Aren't you worried he'll steal your tricks?
The Prestige, (2006): written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, directed by Christopher Nolan.
The point of this film is the twist, so if you haven’t seen it and might want to, don’t read any further. It would ruin the whole thing for you and I’m just too nice to allow that to happen.
Perhaps, if you’re going to have to have a sibling, an identical twin would be the best sort to choose. A sibling that is exactly the same as you and arrives at almost exactly the same time (though the question of who’s oldest is nonetheless important for many twins) might minimise the horror of the fact that you can be replaced. To a child the sibling means the end of uniqueness, the possibility of being loved less or not at all, being succeeded and even usurped. If they have another one like me, will they still want me? Indeed, who is me if there is another one? The sibling, real or fantasised, brings the critical experience of loss – loss of an original sense of self that is, hopefully, then followed by a conviction in the self that cannot be threatened by the existence or proximity of others. In psychoanalysis loss is always the shorthand for death, or vice versa; and in this sense the identical twin, in fantasy, is the denial of death.
In Juliet Mitchell’s book Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, October 2003), which offers a Freudian model that recognises the role of siblings as well as of parents, she draws out a connection between our sibling relationships and the most fundamental human drives – love, fear, violence. All children, she argues, fear to be ‘dethroned’ by a successor, whether or not that successor appears; the resolution of sibling relationships, even where the sibling is only a possibility, means a tangling with love and hate, through rivalry, competition and identification, that determines our relationship to peers and to otherness that we carry with us through our adult lives. This is in distinction to the vertical and hierarchical relationships we establish with our parents. The brother or sister is both similar to and different from us. With our brothers and sisters we can experience, even at the same time, the ‘ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself’ and the trauma of being destroyed by a usurper.
Mitchell argues that a failure to resolve this intense entanglement results in adult hysteria that can be characterised, among many other things, as a mode relying heavily on masquerade. It’s an interesting landscape within which to view The Prestige, a film that revolves around sibling relationships and lifelong masquerades.
The two central relationships of the film are between identical twins, Alfred Bordman and Bernard Fallon (Christian Bale), a relationship that is itself only revealed at the plot denouement, and between their shared identity as Bordman and the hated rival Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). Bordman and Angier compete for everything that is important to them: love, success, recognition, superior creativity. In contrast, the twins use two masqueraded identities, as the illusionist and his ingeneur, to share the success and the sex life of one man. They refuse, in other words, their difference; their otherness is sent outside the relationship. This refusal of the death of the unique self, the denial of the possibility of losing love, identity – the only child’s refusal – is destroyed by the literal death of one of them. Only by the destruction of one sibling do they become two brothers, where before they occupied the same space.
The otherness of the sibling that is deposited outside this fantasy twin relationship is played out here in the relationship between Bordman and Angier. Theirs is a connection dominated entirely by competition, jealousy, violent destruction and theft; and, more than that, the deep and frightening sense that the existence of the other threatens and destabilises the whole self. This is the sibling problem in melodramatic, grotesque form: the rival must not only be overcome but subjugated, destroyed and all he has must be taken (back).
Angier too is a created self intended to allow more possibility than can be incorporated in one identity but without the threat of relationship with another. It is because the existence of the brother/rival Bordman is so unacceptable that Lord Caldlow has to recreate himself as Angier to compete with and ultimately replace him. Caldlow’s is the fantasy that if we can emulate our siblings well enough we can replace and eradicate them – the violent fantasy underlying adoration of the brother or sister. His denial of the sibling is if anything more extreme than Bordman’s; he manages to create not an identical twin but a clone, he manages to replicate himself and eradicate all difference. It is a fantasy that ultimately turns inward as the distinctions between these real and fantasised identities collapses and he is caught in a perpetual cycle of fratricide and suicide.
For both Angier and Bordman the refusal to resolve the sibling relationship causes a crisis of selfhood. It precludes the acceptance of the true position of the self as being one among others. The film’s central metaphor is the trick and for both of them the real trick is sleight of hand about one’s own sameness/difference – a trick that cannot finally stave off, and indeed precipitates, self destruction.
The sibling is necessary to our progress as individuals. Neither Angier nor Bordman would succeed without the other; each is driven by the existence of the other but also but also enabled by his own narcissistic creation of an identical self. The Prestige is a film about failing to accept the existence of the other, about how this can drive great success and achievement through hysterical denial; and about the impossibility of this as an attempt to deny the principle of death. But it also holds up to us the possible truths that could underlie our own apparently helpful ambitions, identifications and friendships. For Bordman and Angier the hysterical muddle becomes so severe that there is no clear separation between the death of the brother and the death of the self; between suicide and the murder of a clone. The sibling relationship drives endlessly our articulations of the question ‘who am I? And who are you?’
Juliet says: The resolution of fraternal love and hate would seem to underlie whom we may and may not kill.
The point of this film is the twist, so if you haven’t seen it and might want to, don’t read any further. It would ruin the whole thing for you and I’m just too nice to allow that to happen.
Perhaps, if you’re going to have to have a sibling, an identical twin would be the best sort to choose. A sibling that is exactly the same as you and arrives at almost exactly the same time (though the question of who’s oldest is nonetheless important for many twins) might minimise the horror of the fact that you can be replaced. To a child the sibling means the end of uniqueness, the possibility of being loved less or not at all, being succeeded and even usurped. If they have another one like me, will they still want me? Indeed, who is me if there is another one? The sibling, real or fantasised, brings the critical experience of loss – loss of an original sense of self that is, hopefully, then followed by a conviction in the self that cannot be threatened by the existence or proximity of others. In psychoanalysis loss is always the shorthand for death, or vice versa; and in this sense the identical twin, in fantasy, is the denial of death.
In Juliet Mitchell’s book Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, October 2003), which offers a Freudian model that recognises the role of siblings as well as of parents, she draws out a connection between our sibling relationships and the most fundamental human drives – love, fear, violence. All children, she argues, fear to be ‘dethroned’ by a successor, whether or not that successor appears; the resolution of sibling relationships, even where the sibling is only a possibility, means a tangling with love and hate, through rivalry, competition and identification, that determines our relationship to peers and to otherness that we carry with us through our adult lives. This is in distinction to the vertical and hierarchical relationships we establish with our parents. The brother or sister is both similar to and different from us. With our brothers and sisters we can experience, even at the same time, the ‘ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself’ and the trauma of being destroyed by a usurper.
Mitchell argues that a failure to resolve this intense entanglement results in adult hysteria that can be characterised, among many other things, as a mode relying heavily on masquerade. It’s an interesting landscape within which to view The Prestige, a film that revolves around sibling relationships and lifelong masquerades.
The two central relationships of the film are between identical twins, Alfred Bordman and Bernard Fallon (Christian Bale), a relationship that is itself only revealed at the plot denouement, and between their shared identity as Bordman and the hated rival Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). Bordman and Angier compete for everything that is important to them: love, success, recognition, superior creativity. In contrast, the twins use two masqueraded identities, as the illusionist and his ingeneur, to share the success and the sex life of one man. They refuse, in other words, their difference; their otherness is sent outside the relationship. This refusal of the death of the unique self, the denial of the possibility of losing love, identity – the only child’s refusal – is destroyed by the literal death of one of them. Only by the destruction of one sibling do they become two brothers, where before they occupied the same space.
The otherness of the sibling that is deposited outside this fantasy twin relationship is played out here in the relationship between Bordman and Angier. Theirs is a connection dominated entirely by competition, jealousy, violent destruction and theft; and, more than that, the deep and frightening sense that the existence of the other threatens and destabilises the whole self. This is the sibling problem in melodramatic, grotesque form: the rival must not only be overcome but subjugated, destroyed and all he has must be taken (back).
Angier too is a created self intended to allow more possibility than can be incorporated in one identity but without the threat of relationship with another. It is because the existence of the brother/rival Bordman is so unacceptable that Lord Caldlow has to recreate himself as Angier to compete with and ultimately replace him. Caldlow’s is the fantasy that if we can emulate our siblings well enough we can replace and eradicate them – the violent fantasy underlying adoration of the brother or sister. His denial of the sibling is if anything more extreme than Bordman’s; he manages to create not an identical twin but a clone, he manages to replicate himself and eradicate all difference. It is a fantasy that ultimately turns inward as the distinctions between these real and fantasised identities collapses and he is caught in a perpetual cycle of fratricide and suicide.
For both Angier and Bordman the refusal to resolve the sibling relationship causes a crisis of selfhood. It precludes the acceptance of the true position of the self as being one among others. The film’s central metaphor is the trick and for both of them the real trick is sleight of hand about one’s own sameness/difference – a trick that cannot finally stave off, and indeed precipitates, self destruction.
The sibling is necessary to our progress as individuals. Neither Angier nor Bordman would succeed without the other; each is driven by the existence of the other but also but also enabled by his own narcissistic creation of an identical self. The Prestige is a film about failing to accept the existence of the other, about how this can drive great success and achievement through hysterical denial; and about the impossibility of this as an attempt to deny the principle of death. But it also holds up to us the possible truths that could underlie our own apparently helpful ambitions, identifications and friendships. For Bordman and Angier the hysterical muddle becomes so severe that there is no clear separation between the death of the brother and the death of the self; between suicide and the murder of a clone. The sibling relationship drives endlessly our articulations of the question ‘who am I? And who are you?’
Juliet says: The resolution of fraternal love and hate would seem to underlie whom we may and may not kill.
posted by Ask my Animus at 11:49 AM
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