The Risks of Believing in Magic

1001 Movies To See Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 32
Christopher Nolan (writer-director), The Prestige

Early in Christopher Nolan’s 2006 thriller The Prestige, a scene features a supplicant named Angier (Hugh Jackman) begging assistance from Nicola Tesla (David Bowie). Tesla approaches from a raised platform, surrounded by electrodes discharging plasma lightning. It’s tough to watch this scene without recalling The Wizard of Oz, and Dorothy’s first encounter with the Wizard, all lightning and booming echoes. This is probably deliberate.

Like Dorothy’s Wizard, the magicians Angier and Borden (Christian Bale) create wonder and spectacle which keeps their audiences captivated; in return, audiences provide the magicians a living. But also like Dorothy’s Wizard, these magicians increasingly believe their own hype. They demand worship from the hoi polloi, which, in their minds, includes one another. When they don’t get it, their demands become increasingly destructive.

Angier and Borden apprenticed together in Victorian London, paying dues as audience plants and stage machinists. (Their mentor, Milton the Magician, is played by Ricky Jay, an actual illusionist and veteran David Mamet actor, which lends his performance both verisimilitude and a Mamet-like air of bored cynicism.) But a routine stage accident increases quickly, costing Angier his wife’s life. This begins a cycle of distrust and revenge, onstage and off.

Going solo, Angier and Borden face two requirements: establish their personal brands, while sabotaging one another. Both illusionists attempt exceedingly dangerous tricks; both sabotage those tricks to cause their rivals to hurt themselves or others. Both performers get maimed when the other sees through his tricks. Yet each answers their respective setbacks by doubling down, creating even bigger and more spectacular illusions.

Two themes run through this story. First, how much of the spectacle depends not on the event, but on how the performer sells the event? Angier, under his stage name “The Great Danton,” is clearly the superior showman, spicing his performances with unique flair contingent upon his personality. But Borden, calling himself “The Professor,” is the superior engineer, inventing new ideas first. Imagine what these two could accomplish if they collaborated.

Second, how important is belief to stage magic? Naturally, the audience knows the performer has enacted some sleight of hand, but we tacitly pretend to believe the performer’s story, because we cannot see the stage mechanics. But how thoroughly must the performer believe his own banter? Both these performers invest themselves so thoroughly in their stage performances that, if they doubt themselves, they’ll probably shatter.

Christopher Bale (left) and Hugh Jackman in The Prestige

Borden has devised a trick which only makes sense if he can exist in two places at once. Angier wants to crack this trick. Angier’s stage engineer, Cutter (Michael Caine), proposes a simple, elegant, self-contained solution; Angier rejects it, believing Borden must have perfected something bordering on supernatural. Because Angier believes Borden has a high-tech solution, he resolves to recreate it, and does; his belief in Borden’s banter causes him to change the world.

One recalls Arthur C. Clarke’s statement about sufficiently advanced technology.

Convinced that a technological solution exists, Angier consults Nicola Tesla. Like a stage magician himself, Tesla is famous for having some important ideas, but also for selling himself as his most important product. Largely shunned during his lifetime in favor of his rival, Edison, Tesla has come a downright mythological figure in subsequent decades. His very presence in this story provides a Cliff’s Notes on the dominant themes.

Angier, Borden, and Tesla tell elaborate, cantilevered lies to one another, edifices of untruth destined eventually to crumble when somebody pokes the weak brick. That’s what magicians do: they lie to audiences desperate to believe something exists. But these men don’t just lie to each other, they lie to themselves, so often and so elaborately that they forget the narrative they’ve constructed is false. They deceive themselves so often, they believe their own deceit.

Not surprisingly, for a story about stage magicians, this movie builds to a twist reveal. I got accused of “thinking like a screenwriter” for noticing the twist ahead, not by anything onscreen, but by what the movie omits. For me, the story’s culmination came not with the reveal, but with the impediments these characters overcame to reach that moment. These characters face setbacks normal humans would consider impenetrable, and persevere.

Nolan’s surface-level thriller certainly has enough twists and complexity to keep popcorn viewers entertained. But beneath that veneer, Nolan crafts a parable about how belief both empowers and entraps the believer. Both magicians believe they’re morally right, for separate but compelling reasons. But ultimately, everything they believe proves a lie. Sadly, a liar can’t see through his own lies.