Does Christopher Nolan Dream of Electric Sheep?

Yes. He Does.

I haven’t watched Dunkirk or Oppenheimer. Perhaps that’s because I have come to appreciate Christopher Nolan’s films less and less.

Memento is my happy — if not frenetic — place.

Insomnia uses setting better than just about any film I’ve seen.

Inception is visually compelling from start to finish.

I’m not making a chronologically-sharp argument here: Nolan’s work doesn’t degrade perfectly film-by-film. The devolution zig-zags a bit.

The Dark Knight precedes Inception, but is inferior by a Gotham block. I’ve tried to watch it several times, but can never make it past that insipid dinner table conversation between Dent and Wayne about vigilantism. Additionally, that “Batman” voice, the over-hyped Ledger turn that cost him his sanity and life, and the (allegedly) thinly-veiled line between arch-villain and anti-hero is not the stuff of meaningful narrative, it’s fodder for the kinds of mass shootings that still echo in Aurora, Colorado, or detonated Cybertrucks that mushroomed outside branded hotels on the Vegas Strip (as Matthew Alan Livelsberger texted his ex-girlfriend moments before self-immolation, “I feel like Batman”).

My hero, the prolific film critic Roger Ebert called The Dark Knight a “haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about. That’s because of the performances, because of the direction, because of the writing, and because of the superlative technical quality of the entire production. This film, and to a lesser degree Iron Man, redefine the possibilities of the comic-book movie.”

Ebert was probably correct in his assertion that Nolan and Favreau transcended the limitations of the mile-wide-inch-deep nature of Superman (1978), Flash Gordon (1980) or Howard the Duck (1986). That’s far from difficult (or impressive) to accomplish.

Memento came out in the new millennium. It was an indie film. It had few effects beyond reversing film or developing in black-and-white versus color. Its 9 million dollar budget likely forced Nolan to focus on the psychological changes of the character moment to moment.

I feel for Leonard Shelby in ways that I can’t (conceivably) feel for “The Protagonist” in Tenet.

John David Washington is all flattened affect for 2 hrs and 30 min, and the other characters are little more than screensavers from outdated PCs, or amped-up caricatures (I’m looking at you Sator — but also, quite frankly, it’s hard to look at you when you’re a Shakespearean-trained actor playing at being a Russian mobster-turned-oligarch in borrowed clothes).

It’s likely that Nolan dreams of electric sheep.

He increasingly creates characters that can’t elicit pathos from an audience. I genuinely care about Leonard to the point where I refuse to call him Lennie out of respect for the fact that his wife used to call him Lennie and he hated it. But The Protagonist in Tenet? Every line of dialogue Washington delivers (the apple falls orchards away from the tree in that family) is neutered of emotion, vitality, and purpose. I care not if he lives or dies. I care not if the cyanide capsule he bites into and swallows is part of a test or the real thing.

Ten years later Inception definitely gets in my kitchen. Ebert calls The Dark Knight “haunted,” but I think Inception is the brooding ghost of personified angst. It’s as dystopian as Blade Runner and as clinical as Alien, and it makes me care (enough) about Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) and his Odysseus pantomime.

But by 2010 I’m starting to notice that Nolan prefers a world in which the humans aren’t really conscious or in search of some kind of emotional truth at all.

I see Nolan aligning ideologically with centimillionaire Bryan Johnson who believes that the mind is the problem, and the solution is to tune into a different frequency.

The mind is just in the way.

Maybe it’s why Nolan doesn’t allow chairs on set, or always comes in on time and under budget.

Maybe it’s why wives are disposable in his films. In Memento, Shelby’s wife is deceased and he probably killed her. In Inception, Cobb’s wife is just a projection (she’s long gone, too), and the power of suggestion led her to jump from a hotel window. Sator, in Tenet, spectacularly shoots his spouse Kat against a plate-glass window at the intersection of now and later.

Jonathan Nolan, the brother, is the one who revived Michael Crichton’s old and dusty property, Westworld, for HBO’s prestige television run.

Westworld is a nice bit of sibling rivalry.

It suffers from many of the problems I describe here. Both brothers seem obsessed with turning humans into bots, or vice-versa.

I watched Interstellar in 3D Imax upon release in 2014, but I can’t recall a single “emotional” scene that made me think or feel (save for present and past Murph communicating through bookcases).

After 4 seasons of Westworld, I think I was supposed to care about Dolores Abernathy — maybe want to protect her, see her as the victim, view her as human, but I couldn’t. Dolores exists and persists through several incarnations. She’s a homesteader protecting the family farm, a damsel in distress dropping groceries on a Wild West throughway, and a modern gal working in the big city — withdrawn and isolated whether at work or in her capacious apartment, mostly sleeping, or sleepwalking. She’s beautiful and vulnerable, alabaster skin, light eyes, blonde hair, feminine and mysterious. So why don’t I want to rescue her? Why isn’t some parasocial relationship blossoming?

The big “tug-at-my-heartstrings” moment was Jeffrey Wright (as Bernard) sitting at the foot of a motel-room bed lost and alone, a man without a country (or tribe, untethered from his creator), but I couldn’t have cared less.

John and Chris are both technically gifted filmmakers (to put it mildly). I would often watch the “after the show” segments on HBO about the extremes the showrunners went to create the visuals of Westworld, yet I couldn’t help thinking it was akin to assembling a 500,000 piece jigsaw puzzle of Rush Limbaugh’s face.

What was the payoff each week? Why do it? That it only ran for 4 seasons, and Nolan and Joy (his partner) had to shut down and retool midway through season 1 says a lot.

In Inception, billionaire energy scion Cillian Murphy’s Robert Fischer has lost his father, but his father didn’t love him: he was incapable of positive emotion, of expressing his feelings (other than rank disappointment). When Maurice Fischer dies, Robert is not so much drained, he’s just “Robert the next day.” I don’t feel anything. The character feels - what - maybe “resigned?” Okay. {Even Roman Roy could muster a near-nervous breakdown for his family patriarch’s passing — a man equally distant and dismissive}.

Cobb returns to America at the film’s end, gets back to his kids, his spinning totem is placed on the edge of a table (Cobb exits through the back door of his Craftsman-style house to dote on Phillipa and James forever playing the backyard), and Nolan cuts to black. The wobbly diegesis makes it a bit unclear as to whether the top still revolves to this day, or has long ago sputtered out.

And what does Nolan tell us, begrudgingly, reluctantly?

It doesn’t matter. He says.

Cobb has accepted that ending as his new beginning. His present reality.

So - that’s it? We can just master our emotions? All that’s required is a powerful catharsis, and we’ll never look back? Entirely do what David Foster Wallace warned us about, but couldn’t do himself — as if Cobb wouldn’t eventually come back into the house he shared with Mal, see the top still spinning (or spent) and resume his ruminations either way? {Moreover, Cobb’s wedding ring was his totem; its absence on his finger means he’s awake. The top was Mal’s reality checker — so what does it even mean that Cobb spins it in the final scene? Is it in memoriam? To test if he’s in Mal’s dream? Is it done out of obsessive habit? And wasn’t there a long-standing rule about never touching, using, or relying on another’s device — that it would corrupt its empirical value? Regardless, doesn’t the simple act of Cobb setting the top in motion suggest he isn’t certain? And wouldn’t that contradict Cobb’s final act as he confidently steps out into the sunlight to reunite with his children? So yeah, Nolan’s got me thinking, sure, but feeling? Not so much.}

For Nolan, perhaps there’s an on-and-off switch, a reset button, a master-control. His mind is decidedly “the servant.”

For Nolan, perhaps we all live in a simulation, or he is the architect of his.

Whether it’s DiCaprio or McConaughey, Nolan will turn them into his own robots who can act out his either A) entirely overblown and overwrought human dramas, or increasingly so B) his utterly-devoid of human emotion caricatures enacting human social dynamics that feel alien and unfamiliar.

Maybe it’s a British thing: continue stiff-upper lipping it; I’m keeping calm and carrying on?

I often return to Memento and Inception, because I teach them each semester. There’s so much realism in Memento. There’s so much thinking in Inception.

I recently screened Tenet for my seniors and no one left to use the bathroom over three class periods.

I wonder if it’s because my students (to some extent) see themselves in the characters. I don’t really know. Maybe we’ve become less emotionally messy as a society because technology has made us passive observers, our iPhones, Surfaces, and Echoes just appendages or organs we don’t realize are vestigial, slowly choking off our individual humanity that will surely become collective.

Perhaps Nolan is just getting more reductive as he gets older and (theoretically) wiser. His debut effort, Following, was a low budget college thesis film that got some legs post-Memento. It’s about a stalker who meets a stalker and creepy hijinks ensue. Maybe the sketch or study for what is fully realized in Tenet is telegraphed in Following: the main characters objectify humans. One man is a writer who wants to understand the lives of others. It’s recon for his unwritten novel. He enters strangers’ apartments after observing them in a cafe in hopes of understanding how they live, what makes them three-dimensional…something he just doesn’t seem to know about his fellow man.

Maybe Bill (the budding author) is a proxy for Nolan himself. Maybe Nolan grows increasingly reductive in “the human interest” side of his moviemaking as time goes on because he knows that we - the audience - have also grown less interested in family gatherings, eye contact, and reproducing.

Or, Following (from 1998) could be a kind of confession: I’m Christopher Nolan, and I don’t really understand these creatures enough to write about them, so I’ll tell the story of the sociopath who can’t relate to them either, can’t understand the notion of boundaries or the utility of social contracts, the purpose of laws, or the distinction between public versus private space. And - just like me - I’ll make him a writer. I’ll shoot the film in black-and-white — it will add to the flattened affect of my postmodern aesthetic (aka the way I see the world).

It’s also possible that Nolan is a good deal like Christopher McQuarrie, who once told me that dialogue is a cheap and easy substitute for action. McQuarrie had spent his early years in awe of Mamet and Chayefsky, mimicking their characters’ speech patterns in The Usual Suspects (and his first, unseen film Public Access). But McQuarrie has all but stripped away clever repartee or slick banter; he now despises monologues and abhors soliloquies. Inception is little more than an action film, and Tenet is literally an action film. If McQuarrie longs to make a silent film, Nolan’s Tenet has long stretches without words (most notably when The Protagonist is shipbound and training in a narrow, vertical hold).

And it’s no coincidence that Nolan is loathe to explain any choices he’s made to audiences — or even Stephen Colbert during a longform interview. Yes, he makes films that the whole world waits with baited breath to watch. He understands the end-user experience, forbidding any of his works to be first streamed before theatrical release.

Yet it’s not so simple to figure this all out. I’ve struggled with it. Tenet is so dialogue heavy (when it’s not being mute) that it nearly asphyxiates on its own word vomit. Inception is wonderful, but it’s almost identical to Scorsese’s Shutter Island in nearly every single way: it stars DiCaprio, came out in 2010, features a man who can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality, has a dead wife to pine for, and an ending that lives and dies by its strategic ambiguity.

After watching Shutter Island, I had a four hour discussion with my wife (appropriately enough) about what had just happened. The first time I viewed Inception was in bed on a laptop. I fell asleep. Nolan - himself - could have predicted that. His movies demand a home theater at least. The irony, of course, is that movie theaters are communal experiences.