B0041VYHGW EBOK (125 page)

There are auditory motifs as well. The harsh sound of iron, suggesting an age of lumbering mechanical objects, is first heard in the opening, when the top of the tank slams down with a shudder. From then on, we frequently hear rasping metal—chains in Alfred’s prison, the buzzing shock Robert gets from Tesla’s fence, the clank when the Tesla coil is switched off (but not concealing the snick of Robert’s trapdoor), and the groaning spring that locks a dove into a trick apparatus. When Sarah hangs herself, some metallic clashing is heard, and later, when Alfred kneels to his daughter behind prison bars, we see little of his gestures but judge from the frantic clanking of his chains that he is desperate. This sound motif informs the final sequence, which crosscuts Alfred’s hanging with Robert’s disposal of Tesla’s machine: while Cutter winds a creaking winch, the prisoner’s chains clank and drag as he mounts the gallows.

A less harsh motif dominates the scenes involving Julia’s immersion stunt. When she is first bound and submerged in the tank, a soft snare drum taps out a pulse. Later, when she is tied and can’t escape, the tick of Cutter’s stopwatch takes over the sound track, as if measuring her heartbeat; the sound stops when she is dead. At the film’s climax, when Robert’s opening act is replayed, a similar pulsation is heard in the nondiegetic music as he drowns—creating a parallel to Julia not unlike the one we’ve seen in the images (
7.57
–
7.59
).

In many films, parallels are carried by dialogue, and
The Prestige
makes constant use of recurring lines. Julia says that calling the act The Great Danton is “sophisticated,” and after her death, Robert honors her by using the name: “It’s sophisticated.” Tesla’s remark that “Man’s grasp should exceed his nerve” is modified by Robert as his new tagline: “Man’s reach exceeds his imagination.” The most vivid dialogue motif is probably the one launched by Cutter, when he talks of “getting your hands dirty.” At various points, Cutter and Alfred invoke this line to taunt Robert’s reluctance to risk everything for his magic. At the end, however, confronting Robert’s elaborate revenge scheme, both Alfreds admit that he has finally gotten his hands dirty.

As with other techniques, some of these dialogue motifs not only clarify the story but also drop hints. One striking instance occurs when at the climax we hear the warden intone, “Alfred Borden” during the hanging scene but see the mysterious assistant Fallon making his way to Robert. The juxtaposition prepares us for Fallon’s unmasking as one of the twins. At various points, Robert says that in a disappearing act “no one cares about the man who goes into the box. They care about the man who comes out the other side.” The motif points toward his method of callously killing the performer in the Tesla machine so that his double can be re-born elsewhere. It also anticipates the ending, in which Alfred, apparently hanged, returns home to Jessie and Cutter.

The Prestige
uses Robert’s and Alfred’s journals to frame certain parts of the past. One man reads the other man’s diary, which will lead us into or out of a flashback. In itself, the diary device is quite familiar, but
The Prestige
gives it a special emphasis by embedding one diary within another. In the past, Robert stole Alfred’s notebook, and as he deciphered it, Robert recorded his reactions and memories in his own diary during his trip to Colorado. Robert’s diary comments on Alfred’s journal are later read by Alfred in his cell during his trial.

The embedded diaries help keep us oriented in time, guiding us from present to past and back again. Again, sound plays a crucial role in acclimating us to the device. The convention of letting us hear the diarist’s voice as the reader reads the lines is a very helpful guide.

After the imprisoned Alfred is given Robert’s diary, he starts to read it, and we hear Robert’s voice-over, representing what he has written. “A cipher—an enigma—a search.” The line leads us into the first of several flashbacks to Robert’s trip to Tesla. Early in his stay, Robert begins to decipher Borden’s notebook. Robert’s diary voice-over describes a passage as taking place “just days after he first met me.” This segues into Alfred’s voice-over, representing what Robert has just deciphered: “We were two young men devoted to an illusion.” The transition to a flashback within a flashback is made clear through the smooth transfers from one voice-over to the next.

The conflict between the men gets sharpened when even the diary entries seem to quarrel. As we see Alfred double over in pain from the botched bullet catch, we hear his diary voice-over explaining that he didn’t really know what knot he had tied to bind Robert’s wife. “I told him the truth” is followed by a cut back to Colorado, showing Robert reading Alfred’s diary as the voice continues: “… that I have fought with myself over that night.” Robert looks up from the diary and cries out, “How could he not know?” That external line of dialogue is repeated, but now as a voice-over: “How could he not know?” Cut to Alfred reading the line in his cell. The embedded diaries and blended voice-overs create a tense conversation across time and space.

Once the early transitions have established the nested time frames, however, the film starts to shift among them without showing the diaries or employing a voice-over. Instead, the voice-overs of Robert and Alfred are used to punctuate certain scenes, supplying private thoughts in the manner of an internal diegetic monologue. For example, on the street, Robert spies on Alfred and his family. Robert’s voice-over bursts out, “I saw happiness—happiness that should have been mine.”

Above all, it is Robert’s diary voice-over that helps shift among time frames. His summaries of what he reads in Alfred’s diary substitute for Alfred’s direct voice-over. This prepares us for a surprise when Robert skips to the end of the diary and Albert’s voice-over returns ominously:

Today Olivia proves her love for me—to you, Angier. Yes, Angier, she gave you this notebook at my request. And Tesla is merely the key to my diary, not to my trick. Did you really think I’d part with my secret so easily, after so much? Good-bye, Angier. May you find solace for your thwarted ambition back in your American home.

But in a film of many parallels, even this mocking challenge is surpassed by another. Alfred, reading Robert’s journal in his cell, confronts this on the last page:

But here, at the turn, I must leave you, Borden. Yes, you, Borden. Sitting there in your cell, reading my diary. Awaiting your death, for my murder.

Alfred is as baffled as we are. How could Robert have known that he would die and that Alfred would be accused of his murder?

In retrospect, we realize that Robert (the clone who survived that night in the theater but didn’t reveal himself) has prepared the final entry, and perhaps the whole journal, after Alfred’s arrest as a way of tormenting him. The power of these surprises derives from a subtle shift in the voice-over convention. Going beyond simply giving us information, the diary-driven voices have misled us.

By weaving parallels and journal entries into the plot, the film propels the action forward while enhancing the mysteries. We are continually confronted with new information that has to be fitted into what we have already seen and heard. Yet the film also hints at what is concealed. Most centrally, the secret of both illusions is substitution of a double, and this is suggested by a visual motif. We learn that, since canaries look alike, magicians make canaries vanish and reappear by killing one and substituting another. This is a prototype of Robert’s cloning technique, but it also foreshadows the consequences of the Borden twins’ decision to live out their act, with one eventually sacrificed for the other.

As we’ve seen, hinting occurs throughout the dialogue and the voice-overs. As a single character, Alfred seems contradictory, alternately considerate and brusque. He speaks often of his secret, of being torn in two. His wife, Sarah, says that when he says he loves her, some days he does and some days he doesn’t. In the climactic quarrel between the couple, she says she knows “what you really are,” which panics the cold twin. Perhaps she suspects that there are two Alfreds? Sarah asks if he loves her. “Not today.” She hangs herself.

More subtly, offscreen sound is used to withhold the “Prestige,” or the payoff, of each man’s greatest trick. (Originally, the word
prestige
meant “illusion,” especially one that dazzles the eyes.) Alfred’s first, minimal version of the Transported Man is shown only in part. We see the setup with Robert watching avidly and Cutter elsewhere in the audience, skeptical. But we don’t see the Prestige phase of the trick. Nolan keeps the camera on Cutter while we hear the second door open and the bouncing ball being caught by the duplicate Alfred. Nolan thereby makes the trick itself mysterious, to be revealed in full later. Conveying the illusion through offscreen sound also emphasizes the contrasting reactions of Cutter, who is unimpressed, and Robert, who considers it “the greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen.”

Another parallel, then: when Robert demonstrates his Real Transported Man before a world-weary theatrical agent, he vanishes from the stage in jagged blasts of the Tesla coil. The agent protests, “He has to come back. There has to be—” “A Prestige?” says a voice from offscreen. The agent turns automatically to see Robert behind him, stepping down from the back of the balcony. We will see the same stunt presented more fully and with panache in the first performance, but the momentary channeling of story information through the agent emphasizes what Robert values as a performer: watching the viewer’s stunned expression when confronted with what appears to be a miracle.

The use of sound to both reveal and conceal story information, in conjunction with other film techniques, comes at the very start of the film. Here sound and image must orient us to the narrative world, introducing the main characters and dramatic issues. The opening must also plant details that may seem unimportant or puzzling but that will later play major roles. The opening of
The Prestige
also introduces us to one of the film’s major storytelling techniques, that of the voice-over commentary we encounter in the diaries. And some clues tantalize us but become comprehensible once we have penetrated the film’s secrets. Once more, we find that sound assists both clear storytelling and bold misdirection.

The most dramatic portions of the opening involve a performance of Robert’s Tesla-inspired version of the Transported Man. Alfred, disguised in the audience, goes onstage to inspect the gadget and then dodges into the wings and down under the stage. There he finds the tank awaiting Robert. As the trick is consummated, Robert plummets into the water and starts to drown before Alfred’s eyes.

The performance is played with no dialogue, apart from the moment when Alfred assures a stagehand that he’s part of the act. There is a soft but ominous drone from the musical score, overridden by fierce crackling as the Tesla coil fires up. As with the other major illusions, the act’s payoff takes place offscreen; we see the result when Robert falls through the trapdoor. The coil’s crackling and the musical score stop abruptly, in a harsh cutoff that will be typical of the rest of the film, and we hear a splash as Robert is submerged. The top of the tank snaps shut with a whang. Then another long silence, enhancing suspense.

The audience stirs restlessly; where has Robert gone? Meanwhile, below stage, Alfred approaches the drowning Robert and we hear the heartbeat pulse in the orchestra, foreshadowing Cutter’s ticking stopwatch. As Robert thrashes underwater, the nondiegetic music turns into frantic string twitterings. The image fades to black, the music dies, and the next sequence, at Alfred’s trial, begins.

But this highly dramatic scene, showing a magic trick apparently gone wrong, is crosscut with a more mundane, even trivial moment, taking place in an unidentified time. We see Cutter stroll past a row of cages, select one canary, put it into a cage, and make it disappear. He then makes it reappear to the delight of a little girl, who we’ll later learn is Alfred’s daughter Jessie. There is no dialogue from within this scene, only the chirping of the birds and the sound of Cutter performing the trick; the tense, somber music starts in this sequence and continues until the moment of Robert’s immersion.

Two magic tricks, one of great simplicity and the other of lethal complexity, are shown in alternation. In three minutes, the film has aroused all manner of questions about what has led up to these events and what will follow. The narration also asks us what connection we are to make between the canary trick and the elaborate stage show. The answer, itself partial and teasing, is provided by a voice-over commentary.

We hear Cutter’s voice explaining that every magic trick has three parts, and his layout of the phases corresponds to both crosscut lines of action. His description of the Pledge, the promise that things work in the ordinary way, is heard in his voice-over as he silently shows Jessie the canary and puts it in the cage. Cut to Robert displaying himself and his machine. Spectators, including Alfred, climb onstage to inspect the gadget.