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.

The Nature of Truth and Identity

 In the film The Prestige, the very nature of truth and identity are playfully toyed with at the expense of the audience for the direct purpose of demonstrating the complicated nature which both of these concepts entail. Who both of the main characters are is a question that is constantly thrown into question until the very end. At the very beginning, however, the watcher is instructed indirectly by Cutter through his dialogue with Borden’s daughter when he tells her to “Watch closely”. As Descartes points out throughout his Mediations, the senses can deceive and are not completely reliable for the discovery of the true nature of the world.

            In his Disappearing Man illusion, Borden uses his twin brother to deceive the audience into believing that he has defied physics and been transported through space and time to another location on the other side of the stage. As Locke states in “Of Identity and Diversity”, two things cannot be in the same place at once and it follows then that one thing cannot be in two places at once. Throughout the film, Angier is obsessed with discovering the secret of this illusion and is convinced that it cannot be as simple as a double. These magicians exist as a sort of paradox, they are meant to, by definition, conceal the truth from the audience, but they are completely obsessed with knowing the truth themselves. What the truth is, however, is hidden to the point where the audience is forced to question whether or not these magicians even truly know the truth.

            A very cynical world view is expressed twice in the movie that the world is a horrible place. Angier’s double asserts that if everyone knew as much about the world as he did that they would be drunk all the time as well. At the end, while Angier is dying from a gunshot wound inflicted by Borden, he expresses a similar view that the world is a horrible place and that everyone knows it, but it is their job as a magician to attempt to fool them. It is not just that the audience is fooled however; it is that they want to be fooled. The truth is not what they want, because according to Angier they already know it and are constantly engaging in an illusion themselves.

Robert Angier, at the beginning of the movie, seems quite happy with his life until his wife’s untimely death. His very identity is thrown into question at this point. Borden’s identity, however, is kept a mystery throughout the entire film. But are these characters who they pretend to be? Are they who people think they are? Or are they something completely different altogether? Borden states that he and his brother lived only half a life and that this was enough for them, but not enough for their spouses. Although Angier states that the entirety of the world knows that the world is horrid and awful and wish to be deceived, Sarah Borden and Olivia Wenscombe as a case study show that constant deception leads to horrible consequences. Although Angier claims that everyone deceives themselves, when it is someone else doing the deceiving suddenly this does not lead to the result that Angier claims it does. Sarah knows that she is being lied to and is constantly led to question everything about her entire existence because nothing is as it seems on the surface level. Olivia calls Borden cold and it would require a high level of the inhuman quality which she asserts he has to do all of the things that he did.

One is left with the feeling that Borden has really been misunderstood throughout the entirety of the movie and is really the “good guy” but I am forced to question whether or not there is a “good guy” besides possibly Cutter. This one man seems to have knowledge on a par with both Borden and Angier, but keeps his humanity. Cutter, however, is an older man and, as he regularly states, obsession is for the young, implying that he has not always been so. This leads to another slightly deeper question into whether or not it is possible to live a moral life or if it is only possible to live the least immoral life possible. One of the Bordens, at least, is able to get through the obsession of his youth and discover what is important in his life—his daughter. But the questions are left hanging. What defines us? Is it what we do, who we think we are, what people think of us, or something else altogether? What is the truth? Is the truth good, bad, or neither?

Gender and Identity in The Prestige

*The following contains spoilers about the film The Prestige.

The Prestige (2006) is a film that induces the viewer to consider the nature of identity. Throughout the film, the viewer is caught up thinking and wondering about the male characters of the film. Borden and Angier both end up living with a different identity for prolonged periods of time, which creates for the viewer a sense that we can not know the true identity of each of these characters because they're never being truthful with us. This is compounded by the element of performance in the film. Each of these men become actors, and it is unclear when that mask comes off. The employment of audiences, masses of unknown faces, who will never gain an identity and who exist just to support and feed Borden and Angier's own identities serves to further question what identity really is. Every time one of the magicians intrudes on the other's trick, it's as if you're coming out of a haze, finally seeing something solid and real as you recognize a familiar element of each character. This further serves to keep their identities in question. One moment they have the hopes, ambitions, and desires we've come to associate with them, and the next they're a nameless face in the crowd. The understanding of identity portrayed in John Locke's Meditations II is in question here, what identity do these men really have? At the end of the film, however, the illusion dissipates, and we all know and understand the trick. The men are no longer shrouded in mystery, and their identities (even the essential differences that define each of the twins) have become clear to the viewer. We are allowed to go back to our previous understanding of identity, where one man has one consciousness and one history. The requirements for John Locke's concept of identity are satisfied and we're satisfied too, because now we understand it, the secret is lost. "The secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything".

 The women of the film, however, call identity into question in a far more subtle manner. Unlike the men, it is not their goal to deceive or create doubt about their identities. However, the way in which these women were created in the film strips them of any true identity.

Look at the pictures below:
 

They're all the same woman.

I mean, yes, they're different actresses, with slightly different facial features and slightly different hair. But really? They're the same woman.

Each of these women meets and falls in love with one of the main characters. She lives her life being his pretty assistant. She does everything she can to make him happy and support his career, from physically taking care of him, to becoming a sounding board for his obsessive ravings. Eventually, however, each of them falls prey to the man's obsessions. The trick takes priority over their lives, and they become one of the sacrifices the man has to make. The comparison is strikingly clear in the scene where Sarah dies, hanging like a birdcage in the room full of doves. While the women are technically in different situations, their actions, personalities, and eventual fates are virtually indistinguishable from each other. They are defined by their love and dedication to the main character, even their deaths are all about how they affect the magician's identity. Their identity is not distinguishable from each other, nor from their love interest. They become just another part of the magician he is capable of losing when the risks become too great, comparable to Borden's lost fingers.

As the viewer is distracted by the question of identity concerning the magicians, the women represent a different kind of loss of identity. The lack of separate identities for the three women fits in this movie, where there are clones, twins, and doubles all over the place. It makes sense to have these three characters blur the lines of identity, since everyone else is anyway. However, this is not a phenomenon unique to this movie. In fact, female characters are often written as forgettable archetypes in film and literature. If the plot is not directly centered around the woman and her personality, the general consensus seems to be: why giver her one? So my question is, do we believe the filmmakers did it on purpose? Was it purposeful to cast three women who look remarkably similar? Was in on purpose that they wrote their parts so that act, speak, and are broken in the same ways? Was this an intentional choice to make the question of identity pervade the film even further, or was it the product of our society's lack of interest in portraying complex, individual female characters?

The Prestige and Perception

Trompe-l'oeil, a French phrase meaning "deceive the eye," is an art technique which makes a two-dimensional piece appear 3D - it is an optical illusion. Likewise, The Prestige was a trompe-l'oeil which trumped my logic and made me say, 'oi.' Just when I was certain I understood what was happening between the dueling magicians, another complexity would be revealed, and I was left scratching my head. The Prestige in itself is a fulfillment of Mr. Cutter's three necessary stages of a successful magic trick - the pledge, the turn, and the prestige: Angier devotes himself to discovering the secret to Bordon's trick "The Transported Man" and topping it, he discovers a supreme illusion and thinks he's had vengeance, and finally Bordon reveals his true secret.  Though a professional magician, Angier repeatedly falls one step behind Bordon's cunning in a way that echoes the statements made about human perception in René Descartes' Meditations.

During his opening and closing monologue, Mr. Cutter asserts that during an illusion, the audience will think they're mentally searching for the magician's secret, but their unconscious desire to be fooled prohibits them from actually doing so. The repetition of Cutter's philosophy emphasizes its prominence and significance to Angier's desperate and obsessive determination to have vengeance on Bordon, the murderer of his wife. While Angier undeniably desires nothing more than to one-up Bordon, he searches for the secret the wrong way. When Angier and Mr. Cutter begin their attempts to re-create Bordon's "The Transported Man", Angier vehemently protests Mr. Cutter's belief that Bordon uses a double. Mr. Cutter argues that Angier wants the secret to be more complex, but it isn't. His imagination forbids him from accepting Mr. Cutter's (accurate) hypothesis.

Angier's inability to believe that Bordon uses a double affirms Descartes' belief that imagination and sensation can lead accurate perception of reality astray. In Meditations, Descrates describes an encounter with wax - first in its solid form, then as a melted substance. He argues that the human senses will lead him to the false conclusion that these are two different substances, as the melted wax does not feel, look, or smell the way the initial wax did, but that his intuition and mind will lead him to the correct answer. Angier might watch Bordon's trick and think that it's impossible for him to use a double since the man going into the door and coming out of the other door look and sound exactly alike. If Angier were depending on his well-trained magician's mind to determine Bordon's secret, he'd understand as quickly as Mr. Cutter that "The Transported Man" had to rely on a double.

But Angier isn't the only person falling victim to their own, as Descartes would argue, clouded human perception. I fell into the same trap in a very similar way as Angier. I set out to watch The Prestige with my philosophical glasses on: I took notes and concentrated hard. Yet similar to Angier's inability to grasp the secret of "The Transported Man," I found myself over-thinking nearly every move that was made and word that was spoken. I was just as predictable as Mr. Cutter asserted the audience would be - completely unaware of my desire to be fooled. While a few lingering closeups and perplexing flashbacks hinted to Bordon's secret, I didn't realize their significance or meaning until the film was finished. Even Mr. Cutter, who fully understood the folly of human perception, was tripped up once or twice, missing Angier's transformation into Lord Caldlow as well as Bordon's double-life.

The Prestige skillfully intertwines multiple magic tricks into one mind-boggling film - it's like a magical prelude to Inception. When I thought I knew what was going on I really didn't, and when I thought I'd caught up to the plot once again, I discovered I'd been totally oblivious to the complexities of the story. The consolation was that Angier and I went through the same process - both of us searched hard (though not to the same degree - my life's still intact) for what we believed was a hidden truth. Descartes' Meditations gives the two of us the consolation that we're not stupid, we're just falling victim to our sensorial perception of reality: we're trying to understand the wax with our senses rather than with our mind and intuition, which in this event, certainly knows better. Angier seeks tirelessly for the secret to his enemy's great magic trick and just when he believes he's gotten the ultimate revenge and prestige, it's revealed how blind he was. The Prestige questions not how hard, but how closely we'll search for the answers our beings so desperately reach for.

The Transported Hog

This is my fourth time watching the Prestige and, while I don’t pretend to have every single plot twist worked out, the plot twists of this film aren’t what I find most fascinating about the film. What interested me most about this film when I first viewed it originally and still captivates me is the transported man. It is not simply the magic trick of the transported man however; it is the reactions of Angier and Cutter, and the subsequent strife it creates between them.

Angier’s reaction to seeing the illusion is not only to exclaim that it is the greatest magic trick he has ever seen, but also refusal to accept the notion that the trick is preformed using a double as Cutter claims. What interests me most about this continued exchange between two characters is that it is, keeping in mind Lock’s discussion of identity, akin to a conversation between two platonic interlocutors entrenched in debate.

            The first comment that Cutter makes about the Transported man is that it is simple. He informs a flabbergasted Angier, who notes he has just seen the greatest magic trick ever preformed, that the secret of the act requires little more than a stunt double. Angier passionately rejects this claim arguing that the “double” was not just a imposter but indeed Borden himself. The trouble is, Angier also agrees that for him to transport himself is impossible. Here, Angier is pointing out the same argument made by Lock that all the particles of Borden’s matter are identical in both cases, thus negating Cutter’s double theory.

            Seemingly proven wrong, Cutter admits he cannot duplicate the Transported man without a double. Unfortunately for Angier when he acts on this advice, the resulting performance of “The Great Danton” ultimately fails. At this point, Angier goes to find Tessla and figure out what has become his greatest obsession, the mystery of the transported man. As we know, what Angier discovers is that the machine is not only a teleportation device, but in addition to transportation the machine duplicates the subject. In this way, Angier has solved his first problem of understanding how Borden can be in two places at once.

            It is not until much later in the film that Borden’s true secret is revealed however and we finally see that Cutter was right all along. Namely, the trick only required a double. While Fallon was an identical mass of atoms at the time of his conception, we learn that Borden and he were separated by space, which as Lock informs us makes all of the difference. By affirming that the mass of atoms, however identical, are separated by space proves that they are in fact not the same being. While it is true that at the time of Fallon’s genesis both he and Borden were the same mass of atoms, this separation of space affirms that they are not entirely identical.

            What the machine seems to have reproduced, but not duplicated, according to Lock, must have been the soul. This puzzled me for a long while after watching the Prestige. It is the notion that these two men can be the exact same person, but not be bound to the same actions. For example, while it makes little sense that Fallon would be a marionette that simply duplicates Borden’s actions, it does seem plausible that Fallon would be a kind of tabula rasa that simply took Borden’s orders. I thought it was even more likely that he would be, as a complete and exact clone, inclined to the same tendencies and motivations as Borden. This, as we learn by their having truly loved two different women, is not the case and they were indeed, lock would claim, separate souls.

            This is because; more important than the arrangement of atoms, according to Lock what constitutes an Identity is the prolonged contribution of the subject in a life or continued series of events. While Lock had not seen the Prestige he have given us a similar example of a man becoming trapped in his hogs’ body.  He claims that if this were to happen, we would call such a hog by the name of the man who inhabits the animal shell. In the same was, Fallon is addressed as such through out the entire film, he loves a different woman, and has an existence independent of Borden’s: He is a unique soul in another’s body. In this way, Lock finally sheds light my question about the Prestige, and settles the argument between Borden and Cutter simultaneously.  

           

When I watched the film this time, however, another question arose: Is the Angier we meet at the beginning of the film the same one who we see in the last scene of the film? I don’t know that this was intended to be ambiguous, however, it is still unclear to me. At the end of the film, Angier exclaims that he never knew weather he was going to be the one in the box at the end of the night, and indeed in some instances he seems to imply that he was. However, since we know that they used the same duplication method as Borden and Borden was not the same identity as his duplicate, is it possible for this Angier to be the same one as the one we saw at the beginning of the film, considering of course that the Angier who went through the trap door was random? Is this a plot hole, or has someone else figured it out?

WEEK ONE: Mind and Metaphysics

The theme for the first week of our Philosophy and Film class is "Mind and Metaphysics." Unfortunately, the so-called "ice storm" has prevented us from meeting together this week but, fortunately, we have this blog to mitigate that.  Each of you will choose from the list of films provided this week to post your own treatment of questions/issues in metaphysics or the Philosophy of Mind, but I wanted to start things off with a few general remarks about those fields of philosophical inquiry and, in particular, their relationship to our "primary" film for this week, The Presitge (2006), directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson. 

Metaphysics, along with epistemology and ethics, is one of the foundational areas of philosophical inquiry.  That said, "metaphysics" as a field of philosophical inquiry is notoriously hard to define.  This is because, among other reasons, the scope of metaphysical inquiry is immense.  Metaphysics primarily concerns itself with the nature of being and the world.  It investigates the categories by which we understand existence, reality, and objects, as well as the properties-- like space, time, cause and effect-- by which we understand our experience of existence, reality and objects.  Because the constitution and resolution of all metaphysical questions requires thinking, the Philosophy of Mind is an appropriate correlate, as the primary concerns of that field are the nature of the mind, mental properties and functions, consciousness and the relationship of all of these to our physical bodies.  So, with "mind and metaphysics," we set before ourselves the project of considering the entire array of questions that address both being and thinking.  A formidable project, indeed.

I chose Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige to begin our course because the quite remarkable story depicted in it is driven in large part by two phenomena that stymie the human mind's ability to understand reality.  Those two phenomena, which are so similar in our experience as to be often indistinguishable, are magic and miracles.  Here is the trailer for the film:



Because of the nature of the "illusion" featured in The Prestige, there are a lot of interesting questions raised regarding the uniqueness and persistence of personal identity, the relationship of mind and body, our perception of "reality," space and time... not to mention also what can be known and what should be doubted.  Every illusion, we are told, has three parts: first, there is the setup, or the "pledge," in which the illusionist shows us something that appears ordinary but is probably not, making use of misdirection. (Example: a magician shows a dove.) Second, there is the performance or the trick, known as the "turn," in which the magician makes the ordinary extraordinary. (The bird disappears.) Lastly, there is the "prestige," in which the effect of the illusion is produced. (The bird reappears.)  The central idea driving this film is that every illusion needs its third part, the prestige. No one claps when a magician makes a bird disappear because, as the film suggests, it isn't enough just to make something disappear. You have to make it come back again. The "prestige" is what makes we spectators wonder to ourselves: how did he do that? was that a magic "trick"? or was it "really" miraculous?

Of course, we all know that the illusion that we experience in a magic trick is not "real"-- that is, whatever it is we perceive to have occurred is contrary to what really occurred and, quite often, could not have occurred in reality.  However, our experience of the illusion is real, our perception of the illusion is real, even if what we experienced or perceived did not really happen as we experienced or perceived it.  If what we experienced/perceived in a magic trick were really what happened, it wouldn't be an illusion or a magic trick, it would be a miracle.  What the good magician or the good illusionist aims to accomplish is the production of a perfect simulation of reality, such that the spectator is forced to really wonder whether what s/he saw was real or not.

The difference between the experience of a perfect simulation, on the one hand, and the experience of the experience of a perfect simulation, on the other hand, poses interesting questions for both metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind.  It highlights something structurally similar to the difference between the experience of "magic" (with an understanding here that "magic" is really illusion and trickery) and the experience of a "miracle." A perfect magic trick aims to entirely veil the part of it that is a "trick," to produce the illusion of not being an illusion, and thus to make its appearance in our experience appear as a miracle. (Material objects don't just disappear and reappear with an 'abracadabra' and a wave of a wand! You can't saw a woman in half and then put her back together! Natural laws cannot be suspended! It must be a miracle!) If we ever really had the experience of a perfect magic trick, one that perfectly masked its illusion, we would, in effect, have had the experience of a miracle. But, in fact, when we watch a magician do his trick, even if he is very, very good at it, we are experiencing it as an illusion, as a trick, as a simulation of something miraculous. That is why we can give an account of our experience of it as magic, and not miracle. Compare that to the experience of watching a young child in his or her first encounter with a really good magician. The child experiences the trick as real; in fact, the child does not experience it as a "trick." We adults, looking on and knowing that there is no such thing as "real" magic, can observe the total assimilation of reality and illusion that the child is experiencing, but neither we nor the child are in fact having the experience of a "perfect illusion."  The phenomenon highlighted in the title of Nolan's film, the "prestige," is the production of an illusion, which is a phenomenon that stymies understanding and compels us to ask ourselves profound questions about mind and metaphysics. 

Now, for some people (like Hugh Jackman's character in the film) the prestige produces not only wonder, but also madness. Like Jackman's character, most of us want to "figure it out" when what appear to be illusions are presented to us in experience-- or we want, at the very least, to believe that it can be figured out--and, if we are conscientious and reflective, leaving the illusion as a "mystery" seems unacceptable.  Quite often, the unexplained (or inexplicable) nags and irritates and drives us obsessively toward demystifying the mystery, that is, reconciling it with standard categories of human understanding.  As we can see in the essays by Descartes, Locke and Hume this week, our standard categories of understanding are more or less capable of accommodating mis-perceptions, illusions, simulations, mirages and trickery.  What they are unable to accommodate are miracles, which upset everything we think we know about reality and our own minds.

I'd like to suggest, at the outset of our semester, that we consider the possibility that philosophers in particular need the "prestige."  Perhaps what Philosophy "does" is the prestige, the presentation of the illusion that something-- perhaps everything-- can be known.  And, perhaps, cinema does the same.