Excerpts
According to Will Lloyd,
The director is a mass entertainer with an elitist disdain for the masses. In his films, order and hierarchy reign supreme.
Nola went to Haileybury College… A prison… though with better hymns, and one where the prisoners eventually graduate as prison guards.” “Survive your first two years at Haileybury,” claimed RAF group captain Peter Townsend, “and you could survive anything.”
Haileybury was a finishing school for a dead Empire.
Nolan never slept well there. This was the early Eighties; he believed the world would soon end in a nuclear holocaust. In the dormitory each evening he would lie in his bed after lights out listening to the scores for Star Wars, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, or Vangelis’s score for Chariots of Fire on his walkman.”
Nolan’s fastidious character hints at a pre-21st century moral seriousness… Nolan believes in deadlines and careful resource allocation. He considers efficiency “a form of control”. No sentiment. No treaties with fashion or whimsy or freedom.
The movie must come in under budget. Decorum must reign. Fiscal responsibility for ever and ever. What happens if the rules disappear? What is the underbelly of realism and rationality? … The opposite of order is anarchy.
Every Christopher Nolan movie is about the torture of a man like Christopher Nolan... Nolan’s heroes are solitary, languid, self-punishing rationalists who must be destroyed before they can be redeemed.
With Oppenheimer, Nolan takes this masochism to a nihilistic new extreme. Oppenheimer’s intellectual adventurousness is accompanied by, or perhaps provokes, his personal licentiousness… He is the only Nolan character to have anything like a sex life. (Nolan frowns upon this.)
Oppenheimer does not sympathise with Oppenheimer. The bomb, his life’s work – which Nolan condemns as a modernist project like those of Freud, or Stravinsky, or Picasso – is a hideous error.
Christopher Nolan is an auteur who claims to be a craftsman, an engineer who despises new technology, a starkly conservative Englishman who lives and works in the most liberal city in the United States. Above all, Nolan is a mass entertainer with an elitist disdain for the masses.
Without rules, human beings are nasty and brutish. This lofty insight leads Nolan to believe that the filmmaker and the audience can never be equally matched.
The reconciliation of brutality and cruelty with order and hierarchy is what Nolan always hopes to achieve. The dormitory room might be bleak, but it will always shelter us. Horror is necessary to prevent greater horror. This is Tory propaganda on the grandest possible scale.
As Michael Caine’s cockney trickster says in The Prestige: “Now you’re looking for the secret. But you won’t find it. Because you don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled.”
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