Jeremy’s Tophunder №12: The Prestige

10 min readMay 20, 2020

“Are you watching closely?”

Christian Bale’s opening line over the movie hangs for about two hours, and then it suddenly becomes apparent why in the movie’s final 10 minutes.

Every time I re-watch The Prestige, something new occurs to me. For a while, I thought it was merely a very good movie, written and directed by one of the best writers and best directors currently working. But over my last few viewings, I’ve started to think that there’s something else going on, but I just can’t quite place my finger on it yet.

If you haven’t seen The Prestige, I’m going to spoil the bajeezus out of it over the next few minutes, so I’d recommend that you stop reading here if you haven’t seen it. Speaking of which, go watch it. It’s an amazing movie, and it’s only a $4 rental on Amazon. I mean, what else were you planning on doing tonight?

Before I dive into the shit that we all missed the first time around, let’s just agree on a bare-bones plot:

Two magicians, Robert Angier (played by Wolverine) and Alfred Borden (played by Batman), develop an intense rivalry after a mistake Borden makes accidentally results in the death of Angier’s wife. Angier seeks revenge, and the two magicians alternate sabotaging the other’s career, stealing each other’s illusions, and generally just messing with each other in progressively more and more sadistic ways. Angier, desperate to learn Borden’s method of performing a trick where he seemingly teleports across stage, first hires a look-alike, but when that proves unsatisfying, he steals Borden’s diary. The diary leads him to America and inventor Nikola Tesla, which at first appears to be a red herring, but Tesla is able to build Angier a machine that allows him to clone himself and perform a better version of Borden’s illusion. In his final act of revenge, Angier uses his cloning machine to fake his own death and frame Borden for his murder. Following Borden’s execution, Angier hides the cloning machine, only for Borden to arrive to kill him, explaining that who we thought was Borden’s assistant had actually been his twin brother all along.

Are we all good with that? I feel like that’s most of the broad strokes without diving too deep into the nitty-gritty stuff.

Okay, so, what now?

I just can’t help shake the idea that there is some much, much deeper stuff going on. Other than his work on the Batman trilogy, Christopher Nolan has never made a straightforward movie (and even some of the stuff from Batman is open to interpretation). Specifically, he is known for intentionally limiting the amount of information given to the audience, and for leaving endings partially or wholly ambiguous. This started all the way back in 2001 with Memento, and continued to some degree or another in all of his non-Batman films. The Prestige seems to fit that mold. Key components of the plot are obscured for most of the movie — they’re hinted at, but never in an obvious way. But the part that bugs me is how nice and tightly everything is wrapped up at the end. Angier’s deception is revealed to Borden, Borden’s deception is revealed to Angier, and both of them are revealed to the audience. It might take 2 or 3 viewings, but an attentive viewer can really get a complete grasp on the plot.

That’s what makes me think there’s something deeper. That’s what makes me think that Bale’s opening line, “Are you watching closely?” is more than just a hook for the movie, it’s an invitation to try to parse out even more detail.

Michael Caine’s opening monologue that immediately follows Bale’s opening line reads as follows. I’ve emphasized a few lines:

Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge.” The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird, or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course…it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn.” The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now, you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.

Here’s where my mind goes with this: In a few of his movies, Christopher Nolan has made meta-references to the filmmaking process. The most apparent example of this is in Inception, where each of the seven central characters have a rather easy allegorical parallel to some part of movie-making. I think that’s what’s going on here. Christopher Nolan is setting up the movie to be a magic trick. First, the filmmaker shows you something ordinary (a movie about magicians). Then, the filmmaker makes that ordinary something extraordinary (the movie about magicians has some cool twists in the story and an extra cool twist ending). But that’s only the first two parts of the trick. You aren’t looking for anything deeper, because you want to be fooled; you want to believe that there’s nothing else to see. But we still haven’t seen The Prestige. THAT’S what the movie is. The Prestige is… The Prestige.

There are people on the internet that have gone way, way, way down this rabbit hole, looking for alternative theories to what’s actually going on in the movie. Most of the theories rely on the inconsistent and unreliable narration. The voice-overs we hear for the first half of the movie are the two magicians reading each other’s diaries. But it becomes clear by about the half-way point that both diaries were given intentionally to the other in an attempt to fuck with their minds. Both of them are driven by an obsessive desire to deceive, and can’t be treated as reliable narrators. There’s no central truth to the movie, and so suddenly, any scene that features just one of the magicians can be spun as exaggeration or outright fabrication.

For instance, one theory advances the idea that the clone machine that Tesla built for Angier never actually cloned anything. Any instance of the machine appearing to work on the screen is simply Angier’s outward duplicity, lying to Borden (and to the viewer) to convince us that something extraordinary is possible. This is even hinted at in the movie. Following Angier’s “death,” Cutter is trying to prevent anyone from buying the machine, saying, “This wasn’t built by a magician. It was built by a wizard. A man who can actually do the things a magician pretends to.” (It’s extraordinary.) The judge replies, “I’m sure beneath its bells and whistles it’s got some simple and disappointing trick.” (It’s ordinary.) Is it possible that the machine just makes a bunch of sparks and lightning, and that’s it? It would possibly provide an explanation for why Angier “duplicated” himself and left one copy to drown every night, instead of just making one copy to perform the illusion over and over again (namely, that no duplication ever took place). It would also explain why the movie appears to take a hard left into science-fiction despite being set in the 1890s (namely, that the machine itself is a fiction). It would also explain why Angier would just leave a hundred dead clones of himself in the basement of an abandoned theater where anybody could theoretically stumble upon them (they weren’t real). Furthermore, it tracks with Angier’s undying obsession to prove to Borden what a great magician he was. What better way than to convince Borden that he learned how to literally clone and teleport himself? It also tracks with Borden’s deception as well — Borden seemed to know that Tesla was a quack, otherwise he wouldn’t have gone to such a great effort to convince Angier to travel to America to find him. AND, obviously, it tracks with Michael Caine’s voice-over. We want to be fooled. We want to believe that a truly magic machine is making clones of Hugh Jackman. But it isn’t. There has to be a much simpler explanation at hand. However, the theory does leave a few holes, notably, if the clone machine never worked, why are there bodies in the water-escape tanks? Did Angier plant dummies in there? Sure, it’s possible, but it makes it seem like a bit of a stretch.

Okay, how about another theory?

There’s the idea that Borden 2, as Fallon (the one that survives in the end), conspired with Angier to frame Borden 1 for Angier’s murder. This theory posits that the surviving Borden was the one that loved Sarah, who ended up committing suicide rather than live with Borden’s inconsistent love (because only one of them loved her). So, while Borden 1 goes crazy trying to figure out how Angier does his trick, Borden 2 fans the flames, saying he has no idea (which might be the case). He goes to Angier as Fallon and they together orchestrate their revenge on Borden 1, both of them blaming him for their loss of the woman they loved, with Borden 2 knowing the truth, and Angier knowing the half-truth. This theory works with either side of the Fake Clone Machine theory, and helps to explain why it was so easy for Angier to make sure Borden was in the right place at the right time to frame him (because Borden 2 would tell Borden 1 when to go backstage). The theory partially falls apart, as it muddies Borden 2’s motivation for killing Angier after the fact (he’s going to team up with him and then murder him?), but it could possibly be explained by simply Borden 2 wanting to tie up loose ends, or exacting his own revenge on Angier for adopting Borden’s daughter.

There are several other theories out there that range from simple and vaguely believable, like Borden never having a twin until Tesla’s machine cloned him, to stuff more convoluted and intricate, like Cutter secretly being the puppet-master, playing Borden and Angier off each other, in the hopes that Angier would end up dead or in prison and Cutter would inherit Angier’s fortune (it’s kind of insane, but there’s a way to thread the needle in a way that makes it plausible). And on top of that there are all the little easter eggs that probably don’t even qualify as alternate theories, they’re probably just the actual truth (like when Borden doesn’t remember which knot he tied on Angier’s wife, it’s because it was the other Borden that tied it).

But, the million dollar question is — do I actually believe any of these theories?

And the answer? I don’t know. Maybe. Which kind of brings us back around to the other side of this coin.

What if the “trick” is just a double-cross? What if The Prestige is that the movie invites us to dive into the subtext, looking for a hidden truth, only for the reality to be there isn’t one? Much in the way that Nolan set up an ending to Inception that basically said (spoiler-free, although I can’t envision a single person anywhere that would read 2000 words on The Prestige that hasn’t also seen Inception, but whatever), “Event X that everyone cares about doesn’t actually matter, because Event Y that nobody seems to care about is happening right there in front of you, but you’re distracted by Event X,” what if The Prestige is saying the same thing — that what we see on the screen is all that matters? Both movies play with the concept of reality vs. something else. Inception uses dreams, The Prestige uses illusions. Both movies are potentially trying to trick us into thinking that the “reality” shown by the movie is, in fact, not real.

It brings me back to Michael Caine’s monologue that bookends the movie: You don’t really want to know, you want to be fooled. It raises the question — who is getting fooled? The people who think the movie is the movie and everything that you need to know is laid out in front of you? Or the people who think that there -has to- be something else under the surface? It potentially creates a permanent loop, in which the trick is that the movie is a trick about the movie being a trick, ad infinitum.

And that kind of brings me full circle. I’m not sure that it matters. I think that any movie that can get people talking with this level of detail 15 years after its release is a masterpiece on some level. Whether or not there’s any hidden meaning is secondary to the fact that the movie opens up those possibilities. There are certainly some theories that I enjoy and believe more than others, but it’s the foundational elements of the movie — deception and smoke and mirrors and unreliable narration — that keep me interested in the movie. A week ago, as I looked ahead to which movies I’d be watching this week, I remember thinking to myself, “man, maybe №12 is too high for The Prestige. I might need to drop that down on my next draft of the list.” But after watching it again and re-familiarizing myself with all of the weird, hair-brained ideas that fans and critics and everyone else have interpreted over the years, I realized once again that this might actually be Christopher Nolan’s best movie, and №12 was the perfect spot on the list for it.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall