The Prestige, 2006 Film: Important Historic Themes of Illusion and Morality

The Prestige is one of my truly favorite films, with a fantastic cast, including Michael Caine, Christopher Bale and Hugh Jackman. Based on Christopher Priest's 1995 book, the film's importance lies in an underlying concept that an audience always believes that somewhere, beneath the tricks, behind the prestige, something more exists--some true magic that fascinates and allures both magician and audience.

Two rival magicians, Borden, played by Christopher Bale, and Angiers, portrayed by Hugh Jackman, engage in a vicious rivalry with terrible cost. The envious Angiers pursues and exploits the chimera of the perfect trick, in order to overshadow the succes of his bitter rival. The complete moral bankruptcy of Jackman’s character, and the complicity of the audience through their suspended rationality, fueled by a willingness to believe in magic, reveals a horrifying result.

Simply put, the audience cooperates in oblivious moral ignorance while enjoying being hoodwinked. Never realizing or considering the quantity of unseen dead pigeons jettisoned from the magician's collapsed cages after each performance, the audience believes in the trick, and equally believes that the magician holds some secret magic power that makes the impossible possible. For the audience, possibility of the existence of magic somehow makes their individual lives more hopeful and meaningful, and thus more bearable.

Rival magicians know better, and try to discern the trick, while knowing that any magician's popularity rests in the perfection of the illusion, the prestige that makes an audience gasp with wonder. Night after night, Jackman’s character performs a trick that is unthinkably immoral and callous, and thus completely puzzling to audiences and fellow-magicians. His quest to defy natural laws, to exceed knowable limits, to harness scientific discovery in search of the perfect trick, leads him to commit deplorable crimes for the sake of entertainment and personal ambition.

It is an old theme, worth repeating, that pursuit of illusory success always comes at some cost. We rarely ask ourselves how complicit we may by our passive enjoyment of those who bemuse and bedazzle us, while they may be tempted to exceed moral limits in their pursuit of ever greater illusions. The search for magic, for the secrets that defy rationality, lead us to delight in strange phenomena, to trust in those who challenge and distort our perceptions of reality and lead us to believe in strange powers that "lie beneath" revealed truths. A cameo by David Bowie as the mad genius Tesla underlines the complex relationship between technological wonders and moral consequences.

In the Victorian era, Freud posed ideas of the unconscious mind--a world that lay beneath perception--while new inventions, such as radiation and electricity, defied known reality. Many writers and thinkers of that era questioned and examined the uneasy borders between magic and science, good and evil, progress of mankind and the callous use of others to serve greed and pride.

These great historical themes concerning the moral cost of man's imaginative ambition deserve consideration, especially, in light of today's globalized seduction of willing consumers/audiences through use of a dazzling array of technological advances, often with little regard for moral consequences. The unchanging human heart continues to be complicit in being hoodwinked by its fascination and underlying belief in magic—arrayed as science, progress, security, or simple entertainment— that may hide a moral abyss of unthinkable secrets.

Daytrip to Tournai, Belgium

During a terribly rainy, cold week in Paris this April, I decided to take the train from the Gare de Nord in Paris, to Tournai, Belgium in search of tapestries. When I arrived, I learned that the immense Notre Dame Cathedral was under reconstruction, and most of it is inaccessible at present. The famous tapestries that illustrate the history of St. Eleutherius and Piat are either covered or hidden away (I couldn't quite ascertain which), but are not available for viewing. The treasury is closed and most of the building is shut down for repairs.

Tournai is really a very interesting city, and the people were very friendly and helpful. The lady at the cathedral was so kind that I completely forgot my disappointment over the closure of the major exhibits. Some saint--I don't know who--was discovered to be buried behind the altar,and they have been excavating underneath the cathedral to disinter the bones. The place is immense--and there is just no way to explain why I should have enjoyed myself in this place that is covered with scaffolding, dust, and has a huge hole in the middle of it--but I did!

Perhaps it is just that I had decided to enjoy myself or because I had been really well-fed at a lovely, small restaurant called L'Orchidee, where they served a delicious, well-prepared 3-course formule, with generous portions for under 12 euros, and a great glass of the vin ordinaire--house red--for 2.5 euros! Each table was decorated with live orchids, and the clientele represented a cross-section of well-heeled tourists and cheerful local regulars. The whole town shuts down for dinner from 12 - 2 p.m. each day, so the forced relaxation changed my entire disposition while I avoided a drenching rainstorm during lunch.

I guess my disappointment dissipated in the general relaxed, friendly atmosphere of the town. The cathedral is ancient, immense, and full of interesting history. A stop by the Office of Tourism on the way to the Cathedral and Tower provided lots of historical information, while the Tapestry museum with its collection of early tapestries and more modern ones, also offered a chance to observe working restorers patiently mending the fragile treasures in their upstairs workshops.

Sometimes traveling is just a matter of relaxing and enjoying whatever we find, and not feeling disappointed that our agenda must change with new information. Besides, Belgium in the rain was perfect--and long, leisurely dinners in the afternoon seem to make very agreeable hosts--and tourists.

France in the Middle Ages 987-1460: From Hugh Capet to Joan of Arc by Georges Duby; translated by Juliet Vale.(Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.) 1991.

This volume by Georges Duby (1919-1996), distinguished professor emeritus of the Collège de France, was written about ten years before his death. It is an excellent resource and a good introduction to French medieval history for the serious student of French history. His argument is especially strong in connecting the evolving French political, economic, and intellectual movements to counter-developments in historic events and thought. It is part of a larger series on French history that was commissioned to celebrate the Millennium, and his section, despite its title, is a short introduction that introduces his real expertise in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, with a short wrap-up of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The choice of Joan of Arc to represent the single even of the fifteenth century is mean to connect to the next volume (written by Leroy Ladurie) and to demonstrate the continuing romantic influence of the symbolism of the Middle Ages—especially through adaptation of sacred symbols to modern and secular movements and national allegiance.

While he is primarily interested in social history, especially as it pertains to tracing the development of feudalism, he appeals to younger historians to write feminist history, gently offering questions and direction for further study. He is sensitive to the plight of women, as comments in his book, The Knight, The Priest, and The Lady, based on very popular public lectures he delivered in the 1980’s at the College de France had demonstrated. In later years, Duby limited the focus of his writing (he also continued to direct a center for medieval studies in Provence) to the narrative history he had pioneered with Leroy Ladurie and others, preferring to offer his own views and interpretations, based upon a long and successful career.

French scholarship applauds his writing--he was, after all, a member of the College de France. But some English-language peer reviews, while acknowledging his legendary historical reputation, criticized his decision to decline construction of a feminine narrative, citing a lack of documentary evidence for the tenth through thirteenth centuries in France, and admitting the lethargy of the French academy’s attention to feminist history. He noted that he felt unqualified to speak for these hypothetical women, as neither his training nor his gender qualified him to do so. I found his reluctance charming, and consistent with the polite manner of a gentleman of his generation. One female historian, no doubt aggrieved over the impossibility of finding substantive support in Duby’s scholarship for feminist history projects, wrote that she was “angry” that he had died before replying to her review of his work! Some English-speaking historians seem to have declared that every work must explore every issue from every possible viewpoint in order to meet peer approval standards, a demand that has led to a great deal of sameness and dreary redundancy in current academic work.

In this volume, Duby produced a brief summary of the study and conclusions he reached in a lifetime of careful research, presented with a soupcon of the distinctive and compelling narrative style of the Annales historical method, which he helped to pioneer. Duby’s style will not please modernists, who offer deliberately bland, disinterested voices that confer objective authority, while asking us, like the Wizard of Oz, to ignore the actual men and women behind their disembodied voices. By contrast, Duby's historical narrative voice is lively, engaging, intelligent, humble, and authoritative. I like his voice, so I enjoyed the book. Overall, the book is one which would stimulate discussion and cause serious students to want to inquire further, while providing excellent insights from an important French historian.