Christopher Nolan: Time, and Other Fascinations
I just rewatched Interstellar for the third time, and it got me thinking about Christopher Nolan’s fascination with time. I’m sure all of his movies have this theme within them, but I’m going to use these three films to demonstrate my point. One reason for that is because I genuinely believe they represent the best examples for this little essay, but another, more practical reason is that I have seen all of these movies recently enough to have the capacity to write about them in a way that makes sense.
Real quick, if you’re stumbling across this and you haven’t seen one, two, or all three of these movies, please forget you found this post and go watch them. They are three of the best movie viewing experiences I have ever gotten the privilege of having, and I would not want to spoil that beauty for anyone. Of course, anyone who knows my blog knows Inception will always be my favorite and my baby, but all three of these movies deserve your time. I try not to be a Nolan groupie, but wow, these movies are incredible. There is such intense complexity within them, and yet they are all so accessible because they center around painfully human emotions. With all that being said, here’s my little essay/analysis/rambling about three movies built around time: 2000’s Memento, 2010’s Inception, and 2014’s Interstellar.
Memento follows Leonard Shelby, a man imprisoned by his loss of time. He is incapable of retaining his short-term memories, meaning he exists harboring memories of a life he cannot continue. Yes, he lives beyond what he remembers, but he loses all of that time. He is fractured over and over again, repeatedly having to bear the weight of the loss that not only gave him this condition, but lost him his wife, as well. Within that seemingly futile existence, Leonard finds himself obsessed with solving his wife’s murder. He drives himself in circles, ultimately creating himself puzzles to solve in order to protect himself from a truth he cannot accept. He cannot heal from his wife’s death, because it will always feel moments away. Leonard exists in an endless day, chasing his own tail for as long as he can stand it before his mind breaks. This film is both the earliest in the trio and the darkest. Leonard gets no clean-cut, happy ending, he cannot persist through time because he doesn’t have it in the first place. He cannot harness the one thing that could save him.
Inception, released a decade after Memento, finds a new way to distort time. With this work being later in Nolan’s career, it is not only larger in scale, but in marketability, as well. Memento was his second feature film, before he was the mammoth of filmmaking that he is today. As a result, that movie isn’t working to be relatable to a large audience. Nolan, at least in my opinion, was creating something to grapple with and expand upon one of humanity’s mysteries: time, and how its creation, while largely human in nature, ends up controlling it’s creators. Memento is grimy, Memento is dark, Memento is on the fringes of “acceptable” filmmaking. It is bold, is it loud, it is bloody. I would not say Inception is more palatable of a movie compared to this predecessor, but it’s certainly more polished. Nolan now has millions of dollars and hundreds of people who have faith that he can create something special, and with Inception, he does.
Dominic Cobb has not lost time. In fact, he has gained it. He has lived a lifetime with his wife and then, he must start over. Cobb works in a field where he can expand time, where he can stretch it. And yet, just like Leonard, it appears he cannot harness this ability no matter how hard he tries. He can expand time all he wants, he can live decades upon decades with his wife in limbo, but he still loses her. He can built their memories into dreams, he can trap her in a graveyard of the life he lost, but none of it will bring her back. He can slow time, but he cannot stop it, and he cannot reverse it. Time has caged him not through a loss of it but through it’s limitations. Leonard is denied time entirely, but Cobb is faced with the fact that no matter how much power he has over time, he cannot reverse it, can never fully control it. It is not his. It may bend to his will in dreams, it may give him hours in place of minutes, but the clock will never turn back. Mal will not come back to life.
Interstellar comes in at a time when Nolan fans were, seemingly, holding their breaths. The Batman trilogy is completed, and so everyone wonders what he’ll do next. He comes back with an incredible bang with this film. Inception and Memento are by no means easy to understand; a headache is a customary companion to both movies on a first viewing. But Interstellar is on another level of confusing. It is a literal out of this world experience, in which an audience is tasked with learning the unlearnable. Space, singularity, time relativity, all of it is thrown at you with no attempt to make it palatable. Nolan persists in his boldness by banking on the humanity that screams over the confusion, and it works in an incredible way. Beyond all of the nonsense math, physics, and astronomy that I’m sure folks smarter than me understand, Interstellar is a movie about a father and a daughter. Joseph Cooper is tasked with leaving his daughter, Murphy, in order to save the world. It is only after he embarks on this interstellar travel that he realizes just how much time he is about to lose. When he returns to Earth, if he ever does at all, Murph may not even be alive. What amounts to hours for Cooper will become years upon years on Earth. He is faced with the reality that in order to save humanity, he must lose his reason for saving it. He must sacrifice not himself, but his little girl. He will lose all of the time he was meant to have with her. He must give up that time. He must sacrifice a present with his daughter for the potential of her future, and the potential is ever so slim. This loss is an inevitability. Cooper has no way of recouping that life. He is in fact gaining time, technically gaining years and years on his life, but it does not serve him. He must outlive everyone he loves for the glimmer of a brighter future.
I have painted a rather depressing painting here, but that’s because I’ve left out a key element to all of these stories, and that is how all three of these men, despite all odds, conquer time. And how do they do that? Through Nolan’s other persistent, extreme fixation: love.
Leonard’s story is admittedly the hardest to find joy and success in, but I believe that it is still there. Leonard motivates himself through his love for his wife. He is fueled not just by her loss but by the memories he still has of her. Yes, he corrupts his life, and yes, he cannot heal from the traumas that brought him to this state of being. But he tries. He builds a world for himself and keeps himself inside of it, he desperately clings on to sanity, he fights against time with all he has. He tattoos his body, he writes persistent notes, he creates a storyline to keep himself going. Of course, that storyline ends up being nothing more than a farce, a tale Leonard created for himself in order to have some sort of meaning, but is that not a conquering of time? He wrote his own story, he got around the absence of time by creating a false timeline anyway. You could see that as a subservience to time, a desperation for it, but I don’t think that’s fully the case. Leonard loves his wife to the brink of insanity. It destroys him, but the love was there. It couldn’t save him. But it was there.
Inception is where this theme of love truly starts to shine. Cobb does not succeed through gaining the power over time that he longs for. He does not turn back the clock. It is only when Cobb releases control that he finds freedom. He has to let go. He has to let time press on, he has to accept that no amount of stretching can bring his wife back. He must move forward with time and enjoy a future he never allowed himself to live in. With that acceptance of time, with that letting go, he finds joy with his children. This interpretation works even under a pessimistic viewpoint of the ending. Even if that top didn’t stop spinning, even if Cobb is forever asleep, as Nolan says, Cobb isn’t looking at the top anymore. He isn’t watching it spin, he isn’t questioning time, he isn’t trying to be its master. He can finally exist knowing that the love he had for Mal was enough to make all of that time worth it. He got his time with her. He cannot create more, but that’s okay.
It is in Interstellar where Nolan’s vision of love as a tangible power comes fully into focus. In Memento, love is a constant motivator, but it does not change Leonard’s fate. In Inception, Cobb’s love for his wife is what gives him the strength to leave her behind. In both films, love is incredibly important, yes, but it is also a passive force. It is something that undoubtedly exists, like atoms, but cannot be possessed for something outside of an emotional capability. Yes, love drives Leonard to fight for his wife’s justice, and love drives Cobb to imprison and, later, free his wife, but both men ultimately make these choices through their own will. Love gives them the strength, but it is not the strength itself. That strength must come from within them. In Interstellar, this changes. Love becomes an active force that not just affects our protagonist’s motivations, but an active force that changes time.
Cooper is only able to save humanity because of his love for his daughter, and Murphy is only able to save humanity because of her trust in her father. No one else could have completed that mission. Cooper and Murphy are two halves of one whole. One cannot exist without the other. Murphy cannot get the message and send her father to space without her father giving her that message. It’s complicated and extreme and almost outlandish. Almost. What saves this movie’s finale from being a complete mess of sci-fi nonsense is the fact that at the singularity, at the center of it all, for Cooper, it’s all Murphy. It’s all her. All one child’s bedroom. She is the answer. She goes back to that room and takes the watch of a man who abandoned her decades ago because it was her father’s. She loves him. Cooper can literally bypass time, can literally warp it and bend it to his will, because he loves his daughter. Because he wants to save her. Because really, to him, all of humanity is within her. Love gives Cooper the power to control time, to harness it in a way that Leonard and Cobb never could.
When I think about this progression, I think about Nolan and why he created these films. This trilogy feels like a story, like a message, like a lesson that we get to watch this director learn over nearly a decade and a half. He strikes me as a man who spent the majority of his life questioning time. What is was, what it meant, what it could do, and how to push past the bounds of it. He begins his questioning in Memento and creates an experimental, groundbreaking film that tells a nonlinear story in a way that just manages to be comprehensible. The through-line of Leonard’s love and passion for his wife is what keeps this movie grounded, and if Nolan didn’t know that while he was making it, he certainly learned it afterward. By creating this film and seeing that the reason it succeeded was not just because of the time he twisted to invent the story, but also because of his main character’s fervent passion, Nolan began answering the question he had laid out for himself: “How do I conquer time?” Thus, love as a force not against time but above it becomes a passionate theme in his work.
There is a poignant, intentional beauty in Cobb’s final words to his wife. It’s not his real wife, not anymore, just a projection of the woman he loved, but the conversation is still monumental for him to have. He has to realize that love is not something that can be caged, that while he may slow time all he wants, love will not confine itself. Mal quite literally pushes through his brain, pulls freight trains through his dreams, and manifests that love which screams, “you may not keep me here.” By letting his love exist, by letting this love move on from the past, he infects it with grief. And yet, it allows him to find peace. He gains what Leonard is denied: the time to heal.
Finally, Nolan creates love as a force to be harnessed to save humanity. Interstellar makes his point about love the most plain and simple out of all three of these movies. A character quite literally posits love as a tangible force that exists beyond emotion and chemical reaction. When Cooper originally rejects this notion, he has to pay the price for it. It is only when he accepts love as something stronger than time that he can find and save his daughter.
I guess I’m writing all of this to answer my own question about Christopher Nolan. I have always been so amazed by the fact that despite how insanely confusing and outlandish most of his films are, they still all bring out incredible emotion. I have the least evidence of this for Memento, since I’ve only seen the film once, but I remember the pit in my stomach that stuck with me through that entire film. I have seen Inception eight or nine times, and yet Cobb’s goodbye to Mal still brings tears to my eyes. Watching Interstellar today, despite watching it for the third time, I spent 70% of the movie being utterly confused. And yet, Cooper’s final conversation with Murphy made me cry. I have always wondered how Nolan manages this emotion through movies that are characterized as sci-fi, action films, but the answer feels so simple to me now. Nolan creates his films, especially these three, with a painfully human endeavor. He is acutely aware of how humanity persists through chaos, through time, through space. How any story of any great depth always goes back to humanity’s quest for two things: answers, and connection. Nolan persistently posits that the answers are found through connection, that to achieve greatness, to conquer our worst fears, we must always turn to love.
Nolan is praised for filmmaking that exists outside of a norm. He creates things that are inconceivable to most people in his field, and yet, his films are so powerful to so many people because they rely on the most common, normal aspect of our existence. So many great ideas for sci-fi movies fail because they assume that a great idea can carry you to success. But you can create the most amazing looking spaceship, you can give me complex cinematography and high-brow concepts, but none of it will matter if there is no human to give your story meaning.
That reality gives me the smallest amount of hope that AI won’t take over the world like I fear it will. Things that are created without human touch, without human confusion, without the human will to learn and love, are meaningless.
I really hope that these extreme, original ideas are something Nolan is still willing to work with in the future. I did just write an entire essay about how it’s not the uniqueness of these movies that makes them work, but that uniqueness is what makes them interesting. It’s what makes the message more powerful. A story of love existing in a movie about a guy who has no short term memory, or about a guy who steals information from people’s dreams, or a guy who travels through wormholes to find a habitable planet, is all the more impressive and all the more exciting. It seems like Nolan is gravitating in a different direction lately, and that saddens me. Yes, he made Tenet, which is a movie that almost definitely fits with what I’m talking about here, but I didn’t bring it up because I, erm, haven’t seen it yet. But with his other most recent movies, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer, and the upcoming The Odyssey, it seems like Nolan is going in a historical direction. Don’t get me wrong, I saw Oppenheimer, and it was an absolute triumph of filmmaking. It was powerful, deeply depressing, and entirely successful in getting its meaning across. But it doesn’t have the same “special sauce” that these three movies have. Nolan is capable of truly groundbreaking storytelling, and I think it’d be a shame if he stuck himself in a box of movies about the past (whether that past is real or fictional, considering The Odyssey). His ability to make such insane stories so human is what, in my opinion, makes him such a talented director. I suppose only time will tell what’s next for him.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I hope it made some sense. These movies are all so fantastic. I will never not love a story whose conclusion is that love conquers all.