The Prestige | Archive

20:20Josh Larsen:But I do, that's my understanding. But there is a line of dialogue. He says, how about how it took sacrifice and it took, it was dangerous because he never knew if he'd be the man in the box. Which I'm still trying to unpack. I'll be honest with you. I feel like, and maybe a listener will be able to explain this who's paid closer attention, but I feel like that's a conflict. And my understanding was, and to me it strikes me as more powerful, if the showman, the stage guy, getting all the applause, it goes back to him being underneath and not hearing the applause, knew each night to keep this ruse going, this long con to get bored in, required nightly suicide.

21:01And that is, you know, an equally monstrous, but kind of a

21:07Josh Larsen:differently monstrous conundrum. So I don't know if you, it sounds like you had the same reading I did on that at least.

21:13Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I definitely did. And to go back to your point, too, about what we as viewers want to accept or don't want to accept, the Tesla line played by David Bowie here, where he says you're familiar with the phrase, man's reach exceeds his grasp. And he says it's a lie. Man's grasp exceeds his nerve. That's surely what we see play out over the course of the movie. And ultimately, Angier realizes that he has the nerve and he steals himself to do this every night. But I think we as viewers almost are that man. We just don't have the nerve to do what Andrew's capable of. And we don't even want to believe that someone like him or anyone is capable of that.

21:49Josh Larsen:Yeah. Yeah. So let me back up and state, you know, kind of where I was at with the film in 2006 and why for me to say that this was a little bit less of an experience is not a slight on the film at all, because I think at the time, again, coming after Batman Begins, I would have claim this was Nolan's best film in 06. And I think that was partly because for me, it was a return to Memento form. I had loved Memento, was thrilled by Batman Begins, again, as sort of a kid who grew up on superheroes. And this was a new way to approach them, I thought. But both Batman Begins and Insomnia, comparatively to Memento, were pretty straightforward.

22:27Josh Larsen:And I was so excited about this new filmmaker who made Memento that when I got this, and it seemed much more in the vein of Memento, but maybe a little more, I don't know if polished is the right word, but it's a bigger scale, bigger production. It just, it knocked me out and I loved it. Now, even if I don't say it's probably maybe not Nolan's best film, I do think it might be his most Nolan-esque and that's because it's got the narrative layers and the convoluted timeline we think of. These themes you and I have already discussed, obsession, mainly in the lengths, the places obsession will take men.

23:05Josh Larsen:We have more traumatized protagonists, both of them doubly traumatized, you know, triply if you include the Borden twins. And then adding on top of this, these bold visuals that we've come to ascribe or expect from Nolan here, maybe it, there aren't a ton of them, but the ones that we get, and I'm going to go back to the top hats, those top hats in the field or the light bulbs glowing in the snowy field are just, when you say the prestige, instantly I see the top hats. And so I think for me, even thinking about the films that are to come in our overview, but obviously you and I have both seen, the prestige maybe remains the most Nolan-esque film in his filmography.

23:51Josh Larsen:30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Or will you trust the people five miles overseas? This is a story about neighbors turning on each other. And what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough. We reached for a feeling that exists in this city. But we're not stopping, are we? I'm Ben Nadeff-Haffrey. And for my new series on revisionist history, I took a deep dive into Staten Island's attempt to secede from New York City in the 1990s, and what it all has to do with the politics of resentment that dominate America today.

24:37Josh Larsen:Listen to Revisionist History, The Staten Island Problem, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

24:50Josh Larsen:We've all been there. We've had seasons that have shaken everything. The question is, what remains when the shaking stops? Hi, I'm Gary Valenciano, and on my podcast, Unshaken with Gary V., I sit down with amazing personalities and we talk about the seasons that nearly broke them, the lows that carried them to their highs.

25:15Adam Kempenaar:Listen to Unshaken with Gary Vee on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

25:25Josh Larsen:The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about Enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it. Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it?

25:47Adam Kempenaar:Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

25:58Josh Larsen:I'm Rebecca Nagle, Goheen Dawadon, Jalakayetlike, La, citizen of Cherokee Nation.

26:04Adam Kempenaar:Are you guys big Chiefs fans? Hell yeah.

26:07Josh Larsen:This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

26:26Josh Larsen:I'm Emily Oster. I'm an economist and data expert. And I'm Perry Wilson. I'm a medical doctor. And this is our new podcast, Wellness Actually. Because you're getting a staggering amount of health and wellness information nowadays, and some of it is awesome. And some of it is, well, actually, bullsh**. Fortunately, we're both people who know how to read studies, parse data, and can tell you what's worth trying out and what you can safely ignore. Each episode, we tackle the health news of the week and then take a deeper dive into a misunderstood health and wellness topic, like... What's the deal with peptides?

27:00Josh Larsen:What's the deal with GLP-1s? What's the deal with creatine? What's the deal with cupping? What's the deal with sleep? So join us for a weekly dose of sanity. It might actually be just with the doctor. or The Economist ordered. Listen to Wellness Actually on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

27:24Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, and I think we'll obviously have a clearer answer to that as we do get through these movies. But I would say, at least right now, if we didn't know Inception was coming, for example, then we would have to say, well, this feels like the culmination of his career. You know, as we're now back to going in order it feels like every film we've seen has been building to this one and we are out of order a little bit because we talked about all three of the batman films together but it was funny for me even watching the way borden and angier keep trying to essentially settle the score with each other until it gets so bad that we're in mary shelley's frankenstein territory Right.

28:05Adam Kempenaar:As we touched on with all these these compromises. And all I could hear in my head is Commissioner Gordon talking about the Joker or Alfred talking about the Joker and the idea of escalation. Right. Like from the Dark Knight. It's just a constant state of escalation. Once you realize that something is possible, it really is in the same terrain. This idea that once there was some kind of harmony that was established in Gotham, well, then something had to come along and break that all up and turn it into chaos. And we had to have an agent of chaos who is someone who has the nerve to do all the unthinkable things that the Joker does.

28:41Adam Kempenaar:So that was definitely in my mind watching it. And I'm thinking about Bruce Wayne. I'm thinking about Leonard. I'm thinking about Will Dormer. Guys all, again, driven by vengeance, as both of these guys are, right? And by guilt. And they're actual, they are performers, right? They're not just Bruce Wayne putting on the cowl to go out and fight crime. they're performers on a stage and they've created this whole act in this whole world around them that allows them to act on their pain basically to make sense of their pain which seems so fundamentally true to christopher nolan and i'm going to take this back to a conversation we had that some of our listeners heard our family members on patreon this past weekend we recorded a conversation with our producer sam about the life aquatic with steve's issue a film i was hoping I would love after years of thinking it was Anderson's worst.

29:30Adam Kempenaar:And as you know, I've talked about Inception on the show before and that analogy of Cobb, the dream maker and the world creator as filmmaker. Right. And then you guys, just the same day I saw The Prestige, I watched it the night after we taped that conversation and I've got ringing in my head, you and Sam putting forth this position that The Life Aquatic seems like such a personal Wes Anderson film, maybe his most personal Wes Anderson film, as it's about a movie maker. And you've got this director in Marie's character having to deal with the personal costs of his art and the responsibility that he accepts or doesn't accept for his crew, just the weight of all that and trying to reconcile what kind of man you are with what kind of artist you are, because it seems that it may be impossible to be both a good man and a great artist.

30:20Adam Kempenaar:And whether I don't know if you guys use the term an apology or whether it's an actual reconciliation that Anderson over the course of that film does come to terms with that idea. That's all in my head as I'm watching this film and I'm thinking, well, then what do we make of the prestige? What do we make of what Christopher Nolan might be doing from a personal standpoint with this material? Is it an actual apology where he's saying, this is it, this is the life of the artist and I'm committed to it, just like Borden and Angier are, is it a validation? This is a pretty cynical view in terms of understanding what Nolan might be like as a man.

30:55Adam Kempenaar:It's not very charitable, but he's saying, yeah, you know what? These great feats are really what it's all about. And if there are sacrifices you make along the way, personal costs, that's all worth it. Or do you do what we probably have to do because it's fruitless to try to imagine who Christopher Nolan is as a person? And we take it out of that realm of trying to understand his psychology, and we just look at it as an exploration of these ideas, right? I mean, at the end, we get that line where he says, the audience knows the truth. And Jier says, the audience knows the truth. The world is simple.

31:29Adam Kempenaar:It's miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder. and that sure seems compatible with a filmmaker with the idea of a filmmaker like Nolan making all these films we're talking about that are so bleak that have in a lot of ways a very miserable pessimistic worldview but as a filmmaker he does try to make us wonder and that might be the only real grace we ever get is through art through the type of art that he is striving for well so that's

31:58Josh Larsen:bringing us to one of the criticisms or at least descriptions of Nolan as a cold filmmaker and And I don't know if I've ever been tempted to read one of his films as some sort of personal statement or even an expression of a personal experience because I just haven't gotten that vibe from any of them. I think you're probably right to point to Inception as the one that most closely could be the analogy for filmmaking. And that's personal. It's professional personal, right? But these other concerns that are more private personal or psychological personal, those elements are in his movies, but I do think it's something that is not one of the strengths of his movies.

32:41Josh Larsen:Let's put it that way. Maybe Memento is the one that registers where the emotions and the experiences are so raw, I feel them. Um, the prestige is another movie again, for how much I like it, where I would say the emotions are somewhat mechanical or they almost feel required because Nolan, as a filmmaker knows, especially when he's working at this scale, you know, you're, you're a mass audience filmmaker at this point. And there are elements people are going to expect. And some of that might be romance. Some of that might be, you know, family relationships. And I think we get to, you know, one thing that struck me with The Prestige is that the dead wife or the dead lover thing, it's a little more problematic in retrospect.

33:32Josh Larsen:And by that, I mean, before this was something we got pretty much just in memento, right? If we had come to The Prestige new in 06, but now we're watching it again in light of The Dark Knight Rises, where that happens, in light of Inception, where that happens, right? If I'm remembering Inception correctly. So this also brings us to the performances, I think. And back to Rebecca Hall, who I know you wanted to get back to. I think she is giving the best performance in the film, yet she's not quite able to carry all that emotional weight herself. No, it's unfair. As good as it is unfair. That's the perfect word for it.

34:07Josh Larsen:And so for me, and I am connecting this back to your point about this being a personal expression, because that's what we're, as people, as humans in relationships, that's where we're going to connect, right? We can't all connect with, you know, not even magicians, but let's just say broader artists or people with creative aspirations or any sort of aspirations that we might become obsessed by. We could connect with that, but those are sort of professional, even though they're intricately connected with who we are as people too. The relational stuff is where the movie still falls a little short, and I think a lot of his movies do.

34:38Josh Larsen:the whole business between her and Scarlett Johansson, her character and Scarlett Johansson's character and Bale's two characters just feels rushed to me. Not convincingly handled. I think it feels all the more so with Hall's sudden suicide. And so I think that is something that is lacking here and is maybe a different answer to what you're bringing up. But for me, that's where the personal element comes into play and it just doesn't register as strongly as I wished it would.

35:11Adam Kempenaar:Yeah. And I will say, I never thought of Nolan, I suppose, as a personal filmmaker in the way we typically think of filmmakers who kind of just open a vein and bleed on the screen for you. Like Noah Baumbach, right? Yeah, like Noah Baumbach. True. But that had never occurred to me until I saw the prestige. I watched it in this context and saw that these meta elements that we have touched on throughout this entire series, they're so blatant here. That acknowledgement of the audience, including even the framing device of Michael Caine's voiceover, which is just acknowledging the role that the filmmaker is in and we as audience members.

35:48Adam Kempenaar:So it did really hit me this time. But Josh, I'm completely with you. There's a line in this movie that really stuck with me this time. And I don't think it's just because for reasons I'll explain, I don't think it's just because I've heard this word cold also thrown out as a criticism of Nolan. And I don't know if that was a common criticism of him back at the time this film came out too, or something that has grown since then. It also is a word that a lot of people have attached, of course, to Stanley Kubrick, who's someone we know that Nolan does revere on some level as a filmmaker, and a lot of comparisons are made to him.

36:21Adam Kempenaar:There's a line that Scarlett Johansson has in this movie. Talk about another character who gives a great performance that isn't really a fair fight. She has a line when she finally says goodbye to Borden and she says, you could be in some other cafe saying the same thing about me right now. It's inhuman to be so cold. And that really felt to me with this swirling in my head, it felt like Nolan put that line in as if, as if he had had someone in his life say that exact phrase to him. Yeah. A bit of self critique. Yeah. Self critique that he puts, he puts in the film. And I'll say about Johansson too, she's so good as an actress, even in 2006, and she has so much life brimming through her that I do believe her, even though the movie completely marginalizes her.

37:04Adam Kempenaar:I believe every, every moment that she expresses anything that seems like an actual human emotion in this film. And so that's what I want to get to where the coldness does creep in for me, Josh, in this movie is that if Nolan really wanted to reconcile, I think in a truly meaningful way. The man in the art, personal happiness versus professional success and ambition. If you want to make it more cliche, the head versus the heart. He gives us the elements and he even tries to make them very prominent. Yes. But it turns out they're just window dressing. Yes. They're parts on the chessboard for him.

37:40Adam Kempenaar:Correct. And I am talking about Borden's daughter and I'm talking about Sarah. There should be, if you really do think about the end of this film and process everything, which is hard to do, as we've said, even on a second viewing, there should actually be a powerful, happy aspect to the end. That's after Borden and Jir destroy themselves. One part of Borden, the twin lives and through the destruction of his brother and in the reunion with his daughter, he finally gets to be his whole self. That's what Borden says to him from jail. He says, go live your life in full. This idea that now unencumbered by obsession, his or his brothers, he gets to finally go and live.

38:22Adam Kempenaar:And that moment at the end, when the daughter and the father reunite, that should stir something in me as a viewer, just like it should stir something in me when I see Sarah hang herself. When she dies, I should really feel something. And I never do. There is a truly mechanical aspect to it. Your word there, Josh, is right. And this is a film I've touched on already. It feels the most like memento to me. And some of that is the flashback structure where you also feel like you pop in sometimes on discussions from a character's past only so Nolan can provide a story element that's necessary to pull off the grand trick.

38:58Adam Kempenaar:But there's nothing about those scenes that does actually have emotion underpinning it. And it does all feel too cold and too calculated. And I think that's a sacrifice Nolan makes that's unfortunate because the film would be stronger for it.

39:12Josh Larsen:Well, it's unnecessary is what it is. So you're right. I had the same response. And that's a reveal. That's kind of a tell in this movie of tricks that it's not really what the movie is interested in. It's not interested in the family or the daughter. It feels like, as you said, it needs to be. Now, let me be clear. I also don't think Nolan has to be interested in that. I am not saying that every great movie has to have a strong marital relationship or a strong family dynamic. Again, I get the sense that as a filmmaker, perhaps he felt this was a necessary element in this story. As I don't think we've mentioned yet, this is adapted from a book.

39:53Josh Larsen:So maybe it was in the book that is by Christopher Priest. Nolan wrote the screenplay with his brother, Jonathan. And so they're just including it as part of the story because it was originally there. But let me, you know, not to get ahead of ourselves, and I'm curious to see if I have this reaction when I see Dunkirk again. But I think one of the things I love about Dunkirk, in retrospect, Adam, he doesn't even try to include that stuff. And that's why I love Memento as well. He doesn't have to. He doesn't try there. Yeah, he doesn't have to in Dunkirk because obviously, you know, it's men in battle the whole time.

40:26Josh Larsen:So it wouldn't make sense to kind of voice that upon the film. But yeah, and Memento has a little bit more of it as sort of, you know, again, the dead wife syndrome, but not as much as here. And so this isn't something, if it's not a strength of yours as a filmmaker, maybe you don't have to try to include it. Although it's also admirable to see if you can pull it off, you know? Yeah.

40:49Adam Kempenaar:Well, he gives us just enough to care about the characters, but really only to care about them when we realize that they're not characters.

40:56Josh Larsen:Yeah. So I'm going to have to, and I'm a big fan of Scarlett Johansson and have been for a long, long time, but I do have to disagree. I just don't think the movie serves her poorly, but I don't find her convincing in her scenes either. And maybe it's especially that moment where she has to be an unconvincing actress with Borden, you know, and we're supposed to see that she's a bad actress. And it's just too close to some of the other scenes that we get. I don't know if I had that reaction to it, Josh.

41:23Adam Kempenaar:It's more on her.

41:25Josh Larsen:I mean, it's more on the movie, I should say, than her, to be fair. Yeah.

41:28Adam Kempenaar:But there's just two different versions of that scene, even. Like, I don't really know in some ways what would be the bad acting versus the good acting.

41:37Josh Larsen:Well, and I think they use, maybe that's part of the problem. I think they use the same exact footage because they know they can. But I think we should get to the talk about Bale and Jackman as co-leads, because I'm someone who has, and I haven't quite specified exactly what it is, but a little bit of an aversion to Christian Bale. I think he just tries so hard, so obviously hard. But I think he's great here. I think he's perfectly cast as this obsessive risk taker, as the pure artist. You know, you get a sense like this is how Bale would talk about acting, the way that his character talks about magic and performing.

42:13Josh Larsen:And so I'm with him all the way in this film jackman i think is great when he's the showman on stage like that's probably what got him the part right yes when the great denton is supposed to be um exactly this guy who would bring in the crowds and he's just there's there's a big gap between that and say the scenes where he's reading those journals and it suddenly understands he's been had and he you know blurts out the anger. I know. A very, you know, that's got to be one of the hardest sort of scenes to perform is you're all alone, no one to react off and you're responding to a piece of paper.

42:51Josh Larsen:So, you know, more power to him, but it's, there's a big gap between that and when he's on stage.

42:57Adam Kempenaar:Ladies and gentlemen, much of what you've seen tonight may be termed as illusions or entertaining

43:03Josh Larsen:trifles.

43:08Josh Larsen:Alas. I cannot claim this next feat as illusion. Watch carefully. You will see no trickery. No trickery is employed. Merely a technique familiar to certain citizens of the Orient and various holy men of the Himalayas.

43:29Adam Kempenaar:So that's another part of this film, Josh, that we saw exactly the same way. I was really surprised because I can't recall ever having a negative reaction to Hugh Jackman. And it's not as if I'm negative overall or think it's a terrible performance, but in comparison to Bale, it really doesn't hold up at all. And I think that Bale's giving a great film performance. He's playing someone who's a little bit impenetrable. And as an audience member, we're staring at that camera and we're trying to understand what's in his head. And Jackman, I agree. I think he's expressive and too theatrical to a fault.

44:04Adam Kempenaar:I felt like the performance, I suppose, was a little bit too hammy. And that does work when he's the great Danton on stage. But offstage, it doesn't. So I, too, was really struck by the disparity in those performances. And I think we're both acknowledging they're very different characters. But even in those moments where Angier is supposed to be just as dark and brooding. Yeah, that's what it is. And enigmatic as Borden. He's just not giving you that element, unfortunately, to play off of as a viewer. Now, it's funny. I was having a conversation over Slack with Sam and he liked the movie, but didn't love it.

44:40Adam Kempenaar:This is definitely mid or second or third tier Nolan for him. And he's doing the same thing when there's a movie like this that he's just not buying. He's nitpicking it apart, right? So all weekend we're going back and forth on different things. And most of it I'm arguing with him on or trying to explain that it's all accounted for, that it does make sense. It's in the movie. and we're talking about jackman and i say to him i can't believe you haven't pointed out the biggest actual flaw with this movie which is the performance that he gives as root the actor like like how all of a sudden it's just a saturday night live character who shows up in 1890s london brings some levity that's so no i know it's sam of course yeah sam of course just like you josh writes back and goes of course i loved it yes it was like i mean we're really due

45:26Josh Larsen:for a little bit of lightness, and then he shows up. And I thought it was great. Those teeth, man. The teeth, yeah. Those teeth. I don't know. And one more performance we should note is Bowie. I mean, how good is Bowie in a couple of scenes, and precisely because you would never know it was David Bowie. Nothing is impossible, Mr. Angier. What you want is simply expensive. If I were to build for you this machine, you would be presenting it merely as illusion? Well, if people actually believed the things I did on stage, they wouldn't clap that scream.

45:58Adam Kempenaar:I mean, think of sawing a woman in half.

46:01Josh Larsen:Mr. Andrew, have you considered the cost of such a machine? Price is not an object. Perhaps not, but have you considered the cost? I mean, obviously there are a few features that maybe would give it away if you didn't know going into it. But really, it's the sort of subdued presence and serene and kind of resigned to the state of the world, but pursuing his obsessions anyway, that he brings a full character in just a couple of scenes. So I want to just hit a few notes of sort of technical things we've been tracing throughout our overview, like cinematography, music, editing. Because it's interesting to see Nolan's collaborators and who he's working with here.

46:43Josh Larsen:The cinematography by Wally Pfister, Memento, Insomnia, did the Batman films. Those foggy Colorado scenes, I've already mentioned them, I think are the visual high point for me. Just gorgeous. And really, how about that lamp coming on at the train station when Angier arrives and just tells you something magical and also scientific is happening here, right? The music is interesting because it is David Julian. so not Hans Zimmer who's always associated with Nolan but Julian did Following he did the music for Following he did the music for Memento and the music for Insomnia it has similar ominous tones I think to Zimmer's work but is probably a bit more restrained in its employment of them and then one more thing I wanted to throw out there is just the editing by Lee Smith who joins Nolan on Batman Begins so the previous film and then sticks with him since there's a really nice sequence here when Michael Caine is training Jackman with the disappearing dove trick.

47:44Josh Larsen:And the way they show us is we go back and forth to Jackman, learning it from Caine and then demonstrating it himself later to a theater owner, trying to book the theater. That was a really skillful way of taking us as viewers through the process of the trick. And then also moving the narrative along. Cause I did feel, you know, this is a plot heavy film. And one of the sort of hiccups I had is getting through all the machinations of the plot could be a bit of a slog at certain points, but here it was a real skillful way to kind of just move us quickly through it.

48:17Adam Kempenaar:Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I had two quick hits, and one of them was definitely tied to the editing. There is a real economy to it that I appreciate. And I'll give one example, though there are many. The fact that we discover Borden on stage at some point has now rebranded himself as the professor. And the movie doesn't devote any time to that. We don't get that aha moment. It's not like he's sitting in the workshop one day and he says, I need to create this persona. This is what I'm going to call myself. He just all of a sudden is that on stage. And we understand as viewers, based on the science aspect, at least the way he's kind of fooling the audience with the theatrics, it seems scientific.

48:58Adam Kempenaar:So he's going to call himself the professor. The movie doesn't otherwise get bogged down in it. There are a bunch of scenes like that and moments that Nolan gives you maybe about 12 seconds. And just in that 12 seconds or less, we really do get everything we need to know to get us through the rest of the narrative.

49:14Josh Larsen:Yeah, it goes back to that are you watching closely idea, which should not only be a tagline for our overview, but really it is true of every Nolan film. Because it's not just because they're tricky, but they often kind of formally and they reward that sort of attention. I think of Bale at one point saying a real magician tries to invent something new. And that's maybe for me the key line in terms of this being about filmmaking. Because I think what we've seen so far, even with something like Insomnia, which is many respects a genre film, but there are elements to that where you can see him trying to invent something new.

49:52Josh Larsen:Certainly did with Batman Begins. It seems to be what he sets out to do with each of his movies.

49:58Adam Kempenaar:Absolutely. I mean, really, it is probably what any filmmaker, what any artist should always endeavor to do. The other part I wanted to mention is that touch of the blind assistants and the way when that blue light crackles and you see it reflected in their eyes. I mentioned in the setup this going into gothic horror territory, and there is, of course, undeniably that Frankenstein aspect to it. And that's the moment where it becomes true horror almost. It really does give you that sense that, oh, Angier has turned into something demonic. He's gone somewhere dark. Yeah, somewhere so dark he is crossed over into another realm when we see those blind assistants in their eyes.

50:42Josh Larsen:So that reminds me of a question I wanted to ask you, actually, back to Angier. Do you think he's essentially, I mean, we do see that he's the real villain, right? The whole narrative kind of goes that way. But I wonder if you think it's not so much that he's monstrous, a murderer in the ways we've discussed, but do you think it's because he's cheated in the magic world? Because he's essentially employed science, right? Rather than deception or illusion? Or do you think what he's doing, it's still a form of deception, I guess. I don't know. It struck me if that was like, maybe that's on top of his other sins, is the sin of cheating at magic in a way by using this box.

51:23Adam Kempenaar:I don't know. It's interesting to think about. For me, I just can't help but tie it to that idea that Borden expresses at the beginning, which is the whole act is really just commitment. It's all about committing your entire life to it. So he wins then. So he wins. He wins that way. Like, even though you're right, he's the villain and he's broken all sorts of, as we said, laws of humanity. Somehow he's the most professional. He proves himself to be the most professional in the end. He's gone the furthest. By having that commitment. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's true. No more secrets. Secrets in my life.

52:02Adam Kempenaar:The Odyssey coming Friday. We hope you enjoyed that conversation from our archive about The Prestige. If you would like to access archive reviews like that at your fingertips, anytime you can do that by becoming a film spotting family member, you get bonus shows, a weekly newsletter and more learn more at filmspottingfamily.com. Thanks for listening. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.

52:39Josh Larsen:30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Or will you trust the people five miles overseas? This is a story about neighbors turning on each other. And what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough. But we're not stopping, are we? Listen to Revisionist History, The Staten Island Problem, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. I'm Tarika Foster-Brasby. What's up, y 'all? I'm your girl, Cheryl Swoops. When you tune in to a new episode of our podcast, Levels to This,

53:22Adam Kempenaar:you're definitely going to get some spicy WNBA analysis. But we're more than just hoops. And the real conversation is what we actually bring. It's been really, really cool seeing kind of these women just really step into their power off the court and understand that they are basketball, right? And they're not asking for permission.

53:43Josh Larsen:Listen to Levels to This with Cheryl Swoops and Tarika Foster-Brasby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us, and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

54:23Josh Larsen:Bill, why is my eye twitching? Does this mean I'm in perimenopause? Where's my phone? Juliana, maybe we can ask an actual human. Yes, because I have questions and I bet you do too. Like, is it normal to sleep in separate bedrooms? We do that and I still need to know why my poop's been green. We've got actual people answering these exact questions. Listen to Bill and Juliana.

54:45Adam Kempenaar:The podcast.

54:45Josh Larsen:On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. you