Alex writes about what makes us all collectively understand and enjoy the work of Christopher Nolan.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n \u201cMurphy’s law doesn’t mean that something bad will happen. It means that whatever can happen, will happen.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n I have spent a lot of time thinking about this quote over the past few months, for reasons only kind of related to my profound level of interest in the movie it is pulled from. Something about the line sticks, because something about the way Christopher Nolan makes films sticks with people like myself. The line itself reads as overly simplistic on paper, but when Matthew McConaughey mumbles it, it somehow becomes the only thing I want to think about. The line is a conscious separation, a move away from the most common perception of a concept that we all understand, but that separation never makes such a large leap that we can\u2019t immediately follow what has changed about it. It\u2019s broad, but it\u2019s likely that broadness that allows Nolan to temporarily become the zeitgeist every two years.<\/p>\n Christopher Nolan is very, very good at making films. Yes, art is subjective and all that other bullshit I say in conversations to try to not sound like an elitist, but this is as close to an inarguable fact that exists in Hollywood. If you didn\u2019t like The Dark Knight, you probably still liked The Prestige, because people who can\u2019t deal with superhero movies enjoy magician movies that are actually secret analyses of the modern media environment. Memento is probably one of the best ten American movies of the new millennium, and one that will not get any less interesting as the years continue to pass. Inception is about as good as big budget filmmaking has the capacity to be. These are all films that I love, and films that I have seen a gratuitous amount of times. I love them, and I have no trouble explaining why when asked, but it seems odd to me that most people feel the same way. Rarely do my tastes align perfectly with that of the crowd\u2019s. I think Nolan\u2019s films are often fascinating and worth thinking about after they end, and they are executed in such a manner that their core ideas are rarely obfuscated by something as boring as an action sequence, but a good execution of good ideas does not necessarily mean a film catches on with the public. If it did, Whiplash would be this year\u2019s biggest box office smash. So there must be something in Nolan\u2019s head that is the secret to blockbuster filmmaking, something the rest of the filmmaking community simply doesn\u2019t have access to (or perhaps chooses to avoid).<\/p>\n Admittedly, not all of Nolan\u2019s movies have been as popular as those featuring Batman, because nothing in cinema is currently more popular than a rich person in a costume. Memento was only a very specific kind of hit, and despite its financial success, nobody ever cared all that much about Insomnia. The Prestige stars Batman and Wolverine, but did not do Batman nor Wolverine numbers. Yet every post-Memento Nolan film has made over $100 million dollars at the box office, and has been equivalently well-reviewed. One can debate which of his films is actually his best, or whether any of them are actually great films, but the popular and critical opinion is always exuberant. He doesn\u2019t seem to leave people non-plussed.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n There are obvious reasons for why Nolan is able to succeed at such a thing, I suppose. He makes more thoughtful versions of dumb things. In his round of recent Interstellar interviews, he has been talking about how he almost feels a sort of responsibility to make his films as big as he can, and sometimes the trickier aspects of his earlier films have to fall by the wayside as a result. More than anything, Nolan wants audiences to be wowed, and this is why he tries to make each of his movies bigger than the last. This tendency leads Steven Soderbergh, who helped Nolan in the door at Warner Brothers, to believe that Nolan will never make a film as small as Memento or The Prestige again. Like all wistfully nostalgic film-lovers, Nolan recalls the feeling of sharing an experience with a room full of strangers, and that\u2019s what he wants to give people each time he convinces somebody to give him $200 million dollars to play with.<\/p>\n In a recent New York Times profile, writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus recounts Nolan talking about what brought him to his love of cinema, and points to a time in his youth when Nolan saw Star Wars and a re-release of 2001: A Space Odyssey within the span of a year. Whether this is being brought up as Nolan\u2019s Interstellar advertising talking point or not, the linking of these films is likely perfect. Both films take place in space. Both films are well made. Both films are entertaining. But each of those films is interesting in its own way: Star Wars was an engaging, linear narrative about a boy growing up to become a savior, made up of all the most crowd-pleasing moments possible. 2001: A Space Odyssey was about a journey into space, but it could also be about four million other things, depending on your perception of Joel McHale lookalike Keir Dullea\u2019s final scene. Put these two films together and you have everything that\u2019s present in Nolan\u2019s career: simultaneous satisfaction and mystification.<\/p>\n In the way Nolan tells his stories, he frequently splits his narratives in two strands (at least), so that he has a way to intercut the narrative in a way that keeps the viewer guessing as to where they really are within the story. Even with Memento, one of his smallest scale films, the story film is built around forward-moving narration scenes and backward-moving details, until they meet in the middle and Joey Pants and Jimmy Grants get shot in the face. Nolan\u2019s Batman films have climaxes that each get progressively more complex as the series continues; in Batman Begins, we get Batman fighting separately from Rachel Dawes and Gordon. By The Dark Knight Rises, there are those kids on the bus, Batman punching Bane, people hiding a nuke, Catwoman freeing cops, and then probably also four other things I forgot amidst the anarchistic chaos. Inception does this too: with its dreamscape\u2019s various levels, we see characters threatened by a gunfight in reality while also trying to incept Cillian Murphy so he accepts a role in Peaky Blinders. As one action sequence is resolved, it\u2019s satisfying, but the fact that there are still two others for the characters to get out of compounds that satisfaction. Nolan lays so many various narrative threads that when they all get tied up, one after another, they form a storytelling climax to pair with the more physical one happening on a mountain in Alberta. He makes complex things seem surprisingly simple; this is why Memento can be enjoyed on one viewing despite the fact that it is borderline impossible to keep track of everything that actually happens. The world of Inception is illogical and complicated, but nobody really had all that much trouble remembering where they were, and if they did, they still understood that they cared about what happened in the final shot. The key events are shown in a way that we remember and follow them, because Nolan knows how to make sure we all see the most important things in his films.<\/p>\n