Christopher Nolan Technique the British-Born

Christopher Nolan Technique

The British-born director Christopher Nolan brings a very specific essence to his films. One can trace it from Memento (2000) to Insomnia (2002) to Batman Begins (2005), the Prestige (2006), the Dark Knight (2008), and Inception (2010). Nolan pulls together several different threads for his tapestries: psychological manipulations (Memento is about a man who has no short-term memory and must overcome this handicap to find the killer of his wife; Insomnia is about a sleep-deprived detective with a troubled conscience; Batman Begins illustrates the complex psychological framework of the Batman myth; Inception takes a deep and intricate journey into the layers of the mind), the elegant look of the film noir genre, and the contemplative feel of the philosophical -- weaving them all into a unique film experience. Nolan's oeuvre is one that reveals a director who is not afraid to strip away the layers of human emotion and psychology to expose the good and bad elements that compose the human heart. His work is also characterized by an increasing devotion to the spectacular, with each film seemingly attempting to outdo the previous one in terms of special effects and imagination.

This devotion to topping himself is one reason "Inception resonated with a global audience" (Rosenstock 114). Nolan devotees (won from his earliest film Memento and on through to the Dark Knight) knew that the director was going to deliver a psychologically-driven suspense film that would be packed with stellar dream-like special effects. Indeed, the emphasis on dream-like worlds, power, control, reinterpretations and illusions permeates all his films. As Adrian Gargett states in an essay on Memento, "The film proposes an ironic reinterpretation of the private-eye genre in which the conventional pattern of heroic self-determination played out by Leonard Shelby is contradicted by a self-conscious critique of the formula carried by the film's structure, a critique that sees the hero's control over his world as an illusion" (2). Nolan's Dark Knight deals directly with the idea of a hero's control over his world by pitting the emblem of anarchy (the Joker) against Batman (a mythological hero, supported by technology that borders on the totalitarian). Nolan questions the degree of power that someone like Batman should possess and whether or not he actually possesses it. Much of the film is spent analyzing this philosophical query, with Batman's tech-support man Lucius Fox even weighing in with his two cents. Regardless of the film, Nolan inserts the same preoccupations again and again.