Christopher Nolan, Virtue, and Classic Literature (Part I)
The new Christopher Nolan movie, Oppenheimer, is coming out next year, and we have no idea what it is about. None. It’s starring Cillian Murphy and obviously has something to do with the creation of the first atomic bomb (but more than that)…but this is still all we know. Thus it seems like a good time to look back on what Christopher Nolan has previously given us.
And when we look back on Nolan’s work, we see a pretty clear pattern.
First, every movie is based on a classic work of literature.
We’ll deal with the themes and how they follow a classic vision of ethics in a second article, but it should be noted that each work has a central theme of one of the cardinal or theological virtues of classical philosophy (Prudence, Temperance, Courage, Justice, Faith, Hope, and Charity).
It works out as follows:
Movie/ Virtue/ Classic Work
Batman Begins Prudence The Aeneid
The Dark Knight Temperance Othello
The Dark Knight Rises Justice A Tale of Two Cities
The Prestige Courage Faust
Inception Faith Theseus in the Labyrinth
Interstellar Love The Odyssey, Heart of Darkness
Dunkirk Hope The Iliad
Tenet Friendship King Arthur
Oppenheimer Hubris? Medea?
And I admit that is a pretty sweeping claim, so let’s go over a few things to justify this position.
The Early Films (Following, Memento, Insomnia)
For this discussion, I feel these early films of Christopher Nolan should not be included in the discussion of his source material and thematic meaning. The first two major films he created, Following and Memento, seem to be more about Nolan establishing and working out his stylist’s touches (non-linear storytelling, reveals that cause all previous information to be reevaluated, a neo-noir feel in non-noir stories). We could talk about their thematic material, but it is clear that these movies are more about style than substance, as is often the case in any artist’s work. Insomnia being a work directly adapted from a previous script for an English audience, a relatively faithful adaptation as I understand it, is another point of Nolan establishing his credentials before being allowed to do what he wants.
Not to say that these aren’t good films. They are. They are a must for anyone who likes the works of Christopher Nolan. But they are still movies that lack the substantive depth of the later films of his later works. He was still learning how to use the camera to craft stories, doing stories other people had come up with, or simply reining his style. Every filmmaker’s early work isn’t usually their best work, and Nolan is no exception—even if his early work is still better than most directors at the peak of their career.
What we can draw from these is that Nolan never seems to see linear time as a constant in storytelling. Following goes back and forth in time and perspective, and Memento is famous for having two different timelines (one going forward, one going backward) that meet together at the climax of the story only occurs in the middle of the story. Insomnia has a more linear progression, but it is the only time when Nolan seems to be just using another person’s work and not deviating too much from the way that the story was originally written.
And this is important to understand that time is rarely a constant in Nolan films because otherwise, you’ll get lost quickly. Batman Begins starts with a series of flashbacks, Prestige is told from several overlapping timelines, Inception has time work differently in every level of the dream, Interstellar has time travel and relativistic time dilation, and Dunkirk tells three different stories operations over different periods of time that all come to one single climax, Tenet literary makes you watch things going forward and in reverse at the same time. Time is the most fluid thing in Nolan’s films, and this is important to understand. If one of the most constant things in existence is fluid, then you have to understand that everything from there is something up for discussion, not just to be mindlessly absorbed.
So let’s discuss how all Nolan films are drawn from classic literature.
From here, it might be best not to take the movie in chronological order but start with the strongest points so you can see where this thesis is coming from and move on to what I will admit are cases where I am either missing the obvious connection or I am open to other works of literature comparisons if someone has any suggestions.
Inception (Theseus in the Labyrinth)
This is probably the easiest case of showing the source of all Nolan stories comes from classic literature. In both cases, we have our hero, either Theseus or Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), having to run through a massive series of mazes (the literal maze of Crete’s Labyrinth and the mazes that Cobb and Ariadne (Elliot Page) make up for the dream) and finally, in both cases, both heroes are led out of the maze by a woman* named Ariadne. In the movie, Cobb’s wife (and his guilt) Mal (Marion Cotillard) serves the function of the Minotaur that needs to be killed. You even get a healthy dose of the father/son relationship themes of the original story in both Cobb’s relationship with his father-in-law (Michael Caine) and the broken relationship between Robert and Maurice (Murphy and Pete Postlethwaite). The fact is that anyone who can’t see the seeds of Theseus in Inception is not being intellectually honest.
The Dark Knight Returns (A Tale of Two Cities)
Now the obvious part here is that at Bruce’s (Christian Bale) empty grave, you have Commissioner Gordon (Gary Oldman) reading Sydney Carton’s final speech from A Tale of Two Cities to both honor Bruce’s supposed sacrifice and show how Gotham would recover. But the parallels hardly end there. Dicken’s classic shows what life was like during The Terror of the French Revolution, and that is easily paralleled in Selina’s (Anne Hathaway) early pseudo-Marxist “eat the rich” speeches, which parallel the claptrap of equality that the early French Republic shouted but never seemed to live up to, the images the condos of the rich being torn apart and of course the courtroom trials overseen by The Scarecrow (Murphy) with Bane (Tom Hardy) winding a string of twine is a direct reference to Madame DeFarge from Dicken’s novel who sat at court knitting.
The Dark Knight (Othello)
The last two were obvious, where you had direct references to the original work, and it gets a little harder from here.
The first thing to understand about Othello is that the play is mostly about how Othello responds to Iago, an embodiment of the devil on our shoulders. Iago, as this embodiment of evil, can’t be given anything like a human motive, as he is supposed to be the darkness inside us, and so he has a myriad of motives depending on who he is talking to. To Roderigo, who wants to be respected by Desdemona’s father, Iago bitches about his lack of promotion; to Brabantio, who is horrified by his daughter marrying a black man Iago shoves out a string of racist statements; to his bitter wife, he shows her the same bitterness, to old Othello is unsure of why his wife loves him he offers jealousy, to Cassio who is a good person he can only encourage him to have more than one drink, and to the perfect Desdemona Iago can’t reflect negativity that isn’t there so he’s quite likable when around her. In between this, he offers motives of revenge, lust, greed, jealousy, envy, and just evil to the audience hoping that one of those will stick. Why? Because Iago is without motive. He is evil for evil’s sake. You could say, like the Joker (Heath Ledger), he’s an agent of chaos.
Further, this constant shifting of Iago’s motive is mirrored in The Dark Knight. A comic book character’s motive, hero or villain, is tied up in their origin story, and so to have as many motives as Iago, you’d have to constantly change your origin story…just as the Joker constantly changes his story of “You wanna know how I got these scars?”
The fact that the love triangle of Othello-Desdemona-Cassio and Harvey-Rachel-Bruce helps show that, in this case, it is Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) who is the equivalent of Othello. He may not be responsible for killing Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal) like Othello is for killing Desdemona, but Harvey and Othello have a darker second face their devils can play on to ensure both destroy their legacy.
The difference is that while Othello may plead to “Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate, nor set down in malice” Bruce and Gordon can’t speak the truth of Dent if they are to keep their dream alive.
Interstellar (The Odyssey)
Still, in the category of obvious comparisons, this one does give a few problems in that it has some distracting elements.
The most distracting element is that you have Michael Caine repeatedly quoting from “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” which works thematically as the character thinks that Earth is going to die with all the fatalism of the poem and none of its heroic moments. As I am sure this film is The Odyssey, it’s strange that Nolan didn’t pick Tennyson’s “Ulysses” where the lines of “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” would have fit just as well as all the places “Do Not Go Gentle” was used, but that does not take away from the core points.
And what are those points?
First, you have a story about a man going on a long adventure whose goal is to get back home to his family (for Odysseus, it is his wife and son), for Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to get back to his daughter Murphy (Mackenzie Foy/Jessica Chastain/Ellen Burstyn). Both Odysseus is blown off course by storms at sea (in Interstellar, it is a giant wave on a water planet that causes them to lose 20 years of time on their project). Both men have to navigate the narrow passage—for Odysseus is Scylla and Charybdis; for Cooper, it is piloting close enough to a black hole for the ship to get enough momentum to make it to its last destination but not so close that the ship is destroyed. Both take a trip to the underworld where they see people from their past—literally, for Odysseus, for Cooper, it is seeing a tesseract representation of time past the event horizon of a singularity. Both are guided by godlike figures, Odysseus has Athena, and Cooper has the distant future of humanity. And, of course, both men, after getting home and seeing the ones they loved, go back out from home for more adventures in the unknown. It’s too many parallels to be simply the fact that certain archetypes are in every story. The parent-child relationship, the being blown off course by storms, and the leaving after coming home is too specific.
However, there is that middle portion of Interstellar where the crew is betrayed by Dr. Mann (Matt Damon—on a side note, this is the third movie about the US government wasting time and resources to save Matt Damon after Private Ryan and The Martian…we all need to agree that if Damon gets lost again, we’re just leaving him). And the whole process of several times referring to Mann as the best of anyone who worked on the project just screams all the praise for Kurtz that Marlowe hears in the heart of Darkness, and just as Kurtz has become a barbarian, Mann is a lunatic. I can see that Cyclops, Cattle of Helios, Circe, or Calypso were not going to work as the basis for this section, but it is still odd to switch books mid-movie.
But it is not the only time that Nolan draws from more than one story.
The Prestige (Faust)
The Prestige draws from three different stories. In this story of three magicians’ ego games, we have three versions of Faust.
The brother, played by Bale, who dies, is representative of the oldest version of Faust from its Germanic origins. He is so taken with his desire to know more he ruins his life and falls into the trap laid by Angier (Hugh Jackman), which leads to not only the destruction of his life but the lives of everyone around him, much like the earliest version of the Faust tale.
Angier is also destroyed by his need to one-up his opponent. And he commits numerous sins and loses everything, but he also, like the Faust of Christopher Marlowe’s play, has a moment of realization of what it was all about. A lot of good it did him. Angier is also the one who most explicitly makes a deal with the devil in the form of Tesla (David Bowie), who, like any good devil, warns you of what you risk taking him up on his offer but still gives you the instrument of your destruction.
Finally, the brother who lived, like Goethe’s Faust, loses much of what he had in life but is eventually forgiven and allowed into paradise (or to at least raise his daughter).
Tenet (King Arthur)
So this one becomes more difficult to argue. Time, and forcing us to perceive it in new ways, is key to almost all Nolan films, but this is the first time when time travel is so explicitly the central point of the movie. My main point for this is in T.H. White’s unspeakably pretentious tome, The Once and Future King; he added the idea that Merlin aged backward, which was how he was able to know the future—ever since its publication. This point seems to have worked its way into a lot of popular Arthurian lore. No other work of what might be considered classic literature has anything resembling such an emphasis on the perception of time, so it’s hard to conceive of any other possible source for Nolan on this point. With that in mind, our Protagonist (John David Washington) (who is never actually named) becomes Merlin, a man who is in control of all the major levers in a war for survival that can only be won by knowing what is going to happen in the future. From this, it begins to become obvious that Neil (Robert Pattinson), his friend and protege, is King Arthur, who dies in the course of the film (sorry if you didn’t get that) but who will also be a part of the Protagonist future (much like Merlin aging backward would have seen Arthur’s death long before meeting and training him), or, as Neil states near the end of the film, “You’ve got a future in the past.” Further, the way they all seek an item referred to as the Algorithm (a device that can destroy the world by turning the flow of time backward) comes off very much like the quest for the Holy Grail.
There are other little things like the Protagonist’s boss being named “Fay,” a likely reference to Morgan le Fay, or the character of Priya’s double-crossing nature having aspects of Nimue, but these are admittedly weaker. Admittedly this becomes a much weaker comparison, and I would argue that he only used Arthur as a jumping-off point rather than something we should be making clear comparisons to, as with The Dark Knight, Dark Knight Rises, or Inception.
Dunkirk (The Iliad)
Dunkirk takes a lot, believing that it’s the Iliad. You first have to start with the idea that Nolan, since Batman Begins (or at least The Prestige), has always started with a classic work in mind. With that in place, you have to then look for a work of literature that fits and then see if there are any points that fit.
There isn’t a lot to choose from for a besieged army looking to escape; in fact, in literature, ignoring some hideously obscure Medieval texts, there is The Iliad and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes. And Seven Against Thebes, with its themes of brother against brother and the besieged party turning back the besieges, really doesn’t fit. So we have the Iliad as the only other work that even vaguely fits. But what could further point to the Iliad?
First, you have Cillian Murphy (whom we know Nolan always wanted to make the central figure of any movie, to the point that he initially tried to make Murphy Batman before the studio quashed that idea) as the unnamed soldier who at first wants never go back and run away, to the point that he accidentally kills a young man in the process, but by the end of it has overcome his fears and willing to rejoin the fight. This parallels Achilles’ desire to turn back and leave the war. Further, during the voyage, he receives advice on how to be a soldier from an older man, much like Achilles receives from Odysseus.
I feel it’s a tenuous connection, but the ship owned by the old man is named Moonstone, which might have a relationship to Troy’s defender Diana, but I will admit this is, at present, a bit of a stretch. However, the name seems to be an important part, as it is something that Nolan had complete freedom to pick.
If we accept this as the origin, then the fight of the pilot Farrier (Hardy), who saves the rest of the characters from a Luftwaffe attack, comes off very much like the battles of Diomedes during The Iliad, a hero able to hurt even the god Ares.
The problem with putting this with the Iliad is you have to apply both Trojan and Greek parts of the story to besieged British forces, as Kenneth Branagh’s General character comes off as more of a Priam-like character than any of the Greeks.
Batman Begins (The Aeneid)
I think this is The Aeneid. Mainly because it’s about a young man having to fight to recreate the home he lost earlier in life. That is the extent of the parallel that I can see, and I’d be happier to believe this is still before Nolan had complete control over the films he directed and thus didn’t have a jumping-off point for this film. It’s a weak connection, I admit, and in the future, I may throw it out entirely.
This does allow us to speculate a little what Oppenheimer will really be about. You will need a story about a man who destroyed his life through acts of destruction that he originally sought out, and knowing a bit about Oppenheimer’s life and how the woman in his life, and her communist affiliations, ruined the latter part of Oppenheimer’s career, I think we will find this movie’s origin is the tale of Jason and Medea, with completion of the bomb serving as the Golden Fleece. That would at least be my suspicion, and I look forward to seeing if there are more points in the film that point back to Medea or direct me to another work of literature.
*the character may have been played by a man, but the character is female in the movie.