What ruined cinema was equality. Making a film was once expensive, hence scarce. Only a few people born in the right homes or the handful who got lucky, as though nature wanted to fool people into believing anyone can succeed, could make films.
Also, cinema was all that people had. Now there is the chaos of social progress. Anyone can make a motion picture. And it is not all that people have to while away their time or be moved.
But there is a kind of cinema that endures because it is unattainable for most people. And it is for the same reason that Christopher Nolan is famous; it is because he has become an inequality-preserving institution.
The kind of stature he has today is usually not granted by the world, but once it is, the world adores it for reasons it doesn’t fully know.
This is how it has come to be that it is inevitable I will watch Nolan’s The Odyssey, even though Homer does not interest me, and I am not mesmerized anymore by anything on screen because I have seen dinosaurs, the end of the world, a one-kilometre-high wave and people fly.
I have seen it all. I have returned to a time when the only thing that can be a spectacle is a spectacle, not some camera trick. So what if 1,000 people in costume are arranged in some formation in a film and its PR has planted the truth that they have not been created by computer effects.
Yet, I will go watch The Odyssey. Not because it has Matt Damon or Anne Hathaway. But because it is a Nolan film.
The story he has successfully told is not that a billionaire dressed as a bat can save a fictional city, or that ideas can be planted into someone’s sleep, or that when you travel close to the speed of light, the nature of time changes. The story he has told is that cinema is something that happens in a theatre and that TV is a sad travesty of real cinema.
He has preserved the high caste of big cinema by turning away from the small independent films that gave him cult status, and instead raising a quarter of a billion dollars shooting a drama in the most difficult format possible, with an Imax camera.
Yet, his preservation of inequality does not answer how he has acquired extraordinary fame.
You may say he is famous because he’s very good, but he is not the only director who is very good at his craft. Yet his fame is singular. Probably no one has been quite as revered, even at his peak, not even Steven Spielberg , James Cameron or Quentin Tarantino.
Much of Nolan’s success comes from a combination of special factors—an early break, when he was not a threat to influential figures and they could be generous to him; the narcissism of cults; the transmission of his myth through the misunderstanding of fans who projected their own ideas onto his films; the frenzied word of mouth among those who are new to a cult; and the dreariness of his work that gave it gravitas.
Some filmmakers have one or some of these factors, but only Nolan perhaps has all of them.
The importance of his first major break was not just that it happened, but when. He was just 29 when he finished making his second feature film, Memento and 30 when it released.
Established artists almost never praise their peers; in compensation they promote the very young, the very new or the very old, who are not rivals. I call this the Meryl Streep phenomenon, which is my hypothesis that American actors keep calling her “the best” because they don’t have to be as gushingly generous to their more potent peers.
When a person or product gains cult status, narcissists who are obsessed with themselves, what they love and how unique their taste is, spread the cult’s word through over-articulation. (Those people who formed overnight queues for the iPod surely loved Steve Jobs, but they loved themselves more, their own superior taste and their capacity to stand for hours to procure a thing of beauty).
Also, they tend to wilfully misunderstand a work so they can cast their own ideas onto a work they claim to love. Misunderstanding is a powerful current of transmission.
Writers may tell you that a problem with every story is how to end it. Tarantino solved this, often, by killing many characters. Nolan resorted to abstraction. And that left room for interpretation. When cult meets abstraction, it is enigma.
Inception and Interstellar had unresolved endings that fans thought had deeper meaning. I couldn’t bear their daft debates. (In response, I wrote a murder mystery where the only witness is Christopher Nolan. He tells the cops what he saw, but no one is able to understand how his story ends.)
Nolan used the success of Memento to escape genre and not dig himself deeper in it. His advantage is that he loves the mainstream but his work resembles arthouse, especially to those who have not seen arthouse. That makes his admirers feel that they are enjoying something only high mortals can.
Also, like a good affluent Brit, he has managed to maintain a certain old-fashioned aura about him for decades. Famously, he has never sent an email or used a smartphone. It only makes me feel he must be very rich, but to many he comes across as an endearing ascetic.
As Nolan grew more successful and could negotiate greater independence, he also grew more dreary because being a fearless independent filmmaker is also about preserving what may not be entertaining. But this is a world where people see gravitas in work that is also dense. Like how they value those who make them suffer a bit.
The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.’