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Christopher Nolan opinion
Exploring the many dead wives of Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan has now been happily married since 1997, and he has frequently doled out charming proclamations of his adoration for his spouse, Emma Thomas. However, not to cast aspersions or anything, Sigmund Freud may well have a field day with the psychology of why the director continually kills wives throughout his filmography.
Is this some sort of sick fetish hidden by Nolan within his work? In his private life is he a fiend for doggy-style (getting his wife to roll over and play dead)? Or is it a storytelling device plucked from the age-old pages of the male gaze of literary history? Regardless of the whys and wherefores, it is a trope that has cropped up in just about all of his movies.
In Memento there is a dead wife. In Inception there is a dead wife. In The Prestige there is a dead wife. In The Dark Knight there is a dead wife. Perhaps he was even attracted to Batman in the first place because it involves a dead wife. The same goes for his adaptation of the dead wife novel Insomnia. In The Dark Knight Rises there is an implication that Ra’s al Ghul’s lost “great love” is a dead wife. In Interstellar there is a wife so dead that she is barely mentioned. In Tenet there is a dead wife who is miraculously saved by time travel. And that just about brings you up to speed with all of the dead, indisposed, nearly dead, or implied dead wives in the spouse slaying filmography of Nolan.
Well, before we get into the analysis, it certainly shows that he (and his brother Jonathan Nolan who co-writes most of his films) are pretty lousy at writing female characters. A female role should not be purely there as a narrative point in the male story. All the many dead wives, no matter how they crop up, are only three-dimensional by virtue of the effects they have on the male protagonists. In truth, we know very little about the wives themselves.
It would seem that, for the most part, in the simplest sense, they are there for no other reason than to be dead. Their deaths have permutations that impact the male characters but seeing as though most of them are already deceased and we see them through flashbacks, in the context of the film, they exist mostly in the minds of the males. They are, in essence, a cheap shot to add further motivation to the mission of the male or to provide a redemptive arc.
So, what does this say about the manly protagonists? That they wouldn’t save the world if they were basking in matrimony bliss at home? Is their sole motivation to purge themselves of the emotive angst that they suffer as a result of the loss of their wife—a loss which usually they were responsible for by proxy in one way or another?
As Edgar Allen Poe once wrote: “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” It is a shallow appraisal that, nevertheless, permeated literature for centuries. Nolan’s females fit into this tradition. As in the literature of Poe, Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Kate Chopin, Nella Larsen and more, the women are middle-class, and in some way, it is implied that despite the irrepressible love between the protagonist and his wife, they are somehow dissatisfied.
In the past, this had a sense of realism. As Flaubert famously has Madame Bovary exclaim: “A man, at least, is free; he can explore each passion and every kingdom, conquer obstacles, feast upon the most exotic pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted.” Nolan has clung to this subtextual melodrama and brought it into modern times (and beyond) where it should not be utilised. In the past, it was reflective of a conservative society, now, however, it should be scrapped in place of promoting a progressive one where the individualism of women is not underpinned by a man.
In Nolan’s work, he propagates the dated notion that behind every great man is a great woman… and a dead one is better still. Madame Bovary was published back in 1856, and yet, it still seems to be the case in Nolan’s fiction that the woman is thwarted, and the man is left to conquer obstacles.
That is not to blast Nolan too much, because it’s hardly glowing for the men either. On their part, it implies that they find it easier to be motivated by loss and personal conquest than they are by happiness and unity. They exhibit a quality that Kurt Vonnegut put his finger on when he said, “Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do the maintenance.” These men either failed or were thwarted in the maintenance of marriage, so the next best thing is to build some gargantuan conquest.
