life for the capacity to break mortal limits. (This is the Faustian angle.)
 
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Oh and I hear there are class dynamics what with Bale's cockney and Jackman's posh, but I dunno know nuffin abou' that.
 
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suspendedreason said:
The public’s too far from the stage to tell a difference, and they don’t really care.
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And the public in this flick is repulsive. Rude, demanding, entitled. They interrupt an act midway through its creation, calling for cheap gimmicks, the reveal before it's ready, the pie while it’s raw in the oven. “You were the better magician,” the better-selling Angiers admits to Burdon, just before crossing over. Adoration by the public doesn’t mean shit in final count. Except insofar as it funds you—see Tesla in his retirement throes: “The first time I changed the world I was hailed as a visionary. The second time I was asked to retire.” Burdon just gives it to us outright: “Total devotion to your art. Self-sacrifice. It's the only way to escape all this [taps stone wall].” Sue, these are tropes—the obsessive pursuit of artistic integrity, stiff opposition from a public who doesn't understand you—but this is a film that re-traces the dots between genius and madness—what else were you expecting?
 
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Colorado Springs—first portrayed lightless and frozen—is our Campbellian underworld. The hero’s come here to get something powerful—something not of the world, which he wishes to bring into the world. The carriage is driven by carrion horses; the streetlights glow by supernatural force; the town looks out off the edge of the world. Those who help him caution him—abscond your mission, no good can come of it.
 
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It’s hard not to read the film as a defense of Nolan’s flashy narrative style. His plotlines always eat each other, double back, there are enormous subversions and reversals, the movie made to add up two different ways when viewed under two different states of knowledge. On the first viewing, the viewer is fooled right up to the very end—then the secret is revealed, and previous moments are re-interpreted in its light. Like Bordon’s diary, the meaning shifts when you know the cypher.
 
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But Nolan can’t—ha ha—quite make it cohere. “Why didn't Bale or Jackman just pull the trick lock instead of waiting for the old guy to break the glass?” The pieces never add perfectly up, oh well. It’s “entertainment”; the audience doesn’t want reality, they want to be fooled. The point is to squint at it, enjoy the landscape through blurred eyes. The prestige is not the pledge; it only looks like him. If we spend sleepless nights scrutinizing the plotline and analyzing character motivation, who really got the last laught? Aren’t we a bit like Angiers, obsessing over Bordon’s act, wanting it to be “real,” more than a simple sleight of hand? “I want to translate his writings, and know his state of mind.” Don’t we all, bud. It’ll never happen; we’re “stuck”; the line between what is, and what we think is—that never disappears. Sherlock Holmes’s supernatural deductions were always an illusion—a poker trick, half bluff—psychological warfare more than Bayesian inference.
 
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Even the anagrams (Bernard Fallon/Alfred Burdon) are off-by-one, slightly misaligned. The plot's fake; you need it to be seamless, too?
 
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