The Ambiguous Men of Christopher Nolan
Misery is compulsory for history-makers.
J. Robert Oppenheimer and Lieutenant General Leslie Groves look over maps of Japan. Retrieved from Department of Energy.
Following the 2008 release of The Dark Knight and especially the 2012 release of The Dark Knight Rises, it became common wisdom across the political spectrum that Christopher Nolan is a conservative filmmaker. The former was almost immediately hailed as one of the greatest conservative films, noting its pro-police, maybe even pro-torture message, while everyone was quick to note the clear inspiration the revolutionary Bane drew from the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I was and remain a huge fan of these films and Nolan as a filmmaker, politics aside. As the Star Wars prequels show, having a sophisticated understanding of politics does not make you a good filmmaker. Moreover, I was 10 when I saw The Dark Knight in theaters and 14 when I saw the final film in the trilogy— they both have special places in my heart, even though I now see many of their issues. After watching Oppenheimer at age 25, it dawned on me that although there is an undercurrent of conservatism and elitism in Nolan’s body of work, there is a more consistent and prominent through-line: he makes movies about men of ambiguous character who suffer for their obsessions. Let’s examine the Dark Knight trilogy, 2006’s The Prestige, 2014’s Interstellar, and 2023’s Oppenheimer to see what I mean.
The Precise Nature of Nolan’s Conservatism
While a close reading of The Dark Knight trilogy does show that he is indeed a conservative filmmaker, Nolan does not endorse his protagonist’s most extreme actions, but in fact critiques the strain of conservatism that occupied the White House at the time.
There are very clear allusions to both the Bush administration’s policies and the War on Terror in Nolan’s interpretation of the Batman mythos, and none paint the actions of the United States in a particularly flattering light. In The Dark Knight alone, Batman is shown torturing and brutalizing the Joker and a mob boss to extract information, mirroring the “advanced interrogation techniques” scandal. Later, he hacks into the cell phones of every person in Gotham in what is likely an allusion to the USA PATRIOT Act, which gave the FBI the power to physically search or wiretap an American citizen without probable cause, arguably in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Although Batman is the protagonist, his actions here are not heroic.
No matter how hard Batman beats the Joker in the famous interrogation scene, all he does is laugh and goad him into escalating his tactics further. Throwing mob boss Sal Maroni off a building only reveals that he knows nothing. The Joker cannot be defeated by force– he outsmarts Batman at every turn and is only physically defeated after the people of Gotham refute his philosophical point that average people would rather blow up a boat of prisoners than die themselves, and that said criminals are monsters that would do the same to them. At a few points, Batman’s allies as well as his enemies tell him he’s finally gone too far: his armorer Lucius Fox, maybe speaking with Nolan’s voice, threatens to resign unless Batman’s mass surveillance tech is destroyed once he’s done with it.
Beyond these direct critiques, there are several core elements of Batman’s character that Nolan either didn’t want to stray from or simply didn’t consider the messaging of, namely that Bruce Wayne is a wealthy white vigilante. While director Matt Reeves’ 2023 film addressed his class background and the fact that scaring criminals would probably make crime rates increase, in Nolan’s trilogy he remains a billionaire who spends his nights and immense wealth thinking up new ways to brutalize the poor instead of investing in the communities ravaged by poverty. There is no realistic interpretation of that that isn’t right-wing, and this fact should stop us from reading an endorsement of Batman’s methods into the series. At most, Nolan doesn’t question this premise. No, unlike Batman himself, Nolan is not a fascist: he’s a reformist conservative. This is shown even more clearly in the nihilistic attitudes of the series’ villains.
The Dark Knight Rises’ Bane’s character is likely the most-cited example of Nolan’s conservatism. He uses pseudo-revolutionary language in line with the general French Revolution theme of the film, springs prisoners from Blackgate prison, and expropriates the property of the wealthy. The timing of the concurrent Occupy Wall Street protests was likely not a coincidence.
In the end, however, Bane is revealed to be no ideologue. His true motivation was always to destroy Gotham to fulfill the original plan of Ra’s al Ghul, the villain of the first film. To al Ghul and the League of Shadows who trained Batman, Gotham was a city of criminals that needed to be destroyed, but it’s never really explained why other than a few offhand lines that “justice is balance”. While Bane and the Joker could be read as caricatures of a socialist or communist and an anarchist respectively, Ra’s al Ghul’s paper-thin motivations show that all the big bads of the series are just meant to be mindless avatars of destruction. To the reformist Nolan, the villains of the series do not want to burn it all down for the sake of ideology, but come up with reasons to justify their desire to watch the world burn. If there is a core message to Nolan’s trilogy, it is that evil destroys while good conserves.
Batman lives up to this mantra to a T. He works tirelessly to root out corruption and organized crime, with the hope that District Attorney Harvey Dent’s success in legitimately prosecuting the mob will make his extralegal methods unnecessary. When the Joker succeeds in turning Dent into Two-Face, Batman frames himself for Dent’s murders so the public will believe the system works; not because it works, as the necessity of Batman shows, but because it should work, it must work, to hold the city together. According to Nolan, sometimes the system gets in the way of heroic individuals who try to reform it, and it is at that point that a little extralegal violence is necessary. Systems can only be reformed from the outside, but they should remain intact nevertheless.
The search for conservative politics in Nolan’s filmography typically stops here, but it shouldn’t. His conservatism is reflected not only in his Batman films but also in his implicit endorsement of what I like to call Great Sad Man Theory of History. If anything, his filmography is defined more by this theme than by conservatism.
Only Sad Men Make History
Fundamentally, Nolan makes character studies of men– not women– who sacrifice endlessly for and work tirelessly towards some sort of monumental accomplishment, whether it is to rid Gotham City of crime, split the atom, or– in the case of 2006’s the Prestige, create the ultimate magic trick.
After casting Christian Bale and Michael Caine in 2005’s Batman Begins, he cast them alongside Hugh Jackman of X-Men fame as magicians dedicated to their craft in his 2006 film The Prestige. In the case of Bale and Jackman’s characters Robert Angier and Alfred Borden, their competition to create the best magic trick forms the focus of the film. Once again, this quest transforms them into the exact opposite of heroes.
Angier and Borden torment each other, escalating to physical violence on at least two occasions. Angier shoots Borden’s fingers off and Borden later retaliates by crippling Angiers with the mechanism used in one of his own tricks. It is ultimately revealed that Angiers achieves a teleportation trick by cloning himself and drowning the original in a tank beneath the stage— in other words, literally sacrificing himself for art.
Or take Cooper from 2014’s Interstellar, one of his few unambiguously heroic protagonists. He leaves behind a family to save humanity, watching as time dilation ages his children beyond recognition while time passes normally for him. Even if they aspire to great things to save humanity instead of promoting themselves or seeking revenge, Nolan’s men must make themselves miserable. It is these recurring themes that made Nolan the perfect filmmaker to tackle a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Part of Nolan’s strength as a filmmaker consists of his willingness to confront blockbuster audiences with characters whose moral ambiguity and complexity might make them uncomfortable. Nolan undoubtedly would have been uncomfortable with Oppenheimer’s politics, which he portrays with a sort of distant, cold objectivity, but he also makes an effort to portray any question of his loyalty and patriotism as insulting. Oppenheimer himself is naturally ambivalent towards the bomb as well. In one scene, he insists that the project must be completed over the objections of some of his workers (who opposed continuing after Germany’s surrender), while in others he agonizes over his role in the deaths of countless Japanese civilians. Ultimately, Oppenheimer played one of the largest roles in winning the war, making him a war hero to Nolan’s presumably majority-western audience. He nevertheless stands as the father of one of the few ways humanity has managed to work out a way to destroy itself. While the sensitivity of Cillian Murphy’s performance and Nolan’s direction is unquestionable, it’s difficult to justify treating the subject of the Manhattan Project through such a narrow lens.
Although it dramatizes a massive collective effort amid a global conflict, Oppenheimer is an individualistic and at times radically subjective film. Oppenheimer flirts with communism but maintains his independence by never joining. In scenes where a small board of aggressive, bullish lawyers review his security clearance, it’s clear Nolan is drawing on the longstanding but often eye-rolling image of the heroic individual of great talent facing off against cold bureaucracy. The film features a wide cast of some of the most famous and influential scientists in history but is nevertheless named after one man. The Manhattan Project took years and thousands of people to achieve its goal; a theoretical physicist who admitted to his substandard math skills could not have achieved it on his own. Time and time again Nolan embraces the Great Sad Man Theory of History and tells the story primarily from the titular character’s perspective.
This extends to subjectivity in style as well. When Oppenheimer considers the human impact of the weapon he helped create, Nolan shows us his perspective as he imagines his colleagues as charred corpses he tramples underfoot. His old flame Jean Tatlock suddenly reappears as he recounts their affair in front of a Personnel Security Board. He uses this same technique to put us in the mind of his wife at one point, but overall the film stays largely in his mind. This radical subjectivity makes for great cinema, and individuals are ultimately more relatable to audiences, but it also begs the question of which perspectives are excluded.
The only time Japanese people appear is in the aforementioned charred corpse scene, but they are not only burned beyond recognition but also could simply represent his colleagues once again. Nor is there any mention of the local indigenous tribes impacted by the nuclear tests; contrary to the impression given by the film, the remote locale of the Manhattan Project was inhabited by many people besides the workers. It is unclear if this subjectivity, Nolan’s conservatism, or his attachment to Great Sad Man Theory of History is the cause of their exclusion, but the fact remains that Nolan doesn’t make that sort of film.
Fundamentally, Oppenheimer is about a man tortured by his moral misgivings over the use of the weapon he created. In that sense, the film is the apotheosis of an evergreen Frankie Boyle joke: “Not only will America come to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.”
Even when it is not directly shown, like in his Dark Knight trilogy, a conservatism permeates Nolan’s filmography. It doesn’t come in the form of an endorsement of torture and police brutality, but in the form of films about heroic individual men, often facing off against the obstructionist System, that profoundly shape the world and pay dearly for it in the process. In the course of doing so, he often downplays the importance of collective effort and the perspectives of women as well as racial minorities.
This is not to say he is a bad filmmaker. Although I enjoy analyzing and interpreting films, I don’t often particularly care about their politics so long as I enjoy them. Nolan is one of the few good filmmakers working today that is willing to confront blockbuster audiences with moral complexity that might otherwise be relegated to less popular films. While his breakneck pacing and dialogue is grating at times, his commitment to using film, practical effects, and complex narratives more than earn him his spot as one of the best popular directors working today.