Recently I was at an Indian potluck and Christopher Nolan came up as a topic of conversation. Probably something related to The Dark Knight. Anyhow, the conversation eventually moved to The Prestige and I remembered a thought I had had on the film, but had forgotten about until that afternoon.

One potential way of reading the film would be through a Kierkegaardian lens, which I think shines some light on the trinity used within the film. Hence, we can think of Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialist trinity of the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious as roughly equivalent to the pledge, the turn, and the prestige.

The aesthetic and the pledge are essentially the same: it involves something of a pact, but crucially adorned in a baroque manner (the importance of masks, titles, and theatrics in the film and magic itself). Think of any magic show you have ever seen as well: there is always something of a glam theatric that surrounds the entire performance. We might also parallel it to Lacan’s imaginary order, the order of ego adornment and spectral identification.

The ethical, then, is roughly equivalent to the turn: in it, the object disappears from our sight, as if by magic. But the “as if” here is crucial, because in our heart of hearts we must unconsciously believe that the trick is merely an illusion, even if we consciously wish it to be something more: if we were to fully accept it as something truly mystical, our entire basis of reality would disintegrate. Here the Lacanian connection would be to the symbolic, the stable foundation of language that sutures the wound of the void, as well as what introduces the dimension of the non-all to being: as soon as there is the Word, something can both “appear” and “disappear” (similar to Freud’s Fort-Da game).

Finally we arrive at the religious, which is equivalent to the prestige, when the object returns from “inner space.” It might be helpful to think of it in terms of the Lacanian Real, the point at which we encounter the traumatic kernel at the core of the illusion: on the one hand, we can conceive of it in terms of the violence underlying the illusion, such as the killing of the bird in the disappearing bird trick or the violence the magicians inflict upon one another. Yet it’s also something more: it’s when magic truly happens, when the “illusion” is actually that the trick is merely an “illusion”: it’s the mystical that exceeds and destroys the foundation of our entire reality. It must therefore appear as something evil and monstrous, like the diabolical cloning machine that Nikola Tesla builds for Mr. Angier.

On a final note, one might argue that the truly magical kernel masked by the “mere illusion” is l’objet petit a in its purest form, the object-cause-of-desire, the “lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc.”