From Doodlebug to Oppenheimer : An Analysis of Christopher Nolan’s Film Work

The analysis of the corpus formed by Christopher Nolan’s works allows us to derive its poetics. The key to this is provided by the magic tricks script in The Prestige. All of Nolan’s films from Insomnia onwards are influenced by this aspect. The analysis not only shows how outstanding Nolan’s films are, but they also prove to be surprisingly political. The joker in The Dark Knight turns out to be the embodiment of neoliberalism, and in The Dark Knight Rises, we see Bane, a populist who benefits from the destruction that his neoliberalism wreaks. Inception is an allegory of filmmaking entirely shaped by the script of magic tricks. Interstellar and Tenet are about how humanity reacts to the climate catastrophe: in Interstellar, all that remains for humanity is to flee into space; in Tenet, Nolan allows future generations to fight back against the present. With the first nuclear bomb the protagonist of Oppenheimer gives humanity the power to destroy itself. In doing so, he not only heralds the atomic age but also the anthropocene.

Other key topics in this analysis: the attack on the Kiev Opera house in Tenet and the Russian war against Ukraine in 2022; the references in Inception on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris; the relation of the dead female characters in Nolan’s films to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Philosophy of Composition; in Nolan’s later films, the canary birds of The Prestige transformed into planes; the escape from earth in Interstellar complemented by the evacuation in Dunkirk; the interdependencies between Interstellar and Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel; neoliberalism reflected in Michael Mann’s thriller Thief; the allusions in Tenet on the James Bond film Skyfall by Sam Mendes.

Because of the last point, there is a digression that deals with Skyfall. Against the background of changing gender relations, Bond is looking for a new identity. Silva’s homosexuality is a cipher for misogyny, and the femicide on Sévérine is a reference to the death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs. This includes an explanation of why Bond has to do without his Beretta in Terence Young’s Dr No and is instead accompanied through his film series by the »triumvirate« of the Walther PPK, the Aston Martin, and the Vodka Martini. These findings are looked at in relation to Daniel Craig’s subsequent Bond films.