Stuart Joy - The Traumatic Screen: The Films of Christopher Nolan

First published in the UK in 2020 by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2020 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

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Dedicated with love to my parents

Take a moment to consider your achievement

Cutter, The Prestige

First, I would like to thank Dr Jacqueline Furby and Dr Claire Hines for their unwavering support and encouragement. You have both been a constant source of thoughtful advice, calm reassurance and intellectually stimulating conversation over the years. Without both of you, I simply would not be where I am today. Likewise, I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Edward Chaney, Professor Maurice Owen and Professor Karen Randell for their helpful guidance. Sincere thanks are extended to Darren Kerr, Paul Marchbank and Professor Rod Pilling for their financial and institutional support while writing this book. I would also like to thank several scholars including Dr Donna Peberdy, Dr Devon Campbell-Hall, Professor Will Brooker, Dr Sorcha N Fhlainn, Dr Francesca Brencio, Dr Erin-Hill Parks, Dr Frances Pheasant-Kelley, Dr Tony M. Vinci and Dr Paul Sutton who have all contributed, in various ways, to the development of my ideas. I would particularly like to thank Dr Terence McSweeney whose feedback and guidance have been invaluable. Special thanks to my friend Kierren Darke for his willingness to act as a sounding board for my ideas and lastly, very special thanks are due to my family and my wife Sophie Joy Cross for their kindness, understanding and patience.

Ive done really well so far in my career by trusting the audience to be as dissatisfied with convention as I am.

Christopher Nolan (2010: 18)

Trauma haunts the cinema of Christopher Nolan. Beginning with his short film Doodlebug (1997) and ending with Dunkirk (2017), his films strive to articulate and understand the complexities of trauma. His recurring interest in aligning us with characters who have been traumatized and his repeated return to stories that involve loss thematically anchors each of his films in the experience of trauma. But beyond this, trauma is also explored through our own relationship to his films which frequently feature complex timelines that demand and even reward multiple viewings. These intricate narrative puzzles encourage us to return to them in such a way that emulates the cognitive shifts of traumatic memory just as those who have undergone a traumatic experience must remember the past in the hope of moving forward, we too must recall our experience if we are to understand what we have seen. Take, for example, Nolans debut feature Following (1998). In this film, our own experience of trying to make sense of the discontinuous episodic timeline is paralleled by the protagonists inability to comprehend how he is framed for murder by the mysterious stranger Cobb (Alex Haw). In Memento (2000), the non-linear narrative functions to place the audience in the shoes of Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), a man with no short-term memory who seeks vengeance for the rape and murder of his wife. Likewise, in Insomnia (2002), Detective Dormers (Al Pacino) own actions are the result of a traumatic event that subtly disrupts the linear chronological order of the film from the outset. Elsewhere, Nolans turn to the superhero film with Batman Begins (2005) and its sequels, The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), places an emphasis on Bruce Waynes (Christian Bale) childhood and in doing so proves to be fertile ground for the exploration of the characters traumatic past via flashbacks and other temporal slippages. As with a number of other films directed by Nolan including Memento and Insomnia, in The Prestige (2006) and later Inception (2010), it is principally a woman, or more precisely the death of a woman, that fractures the narrative structure and provides an insight into how trauma is manifested in these films. This trend continues in Interstellar (2014) although, in this instance, allusions to the death of Coopers (Matthew McConaughey) wife serve as the necessary backdrop for exploring his strained relationship with his children whom he is forced to abandon in a story that involves actual time-travel. Finally, in Dunkirk, it is the trauma of battle that underpins the fragmented narrative of a group of soldiers desperately trying to flee the beaches of Northern France amid the Second World War.

The way that trauma is handled in these films corresponds to widely agreed-upon definitions of trauma as an overwhelming response to an unexpected event that can be neither fully understood nor fully assimilated but rather acquires significance after the fact in its repetition (Caruth 1996: 4). This emphasis places these films at the intersection between cinema and psychoanalysis and so my principle focus in this book is how Nolan attempts to represent trauma and how the spectator encounters it primarily in relation to a psychoanalytical framework. Indeed, it seems to me that it is important to move beyond an understanding of these films as being a simple way of attempting to represent trauma and consider instead how trauma is vicariously experienced that is, how Nolans films speak to the spectator. Before proceeding any further, then, it is worthwhile at this stage to qualify my own engagement with trauma. While much of what I go on to discuss involves identifying a signifier for the experience of trauma whether that be Cobbs (Leonardo DiCaprio) involvement in his wifes death in Inception or Coopers attempts to alleviate the guilt attached to his choice to abandon his children in Interstellar I am less interested in the individual event than I am in suggesting that the pathology of the traumatic experience should not be defined by the event itself or the distortion of that event, but rather by the structure of the experience. In the context of Nolans films, this experience is evident not only in terms of form and content through a series of visual and narrative repetitions but also through the spectators engagement with each of his films. I am arguing that Nolans films not only contain attempts to represent traumatic events, but also that our experience of these films means that they can be understood as a distinct form of trauma cinema.