B0041VYHGW EBOK (124 page)

Providence
and
The Conversation
show that distinguishing different types of sound can help us analyze filmmakers’ creative choices. They and other examples also suggest that our categories correspond fairly well to how viewers understand what they hear. We tacitly learn to distinguish between diegetic and nondiegetic, internal and external, simultaneous and nonsimultaneous sound. We’re surprised or amused or puzzled when a sound crosses these boundaries. Because the distinctions more or less tally with our assumptions, the sound bumps in
Providence, The Conversation,
and many other films can undermine our expectations, creating suspense or surprise or ambiguity. The categories we’ve reviewed point to ways in which sound, often without our awareness, shapes our experience of a film.

In London around 1900, two magicians are locked in desperate competition, each trying for ever more baffling illusions. As they deceive each other and their audiences, the film tries to deceive us as well.

A story of crime, professional rivalry, personal jealousy, and grand aspirations,
The Prestige
sets itself a difficult task. The film seeks to be as tantalizing as a magic trick, but one that can eventually be explained. As a result, director Christopher Nolan and his screenwriter (and brother) Jonathan Nolan have the job of both revealing and concealing. The film must present us just enough of the story to keep us engaged, while holding back the answers to the puzzles—and sometimes, like a magician, distracting us from what is really going on. Throughout
The Prestige,
sound takes part in an elaborate choreography of misdirection.

The conflict between the eager Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and the more sinister Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) begins when both are apprentice magicians. Robert’s wife, Julia, dies in an immersion tank as a result of Borden’s faulty rope-knot. As the two men grow in fame, their feud escalates. Robert shoots off two of Alfred’s fingers in a botched “bullet catch.” In response, Alfred sabotages one of Robert’s illusions. Then Alfred mounts an amazing trick, the Transported Man: Alfred seems to disappear from one end of the stage and reappear instantly at the other. Vowing to surpass him, Robert finds a double of himself and creates a similar illusion. But Alfred unmasks the stunt, breaking Robert’s leg and humiliating him before his audience.

Robert vows to find the secret behind Alfred’s Transported Man. After consulting with Nicola Tesla, the great experimenter with electricity, Robert returns to London with a stunning illusion. He stands onstage in a crackling field of lightning bolts and disappears, reappearing a few seconds later in the balcony. Alfred, usually quick to unravel a trick, is baffled. He resigns himself to quitting the trade. Nonetheless, he shows up in disguise at one of Robert’s performances and penetrates the area below stage. At the climax of the trick, Alfred sees Robert fall through a trapdoor into a tank of water below. He watches Robert drown. Alfred is arrested for murder and condemned to death.

At the climax of the film, the original Transported Man illusion is revealed as a simple trick: There are two Bordens, identical twins. At any moment, one takes the Alfred identity, while the other is disguised as Fallon, Alfred’s designer of illusions (
ingénieur
). So when Alfred seems to change his mind about quitting magic, in fact one Borden twin does quit; but the other obstinately attends Robert’s performance. As a result, while one Alfred is hanged, the other can stalk Robert for a final act of vengeance.

Somewhat earlier, and more gradually, we learn that Robert’s version of the Transported Man is no illusion. Tesla has created a cloning machine, which makes an identical copy of Robert and deposits that at some distance from the original. At every performance, one Robert falls through the trapdoor and into a waiting tank, where he drowns. The reconstituted Robert, projected elsewhere in the theater, takes the crowd’s applause—only to be sacrificed under the stage the following night.

The rising conflict between Robert and Alfred reveals contrasting aspects of each man’s personality. Robert is a smooth showman, one whose highest goal is to amaze an audience. Alfred, less concerned with ornate effects, builds his original Transported Man illusion out of two simple doors and a child’s red ball. He believes that a magician has a duty to come up with the most mind-bending trick possible, one that will puzzle not just the public but other professionals. To achieve that, the magician should be prepared to “live his act,” to give up a full personal life if that helps him purify his art. So when one Borden brother loses two fingers to the bullet catch, the other must slice off his own to allow them to continue their charade.

Gradually, the personalities of Robert and Alfred move closer together, and our sympathies shift. At first Robert’s love of magic is sensibly balanced by his love for Julia. Her death increases our sense that Alfred is treacherous and Robert a victim. But as Robert launches an all-out effort to destroy his rival, he comes to seem possessed. Both Tesla and Robert’s
ingénieur
Cutter warn him that he is becoming obsessive. At the other pole, one of the Borden twins falls in love with Sarah, a young governess. He risks giving his secret away in order to have something like a normal life with her and their daughter Jess. The other, more cynical twin takes up an affair with Olivia, who becomes the act’s assistant. The price of finding a woman to love is that sometimes one twin must stand in for the other. These substitutions create emotional discontinuities that each woman detects. To the art of magic, the two Alfreds sacrifice not only themselves but also their loved ones.

The basic story of
The Prestige
is complicated, but it could have been presented in linear order, letting us in on secrets behind the illusions. The plot might have made Robert the protagonist, withholding the information about Albert’s personal and professional life that Robert never learns. Alternatively, the plot could have stuck to Borden’s range of knowledge and shown the twins pulling off their stratagems. (David Cronenberg’s
Dead Ringers
provides a rough example.) Instead,
The Prestige
wants to mystify us as much as the illusions mystify the magicians and their audiences. The competing magicians are driven by curiosity about how the tricks are done, and this curiosity is central to our experience as well.

Accordingly, the story is presented via unrestricted narration, but it is manipulated through many techniques of plot construction. The plot shuffles story order, plays with levels of knowledge, replays some scenes, and cuts off others, withholding their consequences. All these tactics do not confuse us about the basic story progression, however. They arouse curiosity (what has led up to this turn of events?) and suspense (what will happen next?). At the same time, the plot maneuvers misdirect our attention, suppressing key information about the magicians’ secrets.

The overall dramatic progression is framed by present-time action, that of the climactic performance of Robert’s Tesla-driven illusion. This stage spectacle leads to one of the Borden twins being arrested, condemned, and hanged, while the other faces Robert one last time. Most of the plot consists of layered flashbacks showing different stages of the two men’s struggle. Our understanding is eased by the fact that most of the story strands are presented chronologically, as in
Citizen Kane
(
pp. 107
–109). In addition, the basic conflict is maintained through familiar means—scenes of confrontation, or backstage plotting, or confidences shared between the protagonists and their families and friends. Occasionally, there are personalized flashbacks illustrating what a character is recalling, as when in prison Alfred remembers his romance with Sarah. And when the second Alfred confronts Robert at the climax, more impersonal flashbacks show us what was really happening in scenes we thought we understood earlier.

Along with visual techniques, sound choices help smooth our understanding of the ongoing action. Characters are differentiated through their voices, especially the contrast between Alfred’s London working-class accent and Robert’s American accent (which turns out to be fake). A sketchy piano motif in the score is associated with Alfred’s life with his wife and child. Each locale has its characteristic ambience—the prison with distant scuffling and slamming, the less cavernous echo of the warehouse that becomes Robert’s workshop, the warmer sound of the theaters, the crunching snow surrounding Tesla’s compound in Colorado.

The sound track is often expressive as well. David Julyan’s score consists largely of prolonged notes shifting slightly up or down the scale, creating a moody, layered drone. Julyan leads into Robert’s Real Transported Man by layering string chords and soft booms reminiscent of Tesla’s lab. The score even makes use of an electronically generated Shepard tone, which creates an illusory sense of continually rising or falling pitch. The danger inherent in the giant Tesla coils is conveyed through brittle, harsh crackling that often cuts off menacingly, as if it had atomized its target. Indeed, from the very start, abrupt silences jolt the viewer into paying attention to the imagery.

As in most modern films, sound plays an important role in linking scenes. A sustained musical chord links a shot of Robert looking out of his coach with a shot of him already striding along the ground. There are many sound bridges as well. At the close of one performance, we hear Alfred saying, “He’s complacent, he’s predictable,” and this carries us to the next scene, in which he continues to complain about the magician who employs the two men. Robert is musing on a name for his act, and we hear him ask, “How about the New Transported Man?” as crowds arrive to see his show.

Nolan and Nolan also employ the
dialogue hook,
the technique of ending a scene with a line that prepares for the next scene. (This isn’t a sound bridge, because the line is completed in the initial scene.) A simple instance occurs when Tesla asks Robert, “Have you eaten, Mr. Angier?” Cut to the two men at lunch. More dramatically, at a Colorado Springs hotel, the clerk remarks that Tesla has left a box for Robert. Robert: “What box?” Cut to the crate in the hotel ballroom. Dialogue hooks propel the story briskly and can call the viewer’s attention to salient aspects of the scene to come, as the box example does.

Naturally, dialogue can mislead as well. Olivia, Robert’s spy in his rival’s camp, assures him that Alfred doesn’t use a double because the man onstage is lacking two fingers; we later learn that one Alfred cut off his fingers so the two would continue to be identical. In retrospect, many lines prove to have hinted at the Borden twins’ secret. In a quarrel with Olivia, Alfred says, “part of me” had a child with Sarah but “part of me” didn’t, “the part that found you, the part that’s sitting here right now.” At the prison, bidding farewell to Fallon (his disguised twin), Alfred refers to the other’s urge to quit. “You were right. I should have left him to his damn trick…. You go live your life in full now.” Robert’s own cloning stratagem is predicted when he tries to hire a double: “I don’t need him to be my brother. I need him to be me.” Few films contain so many lines of dialogue that can be understood in two equally valid ways.

Parallelism, a common narrative strategy, is important for advancing the film’s action, tracing character development, and maintaining the mysteries.
The Prestige
is based on parallels: two magicians, each with a double and an
ingénieur.
Each magician wounds his counterpart, and each falls in love with a woman but loses her. Other parallels depend on the show business milieu. Acts are rehearsed and reperformed, each time with variations, as when Robert’s double becomes more drunk and heedless. The stage trapdoors that we see so often point toward the gallows trapdoor that will end the life of the brusque Borden twin. Julia’s drowning in the tank onstage is mirrored in Robert’s drowning below stage, and the motif recurs up to the very last image
(
7.57
–
7.59
).