Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Tesla and the Secret of "The Prestige"

Movies are not normally germane to engineering ethics, but I can justify the following discussion of the recent film "The Prestige" thusly. The driving force behind much good fiction, literary or cinematic, is a moral problem. When the moral problem involves technology, you have the same kind of issues that engineering ethics deals with, but in a different context.

This piece should not be read by people who have not seen the film and want to be surprised by the ending, because I'm going to give it away. If this blog had a wider readership I would hesitate to do such a thing—journalistic ethics generally forbidding it—but since all indications are that the audience is, shall we say, exclusive, I will go ahead and summarize the plot.

The time is around 1900, and two magicians, Angier and Borden, fall out when Borden ties a knot around the wrists of Angier's wife in such a way that it may have caused her death by drowning in a stage stunt. Angier, convinced that Borden killed his wife, embarks on a kind of revenge career in which he tries to out-magic Borden, who retaliates by disguising himself in Angier's audiences in order to wreak havoc with Angier's tricks, as well as devising increasingly ingenious stunts for his own London performances. Borden outdoes himself with a stunt called the Transported Man, in which it appears that he walks into a doorway on one side of the stage and emerges almost instantaneously out of a second doorway forty feet away. Angier, convinced that Borden does this trick by means of a machine he bought from the famed American inventor Nikola Tesla, visits Tesla in Colorado Springs, where Tesla has electrified (literally) the entire town in exchange for being able to use the town generator for his own experiments in transmitting energy without wires.

Here is the secret: Tesla, according to the movie, actually hits upon a way, not of transporting objects, but of duplicating them. He begins with top hats (the movie opens with a scene of a pile of top hats outside Tesla's remote laboratory), progresses to cats, and eventually duplicates Angier himself. Angier buys Tesla's machine, takes it to London, and with it stages one hundred performances of his own stunt, which requires him to drown his own double each time in order to keep the number of Angiers running around within manageable quantities, namely, one. The last scene of the movie shows where Angier (now dead—shot by Borden, who turns out to be two people who have been exchanging roles all through the movie) has hidden his one hundred dead bodies, each preserved in its own drowning tank.

As I watched that last scene, a thought flashed through my mind of the thousands of frozen embryos—babies—fetuses—whatever your preferred word is—that are preserved in in-vitro fertilization clinics around the world. They are not artfully lit and do not have all the features of a familiar screen actor, as the bodies in the tanks did. But they share with those bodies the one feature that makes them different from all other material objects: they are in some sense human, though in a state that might be termed suspended animation.

I do not believe "The Prestige" will go down in cinematic history as a great movie, although events could prove me wrong. For one thing, the main characters Angier and Borden, played by Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale, respectively, arouse little sympathy in the audience. They are each so single-mindedly focused on their rivalry that they trash the lives of women and shamelessly exploit anything within their reach to achieve their goals of mastery over the other, which necessarily involves mastery over the material world. As for the Tesla character, played by David Bowie as a kind of proto-Nazi-scientist type, he is simultaneously the enabler of the deepest wrongs committed by Angier, and the prophet who warns against the use of his own tools. When Angier offers to buy Tesla's machine, Tesla says that the best thing that could be done with it would be to sink it under the ocean.

The scientist who issues dire warnings against the use of his own creations is rather a cliché in science fiction. But with frozen embryos an everyday reality and human cloning on our doorstep, we are no longer talking about science fiction when we consider the morality of duplicating human beings. The job of the artist in a culture is not so much to solve moral problems, although they can sometimes help, as Harriet Beecher Stowe tried to do with Uncle Tom's Cabin, which she wrote explicitly to expose the horrors and wrongs of slavery. The artist should bring our attention to things we either do not see out of familiarity, or out of unfamiliarity, or for some other reason. The recent debates over so-called "therapeutic" cloning and embryonic stem cell research, frankly stated, involve the question of whether we should duplicate existing human beings and kill them for some purpose of our own. That is exactly what Angier did with his duplicated magicians. In the movie's system of justice, he died for his wrongdoing at the hand of his enemy.

I have little doubt that most of the people intellectually involved in the production of the film enthusiastically support embryonic stem cell research. Perhaps they see the connection between their film and that issue, and perhaps they don't. The typical response to someone who voices opposition to such research on the ground that it involves killing a human being is that the object in question is not a human being. In a recent Supreme Court case involving a law that prohibits partial-birth abortions, the language preferred by a Planned Parenthood lawyer was to say that the "fetus" involved in an abortion will "undergo demise." Would you feel any better if your doctor told you that you were going to "undergo demise" in a few weeks, rather than just saying flat out that you're going to die? The feelings at stake are not the baby's. Rather, people resort to this kind of language to help them deny the fact that they are dealing with other human beings, beings just like they were when they were that age.

The writer Flannery O'Connor was once asked why she so often tended to write about the grotesque and the bizarre in her stories. She responded to the effect that as a Catholic, she knew that most of her audience did not share her beliefs: " . . . for the almost-blind, you draw large and startling figures." The makers of "The Prestige" have drawn some large and startling figures for us to ponder, perhaps without meaning to. I hope more people will draw the connection between their tale of long ago and far away, and what is going on in the halls of science and medicine today.

Sources: The Supreme Court case is described in an audio report by NPR's Nina Totenberg at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6460614. The quotation from O'Connor is at http://thinkexist.com/quotes/flannery_o'connor/.

17 comments:

  1. I'm not so sure that the Nolan brothers had stem cell research on their minds when they made this fairly great movie (although it's possible Mr. Priest did when he wrote the novel.) .. I think they were, instead, just going for a gotcha moment, but I enjoyed reading your analysis nonetheless

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  2. Consider something else: when the Tesla machine performs its duplication miracle, which man is the original and which is the copy? It matters a great deal, because that's the only way to tell if Angier was murderous or suicidal.

    It's like this: when you step into the machine, another version of you appears a short distance away. (Let's say the original is You A and the identical duplicate is You B) The magic trick drops You A through a trapdoor so You A disappears, while You B steps out into the spotlight several yards away; ie, You has been "transported"

    However, to keep the number of doubles under control, a death trap is placed under the trap door, so You A dies (maybe) each time the trick is performed. But if You A is the ORIGINAL You, why would you step into the machine in the first place, unless you're willing to die for the sake of the illusion? After all, you know the trap is there, since you set up the illusion in the first place.

    I don't know about anybody else reading this blog, but I personally have no wish to drown in a locked box even if I know that an identical copy of myself is nearby, ready to live on.

    On the other hand, if You A learned through experimentation that the machine moved you a short distance and created a duplicate in your place, then You A could safely do the trick countless times -- because You B would be the one who dies. In other words, You A would have to be willing to murder another person time and again for the sake of a standing ovation. Angier mentions this at the end of the movie, claiming to never know whether he would be the victim or the survivor; since his memories would be identical either way, he'd have no way of knowing.

    Personally, if I was setting up something like this, I'd do lots of experiments in advance to make DAMN sure I wasn't the one who got dropped into the water. Angier did something like this in the movie, when we saw him shoot his first duplicate. The problem was, from the viewer's POV it looked as though the original was the guy who stayed in the machine, while the duplicate was created a few yards away. Since the guy who stays in the machine is the guy who gets dumped in the water, it may be that Angier was suicidal. On the other hand, he had no problem shooting another him, so maybe he was also murderous. No way to tell so far.

    Another problem. WHY did he keep all those lockboxes and all those bodies? The expense must have enormous!

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    1. I don't think it matters. I've always assumed that "Angier A" and "Angier B" had the same memories, as they were identical copies. The case of the first try when he shoots his double goes some way to proving this i.e. they both think they're the real one (one thinks he stayed in the same place, the other feels he was transported. It was really just a question of which one got to the gun first). So by necessity "Angier B" would always be the one that survived, so only the brain in that body survives, therefore it can only occur to "Algier B" that he is the right one. Both methods (shooting and drowning) have a different victim, which is the difficult part. Why did Angier set up the trick so that the one that survived in the first go-round dies every night? Anyway, by definition the one that survives is the one that's alive to tell the tale, but the one that's copied and left to drown was the one that succeeded the night before. Wonder what that tells us?

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  3. Angiers said something at the end of the film about "it took courage, not knowing if the turn or the prestige was going to be in the box." Could it vary? And aren't the lines between suicide and murder very thin when you are talking about an exact clone?

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  4. Karl - Thanks for an interesting perspective. The director talks about his desire to produce some sort of resonance with the viewer and he has achieved that with you.

    There was a strong emotional resonance in me that I am unable to identify yet. Perhaps it will show itself soon.

    John, you asked some good questions, let me add one down the path you have taken. Borden had copy too (have to watch the film again to discover if it is in fact a twin or a copy). One of them willingly had to give up their life (execution). Was it in persuit of the Perstige or was it love?

    And finally, was it a flaw in the story line or was there another reason that no one exposed, on behalf of Borden, the secret cache of dead bodies. Certianly, at the end, they were aware of the secret. Why then did they not reveal the truth to the autorities in order to save the life of the jailed Borden? They could have exposed the fraud of Angier but maintained the secret of Borden and not destroyed the Prestige.

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  5. Karl - Thanks for an interesting perspective. The director talks about his desire to produce some sort of resonance with the viewer and he has achieved that with you.

    There was a strong emotional resonance in me that I am unable to identify yet. Perhaps it will show itself soon.

    John, you asked some good questions, let me add one down the path you have taken. Borden had copy too (have to watch the film again to discover if it is in fact a twin or a copy). One of them willingly had to give up their life (execution). Was it in persuit of the Perstige or was it love?

    And finally, was it a flaw in the story line or was there another reason that no one exposed, on behalf of Borden, the secret cache of dead bodies. Certianly, at the end, they were aware of the secret. Why then did they not reveal the truth to the autorities in order to save the life of the jailed Borden? They could have exposed the fraud of Angier but maintained the secret of Borden and not destroyed the Prestige.

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  6. First Time Reader, just replying to michael.

    He used blind stagehands. So no one backstage knew about what was going on.

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  7. You have forgotten one thing.
    The one who drowns every night isn't Angier's double, it's himself. Well, at least it was at the first day.
    This may be the secret of the movie.
    About you misguided discussion all over babys and ethics just do not apply to the movie...

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  8. Or maybe i'm wrong. I've just read that there was a body (the double) left behind...
    oops

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  9. Actually he could have prevented all those 100 clones death by just creating one clone and then using him as the duplicate. If it is illusion that you are bothered about, you can very well achieve that without causing 99 deaths.

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  10. Your attempt to apply the moral dilemma presented in the film to the topics of abortion, in-vitro fertilization, embryonic stem-cell research and genetic cloning shows a startling ignorance of how heredity and the environment contribute to the development of an individual.

    An exact clone (a fully-formed individual with memories, desires and a capacity for suffering) is not comparable to an embryo, which does not have a formed personality or even - for the first several weeks - a nervous system.

    Your shameless straw-manning of the "it's not a human being" argument also exposes your lack of knowledge on the subject. It is not simply about a change of language (though such euphemisms are indeed common), but the empirical fact that at early stages of development there is little difference between a human embryo and a tadpole.

    Furthermore, a genetic clone produced from your DNA would not be "you" any more than would an identical twin, if you had one. The experience separating the two of you would render you perfectly distinct individuals.

    (The movie itself was well executed and enjoyable, but unfortunately full of holes.)

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    1. There's a big difference between a human and tadpole embryo. The human has human DNA - and, no matter what it looks like at that stage, it is human.

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  11. First of all, very well analysed aspect of view in depth upon the moral matters of the movie.The most strange thing in the movie concerning the duplication issue arised from the movie (throught the <> duplication) is that every time he was duplicated the DUPLICATE had the exact memories at that moment with the original.It was like a merely identical same person was created.The main point of discussion in this matter i humbly believe is that how a duplicate through the TESLA materializing duplication , would duplicate the brain signals that would create the memories in the duplicate.In the dying act of angier he shows that during his first attempt to <> himself , after producing his duplicate , i believe its the original who is being shot after saying << no i am the...>> (probably wanting to say <<the original) . Suicidal or murderous the bottom line is that Angier knew that his duplicate would be exactly like him , in body and mind.It is very intriguing...because in fact he was always killing himself in the end..not his duplicate...

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  12. Alright, so the whole thing about murder/suicide, Angier said that it took courage to get up on that stage, but I think the whole crux of that part of the plot is Cutter's story about the sailor. After the death of Angier's wife, cutter told him that he heard drowning is this wonderful experience, to make him feel better. But near the end, he lets him know that he had lied. he'd heard it was terrible.
    So for Angiers, he thought he was sending his double on this great journey, possibly to see his wife, as she had died, but in the end he realized how sick it was.

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  13. If there existed such a machine that could duplicate people why didn't Tesla used it on himself,rather than giving it away to Angier,it could have been a great discovery.Perhaps, he discovered how dangerous it was to use it and though he agreed to give it to Angier on being forced by him,he advised him to destroy it.Well this is just a theory i came up with, that when the machine is used it arouses murderous intent or anger and person fells like either dying or killing,whatever it is it surely is inhuman,Tesla was against the world knowing the existence of such a machine.

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  14. Tesla's Serbian, not American scientist. I also dont like the way he is represented in this movie because first - Tesla never wanted money and he died very poor in a cheap hotel in NY. Second - he didnt invent machine such as this one.

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  15. I just finished the movie and immediately researched tesla and cloning. I saw what they were hinting too, I agree with you 100%. Lets just take a second to look at how far technology has come. Take the hardron collider for example. We are literally finding new particles in space (also weakening the earths magnetic field, how bout that) AND WE THINK WE CANT CLONE DNA? We've beeeen cloning animals and our fucking food. You think human DNA changes that? DNA is DNA. The fact that the UK got the ok to genetically modify human embryos displays the fact its been possible. I know thats not the same but its a baby step. I mean come on, we now can create "designer babies" and literally pick out what we want our baby to look like. Remeber the movie The Island? Holograms in star wars? We have the technology. Irobot? We now have robots that have human emotion and memory. The Matrix ESPECIALLY proposes the most truth. Which anyone can see if we take to seconds to question how we live in a multidimensional world with parallel universes and we waste our lives making a useless piece of paper while most of us are only using 10% of our brains. Relativity theory pretty much proved everything is particles that move in waves, and that can exist in more than one place at the same time. 2 russian scientist have recently proven light and frequency can alter DNA and mimic exact copies of it. We can do juuust about anything. Time to wake up. The truth of what we CAN do is way more enjoyable to explore than limiting our minds to the belief that it is impossible. Nothing is impossible.

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