Are you watching closely? : cinematic deception in Christopher Nolan's Memento, The prestige, and Inception
Kubiak, Klay
Kubiak, Klay
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[Fort Worth, Tex.] : Texas Christian University,
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2013
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I investigate three films of director Christopher Nolan--Memento, The Prestige, and Inception--as platforms for exploring the concept of cinematic reality. A survey of Nolan criticism and the only academic monograph on his films reveals that he has been misinterpreted as a director whose primary concern is exposing through deception and illusion how we are becoming further removed from a ?realistic? cinema. While I agree Nolan's primary aesthetic is deception, my analysis argues that his misdirection is meaningful because it points towards the human desire to choose to live within constructed fictions to maintain happiness and transcend material existence. Three chapters provide a close reading of each film within a context of cinema theory and philosophy. In doing so, I reveal how Nolan adheres to an Aristotelian ideal that cinema, as opposed to isolating us from reality, influences and reinforces how we interact with reality and each other
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English