Scanning the balance of the definition, one would assume this Element to highlight one withdrawn and self-referential: The Dramatica theory of story describes Self-Aware as being conscious of one’s own existence. It’s the only way to escape this.īorden SLAPS the bricks of the wall behind them. Soo hobbles into the restaurant, frail, and fragile. The Motivation of SelfĪs friends and colleagues, Borden and Angier attend a performance by Chung Ling Soo, a 60-year old Chinese magician.

No” seals the Obstacle Character Resolve of Changed and resolves his Obstacle Character Problem of Self-Aware. Borden's act of making her Aware of the fact that he doesn’t love her, ”Not today. His version of The Transported Man exceeds Borden’s act, driving the latter to confess to his wife the lack of affection for her. Robert Browning’s poem applies to both magicians and casts the axis upon which both competing perspectives fall into alignment both men driven to engage in the unspeakable in order to satiate their career ambitions.Īngier develops and grows into the defining perspective of the narrative with this Main Character Concern of Conceptualizing and his Main Character Resolve of Steadfast.

Angier’s problematic Concept of himself finds balance with the deliberate Misunderstandings of oneself presented by Borden. Angier imagines himself a great magician while Borden maintains the ruse of a solo performance act, casting his beloved into emotional turmoil. The individual points-of-view motivating both Borden and Angier share a similar bent for an examination of conflict in process, yet differ along the dividing line of internal and external. The Objective Story Throughline of the film explores problems of the Past, while the central Relationship entertains problematic instances of faulty Memory. Sneaking into each other’s private journals paints the landscape of their dissolving friendship with its deceitful depiction of personal remembrances. Angier (Hugh Jackman) fell victim to his own magic trick–a result of apparent sabotage on the part of rival Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). The story at large seeks to unravel the events of that fateful night when Mr. The Prestige ventures into the same territory with its narrative of two magicians embroiled in a cutthroat game of one-upmanship. One finds the source of conflict in all these movies along a definite channel of the narrative spectrum. Interstellar and Dunkirk aside, his stories focus on problems with the Past, Memory, Understanding, and Conceptualizing: Leonard Shelby and his short-term Memory loss in Memento Inception's Dominick Cobb and his attempt to plant new Understanding into a victim’s subconscious and the League of Shadows and their mission to match Gotham’s fate to that of Rome or Constantinople in Batman Begins.

Writer/director Christopher Nolan visits similar Types of Plot in his movies.

The prestige novel