Cinematic Messages in The Political Christopher Nolan

Deep Reading #5

In an age flooded with media, the cinema industry wields enormous influence. In a little more than a century, movies have evolved into a highly consumerist market based almost entirely on entertainment. Given this (not really) innocent intention of allowing us a little bit of amusement, it might be surprising to find layers of social, political, and economic meaning buried within these mass-produced moneymakers.

But if we think about it, finding political messages in movies is something we do instinctively: whether in the casting, the plot, the environment that gave rise to the movie, or a host of other things. Sitting back and simply being “entertained” by the latest Marvel movie is fairly hard to do. Even if we keep silent during the movie, we’ll likely comment on the politically-motivated elements it contains afterwards.

In his recent book, The Political Christopher Nolan (Rowan & Littlefield, 2023), Dr. Jesse Russell takes this political analysis of cinema to the next level. Drawing from the successful and influential movies of modern film director Christopher Nolan (Dark Knight Trilogy, Interstellar), Russell attempts to extract an extremely detailed and complete worldview that he proposes is manifest within Nolan’s movies. Throughout, he highlights the theme of liberal capitalism, the idea that a humanistic-capitalist system of society is the best way forward for humanity. This idea, Russell argues, reveals itself throughout Nolan’s films in a variety of ways.

Let’s take a look at the most important ones.

1. Illusion and Self-Deception

The first movie that Russell tackles is Memento, the story of Leonard Shelby, an unstable man with long-term memory loss who goes around murdering people apparently to avenge his dead wife. Understandably, much of the movie is presented in a chaotic and confusing way that makes us call into question the reality of the events unfolding. Because of Shelby’s instability and the tendency of Christopher Nolan to create cryptic and double-meaning scenes, by the end of the film, we’re not exactly sure what to make of what we’ve just seen.

I haven’t actually seen the film, so I’m going off of Russell’s narration. But there’s a clear political theme that Russell chooses to highlight. Shelby, before being set off on his murder spree by the death of his wife, was supposed to have been living the standard American suburban life, with all the necessities and basic desires of his life met. While there isn’t really any certainty surrounding the plot of Memento, Russell suggests that the unstable state of Shelby—that is, traveling around and hunting people down—is one that he brought on himself to escape from the “blah”-ness of his everyday life. Instead of becoming an “action hero” out of necessity, it’s a self-deception ordered towards self-fulfillment.

The idea here is that this is supposed to reflect the “mental state” of people who have all their basic needs and desires fulfilled. Instead of being satisfied, they’re unfulfilled and seek something more to give meaning to their life. Obviously, most people don’t go around murdering people, but it’s the whole idea behind the phrase “becoming the hero of your own story.” It’s why video games and action movies are so popular—and Nolan seems to be saying that it’s also behind “self-imposed mental disorders,” where people self-diagnose themselves with some kind of mental disease to alleviate the drabness of everyday life.

Russell also finds this idea portrayed in the Dark Knight Trilogy, where the superhero characters “battle the forces of evil,” not necessarily because they’re morally upright and because it’s the right thing to do, but because they want the “thrill of the heist” to bring them out of everyday life. Obviously, this portrayal isn’t uniform across all the movies, but even the idea of a billionaire (Batman) using his wealth to fight crime in a glamorous and high-tech fashion instead of helping society in lower-key, probably more beneficial ways, might say something about the “therapy” that self-imposed thrill brings.

Nolan takes this idea to the next level in his later movie Inception, and explicitly relates it to cinema. Inception is about big-corporations who utilize a group of people who “incept” into other people’s minds to influence their decisions. Russell argues that this is making clear messages about the nature of movies, where the audience is being “incepted” by the film director. Basically, this means that when we watch movies, we’re allowing ourselves to be brought into an artificial reality. This isn’t hard to believe, but Nolan, apparently, takes this message a step further and says that films are methods of not just “influencing”—like social media “influencers”—but direct brainwashing. Whether or not Nolan is actually making this claim about movies in a movie is up to the reader of Russell’s book to decide.

Towards the end of his book, Russell shows how similar messages on self-deception and artificial reality are expressed in one of Nolan’s more recent movies, Insomnia, but the basic idea has already been uncovered in Memento, Inception, and parts of the Dark Knight Trilogy.

2. Capitalism and Humanitarianism

While the theme explained above is prevalent across Christopher Nolan’s movies, it probably isn’t the biggest one. A more central theme relates to the popular Batman character, who represents capitalism and consumerism. Russell argues for this, seeing Batman as a representation of the entire American capitalist system. The way Batman defeats his enemies symbolizes how America triumphs over other powers, and Batman’s victory is a symbol for the triumph of the American system over other systems.

Let’s break this down step by step—or movie by movie, in this case. Batman Begins is the first of the trilogy, and it portrays how Batman goes from rich orphan to combat-skilled vigilante by going to the Himalayas and training under an “Asian other” mentor character, as Russell says it. The movie climaxes as Batman—or “Bruce Wayne”—faces off against the “League of Shadows,” a collection of antagonists just ripe for the new Batman to take down.

As always, though, Russell goes deeper than the lights and action. Batman’s training sequences convey the idea of the “strength of the ‘Old World,'” with sword fights and meditation sequences. Russell sees this as the value of old Europe, Asia, and everything else not “modern.” During the movie, Batman learns this value, internalizes it—and then defeats it. And he defeats it not just with what he learned, but with the fancy tech that he comes back to Gotham, or America, to get. Russell sees this as an argument for the superiority of America over the “Old World,” because it internalizes its value but then improves it and defeats it with its technological and capitalistic achievement.

This phenomenon isn’t actually isolated to Batman Begins. We can see it in Karate Kid and Star Wars. The American—or human—comes into the “Old World,” maybe a slightly tribal culture, learns it, internalizes it, and then turns out to be better than everybody else at it because, well, because he’s American. Batman Begins takes it to the next level, and—if Russell’s correct—makes an explicit statement about it.

This idea of the new, modern, American system triumphing over the old one also isn’t isolated within Nolan’s movies. Tenet shows an American black man and feminist woman defeating a Ukrainian arms dealer—adding the element that this superior American system is socially superior in addition to being high-tech—and Interstellar shows America winning the space-race through “the power of love” (I haven’t seen it, so you’ll have to watch it to know exactly what that means). In both Interstellar and Batman Begins, Russell sees Nolan making the point that this superior system is humanitarian—that is, the old system is harsh and hateful, but this new one is loving and wants to do good to everyone.

Batman, then, in Nolan’s movies, doesn’t just represent the capitalist system, but the American culture of advanced technology and humanitarian methods that combats hateful threats. This theme continues into the next two Batman movies (Dark Knight and Dark Knight Rises), addressing terrorism, the relation between the upper and lower classes, national security, etc. Russell pulls out hundreds of different facets that can be seen in the expression of the Nolan movies, and about capitalism specifically, he finds Nolan praising it in the premise of Inception, where big corporations rule the world—and Nolan doesn’t seem to critique them.

These, then, are the major political themes and messages present within the cinematic corpus of Christopher Nolan: first, the presence of self-deception as therapy against the ordinariness of first world life, and second, the superiority and inevitably of the capitalist, humanitarian form of society. 

A question that can easily come up when finding messages like this in narrative works is how much of it is actually what the film director intended and how much is “reading into” the story. Did Nolan actually intend to preach explicitly about the American system of society, or is that just how his films come off? Does he actually see Batman as an abstract symbol, or is that just the way the character was created?

Probably, the answer is both. When filmmakers create movies, they’re looking to create a compelling story that’ll make money in the box office, not a subtle message about the current state of society. If that was their sole purpose, the movie probably wouldn’t be any good. However, when creating premises and elements in a story, certain themes and messages rise to the surface. The reason why is because people are entertained by seeing certain things—or because certain things make the movie look good in public presentation.

So the answer to whether Batman is a symbol for something else is yes, but only because people like watching it. Maybe Nolan wants to make social commentaries the primary purpose of his films, but if so, it’s veiled under the surface of entertaining cinematic elements.

Whether or not The Political Christopher Nolan actually uncovers Nolan’s intentions, it’s still an interesting read that reveals deeper possible meanings of popular media. If there’s one major takeaway from the book as a whole, it’s that movies—or any artistic work, really—never exist in a vacuum. Even if they claim simply to be innocent entertainment, they reflect the political and social circumstances in which they were made—and often communicate these circumstances to us in ways we might not even be aware of.