The Unmistakeable Chad Cinema of Christopher Nolan

Why everyone gets tripped up by the blentest man in Hollywood.

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I Don't Need This High-End Knife, But I Can’t Imagine Cooking Without It at Bon Appétit
If You Own a Nice Knife, You Need a Ceramic Honing Rod at Bon Appétit

I used to promote the weekly features more often, so I'm going to blurb them more regularly up top. That's what this newsletter is supposed to be for anyway: shameless self-promotion.

This week's featured works are a pair written almost accidentally. I've long thought myself a true Man-of-the-People when it comes to hardworking, long-lasting, budget-friendly tools. And then I got my hands on a truly spectacular knife, and I'm ready to live like the 1%. I kid. It's a $250 knife—which isn't cheap—but for something that'll last over 10 years with proper care, $25 a year is pretty affordable. Did I do that math right? To go along with it, I wrote about how stainless steel honing rods just won't cut it (or hone it) for higher-end, harder-steel knives. Ceramic is where it's at, both for fine-tuning your edge and taking care of your blade. Don't blow it—protect your investment.

Today's newsletter exclusive is a meditation on the Big Dumb Ideas of Christopher Nolan. It was also written during some bog-standard neurological haywire stuff that crops up every few weeks or so from me, so I've got no clue if it meats my normal crated standard for critque. Lord knows I'm not going to re-read it. Takes, commence!

The Subtext Knower has logged on...

Every few years, Christopher Nolan debuts a new movie and, like clockwork, people rush to fire off their but what does it mean!?!?! hot takes. It's a little surprising to me, to be honest, because his movies function more or less like a sledgehammer: look at the heavy end too long, and it's going to smack you in the face. Nolan is one of our modern era's most technically adept filmmakers, and what he's been able to put on screen is baffling. The most terrified I've ever been in a movie theater was during the thunderstorm in The Odyssey. But I wasn't frightened for the characters. I was frightened for me, the viewer, and whether the storm on screen could damage my corporeal form, lazing in a recliner with around 80-90 other people. What's not baffling, however, is what his movies are about.

Nolan is, by all accounts, a family man. When he's not making a movie, he's with his family. His wife is his producer. He doesn't own a smartphone. His movies are all about how much he loves his family and how he thinks everyone should have a wife. His Batman movies are all about how Batman should have a wife. His dead wife movies are about how the wife should be alive, actually. It's better to have a live wife. If your wife is alive and you're separated, you should see if you can get back to your wife. It's better to have a live wife that you can spend time with in person. His atomic bomb movie is all about how good it is to have a wife, even if you cheat on her, even if she's mad at you.

Christopher Nolan also makes movies about how war is bad. He doesn't moralize on whether they were just, usually. It's just bad when there's war. Dunkirk is about how bad war is. Tenet is about how bad war is. His magic movie is about how bad war is, even if it's just between two people. His Odyssey movie, on the other hand, is about how bad war is, but also about having a live wife, and also about getting back to your live wife. Nailed it. Checked all boxes.

Of course, there's more to these films. An easy read in his movies is that great and talented men have to make family sacrifices if they're going to do The Work. Many filmmakers make movies about finding a balance between family and work. Nolan's films suggest that the balance is a lie. You're either with your family or you are not. You are either doing The Work, or you are not. He's pained to be away from his family, but he seems unable to quit making the movies he feels like he needs to make.

No wonder he loves Heat.

On its surface, Heat is a movie about cat-and-mouse cops-and-robbers. You need a great man to catch a great man. But Heat spends most of its time telling the audience that Lieutenant Vincent Hanna and Neil McCauley are truly sick men who cannot ablate their compulsions. Hanna's drive to catch the Bad Guy destroys his personal life over and over. McCauley lives like a monk and has zero interiority unrelated to taking scores. Their lives are terrible.

The Dark Knight is a near-perfect mirror of Heat. On its surface, audiences think that only Batman can catch the Joker, a truly unhinged monster. But Nolan is quite clear: the Joker only exists because Batman exists. If there were no Batman, there would be no Joker. In fact, if there were no Batman, there would be no Ra's al Ghul invasion in Batman Begins. Without Batman, there would be no Talia al Ghul or Bane. Batman is a nuclear warhead: his enemies are an arms race.

Nolan's Batmen are about how bad war is.

Bring a gun to a knife fight, etc.

Christopher Nolan's lack of subtext doesn't mean his movies lack subtlety. Take, for example, the much-maligned "including my son?" piece of dialogue from Tenet delivered by Elizabeth Debicki. It's been mocked to death over and over, but even Fran Hoepfner's defense of the line doesn't quite track with the true weight of it.

In that moment of the film, Debicki's character is told that her Russian arms-dealer of a husband (who just shot her, by the way) is planning on destroying the whole world. Her "including my son?" response gets to the heart of her character. Up until that moment, Debicki had known that she had been married to an evil tyrant hell-bent on personal gain. She hates him. At the same time, she's made her son her entire world. Blackmailed by her evil husband, she lives a gated life with her entire goal to keep her son safe. Yes, she knows that destroying the world would kill her son as well. But actually processing that small bit of information is what turns her from opportunistic attempts to kill her husband to a full-on conspiracy to kill her husband, including the motivation to personally pull the trigger. She's a broken person who doesn't care if she dies. She does, however, truly care if her son does.

It's these subtleties that drive Nolan's characters and add depth. Ultimately, though, the point of Tenet is "don't do climate change." Because it's irreversible. Chalk another one up for our finest filmmaker of True Chad Cinema: first thought, best thought. My ideas? Big. My themes? Singularly-focused.

And thusly, we get The Odyssey, a truly remarkable (and weirder than it needed to be) movie whose closest analog is maybe that Schwarzenegger Hamlet trailer in Last Action Hero. Nolan gives us Odysseus as a thoroughly modern action star in an unmodern world. He makes Tom Holland say "dad" because he wants us to know that when Odysseus says "war is bad" he's not talking about some mythical war in the past. He's talking about war now.

And it's good that he does because war is bad, and The Odyssey is a movie about how war is bad.

The sledgehammer wins again.

Read

NBA Trade Rumors

Look, I'm a Bucks fan, and the team got decimated. We've been bleeding talent for years to make space for a giant Giannis contract, and now that we don't have that anymore, it's smooth sailing. But we've got some complete bozos on the roster. I'd like to see them gone. And I'd like to see more young talent join some truly promising young talent. If anything, I've always been a big Jaime Jaquez Jr. guy.

Watch

Ripley on Netflix

I'll admit, I wasn't ready for this to be shot so beautifully. Aside from black and white, every frame of this TV show is incredibly blocked for maximum intrigue. Which is good, because Ripley is mostly Guy Doing Stuff. It's not just "good for TV" or "good for Netflix," it's really a spectacular piece of art.

Listen

"Dirty Work" by Steeley Dan

Steeley Dan is great, and they really don't figure their shit out until the mid-period of the band. However, David Palmer's vocals on "Dirty Work" lilting through the chorus sound incredible through nice headphones or a good hi-fi system. Buoyed by its appearance in One Battle After Another, "Dirty Work" truly is a banger, and it's a nice peek into a world in which Donald Fagan isn't a lead vocalist.

Consume

Grill Smoked Chicken from Gourmet

I mean, just look at this thing. I like smoking a bird on the grill, and the methodology here is really great. If you want a quicker cook, go ahead and spatchcock the bird. But the nice thing about a Full Truss is that your meat retains a ton of moisture, even if you overcook it. I think the breast ended up skyrocketing to 175ºF between the penultimate and final temp check. And it was still juicy and delicious. If you want a heavier smoke, use less charcoal and more wood chips than the recipe recommends.

Also, I don't like cayenne. It's a buzzy, quick heat that clouds the palette, so I made a version of the barbecue vinegar using dried ancho chile instead.