Jamie Davies

Jamie.Davies@trinitycollegebristol.ac.uk

Abstract

This essay examines the Book of Revelation in dialogue with the films of Christopher Nolan, with particular attention to the use of nonlinear narrative. The approach taken to Nolan’s work is that of auteur theory, a pattern theory which traces the distinctive technical and artistic voice of the director across a wide range of films (e.g. Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Dunkirk). Insights from this analysis are brought into conversation with Revelation which also, it is argued, employs a temporally-disrupted nonlinear narrative structure. Particular attention is then given to the themes of time and space in Nolan’s Interstellar and the motif of heavenly ascent in Revelation and other apocalyptic literature.

Keywords

Revelation; Film; Christopher Nolan; Time; Space; Nonlinear Narratives

It is commonly observed that the films of British-American director Christopher Nolan are characterised by nonlinear or disrupted narrative techniques, and explorations of time and space, interests which have shaped his contribution to a range of film genres. This essay joins a growing conversation about the book of Revelation and film by surveying these features of Nolan’s cinema and suggesting ways in which his work might provide insights for reading the structure of the book.[1] I argue that Revelation employs a non-linear approach to narrative analogous to Nolan’s storytelling, a disrupted arrangement of story and narrative which is illuminated by the comparison, which also in return suggests possibilities for fresh interpretations of Nolan’s films. The essay closes with an example of this in relation to time and space, by bringing the ancient apocalyptic theme of heavenly ascent into dialogue with Nolan’s Interstellar.[2] 

Christopher Nolan: Hollywood’s Auteur

Cinema can do things with time that other storytelling genres cannot do. Whereas a novel may be read in an afternoon or a year, and the reader is essentially in charge of that use of “real-world” time, this is not the case with film, at least not in its cinema expression. The running time of a film is a fixed piece of “clock time” that the viewer cannot reasonably interrupt, within which a film director can manipulate the viewers’ experience of time. As a result, time has long been a fascination of directors and screenwriters.

One contemporary filmmaker who has exploited this more than most is Christopher Nolan. Nolan is something of an enigma, blurring the usual boundary between Hollywood and independent filmmaking. In the words of film scholar Stuart Joy “Nolan’s work […] has rendered the traditional divisions between mainstream and independent cinema arbitrary.”[3] He commands the budgets and box-office revenues of Hollywood while maintaining the cult appeal and the singular vision of an art house auteur. His singular creative voice can be seen just as much in a 200-million-dollar espionage thriller as in his university project Doodlebug (1997), produced on a shoestring with a single actor and a one-room set.[4] This creative control comes at a price, of course.[5] Nolan’s near-obsessive approach to the filmmaking process is widely recognised. He consistently works with only a small circle of people, and is reluctant to use a second unit, even for large action movies, shooting even stock scenes himself.[6] He refuses to rely too heavily on post-production special effects, preferring physical sets, models and optical illusions, and continues to be a vocal advocate of analogue film rather than digital, and for theatre release over home streaming.[7] He is widely seen, therefore, as a director who is more than just a technical metteur-en-scène but a “primary creator.”[8] 

Nolan’s Cinema: Time, Space, and Nonlinear Narrative

The critical approach to Nolan’s films which is adopted here is auteur theory,an approach which allows us to examine the singular vision of Nolan’s cinema in its technical competence, personality, and interior vision.[9] It is a “pattern theory,” drawing connections between films in order to see a directorial “signature,” and as such we need to examine not just one or two films but a larger body of Nolan’s work across a range of genres.[10]

We start with Nolan’s second film, Memento (2000) a neo-noir thriller that subverts the standard expectations of the genre, especially through its use of nonlinear storytelling techniques.[11] In large part the story runs backwards, with the dénouement known from the beginning. The protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), is afflicted by anterograde amnesia, preventing him forming new memories. In order to piece together his life and identity, Shelby relies on key “facts” tattooed on his body and a deck of annotated Polaroid photographs. In the opening scene, we see one of these photographs, of a bloodied corpse lying face down. The scene plays in reverse and in slow motion, doubly manipulating narrative time. The Polaroidslowly de-exposes, fading to white and then returns into the camera. Blood oozes back into the victim’s skull, and the spent bullet jumps back into the chamber of the gun Shelby is holding. The film’s main storyline moves backward from here, each subsequent scene starting a little earlier in the plot and finishing where the previous scene began. Key characters and events are introduced without backstory, apart from what we can glean from Shelby’s Polaroid memories, the reliability of which he and the audience soon start to question. Memento, however, is not just a story told backward; one cannot simply reverse the movie. Nolan’s brother Jonathan (author of Memento Mori, the short story on which the film is based) calls it a “Möbius strip.”[12] The backward-moving scenes of the narrative, shot in colour and largely with immersive handheld camera, are interwoven with steady, documentary black-and-white scenes that progress forward, in which we are the observers as Shelby gives his version of the story.[13] The result is something of a disorienting, braided narrative[14] that reproduces for the audience the protagonist’s experience of disrupted time and memory.[15]

Memento is not, however, a deconstructed, plotless film. It has all the narrative mystery, moral ambivalence, and criminal intrigue of the noir thriller genre, complete with a twist at the end. But it is not told in a way that can be adequately described by structuralist analysis. Here it is helpful to use the distinction between story, “what happens in the fictional world of the film” and plot/narrative, “the order in which elements of the story are presented.”[16] Ifthe viewer wants to conform the story of Memento to the rules of cause-and-effect, this must be reconstructed from its narrative. In this way the viewer shares something of Shelby’s experience, as one who is unable to think sequentially without disruption and is thus constantly trying to reconstruct his own story.

This sort of anachronous or nonlinear storytelling is a feature of many of Nolan’s films. The Prestige (2006), something of a parable on the art of cinema, tells the story of two rival Victorian-era magicians Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) through the conceit of them reading each other’s diaries.[17] The timelines are shuffled, the narrative moving between the diaries and the events of the story, and since the “facts” of the story rely on the inherent subjectivity of the diaries (written by professional tricksters, no less), we are left to question what is real and what is just a narrator’s illusion. More precisely, the narrative device which structures The Prestige is actually the reading of a diary within a diary, producing a “layered temporality” like a nested Russian matryoshka doll.[18] At the heart of this nested narrative structure is the traumatic event that turned the two former friends into enemies.

Perhaps the most well-known use of this layered temporal device, however, is Nolan’s big-budget sci-fi heist film Inception (2010).[19] Although the movie begins, like Memento, with a scene from the end of the story, the progression is otherwise mostly linear. However, the experience of time is still manipulated, and this is the film’s primary narrative device. The story focuses on Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), an industrial spy who is able to enter others’ dreams to steal ideas or, as in the film’s gambit, implant them. In the dreams which Cobb and his team enter, the laws of physics can be manipulated. Impossible structures can be built as space is folded and distorted into Escher-like illusions.[20] Time, too, is a somewhat malleable resource. While it remains essentially linear, in the dream world time stretches out at different speeds depending on how deep into the layers of the dream the characters descend. The hours of a long-haul flight in the waking world multiply into weeks, months, and years in the nested dreams-within-dreams. During the main heist sequence, crosscutting between scenes at different layers of the dream allows Nolan to show the implications of the characters’ actions across different times and spaces.

Nolan’s fondness for nonlinear narratives is more than a technical fascination; he is personally invested in the intersection of storytelling, philosophy, mathematics, and science, especially the physics of relativity. This can be seen most clearly in sci-fi epic Interstellar (2014), where these interests lie on the surface of the plot. In the late 21st century, faced with an ecologically doomed earth, a NASA pilot-turned-farmer, Joseph “Coop” Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), takes a one-way trip through a wormhole to a distant galaxy in the hope of finding a new home for humanity. The planetary system at the other end of the wormhole, we learn, is in close proximity to a black hole called Gargantua, whose gravity warps the experience of time on the various planets’ surfaces. In one instance, this gravitational time dilation means that Coop’s hours on one planet’s surface translate to decades for his crewmate aboard the orbiting ship. The physics of general relativity allows Nolan to return to themes he explored in Inception, but within a materialist Einsteinian universe rather than the conceit of a dream world. Time and space, we are constantly reminded, are not constants but relative phenomena, almost as malleable in the physical universe as they are in Inception’s dream worlds, or in the craft of the cinematic auteur. In Interstellar’s climactic scenes, Nolan embellishes the science with artistic speculation as Coop journeys beyond the event horizon into Gargantua itself. There he finds himself suspended in a “tesseract,” a three-dimensional spatial representation of four-dimensional spacetime, constructed by beings unknown, in which he is able to interact with time physically in ways that transcend the usual human experience of cause and effect.[21]

Two final films demonstrate that Nolan’s philosophical explorations are not limited to the sci-fi genre. In Dunkirk (2017), Nolan applies his narrative manipulations of time to the usually more restrictive genre of the historical war film.[22] The story of the famous Second World War evacuation is told through three braided timelines, resulting in three different experiences of the passage of time occupying the same space in the “clock time” of the film. The narrative simultaneously recounts a week in the life of the trapped ground forces, a day at sea on the little ship Moonstone, and an hour in the air onboard an RAF Spitfire. In this way, Nolan gives the viewer a share of the subjective temporal experiences of Operation Dynamo (the evacuation mission’s codename) from three different viewpoints.[23] While the story is relatively straightforward, Nolan’s crosscutting between the nested timelines makes them overlap and interlock in the narrative in disorienting ways before they ultimately converge on the same climactic event of the rescue at Dunkirk beach.

Lastly, in his most recent release, Tenet (2020), Nolan brings his singular philosophical vision to the classic espionage thriller. The film has been called Nolan’s “Bond film,” and for good reason.[24] All the usual elements are here: a charismatic spy (John David Washington) working for a secretive organisation, car chases, big-budget fight scenes, a beautiful femme fatale (Elizabeth Debicki), and a mysterious Russian oligarch (Kenneth Branagh). Like its title, the narrative of the film is a palindrome, moving forward in its first half before shifting into reverse in the second half. At the heart of the film’s premise, as well as its narrative technique, is the idea of the inversion of time and the reversibility of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics.[25] Cause-and-effect are manipulated throughout the film, and many key movements in the story only come together once the palindromic turn in the narrative has happened.

Having given a whistle-stop tour of Nolan’s signature use of the themes of narrative structure, time, and space, in the second half of this essay I will read “with” Nolan in offering an account of these same themes in the book of Revelation. This is not an exercise in precise mapping, nor do I suggest that Nolan’s cinema somehow holds the key to unlocking these puzzles in Revelation scholarship. But it is, I hope, something more than just a collection of classroom illustrations, and that reading the two together might freshly illumine these interpretative issues and attune us to them in a new way.[26]

Revelation: A Linear Story with a Nonlinear Narrative?

Like watching a Nolan film, reading Revelation can be a bewildering experience, especially if one attempts to trace its narrative structure. One of the main decisions the interpreter faces is between linear and nonlinear or recapitulative readings. This decision can be aided, I think, by the distinction between story and narrative we noted in describing Nolan’s films.[27] As Furby describes it, the story is“the underlying layer of events, occurring sequentially, which take place in linear chronological time.” This is distinct from the narrative, “the period of the events depicted in the film […] the arrangement of the story material presented on screen.”[28] Viewed in this way, we might say that Revelation has a linear story, but a nonlinear narrative. This allows us to affirm the insights of nonlinear readings involving recapitulation and cyclical arrangements without completely jettisoning the linearity of the book’s story. Recapitulation and linear progression theories are not incompatible but can be seen as describing the narrative and the story, respectively.[29]

To be sure, there is at least one linear story that can be seen in Revelation, that of John’s visionary experience on Patmos. There are other stories revealed within the vision, too, such as the story of a cosmic war, the victory of Christ, and the judgement of God’s enemies. (As in The Prestige, there are books within the book). The logical sequence of these stories, however, does not always correspond to their placement in the narrative: Revelation disrupts and shuffles the story sequence into complex narrative arrangements.

This can be helpful in making sense of Revelation’s various recapitulations and non-sequiturs. For example, as in Memento, some of Revelation’s key characters are introduced in the narrative before we know anything about their role in the story. Take the character of Babylon. She enters the narrative briefly and confusingly in Revelation 14:8, where an angel proclaims that she is fallen before we have any idea who she is. There, her fall is the second of three angelic messages, the third being the judgement of the Beast, who we met in the narrative a chapter earlier.[30] The insight that Babylon is a city isn’t suggested until Revelation 16:19, and here we are told briefly that she is the object of God’s wrath. A full description of the character isn’t really provided until the vision of chapter 17, which makes her the narrative focus, but by now we have already understood something of her role in the story. Chapter 18 repeats the proclamation of her fall, describes her judgements, and details the laments of the merchants at her burning. The narrative of Revelation thus disrupts the story timeline of the character Babylon, and her fall is recounted several times from different perspectives.[31]

The same sort of nonlinearity is characteristic of other narrative features of the book, such as its setting. In Revelation 8:7, all the grass is burned up, but is then there again to be protected in Revelation 9:4. In Revelation 6:13 the stars fall, but in Revelation 8:12 they are darkened by a third. The mountains are removed in Revelation 6:14, yet people can still hide in them one verse later; they are removed again in chapter 16, yet the woman sits on seven mountains in Revelation 17:9 and John is carried away to another in Revelation 21:10. Heaven and earth, or parts thereof, flee away at least three times (Rev 6:14, 16:20, 20:11). A number of important themes and ideas from the end of the story are introduced early in the narrative without explanation: the “tree of life” (Rev 2:7/22:2), “second death” (Rev 2:11/21:8), “book of life” (Rev 3:5, and also 13:8; 17:8/20:12), and “New Jerusalem” (Rev 3:12).

All of this is very confusing if narrative and story are taken to be essentially synonymous. As Craig Koester notes, “non-sequiturs in the visionary world make it difficult to translate these scenes into coherent sequences of events in the readers’ world.”[32] But this “translation” is made easier (in theory, at least) if we recognise the distinction between the two, viewing Revelation’s narrative (and therefore its structure) as somewhat nonlinear while affirming the linearity of its underlying story. Like Nolan’s Dunkirk, the same event in an essentially linear redemptive story is sometimes shown “out of order” in the narrative or repeated from different perspectives. Readers of Revelation accompany John and experience these discontinuities and repetitions. We share his disrupted experience of cause-and-effect and are invited to piece together the story from the shuffled narrative we are given. We are displaced and confused, and that’s part of the point.

Narrative Time and the Matryoshka Effect

In trying to piece together the story from the shuffled narrative, another insight from Nolan’s cinema can be helpful. Like Inception, Revelation makes use of a Russian doll of stories-within-stories. We can trace at least three levels to John’s narrative, each with their own storyline. This narrative analysis is similar to that proposed by David Barr, who identifies three scrolls in Revelation (the “Letter Scroll,” Rev 1:1–3:22; the “Worship Scroll,” Rev 4:1–11:18; the “War Scroll,” Rev 11:19–22:21). These, Barr argues, are “three distinct but interrelated movements” in the book, which he understands to be something like “three one-act plays on the same theme performed in succession within a common frame.”[33] Barr’s analysis has much to commend it, but in the light of the foregoing discussion, I propose two developments.

First, Barr’s proposal is, to my mind, too neat and stable. Revelation’s three “stories” do not separate quite as cleanly or sequentially in the narrative structure of the book as Barr’s reading would have it. Rather, they are shuffled together, with John’s narrative moving between them in complex ways. Second, I am not sure it is correct to say, as Barr does, that, while the three stories share themes and characters, they “do not form a causal sequence between them.”[34] On the contrary, once the three stories are viewed not sequentially but in a nested arrangement, like a matryoshka, a number of causal connections between them can be observed. Events at one level have causal effects at the other levels, though the imagery used may be different. Since these effects are shuffled into the narrative rather than laid out successively, some work will have to be done to see them. Cause and effect might be out of order in the narrative, or events might be repeated in order to depict them at different levels, but the three stories are nevertheless causally connected rather than each having its own discrete logic.

Again, Nolan provides a useful dialogue partner here. Inception has a famous scene in which the characters are in a speeding van that crashes off an embankment. For a few seconds (at this level of the dream-world), they are suspended in mid-air as the van flips over. This temporary shift in gravity is experienced at the next level down, resulting in a wonderful gravity-defying fight scene in a hotel corridor. Nolan crosscuts between the hotel scene and the falling car, now in slow-motion, to remind us of this causal relationship between the two events at two layers of the dream.[35]

The narrative of Revelation sometimes shifts between the three stories in similar ways. Keeping track of this is challenging (perhaps deliberately so) but is guided by indications of the book’s threefold “geographical” setting. First, there is John’s vision on earth, the setting for his encounter with Christ in the opening three chapters and the epilogue. Second, there is his ascent and vision in heaven, where much of the book’s material happens. There is action on earth, of course, but usually described from a heavenly point of view. Third, there is also a story that happens in relation to an innermost space, “the temple in heaven” (Rev 11:19) or “the temple, the tent of witness in heaven”(Rev 15:5). [36] The three stories that correspond to these three settings are nested, like a matryoshka. This is not to say that the innermost story is inferior to the outermost: quite the opposite.

What is interesting to note from our comparison with Nolan’s films is the way in which time operates differently at the different levels. Like Cobb in the dreamscapes of Inception or Coop in the different locations of Interstellar, John’s experience of time bends and stretches depending on “where” he is. The widest narrative frame, John’s visionary experience on Patmos, is not the widest temporal frame of the story. That is found, I think, in the innermost setting, in chapter 12’s vision of the dragon, the woman, and a war in heaven. This vision, preceded by the observation that “God’s temple in heaven was opened” (Rev 11:19), tells the story of a primaeval conflict between God and his enemies, led by the dragon. The temporal setting of this vision is unclear—we are not told when the war broke out (if that is even a sensible question to ask), but I take Richard Bauckham to be essentially correct in placing this vision “chronologically earlier than any previous part of his visionary narrative.”[37] But it is also contemporaneous with the first-century churches of Asia Minor.[38] In this layer of the vision, the dragon is defeated and “thrown down to earth” (Rev 12:9) and a voice proclaims that God’s victory and kingdom have now come (Rev 12:10); “the decisive victory has already been won in the world above.”[39] This victory has “already” been completed, but only on the timeline of this primordial innermost vision.[40] There, as in Revelation 11:15, heaven rejoices, but there is still woe for the earth because the effects of this victory are yet to be fully seen on the earthly timeline, where the dragon continues to make war, knowing that his time is cut short.[41] Subsequent chapters of Revelation play out this victory on the other timelines, as the setting cuts between heaven and earth, before ultimately converging, like the ending of Dunkirk, in the final vision of the New Heaven and New Earth. But it also echoes backward to the churches of Asia Minor, whose conflict with the powers of evil is now understood as an earthly outworking of this cosmic battle. There is thus a causal connection between the three stories, though it is not always presented in a linear way by the narrative. The devil’s defeat in this cosmic frame, completed in Rev 12:10, is related in complex ways to his defeat in the other heavenly visions and, ultimately, the church’s participation in this victory in earthly time.

Narrative Space: General Relativity and Heavenly Ascent

Nolan’s obsession with manipulation of time and space reflects an interest in a post-Newtonian understanding of the cosmos, but this understanding is not entirely without ancient counterparts. Second temple Jewish cosmology is sometimes oversimplified as a three-tiered system, the uppermost tier being heaven which, though exalted, essentially belongs to the same space-time continuum. That may be a fair description of the cosmology of some texts, but a far more sophisticated framework operates in some of the heavenly ascent literature. In the Enochic and hekhalot literature, heaven is described less like the uppermost tier of the cosmos and more like a “parallel universe obeying different physical laws.”[42] To put it in theological terms, there is an infinitely qualitative distinction between the heavenly and earthly realms that a three-tiered cosmology cannot sufficiently express. Earthly laws governing time, space, and thermodynamics are disrupted in the seer’s experience of these heavenly places. Ice and fire can mix or be contained within each other, space is constructed with impossible physics, larger spaces contained within smaller ones, the distances between them increasing exponentially.[43]

The book of Revelation can be approached with this in mind. We have already seen how time might alter at different levels of John’s ascent,[44] but the same might also be said of space. John’s progression through the layers of the cosmos can be seen both as an “ascent” and a descending journey “inward,” from the outer court of earth to the courts of heaven, to the temple within. We find a similar spatial orientation in the hekhalot literature (though the basic idea is more widely found in second temple Judaism) where the cosmos is understood as temple-shaped, and a seer’s “ascent” through the courts of heaven simultaneously seen as a “descent” inward to concentric spaces.[45] The physics of heaven cannot, however, be reduced to a simplistic three-tiered system. When John peers into the innermost room, the “temple in heaven,” he sees, like Enoch (1 Enoch 14.15), that this smallest doll of the matryoshka is in fact greater than those that contain it, both in time and space. “Spatial movements in the vision,” as Koester observes, “are not like those in the ordinary world.”[46]

As such, the various descriptions of John or other characters moving up or down the layers of this cosmos should be taken less as an absolute cosmological geography than a concession to three-dimensional creatures. Turning back to Nolan, and now approaching his work in the light of this study of apocalyptic ouranology, this can be likened to the exploration of General Relativity in Interstellar, particularly Coop’s experience of the “tesseract,” a three-dimensional representation of four-dimensional space-time. To be sure, the connections should not be pressed too hard, claiming that John or the writer of 1 Enoch understood the theory of relativity millennia before Einstein.[47] However, we might suggest that Interstellar can be read fruitfully as a modern heavenly ascent narrative. Many of the key features of such apocalyptic narratives are there in the closing scenes of the film: Coop descends/ascends through the black hole into the “tesseract,” where a mysterious otherworldly guide gives him a powerful but disrupted spatio-temporal experience (through a three-dimensional representation of four-dimensional space-time). He is given a new account of the events of his history, as well as a fresh interpretation of their meaning. Through this experience he learns secret knowledge which proves vital to the salvation of humankind, and, like a seer, communicates these salvific mysteries in esoteric terms (even using the power of books) to his daughter Murph and to endangered humanity. I do not think it is a stretch to describe Interstellar as an apocalyptic film, not only in the modern sense of the word (it is, after all, set at a time of global environmental crisis), but in the ancient literary sense, too.

Conclusion

This essay has been an exercise in “reading with:” reading the Apocalypse of John with Christopher Nolan, and (more briefly in the closing section) reading Nolan with the Apocalypse. As a case study in interdisciplinary biblical interpretation, it has illustrated some of the fruit that can be gathered by deploying a cinematic lens to questions of time, space, and narrative in the book of Revelation.[48] First, in relation to the old question of the book’s narrative structure, I have argued that, as with Nolan’s work, Revelation employs a temporally disrupted approach which separates story and narrative and organises narrative cause-and-effect in nonlinear ways. Second, the lens of Nolan’s filmmaking offers a fresh focus on the question of Revelation’s construal and use of time and space. Nolan’s obsession with the relationship between science/philosophy and the storyteller’s art is paralleled by ancient literary explorations of the structure of the cosmos, especially in Jewish apocalyptic texts.

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[1] John Walliss, Reel Revelations: Apocalypse and Film (Sheffield: Phoenix Press, 2010); Tina Pippin, “This is The End: Apocalyptic Moments in Cinema” in The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and its Reception in Film, ed. Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 405–416, doi:10.1515/9781614513261-029;Meghan Alexander Beddingfield, “Mythic Relevance of Revelation in Film” in The Bible in Motion: A Handbook of the Bible and its Reception in Film ed. Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016), 517–532, doi:10.1515/9781614513261-035; Michelle Fletcher, “Apocalypse Noir” in T&T Clark Companion to the Bible and Film, ed. Richard Walsh (London: T&T Clark, 2018), 21–35, doi:10.5040/9780567666239.0007.These recent handbooks contain a number of chapters on contemporary film directors/auteurs, but Nolan is not among them.

[2] Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, 2014, Warner Bros. Pictures.

[3] Stuart Joy, “Introduction: Dreaming a Little Bigger, Darling,” in The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, eds. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (New York: Wallflower, 2015), 1.

[4] Doodlebug, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan, 1997, Alliance Atlantis.

[5] IMDb’s estimate for the budget of Tenet (2020) is $205 million (see tinyurl.com/3jr8ntv7); Tenet, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan, 2020, Warner Bros. Pictures.

[6] E.g., his brother Jonathan for screenwriting (Memento, Prestige, Interstellar, the Dark Knight trilogy), Hans Zimmer for music (Inception, the Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Dunkirk) and actor Michael Caine (The Prestige, Inception, the Dark Knight trilogy, Interstellar, Tenet, and a cameo in Dunkirk); Joy, “Dreaming a Little Bigger,” 6.

[7] It is not an accident that, at the release of Tenet in August 2020, during the coronavirus pandemic, Nolan insisted on a cinema release when many films were going straight to home streaming services, of which Nolan has been critical: see Kim Masters, “Christopher Nolan Rips HBO Max as “Worst Streaming Service,” Denounces Warner Bros.’ Plan” The Hollywood Reporter, 7 December 2020, tinyurl.com/58b5w43a.

[8] Joy, “Dreaming a Little Bigger,” 6. The contrast between metteur-en-scène as technician and auteur as creative force is drawn by Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the ‘Auteur’ Theory in 1962,” Film Culture 27 (Winter 1962):1–8, reprinted in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy. and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 561–564.

[9] Auteur theory has its origins in French film criticism of the 1950s (esp. François Truffaut and other critics of the Cahiers du Cinéma) but the term, and the further refinement of the theory for the Anglophone world, comes from Andrew Sarris. See Sarris, “Notes on the ‘Auteur’ Theory” and Andrew Sarris, “The Auteur Theory and the Perils of Pauline,” Film Quarterly 16.4 (Summer 1963), 26–33, doi:10.2307/3185951. In Sarris’s view, American cinema lent itself more readily to this approach, since directors often worked on commission across a range of genres, and so, unlike most of their French counterparts, they were forced to adapt their given material, thereby making their signature visions more evident. This applies excellently to Nolan’s body of work, as others have noted (e.g., Joy, “Dreaming a Little Bigger,” 12 n4). Auteur theory has its detractors, of course (most famously Pauline Kael) who prefer to emphasise the collaborative nature of the film-making process rather than the singular voice of the director. “Technical competence,” “distinguishable personality,” and “interior meaning” are the three “concentric circles” of the theory as defined by Sarris, “Notes,” 562–3.

[10] Sarris, “Notes,” 563. The following survey is not comprehensive: the Dark Knight Trilogy (Dates) was omitted by choice (though similar themes can be traced there), and space did not permit comment on Following (1998) and Insomnia (2002).

[11] Memento, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan, 2000, Newmarket.

[12] Jonathan Nolan, in Tom Brislin, “Time, Ethics, and the Films of Christopher Nolan,” Visual Communication Quarterly 23.4 (2016): 200. doi:10.1080/15551393.2016.1252655.

[13] Brislin, “Time, Ethics,” 201.

[14] Jacqueline Furby describes the film as a “plaited rope;” Jacqueline Furby, “About Time Too: From Interstellar to Following, Christopher Nolan’s Continuing Preoccupation with Time-Travel,” in The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, ed. Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (New York: Wallflower, 2015), 264, doi:10.7312/furb17396-020.

[15] Furby, “About Time Too,” 261.

[16] Andrew Kania, “Inception’s Singular Lack of Unity Among Christopher Nolan’s Puzzle Films” in Furby and Joy, Cinema of Christopher Nolan, 175, doi:10.7312/furb17396-015. The distinction between story and discourse goes back to the work of E. M. Forster in the 1920s (classically, in his Aspects of the Novel) but became more important for biblical studies following the work of Seymour Benjamin Chatman, in works such as E. M. Forster, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927).

[17] The Prestige, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan and Jonathan Nolan, 2006, Buena Vista Pictures Distribution and Warner Bros. Pictures.

[18] The matryoshka is a metaphor used to describe Nolan’s manipulation of time by various scholars, e.g., Furby, “About Time Too,” 259 and Kania, “Lack of Unity,” 178. It can be found in Nolan’s earliest work, e.g., Doodlebug (1997).

[19] Inception, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan, 2010, Warner Bros. Distribution.

[20] Nolan regularly draws mathematical diagrams in planning scenes and cites M. C. Escher among his influences. (e.g. Marlow Stern, “Christopher Nolan Uncut,” The Daily Beast, 12 July 2017, tinyurl.com/bdpnsvh2).

[21] See also, Brislin, “Time, Ethics, and the Films,” 207.

[22] Dunkirk, directed by Christopher Nolan, written by Christopher Nolan, 2017, Warner Bros. Distribution.

[23] This is intensified by Hans Zimmer’s score, in which there is the constant pulse of a heartbeat and a ticking sound (sampled from Nolan’s own pocket watch), reminding the viewer that time is running out for the soldiers. A similar ticking sound device is also found in Interstellar. It is not the only musical effect in which Zimmer’s score reflects Nolan’s narrative use of time. Zimmer also makes extensive use of the “Shepard tone” effect, in which three rising scales, an octave apart, are layered (the sonic equivalent of Nolan’s three narrative timelines) to create an acoustic illusion of an impossible ever-ascending tone. It is like a musical corkscrew, or Escher’s impossible staircase, and it creates a feeling of increasing tension. It is not for nothing that Zimmer has called it “Chris Nolan’s score.” See Melena Ryzik, “Ticking Watch. Boat Engine. Slowness. The Secrets of the ‘Dunkirk’ Score,” New York Times, 26 July 2017, tinyurl.com/tr6d2z8d.

[24] This is a widely-made observation, but see e.g. ScreenRant’s Craig Elvy, who dubs Tenet “essentially James Bond with a PhD in theoretical physics;” Craig Elvy, “Tenet Proves Nolan Is Perfect To Reboot James Bond,” ScreenRant, 3 May 2021, tinyurl.com/yck9239d.

[25] Stated in various ways, the second law of thermodynamics establishes the universality and irreversibility of the concept of increasing entropy in a closed system. In Tenet, time (and with it entropy) is reversed.

[26] I am not the first to read Nolan and Revelation together. See, for example, George Aichele, Tina Pippin, and Richard Walsh, “Revelations of the Dream,” The Bible and Critical Theory 9 (2013): 1-24, https://tinyurl.com/3vvf4sn6. Though my interests and method of “reading with” are slightly different. A similar approach to this use of cinema in biblical studies can also be found in Michelle Fletcher, Reading Revelation as Pastiche, Library of New Testament Studies 571(London: T&T Clark, 2017): e.g., 215–216, doi:10.5040/9780567672728.

[27] Again, for a methodological back-marker to this discussion (at least as far as Anglophone biblical studies is concerned, see Chatman, Story and Discourse).

[28] Furby, “About Time Too,” 259.

[29] As argued by Adela Yarbro Collins, The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1976), 8. See also the discussions in David L. Barr, “The Apocalypse as Symbolic Transformation of the World: a Literary Analysis” Interpretation (1983), 43, doi:10.1177/002096438403800105; James L. Resseguie, The Revelation of John: A Narrative Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2009), 54–59.

[30] Though possibly prefigured in Rev 11:8 as “the great city” (so Resseguie, Revelation, 52).

[31] The Beast is similarly treated: introduced in Rev 11:7 as coming up from the pit and conquering the saints, but not described until chapter 13, with its conquest in Rev 13:7, and its ascent from the pit repeated in Rev 17:8. On this and other non-sequiturs see Resseguie, Revelation, 51–52.

[32] Craig R. Koester, Revelation: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible (New Haven: Yale, 2014), 788.

[33] David L. Barr, Tales of the End: A Narrative Commentary on the Book of Revelation, (Salem: Polebridge, 1998), 13. The “three storied” analysis presented by Barr also identifies a similar importance in their setting, which I will discuss below;Barr, “Symbolic Transformation,” 45.

[34] Barr, Tales of the End, 13, see the wider discussion on 13–15.

[35] Gravity, as Interstellar reminds us, can work across the different fields of time.

[36] I judge the first genitive here to be epexegetical.

[37] Richard Bauckham, The Climax of Prophecy: Studies on the Book of Revelation (London: T&T Clark, 1993), 15.

[38] Barr, Tales of the End, 15. I hesitate to say that this takes place in “eternity,” since that would make the conflict with the devil an eternal one, with problematic implications for the doctrine of God. But the timeframe of this vision is, I think, cosmic in scope and therefore contemporaneous with all earthly history. As such, the woman can be seen simultaneously as Eve, Mary, Israel, and the Church.

[39] Christopher Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity (London: SPCK, 1982), 92.

[40] The word “already,” of course, starts to unravel at this point, since the linear sequential experience of time on earth is related to the “time” of the heavenly realm(s) in nonlinear ways.

[41] Barr considers this announcement of God’s victory, at the climax of the trumpet visions, an “obstacle” to linear readings (Barr, “Symbolic Transformation,” 43), but this need not be so if the narrative is understood to be a layered expression of a linear story. This “cut short” time of both trial and witness is, I think, represented in various ways by the Danielic imagery of “time, times, half a time” (Rev 12:14), 42 months (Rev 11:2; 13:5), and 1,260 days (Rev 11:3; 12:6). Perhaps we might even say that these descriptions of the “countable time” of months and days are the earthly temporal way of expressing the cosmic “time” of the primordial vision of chapter 12. As such, the “42 months” of the beast’s authority on earth in Rev 13:5 might be read as the same “time,” from a different perspective, as the “time, times, and half a time” spent by the woman in the wilderness in Rev 12:14.

[42] Philip S. Alexander, “The Dualism of Heaven and Earth in Early Jewish Literature and its Implications” in Light Against Darkness: Dualism in Ancient Mediterranean Religion and the Contemporary World, Journal of Ancient Judaism Supplements 2, ed. Armin Lange et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 170.

[43] 1 Enoch14, with parallels in the hekhalot literature, describes heaven concentrically, with larger spaces inside smaller ones. In 3 Enoch42 there are various mixtures of ice and fire and other physical impossibilities; see Martha Himmelfarb, Ascent to Heaven in Jewish and Christian Apocalypses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 15. In the Babylonian Talmud, reflections on the dimensions of the heavens involve exponential distances between heavenly spaces; see Alexander, “Dualism,” 175 n9.

[44] Himmelfarb rejects the characterisation of Revelation as an ascent (Himmelfarb, Ascent, 34), without giving reasons. While it may not have the clear indications of several tiers of heaven characteristic of many ascent texts, I don’t see why this should not be a fair description of John’s visionary experience, at least from chapter 4 onward, when he is instructed to “come up here” (Rev 4:1).

[45] See for example, Christopher Rowland and C. R. A. Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 330–335; Himmelfarb, Ascent, 14–16.

[46] Koester, Revelation, 764.

[47]Although Kelley Coblentz Bautch has described such spatial material in the apocalypses as “a rudimentary form of science;” Kelley Coblentz Bautch, “Spatiality and Apocalyptic Literature,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel 5 (2016): 278, doi:10.1628/186870316X14805954607713.

[48] For a reading of John’s gospel which has explored this intriguing connection between time, relativity and narrative, see Douglas C. Estes, The Temporal Mechanics of the Fourth Gospel: A Theory of Hermeneutical Relativity in the Gospel of John (Leiden: Brill, 2008). According to Estes, the theory of relativity is a modern way of understanding time that “allow[s] us to approximate and return to the sense of temporality in the ancient world” (252) in a way more fruitful than linear Newtonian temporality. Similar suggestions have been made for Paul (e.g., Douglas Campbell’s discussion of time and Einstein in his recent work: Douglas Campbell, Pauline Dogmatics: The Triumph of God’s Love (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020), 156–57, which includes a brief reference to Nolan).