Identity and Perception in The Prestige

I had seen The Prestige before it was assigned this week, but I had never re-watched it, and this is certainly a film that demands a re-watch.

I found Renee Descartes’ Second Meditation incredibly relevant to this film. Descartes begins this paper by questioning the nature of reality. What, of what we observe in our world and what of what we posit from these observations can be held as irrefutable fact? Decartes uses this question to argue that the mind is more readily understandable than the body. This must be true because the physical world can only explained “according to the notions that I had then formed of it” (134).

The subordination of physical reality to the fallible perception of the mind is a central them in The Prestige. The magic performed in throughout the movie is, as both the film’s and the act’s audience are aware, only illusion. A particularly philosophically relevant part of the movie is a line spoken by Cutter, which both opens and ends the movie: “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.” Searching for the secret behind the illusion is an admittance of the fallibility of our perception. Our senses were fooled, and this leads to the unsettling realization that physical reality, which strikes as factual is actually a matter of our perception, and, as such, is difficult to know in fact.

As Angier says near the end of the movie, “The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you... then you got to see something really special...” The notion of magic seems like it is the hope or the acceptance that a mysterious and unknowable power works on plane invisible to us, but in a way, the idea of magic is also an undeserved affirmation of our own sensory expertise. In invoking the idea that there is a force beyond our senses, magic is also claiming that our senses are infallible at perceiving what is presented to them. According to this idea, magic is not illusion that capitalizes on our ability to misperceive what is right in front of us, but merely an action that operates on a plane separate from human senses.

The question of identity, especially in terms of our Locke reading, Of Identity and Diversity, also had significant bearing in The Prestige. In the introduction of Of Identity Locke states that it is “impossible for two things of the same kind to be or exist in the same instant, in the very same place; or one and the same thing in different places. All conflict within The Prestige is rooted in a crisis of identity wherein two men occupy a single identity. The Borden brothers live their life as if they were the same man, but the tug of their independent identities tears their life and those of the ones they love apart. Each brother is in love with a different woman, but the inconsistent affections of Alfred Borden lead to the loss of love for each of the brothers. Their effort to present a single identity to the world is the kind of sacrifice Borden repeatedly claims to be the only possible source of any great trick.

In the final iteration of the trick Angier actually clones himself, an act that stresses the notion of identity to its limit. Every performance he is both brought in to the world and taken from it. If we take our brief view of his first experience with the machine, where he shoots his double, then the Angier that drowns is the original one and the Angier that is the Prestige is technically the clone. And yet, he reveals his fear: “Would I be the man in the box or the prestige?” showing us that he acknowledged a difference between the two Angiers, but every night Angier was the Prestige, suggesting that he and his clone were perfectly identical in mind, body, experience, consciousness ( Which, like Descartes, Locke argues that identity is rooted in the consciousness of our being, in fact the tenth section of his essay is tilted “Consciousness makes personal identity” (9-10)). He never recognized himself as the one in the box, although it seems that was almost certainly his original self. At the moment of the act’s crescendo, Angier and his second are almost certainly of the same identity, but every passing second separates them through their experience. If the drowned Angier were allowed to live he would certainly be unable to maintain a shared identity with his twin, experience would change them from each other.