The Ultimate Game: "The Prestige"

As I was watching one of my all time favorite films, “The Prestige” (2006), I was reminded of Bernard Suits’ chapters from The Death of the Grasshopper. This film is the story of two Victorian era magicians, Robert Angier and Alfred Borden, their desires to master the art of illusion, and how their competition quickly turns into obsession to perform the ultimate illusion, called the “Transported Man”-- who disappears only to reappear in a different location.



What finally occurred to me is that this film is really a game -- in the very sense that Suits suggests – it has “obstacles” which must be overcome “just so that we can possess the activity as a whole, namely playing the game.”  In fact, this film also fits nicely into Ben’s idea that “games and play fundamentally engage with both rules and imagination/make believe.”

So according to Suits, to play a game is “to engage in activity directed towards bringing about a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit more efficient in favor of less efficient means, and where such rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity…playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” (Suits, What is a Game?).  “The Prestige” follows this kind of game plan.  In this film, the game of illusion has three main rules or “acts”: “The Pledge,” “The Turn” and “The Prestige.”  In the first move, the magician presents an ordinary object, which he offers for inspection. In the second move, “The Turn,” the magician takes this object and somehow makes it do “something extraordinary.”  It’s the third move though, “The Prestige,” that wins the game -- the magician has to bring the object back as it was. 

In “The Prestige” these two competitors understand all too well the kind of game they have begun to play; they know the rules, how to manipulate them…and more importantly they know how their game ultimately must end.   Two others in the film are what I call game-changers in the sense that they present certain obstacles and create tension between two competing forces, leading up to the last move of the game.  Remember, this is set in the Victorian era, 1890s England.  One is Nikola Tesla, the 19^th century inventor/scientist, who reinforces the idea of the “magic of reality,” which is of course science (Dawkins).  As the game progresses, Tesla warns Angier that “society tolerates only one change at a time.”  The other is Cutter, also a magician, older and perhaps wiser than the other two, who builds the contraptions for the illusions. Cutter is a reminder of the time they live in.

It appears that Borden succeeds in the second move of the game, “The Turn,” by performing successfully the “Transported Man.”  Borden himself disappears, but “making something disappear isn’t enough, you have to bring it back.”  Of course he reappears (after he was supposed to have hanged himself).  He didn’t follow the game rules, however, because he used his twin Fallon (who was his assistant in disguise all along) in the elaborate deception.  All this time Angier is obsessed with the idea that Borden killed his wife during a magic act, an obsession that descends into the pit of revenge through the creation his own ultimate “Prestige” as pay back. 

While Borden turns to fraud and sham to win, Angier turns to science, to Tesla, who has created a machine that duplicates objects.  Tesla warns Angier of the dangers of moving in this direction: “I add only one suggestion on using the machine: destroy it. Drop it to the bottom of the deepest ocean.  Such a thing will bring you only misery.”  With Tesla’s machine, however, Angier is able to create clones of himself, a much more morally problematic kind of deception.  Angier’s move “The Turn” also seems to succeed.  The reality is that each time he performs “The Prestige,” he drowns his own double, some 100 of them.  In the last scene of the film we see all of Angier’s dead bodies, each in its own drowning tank.  Through flashbacks and twists and turns, we understand that Angier is now dead, however, shot by Borden (or was it Borden's twin?).

Last move – both have broken the rules of the game, and in the end neither one wins. Still “The Prestige” seems to support Suits’ idea that playing games is a big part of the ideal of human existence.  These two took the game playing way too far, manipulated the rules to the extent that the competition became something else.  What happened in the end, though, is exactly as it should be according to Suits’ philosophy; the rules of the game are put back in play. 

In “The Prestige” we watch the ultimate illusion unfold before our eyes.  Not until the final scenes do we realize that we too have been part of Nolan’s elaborate game all along. Of course we should have known, especially from the opening line of the film that introduces the game challenge: “Are you watching closely?”     

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SIDE NOTE…Interestingly enough, “The Prestige” is another intriguing film by Christopher Nolan of “Batman” fame, and guess what? The “Dirty Hands” scenario finds its way into this film as well.  As I watched “The Prestige” for the fifth time for this blog, I was stunned when I heard Angier state: “I thought you said I'd have to get my hands dirty” and Cutter replies: “Maybe someday you will; I just needed to know that you could.”  And then again when Borden says to Angier: “You're not afraid to get your hands dirty anymore, are you?  And Cutter says to Angier: “Then stay off the stage. You're a magician, not a wizard. You've got to get your hands dirty if you're going to achieve the impossible.” It’s the moral dilemma of the “Dirty Hands” again, not with regard to political action, but rather in the social-cultural context of the period.  As Walzer states in “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”: “No doubt we can get our hands dirty in private life also, and sometimes, no doubt we should.”  The scenario here seems to fall within Camus’ vision, as described by Walzer, that it “requires us to at least imagine a punishment or penance that fits the crime.”  Angier is dead, and Borden has killed him (or was it Borden's twin?).  Who got their hands dirtier here?  That’s a question for another paper.  For now, I guess I’ll have to go back and watch once more Nolan’s “Inception,” as well as “Dark Knight.”

                                                                                          Taken from youtube.com 

Suits, B. (1967). What is a game? Philosophy of Science, 34(2), 148-156.

Dawkins, R. (2012, October). The magic of reality: How we know what is really true. Michigan Lecture Series on Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health. Lecture conducted from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.