the Theory of

NOLAN'S RELATIVITY

or,

A CONFLATION OF
observations from dreams, waking life
and Christopher Nolan's catalogue

by

DOMINIC COOK

Introduction

This essay will be dedicated to observations from Christopher Nolan's catalogue, as well as those of dream and waking life. A good portion of Nolan's movies deal with themes that I find increasingly interesting, so I will use this space to summarize such themes as well as invite inquiry.

To begin, in order of release date, I'll summarize the movies in question, and highlight relevant details.

Memento

Leonard (Guy Pearce) is tracking down his wife's murderer. The difficulty he faces, however, is compounded by the fact that he suffers from a rare, untreatable form of memory loss. Although he can recall details of life before his accident, Leonard cannot remember what happened fifteen minutes ago, where he's going, or why. The story progresses with each new scene chronologically preceeding the previous scene. This results in the viewer experiencing over time what has already happened to Leonard. Thus at the end of the movie, the viewer is at the beginning of Leonard's story and knows everything that, at the beginning of the movie, Leonard had forgotten.

Tattoo's on your Memory

Herein lies the question of communicating with your subconscious. Leonard devises a system, explained in the film, that he uses to keep track of what's going on, and what he needs to remember. With a combination of handwritten fonts, and tattoos, he is able to communicate with his future-forgetful self so by the time his memory is lost and he doesn't know how he got to where he is, he is still able to move forward from the messages he left for himself. What is then relevant for the other films, and for the broader inquiry is the question of communicating with your subconscious. Can you communicate with yourself in a way that you wouldn't know? The memory loss makes such a feat readily available. In the film this proves important because the audience finds out various ways in which Leonard has lied to himself, leaving false messages.

Inception

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief with the rare ability to enter people's dreams and steal their secrets from their subconscious. His skill has made him a hot commodity in the world of corporate espionage but has also cost him everything he loves. Cobb gets a chance at redemption when he is offered a seemlingly impossible task: Plant an idea in someone's mind. If he succeeds, it will be the perfect crime, but a dangerous enemy anticipates Cobb's every move.

The Immense Gravity of a Dream Within a Dream: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Woman Who Plagues My Memory

One of Nolan's more popular movies, people tend to be quite familiar with the premise, dreams within dreams. Here, too, we see Nolan exploring the question of communicating with the subconscious, though in this film, the main character, Dom, is trying to plant an idea in someone else's head instead of his own. In Memento, the character is trying to plant an idea in his own head, though it is only made narratively possible through the memory-loss. Complications arise when uncontrollable aspects of Dom's subconscious interfere with his work inside other people's subconscious, which introduces another important theme in the discussion -- love, roughly speaking. In Inception, and Interstellar as you will see below, deep emotions tend to be quite nebulus, though still immensely psychologically affective, but such inquiry will be held for below.

Another interesting aspect in this film, and one that can't be ignored when dealing with a Nolan film, is it's treatment of time. The dreams are said to have a certain gravity that compounds. The deeper you go in someone's subconscious, and the more layers of dreams you enter, in the film of course, the longer that time feels. Going into one dream, time experienced is somewhat longer than actually passes for the resting body, but going into dreams within dreams, moments that the resting body experiences might feel like years for the consciousness within the dream. This is quite similar to what's known as time dilation, a consequence of Einstein's relativity theory.

Interstellar

In Earth's future, a global crop blight and second Dust Bowl are slowly rendering the planet uninhabitable. Professor Brand (Michael Caine), a brilliant NASA physicist, is working on plans to save mankind by transporting Earth's population to a new home via a wormhole. But first, Brand must send former NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) and a team of researchers through the wormhole and across the galaxy to find out which of three planets could be mankind's new home.

No Country For Old Men

Here again, we see very similar themes to Inception, time dilation and the nebulus nature of emotions. I found it to be quite a sad movie, though it does have a positive ending. But in this film Cooper ends up experiencing enough gravity that by the time we get to the end of the movie his daughter is older than him, a pretty traditional time dilation depiction. There is a scene near the end of the film where Cooper is in some tesseract-shaped room where he is able to communicate with his daughter's younger self, by means of gravity, to tell her the relevant solutions to whatever needed to be done to save humans. The film makes quite a strong point about the relationship between a father and daughter that is strong enough to reach across dimensions.

Tenet

A CIA operator known as, the Protagonist (John David Washington), is given a single word and a gesture as a means to "open doors" in an effort to prevent the onset of World War III. He must travel through time and bend laws of nature in order to succeed.

Oppenheimer of the Future

The feature in this story that is of present interest is what is referred to as a, "turnstyle". These turnstyles, are machines that have been sent back in time from the future, that have the capability of reversing an objects entropy. This results in what are called "inverted" objects which appear to an observer to be moving backwards in time. Naturally, there are certain logical frictions contained in the concept of "inverted" objects interacting with non-"inverted" characters, but these frictions are addressed in the film, perhaps, as much as necessary, and here will be addressed further down. Towards the end of the movie, Priya (Dimple Kapadia) mentions in conversation with the Protagonist, that the scientist in the future responsible for pioneering the necessary technology for these turnstyles is known as her, "Generation's Oppenheimer". In the same way that Oppenheimer helped create a technology that risked creating a chain reaction that would destroy the world, this scientist helped create the technology used throughout the story to reverse the entropy of objects in the world. This scientist however, unlike Oppenheimer, refuses to progress in her research and hides the algorithm in 9 pieces throughout the past.

Conflation

What we are left with, then, are a few themes and the question of how these themes interact, and what those interactions tell us about the world we live in. Time-Dilation, the sub-conscious and gravity form a cord that runs through the movies mentioned above, but a cord that also defines the structure of the world we live in. The movies mentioned above are surely movies, but these phenomena can be experienced, to some extent, in any of our waking lives. Consider an afternoon spent, or an evening, with a friend or a loved one, where after a while you check the clock and are shocked at how much time has passed. You maybe thought only 30 minutes had passed, but in reality it had been 2 hours. Or in very much the same way, remember as a child, waiting in line at the grocery store with your parent, may have easily felt like an eternity, though in reality only a few minutes had passed. Now this isn't just because children haven't lived much life so they experience time to be much longer than adults, though this may have some effect, but children also experience the flight of time as they play a game with friends or do something they enjoy. Time flies when you're having fun, so they say. Now in both of these illustrations, the time that had passed is constant, but the observation of time is what is varied. Here we see that our subconscious feelings have a direct impact on how we experience the passage of time. Consider, for a moment, you're driving somewhere familiar. Perhaps, you're on your way to work, or a friends house; some place that doesn't require much attention to sort out how to get there. As you're driving, you think of this friend you're on your way to see, and you remember the last time you had together, how much you enjoyed it or something that made you laugh (you may even think of this now as you're reading), and suddenly you remember you're driving and the last few blocks, or even miles, have entirely escape your memory. You were distractedly observing this memory of your friend, so much so, that you entirely disregarded the present task. And it is perhaps worth noting that for those well acquainted with meditation, this is quite a normal occurence, your own mental acuity distorting your experience of the passage of time. I have also heard of people's various drug-induced "psychedelic trips" producing a very similar result, though I have no personal experience with this. These memories that capture your attention are what Dunne refers to as "images" in his book "An Experiment With Time". In that book, Dunne proposes an experiment that anyone can try in order to experience something that is still quite hard to define: the interaction between our minds and the world around us. Dunne's book was a quick read for me since I had already done this experiment on my own and had some experience with studying geometric structures, though I did find his illustrations to be quite confusing at times. Still, I'd highly recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic. What is gathered from the work of Dunne, and the logical conclusion of what's mentioned above, is that the mind must be in a dimension higher than that which it observes. Put in another way, in order for the mind to simultaneously experience past, present, and perhaps other, events, the mind must be on at least the next higher dimension. Now, what does this mean for us? How is this information helpful? At the moment, I haven't much of a clue. I am still very intrigued with the thought of communicating with your own subconscious. In Tenet, there is a short dialogue between Priya and the Protaganist where Priya mentions how we communicate with the future all the time. Even in the act of writing a letter, the letter is a message to whomever will read it, whether days or decades into the future. But Priya poses the question: Can the future talk back?

Thank you for taking the time to read this.