Description
Book SynopsisAs a director, writer, and producer, Christopher Nolan has substantially impacted contemporary cinema through avant garde films, such as Following and Memento, and his contribution to wider pop culture with his Dark Knight trilogy. His latest film, Interstellar, delivered the same visual qualities and complex, thought-provoking plotlines his audience anticipates. The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan collects sixteen essays, written by professional philosophers and film theorists, discussing themes such as self-identity and self-destruction, moral choice and moral doubt, the nature of truth and its value, whether we can trust our perceptions of what's real, the political psychology of heroes and villains, and what it means to be a viewer of Nolan's films. Whether his protagonists are squashing themselves like a bug, struggling to create an identity and moral purpose for themselves, suffering from their own duplicitous plots, donning a mask that both strikes fear and reveals their true na
Table of ContentsIntroduction Part 1: Moral Philosophy 1. George A. Dunn—Deceit, Desire, and Mimetic Doubling in the Films of Christopher Nolan 2. Jason T. Eberl—“So You Can Be My ‘John G.’”: Moral Culpability in Memento 3. J. L. A. Garcia: White Nights of the Soul—Insomnia and the Struggle for Purity of Heart 4. Lance Belluomini & George A. Dunn—Love, Value, and the Human Destiny in Interstellar Part 2: Politics and Culture 5. Joseph J. Foy & Timothy M. Dale—“They Turned to a Man They Didn’t Fully Understand”: The Dark Knight and the Conservative Critique of Political Liberalism 6. Kevin S. Decker—The Vale of Top Hats: Duplicability, Duplicity and The Prestige 7. Jason Burke Murphy—Plato, Habermas, and the Demonic Cobb 8. Deborah Knight & George McKnight—“Are You Watching Closely?” Narrative Comprehension in Nolan’s Early Films Part 3: Epistemology and Metaphysics 9. Dennis Knepp—Remembering, Reminding, and Forgetting with Leonard Shelby 10. Karen D. Hoffman—False Tattoos and Failed Totems: Kierkegaard and Subjective Truth in Memento and Inception 11. Jamie Carlin Watson—Inception and Perception: What Should A Dream Thief Believe? 12. William A. Lindenmuth—Spinning Tops and Brains in Vats: Nolan’s Inception and Nozick’s “Experience Machine” Part 4: Time and Selfhood 13. Peter S. Fosl—“You Don’t Know Who You Are”: Imagining the Self in the Films of Christopher Nolan 14. David LaRocca—“Memory Man”: The Constitution of Personal Identity in Memento 15. Louis-Paul Willis—Engaging Otherness through Following: Subjectivity and Contemporary Film Spectatorship 16. Todd McGowan—We Are the Change That We Seek: The Subjectivity of Substance in Interstellar Bibliography
