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FILM _AND_ BOOK
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I had been meaning to read Christopher Priest for a while after hearing about him as an especially good literary fantasy/mystery writer, and last week I came across a copy of The Prestige on my mantelpiece of unread books, and I thought, with the film coming out and that: that’ll do. And it’s a wonderful, exemplary book (I haven’t read Carter Beats the Devil, but from the sound of it neither the film nor the book of The Prestige is anything like it in terms of narrative or tone.) So, much of my reaction to the film, which I was initially very excited about, was in relation to Priest’s novel, which is very different. But for one thing this thread is for the film, and for another Nolan is well within his rights to, and clearly does, construct his own take on the work, and so I don’t want to appear to review it on the basis that the film version is in any sense “wrong” in its direction. With that caveat in mind, I’ll attempt to write down some thoughts on crucial differences between the two and keep it to specifically how that impacts on the film.
mkt made the following comment:
I've read a few criticisms of the film that mention the obviousness of the ending, and I'm baffled. The film is called "The Prestige". My understanding was that the whole film was about expectation, showmanship and willingly being taken in - of course you know where it's going, but you willingly suspend disbelief and enjoy the performance.
I disagree. The film explores the idea that performance magic is tied to suspension of belief, you know it’s a trick, but crucially you don’t know how it’s done, which is premised on the idea that secrets have a degree of power. What Nolan does with the film is dramatise the conflict between the power gained by holding secrets and the cost of deceiving people, and while I’m not entirely clear what the film’s conclusion leaves us with as a message, I suspect that other values are largely being prioritised: Borden’s child is shown as being a real-life concern more important than the squabbles of stage performers or their secrets, and for that matter the wonder left in the minds of the audience. My problem with this in terms of cinematic technique is that I agree with those above that I think there are meant to be a series of “big reveals” in the closing minutes, so the “obviousness of the ending” makes the film appear more clumsy than profound if the intended effect is trickery. And then, if we’re going to accept the conceit that The Prestige as a film is a kind of magic trick where we are astounded at how the narrative does what it does, both the film and the characters are let down by a conclusion that takes you backstage and empties the secrets of their worth as secrets. And normally I don’t think that would bother me much, but in a film based on ideas of bilocation, misdirection, unreliable narration and irresolvable mysteries, such a laborious walkthrough of each stage of the trick isn’t just disappointing but neglectful of both the basic thematic and original source materials.
Comparatively, the novel highlights several less static answers to the “puzzle” of (primarily) Borden’s identity without a definite conclusion being reached; the reader is constantly told here is where I show you that I have nothing to hide, here is where I show you the impossible, now be amazed that I have tricked you. The three stages in the structure of a trick even incorporate the narrative voice:
Let me first then consider and describe the method of writing this account. The very act of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A puzzle is implicitly involved.
The act of telling the truth, of revealing secrets, is itself reduced to being another and perhaps a primary method for preserving secrecy. Which is a way of saying that I don’t think there was the necessity for the film to reveal its own construction so earnestly, where presumably the “cost” of not doing so was the intelligibility of the film to certain audience members. The repetition throughout the film that Borden must be using a double doesn’t need to be taken at face value, it’s a belief of Cutter’s, this could have been shown as an act of misdirection on the part of the director, or undercut by another possibility, but we’re basically given it by the conclusion as reality. The shift of emphasis from a trick where there’s doubt as to how it is done, to a trick that is seen through and it is slowly revealed how it is done, confirms a definite move away from the novel, which would be fine but that the change limits the possibilities of the film in favour of simpler and less interesting answers.
The double theft of journals in the film adapts the literary structure of the novel’s main narrative to its own ends (though entirely dispenses with the modern day setting that acts as a framing device to the entire novel) but misses the subtlety of their employment. The cinematic journals puzzle, antagonise and misdirect, but they misdirect in a direct way, they contain lies and half-truths, they miss, if we choose to see every act as a magical act, the practice of showing the audience that the magician’s hands are empty. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But the strength of the novel lies in the characters’ being partially “seen” even when they employ misdirection to obscure themselves, each character offers a perspective on the other that they themselves can’t see, while the film uses the journals only in the act of them hurting one another; the actual act of deception, convincing the other the journals are genuine, is so minimal as to rob the “trick” of any glamour and reduce it to two men playing manipulative private games.
The conceit of each magician reading the (artificial, manipulative) journal of the other dramatically changes the nature of their relationships. The tragedy of their literary relationship is of the misunderstandings that lie between them, and also their similarities. Rather than the highly visible differences in class and attitude portrayed in the film, the novel, while giving each character a unique back-story, essentially presents their feud originating in two individuals who broadly occupy the same world, and whose differences are in matters of stagecraft, technique, creativity (Borden sees Angier at first as exploitative, Angier perceives Borden’s act to be crude) but both gentlemen wear top hats – so to speak. It’s not just that the film follows the common feature film tendency for less subtle characterisation and avoidance of minimal difference, it’s that something essential about the nature, the bonds of their obsessive concentration on the other is lost when they are presented with every opportunity (on my viewing) as being opposites. I think it’s a damning enough to say that a film so visually concerned with doubling seemed to have so little to say about the psychological doubling between its two main characters.
Another thing, and possibly tied to “the cost of deceiving people” is Nolan introducing the theme that to succeed you have to make sacrifices, you have to get your hands dirty, and to a degree I think it’s this idea of “cost” that replaces mystery or doubt as the other main theme in the film. And I actually found that quite interesting, there’s a judgement being made, I think, about the importance of a real world that demands sacrifices, and how it intersects with a performative world where loss is always temporal.
I think what I found most shocking about the film in relation to the book was the violence. It was a twelve certificate I think, but the violence, both physically and in the character’s interpersonal actions towards one another, was extremely effective; I’ve watched cinematic violence far more extreme that didn’t make me wince so much as when Anger fell through the trapdoor onto the floor. Which I think is a good thing, generally, in that violence and unpleasantness shouldn’t be treated lightly, but it was hard-going in a film which, especially between the two performers, displayed an immense cruelty and a very personal animosity which rested uneasily with and I think overshadowed the professional rivalry.
To compare this to the novel, where there is one serious interaction between the two that has serious physical consequences for someone, numerous instances of performance sabotage, and one attempted murder, the film has (correct me if I’m wrong) manslaughter, attempted murder and mutilation, self-mutilation, bird killing, finger breaking, kidnap, burying someone alive, a shooting (of Cutter – injury), several instances of sabotage, Angier getting his leg injured, a shooting (Angier’s first clone – murder), Multiple drownings, another kidnap, a hanging (murder), a shooting (murder)… It’s a horrible film. Without even going near the tortured personal relationships. Which by comparison makes the book, to my mind, seem even more elegant for conjuring such emotional resonance without resorting to such extremes. One thing the film certainly concentrates far less on is the practice of legerdemain, so though it’s referred to, the act of leaving Borden’s hand a ruin made me jump precisely because of the repeated emphasis the novel placed on how prized a magician’s skill with his hands is, in the context of his profession it’s a devastating injury. The novel is full of unhappiness and personal confusion but it’s modified by the rivals desire to find out more about one another, to understand how the other works, whereas the film seemed imbalanced in trying to combine a professional obsession and difference of methodology with a personal desire to inflict not just embarrassment but pain and destruction upon the other.
Just to go back to the attempted murder in the novel for a sec, in which Angier attempts, after one further near lethal intervention in his act by Borden, to finally just wring the mystery of how Borden performs his trick out of him and then resolve their feud completely, and he isn’t able to do either. And that’s the crux of the novel for me, the characters can’t end their relationship, and they’ve come to a point where that relationship has near-eliminated anything else they might have. Borden is unable to explain his own mysterious identity, while Angier is repulsed by his violence, and at various points they are both repulsed, by the thought of their hatred driving them to violence over as essentially petty rivalry. And they’re both culpable, and ultimately deeply sympathetic characters, whose tragedy is their misunderstanding of both themselves and each other. And that doesn’t exist in the film. There is a humourlessness behind the momentum of each character’s very personal hatred of the other. The escalation of their feud makes narrative sense, as each act of revenge further fuels the growing hatred, but the obsession does not correspondingly increase in its interest to the viewer, it’s missing something, there was no mystery to their relationship that I could perceive, no sense that would worry at each other continually for understanding, only that they would eventually and inevitably hurt one another again.
Borden’s obsessive need is partially checked by his family, and he at the last appears complicit, chastised, but certainly owed more sympathy than the monstrous Borden. That said, Borden’s literal half-victory felt shoddy to me, achieved, as it was, without Borden (Borden in prison anyway) actually doing anything. I was expecting by this point some last minute escape from the hangman’s noose, but I don’t think that the ending could be read that way. Borden (Borden the free man) is damaged by the death of his twin and the threat of the loss (to Angier) of the daughter, but combats that threat not by trickery, but by the intervention of Angier’s assistant (giving Caine a character journey of some degree) and by directly ending the life of Angier and thus the feud.
Other differences:
Caine has a larger role than the ingenieur of the book, and while that’s understandable for an actor of his stature, and there’s little to actively criticise in the three lead roles, his enlarged presence detracts, I think, from the intensity of the obsessive dynamic between the two rival performers, and I didn’t personally feel the “charge” (sorry) between Jackman and Bale was strong enough to capture the attention of an audience primed to examine the plot for tricks. Furthermore, the addition of a technically minded character who seemed to be the primary instigator of many of Angier’s tricks, rather than as simply a trusted craftsman, while giving Caine something to do, undermines the role of Angier as a magician capable of his own unique creativity and identity, which again moves away from the novels leapfrogging contest of two approximately equal magicians with different styles and different attitudes to commitment, and present the audience with more of a sense of a “real” and a “fake” magician, with the fake magician only holding his own through showmanship and the props of others. More generally, the greater emphasis on the “engineering” of magic tricks shown in the film downplays the mental and physical dexterity the magicians of the novel display, and allows far greater range for the idea that showmanship + technology = magic, which I think is reductive.
It’s a very minor point but I think it’s maybe a little telling on the emphasis in modern cinema placed on the plot, there are additions to the film like the blind stagehands which don’t jar exactly, but they do little for the film other than convey a generalised creepiness and explain for the nitpickers why there wasn’t a fuss about drowning doubles under the floorboards after each performance.
The comment about “real magic” in the film (in the sense used by Thorn Davis above) really nagged at me though. At the danger of prolonging this into a rant about the film being just “not as good” as the book, in my head I can’t see either magician saying this. The system of values that operates, believably, in the novel, is that the magicians of the age didn’t see art of deception as being in any way inferior to that of more miraculous means, and that they were not comparable except in the sense that the craft of the former was in creating the appearance of the latter without actually embodying it. The point of The Prestige isn’t about the further ramifications or reliability of the Tesla machine (Possibilities that, rather creepily, Angier pre-meditatively “closes down” with every copy made), it’s about what motivates its use, and even more so the relationship between the two different “magic” practitioners.
Things I liked: I thought Bowie’s understated Tesla was excellent. The electrical effects were not only stunning but highly effective as threatening, uncanny forces. I liked that in the first use of Borden’s Transported man they show how the trick functions but that they don’t present two (undisguised) Bales on screen at the same time. It was that sort of clever open-endedness I’d expected from the director of Memento to come up with. That was an excellent review above Hellbunny, and I agree about the weirdness and dread of the “prestige materials”, although again Priest deals with this somewhat differently.
Apologies for the long post. But I do have a question about the film also – what are the opening, somewhat muffled words, which are repeated later near the end? I think it’s Bale speaking but I couldn’t make it out. |
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