The Prestige (2006)
The best trick a director can pull in their movie, in my opinion, is to cause you to recontextualize every single moment of the film that leads up to the end. Probably one of the most famous instances of this is The Usual Suspects, which is honestly one of the better uses of the trick. Personally, I find The Uninvited to also be an fantastic usage of this method.
However, neither could have prepared me for The Prestige.
This is sadly another movie that will require me to warn you - there’s literally nothing to say about this film that won’t give it away. I could pontificate on the broader themes all day, but the true payoff of those very themes requires you to understand exactly how those themes reach their ultimate peak. If you haven’t seen this movie, then I recommend you go do so.
With that out of the way, I also should reveal a bit of my own secrets: I knew half of the twist going in, though the specifics of it weren’t clear to me. The reason for this is that I once heard someone describe it as “one of those movies where they tell you the answer in the very beginning”. As such, the little boy asking Borden “where’s his brother” was a pretty clear indication to me.
What I wasn’t aware of, however, was how that deception would go, nor was I prepared for Angiers’ plotline to go the way it did. The two stories, while intimately entangled, also work as perfect foils to each other. In fact, despite having a wild sci-fi bent to it, the conclusion speaks volumes about the state of the “two” men’s minds.
If you’ve seen it, then you know that Algiers is searching for the technological peak of the art of magic. He’s the aristocrat, believing that the only way to truly make a good trick is through showmanship and mechanical prowess. As such, his tricks throughout the movie embody this sort of white collar notion, especially since he spends much of the movie insisting that money is no object to him.
This pursuit of the technological height of the art leads him to muck with the nature of humanity itself. It’s such an important facet to his character, one that I’m sure someone has expounded on in the years since the movie premiered: he will throw away every bit of himself to sell the illusion. He himself is the Ship of Theseus, and he doesn’t care how many parts of himself are replaced, so long as the audience looks at him with awe in the end.
His “prestiges”, the hastily disposed-of clones that the machine that Tesla himself created for him produces, are the price of his pursuit.
Contrast that with Borden, or rather, the Bordens. They’re so single-minded in their OWN pursuit of the ultimate magic that everything else is the price. Both halves of Alfred Borden are slaves to the notion that there can only be one of them at any given moment. They will throw away everything, be it love or fame, just to prove that they’re better than Algiers.
The Bordens don’t care about the moment, they care about the endgame. They spend most of their shows being insufferably dull, because it isn’t about the moment-to-moment tricks and traps. They only care about the finale, the prestige. They scrape out a living as the blue collared half of the rivalry, because to them, it’s simply a matter of keeping up the façade and outdoing everyone else in those final moments on stage.
To do this, though, literally no one, not a single soul, can know that there are TWO Alfred Bordens. They must always act as though they’re the only one, the prime Borden. If you watch the movie, you’ll realize that it’s pretty clear when they’re switched, mostly because the movie has a clear indicator of when.
“Well, some days it’s not true. Maybe today you’re more in love with magic. I like being able to tell the difference... It makes the days it is true mean something.”
Sarah doesn’t realize it, but she can tell the twins apart. This is the biggest signal to the audience which twin is which. That doesn’t matter to the Bordens, though. Even when the other one falls for their assistant Olivia, they’d rather maintain the illusion than come clean to either woman, driving one to leave and the other to suicide.
These normal facets of life are the Bordens’ price for their pursuit.
The main theme that surrounds the movie is obsession, both man obsessed with something. For Algiers, it’s obsession over finding out how Borden does it so he can do better and be the greater showman. For Borden, it’s obsession over never, ever breaking the illusion. Both men completely disassemble the lives they’ve built for themselves over this singular mindset, this insistence upon their separate goals.
This is most exemplified in the closing moments of the movie. As Algiers dies from a gunshot wound inflicted by the remaining Borden twin, he insists that his sacrifice of never knowing whether he’d be the failed “prestige” that drowns under the stage or if he’ll be the one standing atop the rafters, was all to see the audience’s faces as he helps them believe in the impossible. As Borden watches him dies and hears him talk of sacrifice, he believes that his own sacrifices, those of his daughter’s mother and of his assistant’s affections, were all in the name of maintaining the greatest illusion the world has ever seen.
In the end, however, both men lose nearly everything while reaching out for a goal that would never truly sit still, a goal of a prestige that audiences would forget when the next big thing comes out. They both lost a part of themselves in spite of a universal truth that Tesla quoted to Algiers, even though he himself dismissed its truth:
“Man’s reach exceeds his grasp.”
Browning meant that man should always keep reaching, but I think this film posits another, perhaps more cynical reading of this phrase.
Man can reach all he wants. He can never reach beyond his grasp.
