Christopher Nolan: Artist of Trauma, A Review of Stuart Joy’s “The Traumatic Screen”

Stuart Joy. The Traumatic Screen: The Films of Christopher Nolan. Chicago, IL: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2020. 185pp. $26.50.

It is no shocking revelation that film—at least film on the big screen—may be dead.

As The Batman director Matt Reeves hints in a recent interview, the only films that studios are willing to risk in theaters during the Covid era are big budge productions of films from recognizable franchises.

Thus, Marvel fans are sure to be in for a treat for the next couple of years.

However, those looking for a “headier” or more cerebral film will have fairly slim pickings.

One seeming exception to this trend is, of course, Christopher Nolan, who is currently filming a biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The director of a number of the twenty first century’s most notable films, Nolan is perhaps best known to global audiences for his Dark Knight trilogy (2005-2012), which set the gold standard for the “thinking man’s popcorn flick.” Especially with his 2008 The Dark Knight, Nolan was able to craft a film that probed some of the deepest philosophical and psychological questions with which humans wrestle along with a fantastic visual spectacle. As a result, it is rumored that Nolan is one of the few directors to be given an effective carte blanche from studios in which he is able to write and direct whatever films he wants since what Christopher Nolan writes and directs usually happens to be quite lucrative.

One of the dominant threads in Christopher Nolan’s work is the (in-)ability of his characters to cope with and recover from trauma.

In his recent work, The Traumatic Screen: The Films of Christopher Nolan, film scholar Stuart Joy tackles this theme in a number of Nolan’s films. Joy praises Nolan as a director who can work within the Hollywood system to create unconventional films. This tension between the production company’s bottom line, and the director’s desire to project his or her vision on the screen is something that has always been characteristic of Hollywood films.

Drawing from thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, film and modernity both are, for Joy, intricately related to trauma. There is further a genre of film called “trauma cinema” of which Joy believes Nolan is an integral part. Trauma cannot be encapsulated words, so, on one level, the representation of trauma is an apparent contradiction. Films thus cannot represent trauma; they can only “gesture” toward it. Joy also curiously points toward the connection between film and psychosis, noting that the Lumière brothers’ first film was screened the same year (1895) as the publication of Freud’s Studies on Hysteria. Drawing from Freud’s early theory of dreams, Joy argues that just as dreams represent the desires of the unconscious, so too do films, which are themselves products of the unconscious, project hidden desire, which the film’s audience can engage. Trauma itself can provide access to the unconscious, and, as a result, a film about traumatic is unique window to the unconscious.

Christopher Nolan is, first and foremost, for Joy, an auteur whose artist and philosophical vision saturates his films.  One of the most pronounced themes of Nolan’s films is anxiety writ large through art. With a host of global catastrophes and wars, the twentieth century certainly was the age of anxiety, but even more so is the twenty-first, and we are only two decades in. This anxiety is further complimented in Nolan’s film with the obsessive concern for control, which, itself frequently accompanies endemic anxiety.

Treading close to one of the cardinal sins of criticism: reading the author’s life into his or her work, Joy argues that Nolan’s own experience of guilt as a result of being away from his family while filming as well as the loss of Nolan’s own father in 2009. Joy does caution that we should not necessarily read too much of Nolan’s life into his work.

Joy sees an arc in Nolan’s films in which unresolved and inescapable trauma in Nolan’s early films such as Insomnia (2002), The Dark Knight Trilogy, and The Prestige (2006), which is later resolved in films like Inception through the characters’ (and perhaps the viewers’) embrace of a comforting fiction. In early films such as Memento (2000), the characters are unable to escape the intrusion of the past in the present, which Nolan illustrates on screen in the form of flash backs. Interestingly, these flash backs are not always consistent—in Memento, we are uncertain whether it is Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) whose wife is diabetic or if it is the wife of the accountant Sammy Jankis, for in the film we see both two versions of the memory: one in which Shleby is administering insulin and one in which Jankis is.

Later, in Interstellar (2014), Nolan presents a (semi-) authentic resolution trauma through the reunification of a father (Matthew McConaughey) and daughter (Jessica Chastain). In Nolan’s 2017 World War II film, Dunkirk, Joy sees trauma as a powerful source of national identity.

Ultimately, Stuart Joy’s The Traumatic Screen provides a careful and accurate analysis of the films of one of the most important contemporary directors: Christopher Nolan. Nolan’s films are not without criticism, and the final analysis might reveal that only a few of the (justly) lauded works of Christopher Nolan are truly worthy of the appellation “great.” Nonetheless, the best of Christopher Nolan’s films are delightful intellectual puzzles that help provide a deeper understanding of human nature, and Stuart Joy’s The Traumatic Screen is a helpful guide to Nolan’s labyrinthian films.

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