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If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm hostility. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The following review of Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige was inspired by the above quote which I discovered on the front page of the Raven Foundation’s website.
The Prestige exemplifies Longfellow’s insight by telling the story of two rival magicians in turn of the century London. The story of their escalating rivalry is reconstructed from their respective diaries.
Because, as the film teaches us, magicians tend to keep the secrets to their tricks in their diaries, both antagonists, Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and Alfred Borden (Christian Bale), steal each other’s diary. But they do not find what they hope to find. The respective diaries do not contain the secrets to their rival’s tricks but the secret to their rival’s identity – or rather the lack thereof. As they read each other’s secret histories, they discover that their rivalry is a quest for the being that the other is suspected to possess – driven by their own lack of being. They imitate each other’s mask of independent being: an illusion both are forced to keep up in the face of their rivalry.
But this insight is only gained in retrospect. Only once they both have successfully achieved their mutual destruction – and thus think they have finally assumed the coveted position of the rival – do they discover that there is nothing there: that the rival’s happiness, the life that they envied is in reality a history of division, torment and evidence of a fickle and contradictory nature – ultimately a lack of being.
