Nolan's "Secret" Early Films

‘Secret’ in huge quotations, of course – none of these movies are hiding from anyone. Well, maybe Following is.

The best entrance in any movie, possibly ever.

My plan was originally to hold onto all of this for a Tenet review; during Tenet’s release window, a lot of the film people I follow were doing big grand Nolan discussions and I wanted to hop on board. I missed Tenet in theatres because… well, there’s kind of a pandemic and I haven’t been to a theatre since Birds of Prey (and may never again! Check out the last article! Synergy!). But I’ve also heard enough that I’m not necessarily excited for Tenet, and a full review of Nolan’s work would eventually devolve into me talking about how Nolan stopped devoting focus to his characters since like The Dark Knight Rises. But, after an exhausting week or so, I’ve decided I really just want to throw some positive energy into the world? And since I’ve been working through Nolan’s filmography as hype-up for Tenet, I’ve realized that I really do love Nolan’s early stuff in a very unique way, and I wanted to gush about it. My plan was not to do a big holiday write-up – Nolan is hardly Shane Black, after all, and none of his movies really feel Christmas-y. But hey, holiday joy, and let’s end the year by talking about things we love! That’s all pre-amble though, so let me introduce you formally.

Everyone knows the name of Christopher Nolan. Since the release of The Dark Knight in 2008, and Inception in 2010, Nolan has kind of become the household auteur. Not everyone has watched Bong Joon-Ho or Paul Thomas Anderson (though apparently, he directed all of HAIM’s music videos?? Who knew?) but almost everyone I’ve run into has encountered Nolan in one sense or another. His take on Batman and the Joker informed a generation, and quite literally shaped modern action and the superhero craze. The ‘Inception BWAM’ has taken a life of its own, as have the many memes the movie inspired. Nolan’s nigh-obsession with practical stunts has almost become memetic in its own right. Known for cerebral plotting at a grandiose scale, Nolan’s films are an accessible gateway drug to huge psychedelic thrillers with complex plot structures, where characters are mostly vehicles with which to take the audience on an otherwise imperceptible ride.

Or, are they?

Al Pacino as an Extremely Tired White Man is a deeply relatable character (This is mostly a joke).

In recent years, we’ve seen a Nolan unhinged. Someone with a full array of tools in his arsenal, and the entire budget of Hollywood behind him. As a result, we’ve gotten The Dark Knight Rises, a movie whose scale is on downright mythical proportions. We’ve gotten Interstellar, with some of the most soaring visuals I’ve ever seen in a movie, with a heart-pounding organ score to boot. We’ve gotten the experiential, visceral highs of Dunkirk, and… whatever it is exactly that Tenet is going to be. But Nolan wasn’t always that way. It’s hard to imagine now, but before he was picked up for The Dark Knight Trilogy, Nolan was putting out character-focused low-budget thrillers, with a complexity that came more in the details than in the plot outline. And, today, I want to give those early movies a little bit of love – because I have a lot of love for them and I wanted to share that.

I’m not fully sure how to structure this, so I’m just going to go one movie at a time. Let’s start with Following:

Following

AKA, Nolan made a movie before Memento? Well, yeah. Sort of.

Following is sort of more of a student film than a proper movie. I probably would have missed it entirely, if it weren’t for catching it in the Criterion Collection and feeling the need to check it out. I don’t want to spend a load of time on Following, but it makes a nice kind of palimpsest, showing where Nolan is starting and where he’s going. See, the remarkable thing about Following is that it kind of feels like his entire filmography in a microcosm. It’s a noir thriller depicting an unnamed young man (credited as “The Young Man.” Protagonist, much?) who is an unemployed writer, wandering the streets of London and observing human behavior. He gets caught by a charismatic thief named Cobb (no, for real) who pulls The Young Man into his world to do some jobs. The movie features a non-linear plot structure, not really because it benefits the story as much as just because it’s a fun way to present a story. There are twists, turns, double-crosses, and a woman who mostly exists as a romance object. It would almost feel like self-parody if it weren’t his first-ever movie.

Fun fact: Following was shot in black and white mostly to save on budget and such.

But I want to give Following its due because its bare-bones nature offers a lot of what will come to define Nolan. First, is that this movie is hard on plot and soft on character. Again, our protagonist doesn’t get a name, and despite how much the movie arguably relies on us empathizing with him, he isn’t really given… you know, motivations or personality. The film instead relies on the storytelling, which is skillfully carried out through the non-linear narrative. But more importantly (at least to me) is the one thing The Young Man does offer us – a sense of the author. See, it becomes increasingly clear to me that Nolan’s work is fiercely autobiographical, in one way or another. He famously talked about Inception as a movie about filmmaking, and I think that’s true about all of his movies. In Following, we follow an awkward writer-in-practice, getting caught up and becoming overwhelmed in a world much bigger than him. He may be unnamed, but he might as well be Nolan himself. Which brings us to…

Memento

Whoa, a Nolan movie with reversed footage? How exciting!

Before Following was even in theatres, Nolan had a script for his next movie. If Following is a test drive, Memento takes the real deal out on the streets (is that how the metaphor works? I’ve never bought a car). It feels like the ideas of Following writ large. While Following’s protagonist gets caught up in the obsession of the thievery business, obsession consumes Leonard Shelby, the protagonist of Memento. I’d honestly say, aside from autobiographical commentaries on filmmaking, Nolan’s second overarching theme is that subject of obsession. And in Memento, that theme of obsession is the most sinister it ever is. While Batman is obsessed with justice and engaging with his own fear, Shelby is fuelled entirely by vengeance. His last real memory is the death of his wife – ever since he has been entirely unable to form new memories. Nolan puts us directly in Shelby’s head through the film structure; we experience the movie backwards as Shelby uncovers clues about his wife’s killer. Despite Shelby’s condition, we are always experiencing new information along with him. The film structure is no longer a fun gimmick, it’s an integral part of understanding the main character.

Apparently Guy Pearce was Scrooge in a Christmas Carol mini-series that came out last year, so uh, Merry Christmas all.

More than that, it’s integral to the core themes of the movie. This is also something I really like about early Nolan – not that he stopped putting themes in his movies, but his early entries are constantly asking these bold questions in a way that is easier to do in an indie noir than a tentpole blockbuster. Because if these movies are all about the filmmaking process in someway, Memento is centrally a movie about constructing narratives. How does a man with no memory narrativize his own life? Shelby even seems to narrate to the film audience, as well as to his listener on the phone, and really anyone who will hear him out. Shelby desperately tries to rationalize his mission to all around him and, perhaps, to himself. Memento directly calls into question the way we tell ourselves stories, the way we tell others stories. Sure, it’s a fun psych thriller, but it’s also a deeply philosophical exploration of the idea of writing and self-narrative.

"Nolan cast Joey Pants in a movie again you coward." - Patrick H Willems' Letterbox review, 2020.

Memento feels so strongly emblematic of all the things that Nolan will become known for. Obsession, time-twisting and structure-shifting plots, as well as deeply psychological stories. But while Following kind of just feels like a vehicle to deliver cool plot twists, Memento is deeply rooted in its characters. Guy Peace's Shelby has a lot of layers to him, and the movie carefully takes us through all of them. Carrie-Ann Moss shows up with a light but fun role, and it's always cool to see her outside of The Matrix. Speaking of Matrix, Joey Pants is just as delightfully punchable as ever. The interplay between them all is delightful. Memento is a tight, small movie, but in a way that's the best part of it. While Nolan's sweeping epics are a delight, it's also great to see him play in a fun, contained sandpit. Often, it can bring out his best as a storyteller. Entertaining plots, intellectually stimulating storytelling, but mostly, deep questions that linger with you long after the credits roll.

Insomnia

Now, here’s a movie that apparently lingered with very few.

I have this old memory that goes back to, like, high school. I’m at my film friend’s house and he shows me this cool Blu-ray Boxset of a collection of Nolan’s movies. Bizarrely, The Prestige was missing, but it included Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Inception, Memento, and lastly, Insomnia. I had seen probably the first three in that list and had heard glowing reviews of Memento, but total radio silence about Insomnia. “Oh, don’t bother,” he said,” it’s not really that good anyways” (or something similar. It was high school; we didn’t talk like that). And so I went on with my life, believing that Insomnia was ‘the bad Nolan movie.’ That is until I watched it about a month ago, and I learned – Insomnia kind of slaps, actually?

So, Insomnia is super unique in Nolan’s catalogue for a few reasons. First, it’s actually a remake of a 1997 Norwegian movie of the same name. Nolan has adapted things before – Batman obviously stands out, but The Prestige was also a book adaption. But, as far as I’m aware, this was the only time that Nolan adapted a separate movie. Also, it’s his first and only movie that he isn’t credited as a writer on, as well as the first and only movie that he’s had a woman writer for. And it shows? A lot? There are multiple fleshed-out women in this movie, and none of them are stuffed in fridges or exist purely to flesh out the male cast. Hillary Swank’s character has goals and aspirations and even a character arc and she’s really cool. Get more diversity in your writing team, Nolan, it would really help you out.

Apparently the original movie took play in Norway, just in case you thought Ari Aster had cornered the market on thrillers set in the oppressive daylight of Norway.

More reasons why Insomnia is the most weird and unique movie in Nolan’s catalogue: it’s told entirely linearly. That makes it the only movie in his filmography with a linear plot that doesn’t have “The Dark Knight” in its name. When I realized this, I was ready to be bored – just a simple noir thriller? No fancy tricks? And then came my biggest surprise: Nolan really doesn’t need those tricks to work. I’m not going to say Insomnia is his best movie, but there is something really refreshing about seeing how Nolan works when he’s entirely stripped bare of his usual methods – and the answer is, he works really well, actually. By being constrained into writing a ‘straight-forward drama,’ Nolan is forced to invest entirely in the characters. And the characters in this movie shine.

Al Pacino stars as tired-as-hell beat cop Will Dormer, an LA detective called up to investigate a murder in Alaska, where the sun never sets. But Dormer’s past catches up to him, and murder suspect Walter Finch, played by Robin Williams, begins to get in contact with him to throw a wrench into the whole operation. When I first heard about Nolan, I remember him being described as always having a ‘big twist’ at the end of his movies that reframe the entire perspective. Insomnia inverts Nolan’s entire structure, however, by putting that ‘twist’ at the end of the first act and letting the implications play out from there. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse in the best way possible, with Pacino and Williams both displaying a shocking amount of subtlety.

Half the movie is these two playing off each other and it's spectacular.

Since it’s operating several layers removed from Nolan, it feels slightly less autobiographical than normal, yet the movie is just as concerned with obsession and storytelling as ever. The title comes from Dormer’s sheer exhaustion as he is tormented by his conscience and the unrelenting sun. Just like Leonard Shelby’s memory, soon Dormer’s perception begins to be called into question. What is memory? Who are we when we’re at our wit's end? Are the stories we tell ourselves really that reliable? Maybe I just like Nolan the best when he’s trying to convince me that I’m actually insane.

The Prestige

The first Nolan film I watched, and to this day, it’s my favourite.

There’ll be another day to talk about The Dark Knight trilogy and beyond, but The Prestige feels like a natural conclusion. While he’s clearly learned lessons from Batman Begins, he hasn’t quite yet been introduced to IMAX through The Dark Knight, a movie that will forever change his filmography. Instead, The Prestige feels like the last hurrah of the old, noir thriller Nolan. It’s funny to think that with Batman Begins, Warner Bros. surely figured they would bring on this indie crime thriller guy to do an artsy grounded crime thriller take on Batman – and instead let him taste the power of a full budget, and let his imagination go wild. The first result of that combination was The Prestige.

On a structural level, The Prestige might be the most complicated thing Nolan has ever done – it certainly ranks pretty high. It represents the culmination of his work on non-linear storytelling, from now on, his experimentations with story-structure will most feature overlapping narratives instead of disordered ones. But in The Prestige the story is conveyed largely through the work of two competing stage magicians, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, as they read each others’ coded diaries. As a result, the plot unfolds as a convoluted web of alternate and competing perspectives. Yet, the audience never loses the thread.

You can really feel the budget expanse post-Batman Begins. Production quality only goes up from here.

It helps that the thread is relatively simple – Alfred Borden and Robert Angier fight to outdo each other, creating the ‘best magic trick,’ and in so doing fall entirely into obsession and greed. More than any other of his films, that theme of obsession comes to the forefront. “Obsession is a young man’s game,” says Cutter, as played by Michael Caine, soon to become a frequent Nolan collaborator. Where obsession is a clear factor in his other movies, here it is the dominant theme. The Prestige is a warning, a sort of horror story where we watch characters we genuinely want to like as they self-destruct in the pursuit of greatness. For a while, it was my go-to Halloween movie, not because it was particularly scary, but because of how it shows the depth of the human psyche.

Yet, The Prestige does something else, something I’m not sure any other Nolan movie succeeds at. It hits me on a real emotional level. While with his other movies I marvel at his storytelling or am wowed by his themes, there’s a humanity that sits at the core of this movie. In a way, it feels almost like some accident. To be sure, the women in this movie get it worse than ever, so it’s not like there’s some newfound empathy. And yet, what lies at the heart of such great obsession? What motivates people to go to the brink?

Nolan's directing style seriously shifts after The Dark Knight, but even in the Prestige you can start to see him experimenting with more creative framing and such.

For one of these men, it’s love. A broken, fractured love, absolutely. It’s been a while since I’ve seen this movie, and seeing it now I definitely felt less sympathetic for some of the twisted things these people do. But I think there is a sense where he learns, where he tries to put his old habits to rest to take a hold of what he has now. Yet, obsession has a way of sticking with you, and old obsessions have a way of coming back to bite you.

For the other man, it’s joy. Not his joy, he’s beyond that. But as the movie draws to a close, he tries to make one last defense. “Don’t you see?” he says. “It was the look on their faces.” He’s talking about his audience, of course. The obsession, the perfectionism; it’s all in an effort to wow the audience, to take them somewhere they’ve never been. It's all in the showmanship. Here, perhaps Nolan is more autobiographical than ever.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the moment you've waited for.

Like I alluded above, I go back and forth with some of Nolan’s more recent movies. While they are certainly well crafted, sometimes they risk losing a bit of the character and heart and philosophy that make his early work so much fun for me. But even as I start to wrap this article up, that idea drives me towards being excited for Tenet again. Because at the end of the day, movies are about how they make you feel. It was the look on their faces. That’s something that Dunkirk especially excels at, giving you a clear and specific emotional response. I don’t expect to adore Tenet on the level that I’ve loved The Prestige or Memento, but I also don’t need to. I think if Nolan is doing anything with his increasingly grand and convoluted entries, it’s exactly that thing he set out to do in The Prestige. To create big and wondrous events, cerebral rollercoasters for the audience. Because it’s about the look on their faces. That’s something I can get excited about.

Side-note, the Criterion copy of Following comes with Nolan's short-film Doodlebug which is... uh, a trip.

I started writing this article partially because I was exhausted by forcing myself through things and shows that I didn’t really love, in a desperate attempt to make myself like them. I was burnt out on things that were ‘just okay,’ and in a world like 2020, there’s really no time to exhaust yourself by doing things that you don’t love. That’s a kind of self-consuming obsession of its own. But being able to go back and enjoy movies that shaped and formed me has been really fun. And discovering new, exciting films by the directors you’ve loved along the way is also exciting. This holiday season sucks, but it doesn’t have to be entirely awful. Watch an old comfort movie, go back to whatever it is that you love. Maybe check out something new, like any of these movies that intrigued you. Or a cozy Christmas movie, like Little Women. Life’s already too overwhelming to be bogged down by things that don’t give you life. Take the holiday to find some joy.

At the end of 2020, we are all Tired Al Pacino. Get some rest, folks.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year. Here’s to hoping 2021 is just a little bit better.