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Regarding book/film sounding awfully like Gold's Carter Beats The Devil - Priest's novel was published in 1995, Gold's in 2001, so if anything sounds awfully like anything... but as it turns out, The Prestige is nothing like Gold’s novel, except for the protagonist as illusionist starting point, which is a remote link if ever I’ve heard one.
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Saw the film last night. Loved it... one of the best films I've seen in years. Given the subject matter, it's no surprise that it revolves around themes of obsession and secrecy, but The Prestige also has a fair bit to say about mainstream cinema’s experimentation in narrative, which have been Nolan's chief selling point as a filmmaker so far. At the beginning, Caine’s character Cutter introduces us in voiceover to Priest's (fictional) three-act structure for a magic trick/illusion – the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige - which itself neatly parallels the almost sacred text of the three-act structure for feature screenplays (noting that the Nolan brothers generally disdain any such structure for their work). But it’s a red herring, designed to make you think that you're going to see one of those movies with a trick ending so popular since the brilliantly constructed and highly successful The Usual Suspects and The Sixth Sense convinced hacks that the best way to sell a screenplay was to tack on an unconvincing twist.
I don’t think The Prestige has a trick, or twist ending, at least not as the concept is known these days. The subject matter, coupled with the Caine’s voiceover introduction featuring the above mentioned device, leads you to believe that the twists and turns within the narrative are leading to a final spectacular convolution which never actually happens. Not that the ending is bathetic – but the pirouetting narrative actually is the point of the film, and the Prestige of The Prestige is to leave us with a satisfying conclusion, just as the Prestige of an illusion is to have the audience gasp and cheer. Cutter says as much in that introductory voiceover, just as Angier does in the film’s coda – the former, at the Turn before the Prestige, along the lines of “but you’re not clapping yet, there’s something more” and the latter, “it was just to see the looks on their faces…”
Thematically, the narrative features secrecy mired in obsession destroying relationships, the destroyed relationships leaving the obsessive nothing left but to continue to obsess. We never find out whether Alfred Borden, as an individual, actually exists anymore than Fallon does, just as Lord Caldlow is no more the real Rupert Angier than is The Great Danton or even Angier himself. Four women stand between characters in The Prestige : Angier’s wife, doomed to a tragic end possibly because of her collusion with Borden in changing part of a trick without telling Cutter, and so beginning the murderous rivalry between them ; Borden’s wife, who is never told of his secret but probably guesses before – and precipitating – her own tragic end ; Olivia, first Angier’s lover and assistant, then Borden’s ; and Borden’s daughter, the bargaining chip between Caldlow and a jailed Borden. Again in these relationships, what comes back time and time again is mirroring, as it does during the (by now traditionally non-linear) narrative in other more obvious ways - in the tit-for-tat games of brutal ones-upmanship, Borden for Fallon, Angier for Gerald Root, Angier for his genuine doppelgangers (forshadowed by the live dove substituting the dead dove, killed in the act of the Prestige), the ‘purloined’ notebook with a twist in its mini-narrative reflected by the same device but reversed later on, Tesla for Edison (and AC for DC), wife for mistress, wife for daughter. Julia Kristeva posits the mirror-phase as a threshold state, and in each of the four women we get to see different facets of the men they mirror, just as each female character’s short arc presents a massive change for one or both of the rivals. In that sense, it’s a man’s movie – the female characters aren’t ciphers, but neither are they as fully fleshed as the two protagonists. I don’t know – is irrational secrecy and obsession just a guy thing? Not sure it is…
You can go further – class warfare! Borden’s working class twins and Angier’s equivalent, purchased with old money (Angier, seeking to learn the naturally talented Borden’s secret, is sent on a wild goose chase, and so ironically finds a way to buy himself a way to duplicate what Borden was born with), playboy and dilletante Angier buys himself the workhouse orphan’s daughter to replace his wife, Angier is bored and seeks the thrill of engagement with an audience, Borden is trapped and seeks a way to make something greater of and for himself. But at the end, all the twists and turns, the reflections and reversals, exist to provide us with a vastly entertaining story. If you were being cynical, you could say that the final ten minutes provide us with three trick endings in a row – except they don’t, not really. We’ve had enough hints to know that Fallon isn’t what he appears (the many, many extended cuts ending on his whiskered face, his telling almost total absence of dialogue or personality, Borden’s mania upon his kidnapping), and given the Chinaman’s secret, the nature of the disputed trick, the constant doubling and mirroring, the constant references to the bipolar nature of Borden’s family life, it’s no stretch to guess Borden’s own secret. Caldlow/Angier is also hardly a surprise, and certainly no more of one than the earlier notebook reversals or the bizarre double-treble-quadruple agent role forced on Olivia. If anything unsettles, it’s the unheimlich, the weirdness and dread involved with the hundred performances of Angier’s ‘The Real Transported Man’, and the Angiers left to drown. The dying Angier mutters something about never being sure which he would be – would he live or would he drown? Is the original transported and the replicate left behind, or the reverse, and, depending on which it is, which is he – the original Angier or a replicate? Which one dies, and how would he know? Angier drowns himself every night, and every night never knows whether he will be the one drowned. That’s one hell of a threshold state to be in, and for a movie all about mirrors, funhouse and otherwise, that’s one hell of a climax to the movie’s Prestige. |
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