The fictional Christopher Nolan

Todd McGowan University of Texas Press, Austin, 2012, 232 pp., $55, ISBN-13: 978-0292737822

Unassumingly brilliant and surgically incisive, Todd McGowan’s recent monograph on the movies of Christopher Nolan, the unlikely director of both cult indie films like Memento and superhero-franchise international blockbusters like The Dark Knight, illustrates that Nolan’s impressively broad oeuvre actually comprises a consistent project to think cinematically about the mediation of truth by non-truths. Lies, deceit, illusions, and errors, far from being obstacles to or opposites of truth, are, for Nolan, preconditions of truth: “truth is the failure of the fiction” (p. 15). Linking this reversal to Hegelian philosophy and Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, McGowan argues that Nolan’s insights are not only epistemologically consequential – bearing on how we can come to know ourselves and others, reality and the real – but also ethically charged. The ethics inhere in the practice of freedom that a lie discloses: “when we lie, we assert our freedom by detaching ourselves from the world as it is given to us” (p. 13). Such detachment activates a new relation to the world and possibilities for changing it: when the world is not sanctified, no transcendent beyond of the world is necessary for reform or revolution; hewing to fictionality exposes the fictionality of the world and invites new invention. “Believing in a real world of significance beyond the fantasy, we fail to act to change the structures in which we exist” (p. 17), but a cinema that aids the traversal of this belief can galvanize an ethics of fidelity to fundamental fantasies and a politics of new structures. Nolan’s cinema is not so much an example as the paradigm of this ethics, not so much a cinema as a meta-cinema – albeit one that avows the impossibility of meta-language. For while “the fundamental deception of cinema itself – the image passing itself off as reality” (p. 15) may function to perpetuate an image/real