Christopher Nolan: King of the Mind Fucks

For those of you living in a cave this summer, Christopher Nolan is the director of one the year’s big hits, Inception. To say that this movie messes with your mind and makes you think would be an understatement. Besides the visually stunning look of the film, the plot and the ending are what really define this as a mind fuck.

The plot of the movie revolves around Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), a man who infiltrates people’s dreams in order to steal their secrets. He has a team of course but they aren’t really the main focal point of this movie. Cobb is on the run from the authorities in the United States. That is until Saito (Ken Watanabe) comes to him and asks him to perform inception on a business rival. Inception is the act of planting an idea instead of stealing it. Cobb agrees to do this on the condition that Saito fix his situation so that he can go home and see his children. The other big thing in this movie is that it is made clear that the dream world is so real that the people that enter the dreams sometimes have a hard time realizing that they are in a dream. For that problem they have totems, which is some object that only they know the special features of and when they hold it they will know if they are in the real world or dream world. Cobb’s totem is a top that when he is in the dream world will never topple. So at the end of the movie he ends up being able to go home and see his children. So just to make sure he spins the top and it spins and spins until he finally sees his children. We never see the top topple but you do hear it waver a bit so the question is “is he in a dream or not?” and that’s where the mind fuck comes in.

Nolan has made a career of these types of movies as well. The biggest two being Memento and The Prestige.
In Memento the movie revolves around a man who has short term memory loss that is so bad that every morning that he wakes up he forgets everything that happened the day before. The worst part for him is that he is trying to solve his wife’s murder so every time he learns some new information he has it tattooed on his body. What is really unique about this movie though is that it starts at the end and moves its way to the beginning. It makes it so we are learning how the mystery unfolds in the same way as the main character. It’s a very interesting style and it certainly screws with your mind especially when he finds out the awful truth that he is the one that killed his wife.

The Prestige is one of my favorite films and it revolves around two magicians in Victoria England. They are played brilliantly by Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman. In the story Hugh and Christian’s character start off as friends and rivals at the same time, Christian is the technically better magician but Hugh is the better showman. They continually compete with one another until Christian does a magnificent trick that involves him practically being in two different places at the same time. The trick confuses Hugh as he works tirelessly to figure out how he does it and to steal it. Eventually he finds himself going to America to visit with Nikola Tesla because he believes Christian did the same thing. While there he figures out that by using Tesla’s equipment that he can make a clone of himself and pull off an even better trick. So he goes back to England and Christian becomes jealous of him and ends up getting blamed for his death after he is caught below the stage with Hugh in a filled water tank drowned. Christian ends up being convicted and executed for his crime. Hugh finally shows himself and is then actually killed by Christian’s assistant. What we later find out though is that the bearded assistant was actually a twin of Christian’s character and that they had been working together the entire time.

Nolan has other films as well but I really think these three exemplify what he does best as far as plot twists and making us think. So when it is all said and done the art of the mind fuck is a very subtle art that keeps people talking for a long time after seeing a movie or reading a book.