The Look On Their Faces
To perform a magic trick, Robert Angier has procured a machine that enables him to teleport across a room, or perhaps it teleports a copy of him across a room. He’s not sure. All he knows is that when he turns the machine on and steps inside, he experiences a flurry of sparks and a blinding flash of light, and then there are two of him: one standing in the machine and the other standing somewhere nearby. To deal with this doubling, he installs a trap door under the stage that opens at the critical moment; the version of him still standing in the machine is dropped into a large tank of water and drowns. Stepping into the machine takes courage, Angier explains, because he doesn't know which copy is “really him”: he could end up as the “man in the box” who drowns, or he could be “the Prestige,” appearing on the other side of the room before an astonished crowd. He has no idea which fate awaits him. And yet, night after night, he steps into the machine. Why?
One of the most striking themes of The Prestige, Christopher Nolan’s brilliantly entertaining mind-bender about a rivalry between two magicians, is the value of wonder. Angier, played by Hugh Jackman, explains his motivation in a key monologue at the end of the film:
The audience knows the truth: the world is simple, miserable, solid all the way through. But if you can fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder. Then you got to see something very special...
It was the look on their faces...
Through his act, Angier seeks to complicate the epistemology of his audience: to make some obvious truth slightly less obvious, some impossibility slightly more possible. He wants to make them wonder: what if the world isn’t so simple, or isn’t so miserable, or isn’t so solid all the way through?
Angier sees this as a deception, of course; he believes that “the truth” is the depressing reductionist picture of the world that his magic trick briefly distracts us from. But there is a tension at the heart of his actions. Somehow, in an ordinary world, Angier has found something so extraordinary that he’s willing to risk death for it.
What could be worth dying for in a “simple, miserable, solid” world? This is the world of physics, nothing more or less than a collection of fundamental particles and forces playing out the math in real-time. There’s no room for the sacred in this ontology, no space for a value beyond pleasure. But Angier is willing to drown himself nightly to witness the reaction of his audience as he destabilizes this picture. He has located something transcendent in the act of making transcendence seem possible. His audience, having been thoroughly disenchanted by the modern world, is normally closed off to the numinous. Yet Angier sees in their faces a kind of miracle: he has pried open, for the briefest of moments, the door to their cage of disbelief.
It’s notable that he accomplishes this with technology. Our mastery of nature has done much to render the world banal and explicable, but Nolan points out that this same mastery can be used subversively as well. We should also note, however, that Angier’s rival, Alfred Borden, is able to perform the same trick without the aid of a machine, relying on his identical twin brother to create the illusion of teleportation. Borden’s magic is made possible by a genuine fraternal bond, while Angier is forced to rely on an artificial reproduction of himself, one which must be repeatedly discarded.
Why does Angier step into the machine? What he understands, on some level, is that the greatest achievement in a secular age is to make God seem possible. This is his aim, the reason he’s willing to kill himself night after night, to stand before his audience and risk it all. He does this to witness the expression of a deeply profound hope, a tentative but genuine openness to a bold idea: that the world isn’t ordinary after all. Maybe a man can teleport across a room. Maybe our lives can have meaning. Maybe, maybe, maybe.