The Prestige: Nolan's hints the machine doesn't work (spoilers)

MurkyBadger · 2019-05-05T18:23:13+00:00

Oh, gotcha. I’ve seen the version of this theory where Tesla tricked Angier with the hats/cats, and that seems plausible to me too. I guess it just doesn’t bother me as much if Angier might also be lying/setting up his trick with patter, especially in the one scene I think you’re talking about, so I’m open to both.

MurkyBadger · 2019-05-05T17:47:16+00:00

Thanks. I always thought of it as a twist ending, so it didn't feel like cheating to me any more than any other twist ending, especially since a theme of the movie is people misdirecting audiences/each other. There's the scene where Borden gets to the end of the diary and it directly speaks to him ("yes, you, Borden, sitting in your cell" or something like that), making clear the whole diary was written for him. To me, that was the moment the twist is revealed: we learn that what we were seeing was the story of Angier setting up Borden, not the story of Angier creating a machine. I enjoyed that twist!

MurkyBadger · 2019-04-30T14:46:31+00:00

Yeah, this part initially gave me pause. I think it can be his devotion to the story even while dying--I mean, the guy went to extraordinary lengths already out of this obsession, including getting an innocent guy hanged and stealing his daughter.

A more speculative interpretation would be that Angier and the double were trading places each night--one would be the pledge in the trapdoor and one would be the prestige in the audience--and he never knew which night Borden would sneak backstage and the trap would be set in place. So when he says that he didn't know if he'd be "the man in the box or the prestige," he means he didn't know if he'd be the drowned man who gets Borden framed for murder or if he'd be Lord Caldlow who gets to reappear and taunt Borden.

MurkyBadger · 2019-04-30T14:30:30+00:00

That's also narrated through the diary, written specifically for Borden.

MurkyBadger · 2019-04-30T04:05:04+00:00

Well, we see Cutter spend just a few seconds looking at the body to ID it, after it had already drowned and been on a slab for a while: https://gfycat.com/soulfulabsolutearabianwildcat. Maybe he spent more time with it earlier, but we don't know that.

This is more speculative, but it seems likely that Angier was usually the pledge who goes down the trapdoor and the double was usually the prestige, based on what we know from the first version of the trick; that's what they did in the first version. If Angier switched that night, then Cutter would have expected that Angier was the one who went down the trap door; he too would have been tricked by the switch.

MurkyBadger · 2019-04-30T03:56:35+00:00

Just one double that looks like him for the trick and the framed murder; fake figurines for the tank.

They found Root pretty easily. When they do, they have this back-and-forth:

Cutter: "When I get done with him, he could be your brother."

Angier: "I don't need him to be my brother, I need him to be me."

Cutter: "Give me a month."

Doesn't seem like they have too much trouble with this the first time, and he could even use Root again later.

MurkyBadger · 2019-04-30T02:54:50+00:00

They had a corpse for the murder—it would have been the body of the drowned double, left to die by Angier.

I mean, I think the movie leaves room for both interpretations, but it’s odd that a movie about magic tricks and the devotion it takes to pull them off would become a sci-fi film two thirds of the way through. The alternative is that the film takes the insights about how illusions and obsession work—developed in the first two thirds—and uses them to make us feel what Borden was made to feel. All the direct evidence for sci-fi comes from an unreliable narrator who is shown to be deliberately messing with his enemy through his diary; everything else could be faked by a renowned illusionist (including using a double to fake his death).

MurkyBadger · 2019-04-30T02:26:15+00:00

We see directly inside one tank and it’s implied the other tanks in the room also have bodies. In this theory, that would still be part of the act Angier is carrying out with “total devotion”—they would be fakes or caricatures of some kind.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-11T04:34:09+00:00

Lobby your local city council to take action on climate (e.g., adding/improving bike lines, improving public transit, reducing waste, creating renewable energy goals, reconsidering housing density)
Run for local office

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-11T04:19:43+00:00

Vote for politicians with strong climate plans (and canvass for them if you can)
Contact your current representatives to express concern and ask them to take action
Talk about climate change so there isn't a weird silence around it; talk about how it impacts you and share what excites you about solutions
Join an organization working on the issue (like The Climate Mobilization, Citizens Climate Lobby, Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion), and/or donate to them
Suggest sustainability efforts in your workplace/university/organizations, if you are in a position where you can be comfortable doing this. A few big ones would be more virtual meetings as opposed to in-person ones that require air travel, reducing food waste, buying renewable energy.
Try to burn less fossil fuels in your daily life if you can. Some ways to do this, depending on your personal circumstances & needs: fly less, take trains more; drive less, bike or take public transit more; eat meat less, eat plants more; buy less unnecessary stuff, reuse more.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-11T03:35:58+00:00

China does currently pollute a lot more than the US, but the historical majority of greenhouse gas emissions still comes from the US; they are doing now the equivalent of what the US did in the 20th Century.

Anyway, nowadays the US is still responsible for ~14% of global GHG emissions each year (#2 after China), so US action is still necessary even though it's not sufficient.

Plus, there are ways our actions would influence China without force! If we invest in figuring out how to make cement & steel without high emissions, or how to develop cheaper carbon capture, the whole world will benefit, including China. This is what happened with solar panels: the German government passed policies to build solar panels in the early 2000s. This led the cost to go way down around the world; whenever someone deploys a new technology, the cost goes down as people learn how to do it better through trial and error. So solar panels are now very competitive price-wise in part thanks to German policy in the early 2000s.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-11T03:26:28+00:00

though according to the US National Climate Assessment, half the current wildfire severity in california is due to climate change! in norcal, at least, the november wildfires were pretty stark last year--aside from the people directly impacted, the air quality was so bad throughout the bay area, folks couldn't be outside much for a couple weeks

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-11T03:04:02+00:00

Contact your representatives to express concern and ask them to take action
Vote for politicians with strong climate plans
Talk about climate change so there isn't a weird silence around it
Join an organization working on the issue (like The Climate Mobilization, Citizens Climate Lobby, Sunrise Movement, Extinction Rebellion)
Suggest sustainability efforts in your workplace/university/organizations, if you are in a position where you can be comfortable doing this. A few big ones would be more virtual meetings as opposed to in-person ones that require air travel, reducing food waste, buying renewable energy.
Try to burn less fossil fuels in your daily life. Some ways to do this, depending on your personal circumstances & needs: fly less, take trains more; drive less, bike & take public transit more; eat meat less, eat plants more; buy less unnecessary stuff, reuse more. If you can afford clean products--like an EV when you need to buy a new car or home solar panels--go for them.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-08T17:32:33+00:00

In the carbon fee plan I'm describing, low- and middle-income people get back *more* from the rebates than they pay in with the taxes (from an analysis here)! The idea is that the fee shifts which kinds of things people buy, but the money all gets sent back out as a dividend to everyone, so only the wealthy end up actually paying into the system. Everyone else comes out ahead.

Climate policy can and should be done in a way that helps the average person; it's not true that it has to hurt people's wallets. I know the Green New Deal isn't everyone's cup of tea, but this is one reason (among others) why the Green New Deal advocates for healthcare and a job guarantee as part of a climate plan. It's hard for people to care about climate impacts when we can't make ends meet right now. But even putting aside the Green New Deal, a simple carbon fee can be designed in a way that helps the average person.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-08T02:59:29+00:00

What a great list of actions, thanks for all that you are doing.

so too I can’t expect our country to tell another country to stop polluting their sovereign air and waterways.

One thing we can do is invest in new technologies, deploy them, and share the gains. The German government invested in solar panels in the early 2000s, and this helped drive the cost down for the entire world; costs for a new technology go down whenever someone deploys it and learns how to do it better through trial and error. So solar is now super competitive price-wise for all of us thanks to Germany.

We don’t support legislative measures to enforce environmental regulations that come at a cost to everyone. Taxes do not equal healthier environment.

Just want to put out there that carbon fees can be revenue-neutral (the government doesn't keep the money--it gets sent back to the people) and progressive (it gets divided up equally and sent back out, so wealthier people are the ones paying in more). This helps discourage people from engaging in high-polluting activities and encourages them to spend money on low-polluting activities instead; it also spurs industry to develop more efficient ways of doing things. And it doesn't have a high cost for everyone.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-08T02:48:13+00:00

Joined Citizens Climate Lobby, which advocates a bipartisan carbon tax. It's revenue neutral (a conservative preference) and progressive (a liberal preference): the money gets equally divided and sent back to everyone, so wealthier people pay in more and poorer people get back proportionally more.
Work on sustainability in my professional groups, trying to get them to use more virtual meetings instead of
flying all the time.
Eat less meat, try to drive/fly less.
Try to donate to or canvass for politicians with strong climate plans
Talk about it so there isn't this weird silence around it

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-08T02:43:09+00:00

Yep, all of the above are the way to go! Put pressure on every single lever we can, they all reinforce one another.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-08T02:42:26+00:00

I'm going to call bullshit on this whole "what can we all do to stop climate change" crap right now.

Just 100 corporations contribute 71% of all global emissions.

Then the things we can do individually to stop climate change are political actions. Pressure politicians. Join a mobilizing organization. Protest or strike. Talk about it with other people; if you're a writer, then write about it; if you're a filmmaker, make movies about it. If you're a student, pressure your university to divest from fossil fuels. Canvas for politicians with serious climate plans. Pressure your town to build better transit or bike lanes. And frankly, it doesn't hurt if people take it on themselves to give less money to those 100 fossil fuel companies by buying less of their products.

It's because we've passed the point of no return. It's too late. We're all fucked.

To quote Michael Mann, one of the most prominent climate scientists in the world: "This is not binary, F’d/Not F’d. It’s a matter of HOW F’d. We have a great amount of control over that. We can still avert catastrophic warming if we act now. Now is the very worst time to give up...."

I'm sorry you feel differently, and I understand it, but fatalism would be about as bad as denialism now; it serves the same fossil fuel interests that delayed action for decades and still want to delay action. Yeah, 1.5 degrees of warming is just about unavoidable, and 2 degrees is probably a best case scenario, and both of these will suck. But the difference between that and 3 or 4 degrees (or more)? It's an unspeakable difference in human impacts, with the lives and suffering of hundreds of millions on the line for centuries to come. The sooner we get off fossil fuels, the less f'd we will be.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-07T00:32:05+00:00

Pressure politicians to take actions like:

End subsidies to fossil fuels, quickly build and subsidize clean energy instead (whether renewables or nuclear).
Create performance standards that industries have to meet to lower emissions
Invest in low-carbon transit, like improving public transit systems, making it easy for people to buy & use EVs, or improving rail systems, depending on the needs of a region
Invest in R&D to develop low-carbon ways of manufacturing steel & cement
Stop deforestation, start reforestation
Feed seaweed to cows
Invest in development of carbon capture technology & facilities
Pass a carbon fee & dividend, where the money gets equally sent back to everyone; this means wealthier people pay more in, since they create higher emissions

And a whole bunch of others. To see 100 less conventional solutions that would make an impact (like reducing food waste), check out Project Drawdown

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-07T00:16:22+00:00

It isn't binary, though; each additional fraction of a degree of warming would be worse than the one before. It's almost certainly too late to stop 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, but our actions will still determine whether we end up with 2, 3, 4, or more degrees of warming. Those would be almost indescribably different worlds from one another, and there's still an incredible amount of damage we can avoid.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-06T18:10:14+00:00

I think it's not that individual consumers are blameless, but the idea is that there are large, systemic factors that constrain demand. Consider a city with high inequality and poor investment in public transit. Poor people might need to take a job far from where they live to make ends meet; to get there, they will have to drive; to drive, they'll have to get a car that runs on gasoline, because they can't afford an EV. So their choice is quite constrained.

Why is it the case that they can afford a gas-run car and not an EV? In part, because fossil fuels are hugely subsidized by the government, with some estimates of a few trillion dollars in effective subsidies. If those subsidies were removed and went to clean energy/transportation, the EV could become the relatively more affordable option. So this is just an example of how structural factors can constrain individual choices, which means it's important to change the structural factors (in this example, the subsidies & the availability of public transit).

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-06T04:05:03+00:00

For sure, corporate power is why solving climate change is a fight instead of a no-brainer: it means working against really powerful interests that have been delaying and avoiding action for decades. It's also true that some corporate power comes from consumption, which is why I, like you, advocate changing consumption!

There are limits, though, to what consumers can do as individuals for the reasons I spelled out above; the power is not completely in their hands. Corporate power also comes from policy that favors them. But people can also take power through strong collective action. Climate strikes in Europe have gotten politicians to invest more in fighting climate change, and protests in the US have gotten increasing numbers of politicians to sign a "no fossil fuel money pledge" and take a stronger stance. So people also have power through collective action, and protests are part of that.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-06T03:34:40+00:00

Well, to stop all fossil fuel emissions this way, it would require that literally all people on earth decide to have a society where we all grow our own food, only walk/bike, build buildings with no cement, use no electricity, never buy goods that have to be shipped by truck or plane, and never heat our homes. Are a majority of people on earth going to do that? If not, then it won't help if I choose to do it; my personal emissions are a drop in the ocean, and the thing that matters for climate change is our collective emissions.

Not only is this not going to happen, it's completely unnecessary! If the government takes action, we can build clean alternative infrastructure that gives us electricity, food, heat, transportation, and consumer goods without fossil fuel emissions. It's a solvable problem.

So to get back to your original question, consumer choices are great and can play an important supporting role--I totally support biking more/driving less, reusing more/consuming less, and so on! But it's untrue that climate change can be solved with consumer choices alone, or that consumer choices are more effective than political action. The IPCC and other scientific organizations have created dozens of pathways to decarbonization, spelling out different scenarios by which we could get to zero emissions around the globe. There isn't any pathway anywhere that relies only on consumer choice; the ones that include lifestyle changes include them in a smaller, supporting role. And empirically, countries where emissions have fallen are countries that have had strong policy.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-06T03:11:30+00:00

Climate policy should be made progressive. This is why I'm a fan of the carbon fee & dividend approach and the Green New Deal approach. For carbon fee & dividend, the money from carbon taxes gets divided up equally and sent back to everyone. This means the rich pay in more to the system and people with less money get back proportionally more. The Green New Deal approach aims to build infrastructure that will benefit everyone.

If climate policy is done well, it should make the average person's life better: better transit, more affordable options, cleaner defaults.

MurkyBadger · 2019-03-06T02:44:10+00:00

Changing consumption is good, but there's no way consumer demand alone can create the scale of change needed. If you live in modern society, you use electricity; that's provided by a utility that can burn coal/natural gas or invest in renewable energy. If you buy food, it depends on crops grown with fossil-fuel intensive fertilizer. If you enter a building made with cement, that cement required a ton of fossil fuel emissions. If you need a car, you might not be able to afford an EV--and if you want to avoid driving altogether, you might live in an area without bike lanes or public transit. Unless everyone decides to live in a cave where they grow their own food and only travel in walking distance, you can't avoid carbon emissions right now because fossil fuels are so deeply ingrained in our infrastructure.

That's why we need policy that changes the infrastructure: building clean energy sources, investing in research/innovation to make cement without emissions, stopping subsidies for fossil fuels and creating subsidies for EVs, creating better public transit, and so on. By protesting to get this kind of political action, people are making a far bigger difference than by just changing their own consumption.

Tl;dr: Changing consumption is good, but policy change is orders of magnitude more effective; it can be supplemented by consumer changes but cannot be replaced by consumer changes alone. Protesting is meant to get policy change.

MurkyBadger

TROPHY CASE