As a director, writer, and producer, Christopher Nolan has substantially impacted contemporary cinema through avant garde films, such as Following and Memento, and his contribution to wider pop culture with his Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film, Interstellar, delivered the same visual qualities and complex, thought-provoking plotlines his audience anticipates. The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan collects sixteen essays, written by professional philosophers and film theorists, discussing themes such as self-identity and self-destruction, moral choice and moral doubt, the nature of truth and its value, whether we can trust our perceptions of what’s “real,” the political psychology of heroes and villains, and what it means to be a “viewer” of Nolan’s films. Whether his protagonists are squashing themselves like a bug, struggling to create an identity and moral purpose for themselves, suffering from their own duplicitous plots, donning a mask that both strikes fear and reveals their true nature, or having to weigh the lives of those they love against the greater good, there are no simple solutions to the questions Nolan’s films provoke; exploring these questions yields its own reward.

A philosophical look at the movie Inception and its brilliant metaphysical puzzles Is the top still spinning? Was it all a dream? In the world of Christopher Nolan's four-time Academy Award-winning movie, people can share one another's dreams and alter their beliefs and thoughts. Inception is a metaphysical heist film that raises more questions than it answers: Can we know what is real? Can you be held morally responsible for what you do in dreams? What is the nature of dreams, and what do they tell us about the boundaries of "self" and "other"? From Plato to Aristotle and from Descartes to Hume, Inception and Philosophy draws from important philosophical minds to shed new light on the movie's captivating themes, including the one that everyone talks about: did the top fall down (and does it even matter)? Explores the movie's key questions and themes, including how we can tell if we're dreaming or awake, how to make sense of a paradox, and whether or not inception is possible Gives new insights into the nature of free will, time, dreams, and the unconscious mind Discusses different interpretations of the film, and whether or not philosophy can help shed light on which is the "right one" Deepens your understanding of the movie's multi-layered plot and dream-infiltrating characters, including Dom Cobb, Arthur, Mal, Ariadne, Eames, Saito, and Yusuf An essential companion for every dedicated Inception fan, this book will enrich your experience of the Inception universe and its complex dreamscape.

Over the past fifteen years, writer, producer and director Christopher Nolan has emerged from the margins of independent British cinema to become one of the most commercially successful directors in Hollywood. From Following (1998) to Interstellar (2014), Christopher Nolan's films explore philosophical concerns by experimenting with nonlinear storytelling while also working within classical Hollywood narrative and genre frameworks. Contextualizing and closely reading each of his films, this collection examines the director's play with memory, time, trauma, masculinity, and identity, and considers the function of music and video games and the effect of IMAX on his work.

An in-depth look at Christopher Nolan, considered to be the most profound, commercially successful director at work today, written with his full cooperation. A rare, revelatory portrait, "as close as you're ever going to get to the Escher drawing that is Christopher Nolan's remarkable brain" (Sam Mendes). In chapters structured by themes and motifs ("Time"; "Chaos"; "Dreams"), Shone offers an unprecedented intimate view of the director. Shone explores Nolan's thoughts on his influences, his vision, his enigmatic childhood past--and his movies, from plots and emotion to identity and perception, including his latest blockbuster, the action-thriller/spy-fi Tenet ("Big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable"--Variety). Filled with the director's never-before-seen photographs, storyboards, and scene sketches, here is Nolan on the evolution of his pictures, and the writers, artists, directors, and thinkers who have inspired and informed his films. "Fabulous: intelligent, illuminating, rigorous, and highly readable. The very model of what a filmmaking study should be. Essential reading for anyone who cares about Nolan or about film for that matter."--Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and Walt Disney, The Biography

From Memento and Insomnia to the Batman films, The Prestige, and Inception, lies play a central role in every Christopher Nolan film. Characters in the films constantly find themselves deceived by others and are often caught up in a vast web of deceit that transcends any individual lies. The formal structure of a typical Nolan film deceives spectators about the events that occur and the motivations of the characters. While Nolan's films do not abandon the idea of truth altogether, they show us how truth must emerge out of the lie if it is not to lead us entirely astray. The Fictional Christopher Nolan discovers in Nolan's films an exploration of the role that fiction plays in leading to truth. Through close readings of all the films through Inception, Todd McGowan demonstrates that the fiction or the lie comes before the truth, and this priority forces us to reassess our ways of thinking about the nature of truth. Indeed, McGowan argues that Nolan's films reveal the ethical and political importance of creating fictions and even of lying. While other filmmakers have tried to discover truth through the cinema, Nolan is the first filmmaker to devote himself entirely to the fictionality of the medium, and McGowan discloses how Nolan uses its tendency to deceive as the basis for a new kind of philosophical filmmaking. He shows how Nolan's insistence on the priority of the fiction aligns his films with Hegel's philosophy and understands Nolan as a thoroughly Hegelian filmmaker.

Christopher Nolan is the writer and director of Hollywood blockbusters like The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises, and also of arthouse films like Memento and Inception. Underlying his staggering commercial success however, is a darker sensibility that questions the veracity of human knowledge, the allure of appearance over reality and the latent disorder in contemporary society. This appreciation of the sinister owes a huge debt to philosophy and especially modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. Taking a thematic approach to Nolan's oeuvre, Robbie Goh examines how the director's postmodern inclinations manifest themselves in non-linearity, causal agnosticism, the threat of social anarchy and the frequent use of the mise en abyme, while running counter to these are narratives of heroism, moral responsibility and the dignity of human choice. For Goh, Nolan is a 'reluctant postmodernist'. His films reflect the cynicism of the modern world, but with their representation of heroic moral triumphs, they also resist it.

Within a short space of time, the film Memento has already been hailed as a modern classic. Memorably narrated in reverse, from the perspective of Leonard Shelby, the film’s central character, it follows Leonard’s chaotic and visceral quest to discover the identity of his wife’s killer and avenge her murder, despite his inability to form new long-term memories. This is the first book to explore and address the myriad philosophical questions raised by the film, concerning personal identity, free will, memory, knowledge, and action. It also explores problems in aesthetics raised by the film through its narrative structure, ontology, and genre. Beginning with a helpful introduction that places the film in context and maps out its complex structure, specially commissioned chapters examine the following topics: memory, emotion, and self-consciousness agency, free will, and responsibility personal identity narrative and popular cinema the film genre of neo-noir Memento and multimedia Including annotated further reading at the end of each chapter, Memento is essential reading for students interested in philosophy and film studies.