Good Clean Fun? Christopher Nolan’s Austere Aesthetic

Some Thoughts on the Blockbuster Filmmaker’s Style & Substance

“How could I ever acquire enough detail to make them think that it's reality?”

“Well dreams, they feel real while we’re in them, right? It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”

– dialogue from Inception (2010)

Why is it so rare to see body fluids in a Christopher Nolan movie? This is the thought that crossed my mind when I was watching his most recent film, Tenet (2020), and it felt like a more pressing concern than what the film was asking me to contemplate – i.e. if John David Washington could successfully travel back in time to save the world. I suppose the topic was on my mind because of a film I’d recently revisited, Claire Denis’s High Life (2018), which, to say the least, does not shy away from the realities of the human body. Rather, the film is a visceral exploration of humankind in the unlikeliest of settings: a spaceship full of ex-convicts, hurtling through the stars for the purposes of gathering intel about deep space and the possibilities of procreation within it. Naturally things get a little claustrophobic on board, by which I mean the film is very aware of the human body’s impact on its environment, and while this awareness is not necessarily laudable in itself, it is remarkable in that it reminds me of all the unavoidable facts of biology that are often excluded from mainstream cinema.

Christopher Nolan is indeed a case study in exclusions of this kind. In fact, coming off of a film like High Life, it seems quite notable that the characters of the Nolan universe rarely, if ever, shed blood, sweat, tears, or saliva with the exceptions of Matthew McConaughey’s tear-shedding bonanza in the middle of Interstellar (2014) and that scene in Memento (2000) when Carrie Ann-Moss spits in Guy Pearce’s drink. Perhaps there are a few other minor instances that I’m forgetting, but considering the amount of running, punching, shooting, and kissing he’s racked up between the Batman trilogy and Tenet, I find it strange how infrequently body fluids appear in his films, and I think the reasons for this can be found in an assessment of his style as a filmmaker.

When I consider Nolan’s oeuvre, the most all-encompassing term that comes to mind is “neat.” That’s because his movies are often executed with an impression of total control (so neat in the sense of “nice and tidy”) and driven by a fun, puzzle-like premise (so neat in the sense of “pretty cool”). This gift for neatness is nowhere more apparent than in his proclivity for thrilling plot constructions. In particular, he has a knack for what I’d call cascading climaxes: the nestling of A-plot, B-plot, and C-plot pinnacles into one super climactic moment. This feature is on full display in Inception (2010) when, after descending through multiple dream layers, DiCaprio and his crew finally succeed in planting an idea in Cillian Murphy’s unconscious, thus completing the act of inception. The cascading climax that follows is a series of overlapping “kicks” across the various dream levels (or plots) that the audience experiences as many cross-cuts between characters. We experience it as each wakes up from one dream layer into the next – from Elliot Page in Cobb’s unconscious to Tom Hardy in the snowy fortress to Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the elevator shaft to Dileep Rao in the van backing off the bridge. As Hans Zimmer’s score crescendos, the edits primarily follow Page as he wakes up in the collapsing snowy fortress, followed by the falling elevator shaft, followed by the van plunging off the bridge, followed by the private plane where it all began.

It’s exhilarating to watch – all the open ends, generated over the course of multiple dream layers, coming together in seconds to great dramatic effect.¹ Few directors can pull off climaxes at this scale and Nolan’s talent for crafting them deserves some recognition. It is an admirable and predictable feature of his films. However, I’m wary of the way this meticulous approach resembles the other familiar aspects of his work: corporate architecture, modern art, steely gray tones, sleek suits, symmetrical forms, paradoxical spaces, and philosophical binaries. In all of these qualities, there appears to be an overriding desire for order that echoes the neatness of his story structure. But the major drawback to all of this orderliness is the dominant aesthetic impression that arises from his work: lifelessness.

This impression comes partly from the fact that his films often take place against the backdrop of extreme wealth. Inception centers on a conflict between corporate rivals; The Dark Knight (2008) follows a billionaire caped crusader as he tries to restore law and order to his city; and Tenet is about a fight over two possible futures: one promoted by a Ukrainian billionaire, the other preserved by a geopolitical time travel organization resembling the CIA (pick your poison). As a result, the characters in these films always dress like they’re conference room ready and often embrace a cold minimalism in their interior design – an “everything in its right place” vibe that would make Patrick Bateman feel right at home. But the other part of this impression has something to do with how Nolan uses setting in general. 

Even when his backdrops do not reflect the stark modernism of extreme wealth, they’re still incredibly bare and homogenous, whether in the clear blue skies of Dunkirk or the vast, desolate landscapes of Interstellar, in which even the planets lack geological diversity and instead stand-in for broad elemental categories – the water planet, the ice planet, and the rock planet (not to mention Earth, the corn planet). When it comes to the built environment, his tastes are equally plain. Take the Batman trilogy for example, in which Gotham City is portrayed as equal parts Pittsburgh, New York, and Chicago, as if all these skylines were interchangeable for one another and patched together only to illustrate some general notion of “city.” I don’t think it’s too bold to say that Gotham in Nolan’s hands has never looked less like Gotham. This is because for Nolan setting is simply a mood, not a place or a culture or a people, which means even in globetrotting films like Tenet and Inception he can’t help but turn his attention away from the distinct features of Oslo, Tallin, Tokyo, and Amalfi, towards the indistinct spaces within them: an airport warehouse, an abandoned Soviet village, a vaguely modern hotel, or a yacht in the middle of the ocean. 

Given these examples, it is not so surprising that a director with both a high regard for premise and a bare sense of setting might exclude some of the more sensual elements of life from his work, whether it be gourmet cuisine, abundant botanical presence, kinky sex, or body fluids. Some peculiar observations arise from exclusions of the latter kind: Dunkirk is a war film without blood and gore; Tenet features a tooth pulling scene in which the pliers appear remarkably unbloodied and the pulled teeth never materialize; Interstellar is a space film that glazes over the issue of bioregenerative life support systems (more on this later); and Inception is a dream film severely lacking in Freudian innuendos.

Compare Inception to Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) – a film Nolan heavily borrows from – and the differences are quite stark. Whereas Kon’s film embraces the strange nature of dreams through provocative and bizarre animation sequences, Nolan’s film depicts dreams as mere duplicates of reality (with the exception of a few Escher-esque touches). In fact, the only ideas Inception borrows from Paprika are plot devices, none of the “dreamlike” oddities, which, beyond being strange, are often related to the body (e.g. humanoid monsters, shared bodies, bloody violence, etc). Watch the films side-by-side and it becomes clear how, in honing his aesthetic preferences, Nolan goes to great lengths to avoid the body.

The same could be said of a lot of blockbuster movies, from The Fast and the Furious to The Avengers to Mission Impossible. There is an immense amount of violence in big budget cinema yet a remarkable lack of blood and sweat (not to mention semen given the homoerotic displays of machismo that often motivate said violence). Rather, the depictions of human experience in all of these films are remarkably impoverished and unrealistic. Characters exchange punches, kisses, and heartbreaking news without so much as a busted lip, saliva strand, or snotty cry. Is the purpose of all this to maintain a PG-13 rating at the box office, or to simply maximize mass appeal by avoiding the uncomfortable realities of biology? Are either of these reasons serious enough for high profile filmmakers to rinse their films clean of the body? 

On the other hand there’s High Life, in which Claire Denis’s camera draws our attention to the things we don’t usually see in mainstream cinema. The film features nearly every product of the human body: blood, semen, sweat, tears, shit, urine, spit, breast milk, and even beard trimmings. She does not include these details merely to make the audience squirm. Rather, they’re essential to the film’s setting: a spaceship that sustains the passengers through a bioregenerative life support system that utilizes all the human and plant waste on board to feed a greenhouse garden that, in turn, yields oxygen, food, and water for the passengers who then create more waste that feeds the garden and so on and so on. Thus, unlike the many filmmakers who came before her, Denis embraces a conceptual issue with space travel that other examples of the genre avoid – i.e. where does all the waste go? – and utilizes it as a parallel of sorts to the theme of incarceration. As Robert Pattinson’s character says, “We were scum, trash – refuse that didn’t fit into the system. Until someone had the bright idea of recycling us to serve science.” All these aspects of the story reinforce one another, forming a rich representation of humanity in the most desolate setting imaginable.

In clean blockbuster cinema, the exclusion of familiar body functions instead reinforces the way said films prioritize elements like plot coherence, concept, and entertainment over more mature and grounded storytelling details. In Nolan’s case, we see this approach at its most extreme. Not only does he exclude body fluids, he excludes any sense of personality that might add a human dimension to his work. Whether its erasing the distinctions between cities around the globe, consistently dressing actors in business, military, and government uniforms, or never writing characters that forget to clean a dirty dish or tie a shoelace, he always strives for a modern aesthetic so dull it couldn’t possibly draw attention from his neat ideas and tidy climaxes.

For me this overriding aesthetic has yielded a filmography that, for all of its spectacle, is oddly lacking in moving imagery. This is because the most memorable images Nolan has generated have always been more illustrative of concepts than characters. When I recall the colorful multidimensional space Matthew McConaughey navigates at the end of Interstellar, it doesn’t remind me of his relationship with his daughter so much as it reminds me of the concept of multidimensional space. When I recall the spinning top in Inception it doesn’t evoke Cobb’s tortured relationship with his wife so much as it does the concept of reality. When I recall the burning plane at the end of Dunkirk, it feels more like a visual ode to heroism and self-sacrifice than an ode to the unnamed pilot played by Tom Hardy. Each of these images offers some intellectual stimulation, but once they’re ingested in the mind they don’t inspire multiple viewings the way a complicated character portrait might. And when a plot doesn’t totally hold up² – and there are certainly examples of this in Nolan’s filmography – the primary pleasure of the film diminishes substantially. It makes me wonder, once one makes sense of a plot as complicated as Tenet's, what is left to return to?

1. The most novel example of cascading climaxes in Nolan’s filmography might be the merging of the separate time signature plots in Dunkirk as the boat parade arrives to rescue the soldiers on the beach. While it doesn’t draw quite as much attention to itself as the climax in Inception, that climactic satisfaction is felt in a very primal way.

2.  E.g. How does Batman return to Gotham in the third act of The Dark Knight Rises without any money or easy transportation? Or how exactly does a “kick” work in Inception?