Newsletter | Will Oppenheimer Mark A Turning Point For Christopher Nolan's Indian Fandom?

IN 2014, around the release of Interstellar, Christopher Nolan did something that maybe no filmmaker as celebrated as himself had done before. Not interviews, cheeky collaborations or elaborate media stunts — instead, Nolan guest-edited a tech magazine. In his note as editor of a special issue of Wired (UK), Nolan wrote, “Film’s relationship with dimensionality has always fascinated me.”

As is symbolic of his tendencies to play with bottom-line physics Nolan designed the issue around ‘five dimensions’ — the fifth being perspective, the perch from where the other dimensions, including time, could be visualised. It’s a heady bit of science talk for the uninitiated, but it territorialises a man who has become a sort of cinematic brand, the epitome of water-cooler conversation. In India, fandom for Nolan manifests in peculiar but obvious ways, and it says as much about aspiration as it does about the impersonation of intellect.

I was inducted into Nolandom in engineering college, possibly the ideal breeding ground for a Nolan fan; the kind of place where science — or at least its dreamier nuances — go to die. The zombification of a field of study that gave us jobs but no real sense of learning or discovery, propelled in us a desire to re-fantasise that which we could not change. To the discouraged and the eager alike, cinema offered the fifth dimension, that perch Nolan wrote about, as a sort of magical viewpoint from where intelligence and intellect seem fairly calculable, even accessible; the kind of cinema that treated science as a cryptic tool as opposed to the bookish simplification of humanity. To college going students burdened by inflexible curriculums, Nolan’s films thus offered a spirituous mix of plain characters and big-ticket physics. The kind we’d never get to practice.

Nolan’s Memento was a huge hit on our portable hard drives. The film every friend wanted you to watch, not because they were moved by it, but because they were intellectually provoked by it. Told in reverse, it’s the kind of film that probably baffles everyone on a first viewing until it becomes a repetitive trick with no emotional core to wrap itself around. But it’s precisely the kind of film that cultures with a conservative appetite for cinema latch onto, as a sort of window into worlds, agnostic about love, family, religion and their subsequent descendants. It was technocratic in some sense, liberating in another. Moreover, it embodied a tactile sense of intelligence, by casually modelling existentialism onto a pseudo-scientific hook. What if time could be reversed, what if there were alternate dimensions, what if dreams could be implanted and so on; folksy questions that Nolan expertly transformed into bewitching, elaborate spectacles.

The Indian fandom around Nolan can be explained through our rear-guard stance against provocation. We prefer interrogating the species through the brushstrokes of science as opposed to the internal configuration of the canvas. This is not the ‘scientific temper’ that Nehru was talking about. Nolan’s cinema also represents the kind of odourless, wishful conflict where gender, race and religion are, unlike in reality, absent. To Indians at least, it represents a haven where politics, at least as a form of corruption, dissipates in the wind of the big, tectonic ideas swirling around the geography of the story. The other aspect that explains this fandom is the underexposed palate, the stifled knowledge of the medium and what it can achieve. To most people who swoon over Nolan, cinema ought to replicate the puzzle box or the circus, endear itself to your sense of curiosity, and endow your sense of anticipation without ever gnawing at your morality. That is, until Oppenheimer.

In India, like the world over, Nolan has become a bit of a brand. A one-man film school most people swear by because they have seen Memento or Following, surrendered to their deception without ever evaluating their emotional appeal. That is not to say that Nolan’s cinema is shallow or not as significant as it is made out to be. For better or worse he is the cinematic equivalent of a messiah, probably the only director working today for whom even reluctant moviegoers would line up at the theatres. 

There is this nerdy magnetism about Nolan’s existential ideas that make him both progressive and regressive. He wants you to leave the cinema thinking that you’ve been part of an experiment without the caveat of damning societal implications. A hallucinatory, but also pointless exercise in mental gymnastics exemplified by the spinning top at the end of Inception. With Oppenheimer, that top will finally stop spinning as Nolan presents his most intimate and vulnerable film yet. To his Indian fans it might be the evolutionary step required, to mutually grow over each other, in the best way possible.