by Gabriel Tupinambá

Christopher Nolan has done as much as he could to disavowal his own achievements. At least it seems that way, when a great film like The Prestige (2006) gets buried beneath the spectacle of his more recent movies. Both the Batman franchise and the Inception blockbuster describe great smoke labyrinths on the screen, which quickly dissipate given the insipidness of the actual plot and characters. Very much in line with the current trend in Hollywood, Nolan seems to have abided to the idea that making the story more complex means ‘humanizing’ characters and making things less ‘black and white’ - today, it seems, the shades of grey of the ink are more important than what is actually written.

The Prestige, on the other hand, doesn’t fit this model at all: none of the important character traits benefit the characters themselves so much as the plot, which plays with the tenuous symmetry between the two protagonists. Actually, the fact that there are two main characters is one of the possible explanations as to why The Prestige ends up being way too formal for Hollywood’s common standards: defined by their very opposition, the two characters lack psychological depth and must rely on the plot - on what is happening to the other character, that is - to have its own characteristics presented.

Adapted from a book by Christopher Priest, the film tells the story of two rival magicians - Robert Angier (Hugh Jackson) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). After Borden’s direct involvement in the tragic death of Angier’s wife Julia, drowned during a trick gone wrong, the two magicians start aggressively to compete, trying to top each other’s acts.

The whole plot revolves around the performance of a particular magic trick, called ‘the transported man’: the magician throws a small ball across the stage and enters through a door just next to where he was standing. Then, almost instantly, he comes out of another door on the other side of the stage, just in time to catch the flying ball before it falls.

Angier witnesses as Borden first performs ‘the transported man’ and then desperately searches for its secret, trying to create an even more spectacular version of the magic trick himself. This leads Angier to ask Nikola Tesla for an impossible machine which could truly teleport a person. Telsa builds it, but there is a catch: it doesn’t only teleport the magician - it duplicates him. One subject continues to be inside the machine while a new, duplicated version of him appears in a different location. To solve this issue, Angier designs a gadget to kill the duplicate that remained in the teleport, drowning him in a water tank - just like the one in which Julia died - every time the trick is performed.

But while Angier uses this strange technological device to accomplish the trick, Borden’s secret goes in a very different direction. When, at the end of the movie, we finally find out his secret trick, the fundamental contrast between the two magicians - and the two sorts of magic - becomes clear: Angier duplicated himself - Borden had a twin brother.

Borden and his twin brother lived as if they were one. They did it by alternatively dressing up as Borden’s assistant, so that from time to time one of them would enjoy the life of the magician - fame, wife and kids - and the other would follow closely, but incognito. And this full-time dedication payed off in the performance of tricks such as ‘the transported man’.

This brief sketch of the story-line already presents us with a semblance of symmetry that cuts across the two main characters. In this review we will try to show that this slightly unbalanced duality is very useful in demonstrating what the term ‘fidelity’ means. Until now, maybe one of the best examples of true fidelity has been Alain Badiou himself, who courageously insists on how the forcing of the inscription of an Event into a given situation is not a matter of morals or opinions, but of truth.

Let us be clear here: as far as ideology is concerned - and we are only concerned with it - we lack the name of a commitment which subtracts itself from the fundamentally egotistical dichotomy of egoism/altruism. Today, to speak of a fidelity to a Cause which is based on a rational understanding that there is something more valuable than the personal freedoms is to talk of nonsense. It is truly unthinkable that there can be a rational relation to an Absolute - we only seem to be able to think what this fidelity would be by using the names of the irrational: fascism, totalitarism, madness, naivety...

What The Prestige allows us to do is to demonstrate the passage from the irrational back to the rational. Here, the name of this passage is ‘magic’.

It is a well-known chestertonian motif the relation between Reason and Mystery: Chesterton, a great detective story writer, liked to show how christians are more rational than rationalists by arguing that the true core of a detective story is in how that which seemed completely irrational and miraculous can be rationally explained by the detective as he solves the mystery. This is the true miraculous moment. The detective story would be completely insipid if the murder which happened in the room with no windows and locked from inside would find a supernatural explanation. No: for it to work, the conclusion must be of such deductive rigor that the reader cannot but see his own bleak universe turned into an adventurous place - it is through reason that the mysterious appears, not by getting rid of it. To believe in God, for Chesterton, means to believe in Reason - as he says, those who don’t believe in God, end up believing in anything...

The influence of this argumentation on the realm of magic and magicians can already be found in other films, such as Bergman’s The Magician (1958), which is directly inspired by Chesterton. In it, the magician Voegler and his crew are invited by a rich man to perform a magic trick in front of an audience interested solely in finding out how the magic is done. There is a long debate about believing or not in magic in times of such ‘scientific’ spirit and the implications of this for faith in general, but, in the end, the fact that the magic is actually a trick seems to scare the venerable Dr. Vergerus much more than if it had been a supernatural miracle. Actually, the film’s point is even more radical: in the mystery, reason is the greatest miracle.

The greatest issue with Bergman’s film is that in order for the mystery of the magic not to contradict reason, the ‘unexplainable’ was shifted from the magic trick back to the magician. Voegler is a mysterious man, always silent - his assistant speaks for him - and, in one of his confrontations with Dr. Vergerus, the doctor says that he hates Voegler precisely because he personifies the unexplainable. So there is a certain supernatural quality to the magician, which allows him to rationally invoke the mysterious.

The Prestige accomplishes the final chestertonian move: the magician’s relation to magic is itself put to the test. But before we begin our analysis, it might be helpful to strip the structure of Angier’s and Borden’s characters to their bare minimum. To accomplish this, we will use ‘the transported man’ as the common point which grounds their opposition.

First, the elements of this structure: there is always a man, his double, a death, a medium and ‘the prestige’ - the magic trick’s conclusion, the moment of ‘dazzling’ the audience. This last element deserves some extra attention.

In the beginning of the film, it is explained to us that a magic trick has three ‘acts’: the “Pledge” - when the magician shows the audience something ordinary - then the “Turn” - when the magician turns this ordinary object into something extraordinary, to the audience’s surprise. Finally, we have the “Prestige” - in which the extraordinary is turned back into something ordinary, but this movement is not a mere ‘return’: the final surprise that makes the audience ‘jump off their seats’ is that the very movement of turning the incomprehensible moment into something ordinary and fully understandable becomes itself extraordinary. As Zizek wrote, in The Monstrosity of Christ, a propos of Nolan’s film,

“Is this triple movement not the Hegelian triad at its purest? The thesis (pledge), its catastrophic negation (turn), the magical resolution of the catastrophe (prestige)?”

(Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ, p.286)

Before we move to Angier and Borden, let’s first test our structure in a sort of laboratory experiment - one which is actually presented to us in the film:

Quite at the beginning of the film, Borden performs the classic magic trick of making a bird disappear. He puts a cage on top of a table, with a pigeon inside (the pledge), covers it with a sheet and then squashes it. The cage seems to give in and disappear, and when he lifts the veil, there is nothing there (the turn). The magician then magically reveals the bird, which appears as if from nothing (the prestige).

But at this point, a little boy starts crying in the (very sparse) audience. Borden comes down from the stage and shows the bird to the scared kid, saying that he shouldn’t be sad, that the pigeon was fine. The boy, who probably had read Zizek before, doesn’t stop crying. He knows it is not the same bird. Borden is enchanted by the little kid (and later even marries the boy’s aunt). When he goes to the backstage to put away his materials, he opens a trap door in the middle of the table and throws the first, dead bird away.

The little boy had learned the hegelian lesson: “in order for the miracle of the “prestige” to occur, there must be a squashed dead bird somewhere.” (Zizek, p.286)

Our little lab experiment featured a bird, its double, a death (the first bird’s), a medium (the trap door) and the prestige - the bird’s appearing out of nowhere.

Angier fits this structure perfectly - we have: Angier, his double (an actual duplicate), a death (the ‘remaining’ Angier), a medium (Tesla’s teleported/duplicator) and the prestige - Angier appears somewhere else, out of nowhere.

The trouble starts when we try to apply it to Borden’s version of the trick. we have Borden, his twin-brother as the double...and here things get a bit complicated: because no one dies! And even if we try to ‘skip’ this and move on to define the other elements, we stumble across a new problem, because we cannot say that the medium is the two doors on stage or the resemblance of the twins. The actual means is the very way Borden and his brother live their lives.

Even so, the prestige itself remains pretty similar to Angier’s and the bird’s: the man who entered the door one is teleported and gets out through door two. But not quite: for us, the audience in the film theatre, Borden’s prestige is actually very distinct. Something extraordinary - not only the apparent teleportation, but the whole mystery of Borden’s figure (a mystery which put Angier in a very similar position to Dr. Vergerus’s hate of Voegler’s ‘un-explicability’) - is turned back into something perfectly ordinary.

So we have two questions to ask. The one of death: “Is there a death in Borden’s trick?” and the one of the medium: “What does it mean ‘to live’ as Borden?”. To answer them, we should first turn to Angier.

When Angier first tries to accomplish the trick himself, still confused as to how his rival managed to pull it off, his mentor suggests that it can only have been done using a double. So they set off to find someone who looks just like Angier - and they do find: an unknown actor who looks just like the magician. Things go well for a while. Angier is a showman, his trick is much more elaborated and well performed than Borden’s and his double does his job well. But Borden - knowing how the trick is done - finds Angier’s double and lets him know how much power he was over Angier. The whole trick depends on him.

So, things spiral out of control and Angier is humiliated as his double, drunk and completely out of his mind, blind with desire to be on the spotlight, ends up helping Borden to mess up the whole trick: Angier enters through the first door, but Borden comes out of the other door, instead of the double (who then appears all tied up, hanging from the ceiling of the theatre.).

In the same way that the little bird’s magic trick was an experiment with the same structure as Angier’s version of the ‘transported man’, this attempt of using a look-a-like is something of an experiment for Borden’s version of the trick. It becomes quite clear then that Borden’s secret wasn’t the that he used a double - this was, for anyone not willing to accept miraculous explanations, the only possible way.

The true mystery was somewhere else. Angier, afterall, found out Borden’s secret quite early on: Borden did use a double. But when Angier tested this himself, and failed, he also abandoned the hypothesis altogether. This is a really important question: Why did Angier’s failure to work together with his double amount to the failure of that version of the trick as such? Isn’t it that it was unthinkable to imagine that Borden could work so well with his double that they were not susceptible to the same, and almost certain, imbalance that power struggles bring about? Wasn’t this the real mystery?

When the two magicians still worked as assistants for the another magician, in the beginning of the movie, they went to see a chinese man performing an apparently impossible trick. While they struggled to discover how the trick was done, Borden came up with the idea that the chinese man led his life in a way as to be always ready to prepare that magic trick - which relied on him pretending to be older than he was, and a cripple. The idea of this commitment was not unthinkable for Borden - this was precisely how he himself lived.

So we know now that the name of the true mystery of the film is fidelity. The two brother’s commitment to their craft was such that they were ready to give away their personal freedoms, even their names, to remain faithful to their Cause. When we say ‘Borden’ we are not naming an individual, nor two. We are naming a fidelity, which cuts across more than one body. And as we name this mystery fidelity, we can also see that it is a mystery precisely because it appears in the conjunction of the question of death and the question of life, that we posed above. The question of Borden’s life is also the question of the death involved in his magic trick.

Around the middle of the film, Angier shots off one of Borden’s fingers, trying to get revenge for the death of his wife. When this happens, Borden realizes that to remain committed to their magic, his twin-brother would have to cut off the same finger, so that they could keep on looking like each other. Here we can see how the question of life and of death are the same: To keep on living, the twin brothers had to pay by giving up a part of their bodies - the cutting off of the finger has the place of the dead bird.

But not only that. The question of life also becomes the question of death in the final moments of the film, when Borden is sentenced to death by hanging. In a clear contrast to Angier’s final Prestige - when he reappears at the end, after everyone thought he had died in the water tank (where his double drowned every night) - Borden’s Prestige is not seen from the perspective of the brother who remains alive, but from the perspective of the one who goes to prison for Angier’s murder. The true mystery is not that he later reappears, but that he dies in order to live. (Suddenly, Joe Hill and Camilo Torres come to mind.)

We could sum up all we discussed until now in the following statement: today, fidelity is only thought as a defense of/against death. And since death is supposedly not thinkable, fidelity is a commitment done against the background of irrationality.

Let’s take Angier, for example. There was a traumatic death in his life - the accidental death of his wife, who drowned in front of him - and his will to revenge her led him to repeat her death every night: every time the trick was performed there was a death by drowning. It was against the background of an unfathomable Other - death itself - that Angier could keep on going, feeding it with the bodies of his own other.

Angier’s commitment is based on the disavowal of the dimension of death that is repeated every time he does his trick. But this is not fidelity. The closest name we have for this operation is...commodity fetishism. Just think of our previous experiment with the bird: Couldn’t we call commodity fetishism the idea that the bird from the Pledge is the same bird from the Prestige? Isn’t this the magical quality of the commodity, the mysteric capacity of real abstraction to coincide with itself?

As Marx (and more recently Karatani) already emphasized for us, the inversion of the relation between Money and Commodity in capitalism, summarized in the formula M - C - M' needs to be thought always in conjunction with the fact that this is actually a two-step operation: first M - C (production), then C - M' (circulation). The whole operation is based on the premiss that the commodity in M - C can be later sold for more money (M') than what it costed. But for it work, one needs to accept that the C in "M-C" is equal to the C in "C-M' ". One needs to equate the two, the first C - which is a product of work - with the second C - which is what is being exchanged. The inherent excess of the first C, the work put into it, which will not be payed for by the exchange, giving rise to profit, is disavowed when the second C (which should actually be written as C') is made equivalent to it.

The forced postulation that C=C’ is what gives rise to the production of surplus-value, and is the source of the commodity’s magic. Isn’t this precisely the same status of the bird in the magic trick? Doesn’t the magic trick rely on Bird=Bird’ ?

The little boy in the audience, who cried, had also read Marx and Sohn-Rethel, it seems: to guarantee the consistency of the commodity, there must be an unknown dead bird somewhere. The illusion of consistency is build on top of not-knowing this excess. In America, they call their money ‘dead presidents’ - quite an ironic coincidence...

Fidelity, on the other hand, is a commitment that is maintained not ‘in spite’ of the dead bird, but because of it. Zizek explains:

“There is, however, a key distinction between Christ’s dead body in Christianity and the squashed bird in the magician’s trick: in order for his trick to be effective, to work as a trick, the magician has to hide the squashed body from the audience, while the whole point of the Crucifixion is that Christ’s body is displayed there for everyone to see. This is why Christianity (and Hegelianism as Christian philosophy) is not cheap magic: the material remainder of the squashed body remains visible (...) A materialist does not deny miracles, he just reminds us that they live behind disturbing material leftovers.”

(Zizek, The Monstrosity of Christ, p.287)

If Christ names an Event, to remain faithful to the christian truth means to pay for one’s death as our very way of being alive. This dimension of death - which is not the traumatic beyond that comes after life - is what Freud calls death drive. It parasites life from within, reminding us of a past that, strangely enough, seems to call out for us from the future.

One can disavow this dimension - at the cost of dead birds, power struggles with drunken, failed actors, or at the cost of the lives of people in countries we don’t know the name of - but make no mistake: nothing has more consistency than something which is disavowed. It is this unacknowledged dimension which sustains for us the guarantee that everything else remains consistent - like the cartesian God, guaranteeing that subjectivity qua cogito would remain the same through time, and not only when it is itself thought.

The difference between Angier and Borden is that Angier exists as the consistent One, while the excess of his existence, the dead left-over, is kept under the veil. To protect the One of his ego, Angier produces an traumatic excess. But we know that by protecting his “Self”, what he is truly protecting is Death, this wholly-Other which spectrally returns every night, to collect a sacrifice. This is what we would like to call...capitalism.

The Borden twins, on the other hand, know that there is no “magic trick” without an excess - and that they cannot live without magic tricks. They live in the only possible way in which their fidelity to magic is not payed for with the irrational disavowal of its excess. Because of this, they invert Angier’s formula: they are faithful to the very excess, to death’s disturbance of life, and this produces the semblance of a One.

“Borden” names an inconsistent “Self” (Borden’s wife thought he was bi-polar!), held together by two unnamed workers whose fidelity to magic amounts to the fidelity to the existence of death drive itself. This is the true fidelity, based on a rational relation to an Absolute. In our day and age, the name for such a fidelity to a past Event which calls us from the future, inviting us to work from the position of the excluded, is Communism.

With Chesterton on our side, we can now affirm that those who believe in the magic of the commodity are missing out on the real mystery. The true mystery is that there is a position one can occupy in which death works for us, and not the other way around. Since Freud, there is something to be known of death, rationally. And when we consent to it, it is death which sacrifices itself. It is this mystery which opens up the space for a new Idea, which states that the price for our lives must be payed by each one of us - It was in the name of this same Idea that Brecht once wrote:

“[Narrator:] When the thinker found himself in a violent storm, he was seating inside a big vehicle and occupied a lot of space. He began by exiting the vehicle, then he took off his clothes and then he laid down on the ground. This way, reduced to his smallest greatness, he overcame the storm. (...) If the thinker overcame the storm, it was because he knew the storm and consented to it. This is why, those who want to overcome death, can only accomplish it by knowing it and consenting to it.(...)

[Instructed Choir:] Who then dies with your death?
[Abandoned Mechanics:] No one.
[Instructed Choir:] Now you know:
No one
Dies with your death.
They have reached
Their smallest greatness.”
(Brecht, the Baden Baden Lehrnstück on Consent)