From the PANY Bulletin, Summer, ’08
I am certain that I am far from the only member of PANY/NYUPI who was deeply saddened at hearing that Jules Glenn had died. Jules was not merely a revered teacher and a major contributor to psychoanalysis, he was a naturally warm and friendly man who took a genuine interest in people. I took classes with him as a candidate at the NYU Institute and later attended many discussion groups and seminars with him as a faculty member. He was always friendly, down to earth, “hamish”.
Jules was one of the instructors for the “applied analysis” course that I took as a candidate. In one of the classes, he talked about his own work on the plays of the twin authors, Peter and Anthony Shaffer. That was when I first learned of his particular interest in the dynamics of twins. It came up again in discussions over the years, most likely in some of the many meetings of the Psychoanalytic Colloquium for Psychoanalysis and the Arts that we both attended. It was for that reason that I instantly thought of him when I happened onto the film, The Prestige.
I had seen The Prestige at some point after it came out in DVD, but it had not made much of an impression on me until I walked in on a scene from it about a month after hearing of Jules’s death and instantly realized, as if in one thought, that this was the theme of my next film essay and that it was connected to my memories of Jules.
A search in PEP came up with four papers that Jules Glenn wrote on the subject of twinship between 1966 and 1986 as well as a book review of a translation of Otto Rank’s essay on “The Double”. The first was a clinical paper written in 1966, “Opposite-Sex Twins”. He presented it as a rare clinical paper dealing with the dynamics of non-identical twins. The succeeding papers approached the subject through the literary works of the Shaffer brothers, fraternal twins, and Thornton Wilder, whose twin brother died at birth.
In the second of his papers on the Shaffer brothers (Glenn, 1974b), Jules summarized some of the psychodynamics that had been identified in twins. “Twins are generally brought up close to each other and develop extremely close relationships. The mother-child dyad is complicated by the fact that two children of similar appearance go through the developmental stages concurrently. The two infants coo to each other, watch and touch each other, play with each other, and later frequently develop a secret language together. As they grow older they engage in intimate, ambivalent games. They get to understand and react to the whims and moods of their siblings with much greater empathy and accuracy than is generally the case with brothers and sisters, often to the point that they become convinced that telepathic communication occurs. As Maenchen (1968) has so aptly put it, in some cases ‘the twin symbiosis drains or replaces entirely the mother-child symbiosis’ (p. 454). The intense affectionate ties between the twins are such that they love each other narcissistically as they consider themselves part of a complete person. They strive to be with the other in actuality or in fantasy, often through the presence of a substitute. They identify with and imitate each other. Sexual acting out of the libidinal attachment may indeed occur, leading to homosexual activity.
“But at the same time they are rivals. Their animosity originates genetically in the pre-oedipal rivalry for their mother. Each feels that the other has deprived him of his mother’s love and supplies, as indeed he often has, for the mother of twins has much more trouble feeding and caring for her two children than do mothers with several children who are born years apart. One twin often has to wait while the other is fed or picked up; there is a real danger of the mother’s doing an unsatisfactory job. At the same time each twin, even in childhood, finds in his sibling an unusual source of gratification. As I have pointed out (Glenn, 1966) this alternation of excessive frustration and excessive gratification can result in difficulty in separating self- and object-representations.
“Uncertainty about ‘ego boundaries’ leads to the twin’s fantasy that he is half a person, that he has been deprived of half his body in the womb or after birth. Feeling deficient, twins may feel justified in trying to retrieve the missing part, even by stealing it back from the twin, or through displacement, from his substitutes. Or he may desire to steal from the mother, whom he pictures as the depriving figure. In either case the hostility may be intense and often has to be defended against. Destroying the twin is dangerous, since it involves harm to what is felt to be part of the self. In addition, the murderous impulses are contrary to the superego dictates. And, of course, the sibling is loved. One way of attempting to avoid hatred is to keep things equal; if each person shares equally there is no cause for rage. It is striking to see twins try to divide food or an inheritance exactly evenly, to an extent rarely seen in ordinary siblings. When things become unequal, murderous rage may follow. The painful antagonism may be avoided by the twins’ complementing each other, each taking on traits and interests opposite to the other.
“The anxiety resulting from feeling incomplete, from being dependent upon, or sexually attracted to, an incestuous object whom one hates, leads a large number of twins to seek extreme independence of each other, thus masking the closeness. The desire to achieve identity as a non-twin, as a complete individual, can be intense.” (pp. 373-374)
The film, The Prestige, is based upon Christopher Priest’s novel of the same name. It tells a complicated story about a deadly rivalry between two young magicians, Alfred Borden and Robert Angier, in the late 19th century. As such, it bears a resemblance to the well-known Peter Shaffer play, Sleuth which Jules Glenn discusses at length. In Sleuth, two men engage in a cat and mouse game of trickery, each repeatedly turning the tables to outwit the other. “Milo tries to take Andrew’s wife from him, and Andrew retaliates cruelly in the first act. Thereafter, Milo repeatedly strikes back, identifying with and imitating his opponent as he tries to make things equal, ‘to even the score’.” (Glenn, 1974a, p. 291) In The Prestige, Borden and Angier are two young magicians working together on an act in which Angier’s wife is bound by them and dropped into a “locked” glass container filled with water. She drowns, presumably because Borden has used a different knot than was suggested to tie her hands. Angier blames him for her death and sets out to get his revenge, much as Andrew does in Sleuth, setting off a similar series of retaliations, each more violent than the last. Glenn discusses Sleuth in terms of the disguised twinship dynamics inherent in the ambivalent rivalry and sadomasochistic play between the two men.
Angier retaliates first by disguising himself and interfering with a trick that Borden is doing, “catching the bullet”. The trick involves sleight of hand in which a person chosen from the audience shoots at the magician. The magician, in setting up the gun, palms the bullet so that nothing is projected, but Angier replaces the bullet and shoots off two of Borden’s fingers. The theme of disguise and interference with the other’s tricks continues, with escalating damage.
The plot centers around one magic trick in particular that Borden has perfected, “The Transported Man.” He steps into a box and almost instantaneously appears coming out of another box at some distance from the first. Angier becomes obsessed with finding out how Borden performs his trick. He is told by the film’s narrator, Cutter, the promoter/producer of Angier’s magic show (called an “ingenieur” in the film) that the only way to do it is with a double. In fact, Cutter hires an actor to be Angier’s double, but Borden manages to find the actor and undermine the show.
Angier has by this time taken a new lover, a woman who works in his act. He directs her to go to work for Borden in order to steal his secrets. He tells her to tell Borden that he’d sent her for that purpose but that she is really there to give Borden Angier’s secrets, creating in her a double agent whose role and attachment becomes more complicated as the film proceeds.
In this, we can readily see the twinship dynamics that Glenn has outlined. We have these two men in a rivalry, with one trying to steal the other’s tricks, in essence his identity. When Angier sends his girlfriend to Borden, they are essentially sharing and exchanging the same woman. In fact, she later comes back to Angier with Borden’s secret notebook. Only later we find out that Borden has sent her deliberately with the notebook. We can easily recognize the themes of mutual identification, some blurring of self and object and a sharing of the same woman. Without much more, we could be thinking about twinship dynamics, but the plot thickens and darkens.
One of the well-known tenets of magic, and one which is talked about in the film, is the element of distraction. The magician attempts to draw the viewer to something irrelevant, keeping his mind and eye off the subterfuge. For our purposes, the focus on magic and magic tricks in this film is the distraction. The opening scene contains the key to our understanding the film’s dynamics of twinship, but we do not see it at that point. What we see is a little girl watching a magic trick while Cutter (Michael Caine) narrates:
“Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts. The first part is called the pledge. A deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he invites you to inspect it to see that it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course it probably isn’t. The second act is called the turn. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret, but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet because making something disappear isn’t enough. You have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the part we call the prestige.”1
We see a series of images while we are watching. In one set of images, we see a coherent scene in which Cutter performs a magic trick for the little girl, taking a small bird out of a cage (the “pledge”), making it disappear (the “turn”), and then reproducing it for her. Mixed in are images that we will later learn are part of the plot, an image of top hats, then images of Angier doing his act, “The New Transported Man” while Borden sneaks backstage where he sees Angier land in a locked box filled with water and watches him drowning. As Cutter concludes his narrative, we see that he is delivering it from the witness stand of a courtroom where Borden is on trial for Angier’s murder.
We are drawn quickly to the conflict between Borden and Angier, a story that is told in flashback form from this trial scene. As the film develops, we learn that Angier draws Borden into a trap. Knowing that Borden will want to uncover the secret to his trick, he sets him up to be present to view Angier drowning so that he will be convicted of his murder. For those who have not seen the film, I will explain how he does this presently (“the prestige”).
But we are distracted from the seemingly more mundane image, the magic trick performed for the little girl. In this trick in which a dove is made to disappear and then reappear, lies a key to understanding the twinship dynamics of the film. You see, we learn early in the film how this trick is done. The dove, the pledge, is placed in a collapsible cage. The magician places a cover over the cage, then collapses it, crushing the bird inside. He then produces another bird, identical looking to the first, creating the illusion that the bird has come back, when indeed it is his “twin” who has been spared in order to complete the trick. Here are the film’s secrets: Two individuals posing as one; one dying that the other may survive.
The film accomplishes this trick through a combination of subterfuge and fantasy. It all hinges on the trick, “The Transported Man.” Angier is obsessed with how Borden does the trick. After his attempt to perform it using an actor double is sabotaged by Borden, he becomes determined to find out. Cutter has told him that there is only one way to do it, with a double, but Angier refuses to believe that. He gets hold of Borden’s diary through his former lover, Olivia, now Borden’s mistress, but it is written in cipher and he needs the key. He forces Borden to give him the key by kidnapping someone very close to Borden.
To understand this, I must explain the evolution of Borden’s “household”. (I think I said this was a complicated plot.) After parting from Cutter and Angier, Borden meets a woman, Sarah, whom he subsequently marries. In fact, he meets her when he is showing the disappearing bird trick to a little boy, her nephew, who sees through the illusion, crying bitterly about the bird that has been killed, seeing that the live one is a substitute. Soon after he and Sarah are settled together, Borden brings in a permanent houseguest, named Fallon, who he says is his ingenieur for his acts. Borden and Sarah have a child, the girl we see at the beginning of the film watching the disappearing bird trick. As the plot develops, Borden also takes on Olivia, Angier’s former lover, as his own mistress.
Borden and Fallon are seemingly inseparable. It is Fallon who is kidnapped and buried alive by Angier in order to extort the key to the cipher. Borden gives him the cipher key, “Tesla”, telling him that the key is the secret, then frantically digs out Fallon from his premature grave.
Throughout the film, we are given clues to Borden’s secret, clues that reappear at the end when the truth is shown. The secret is not “Tesla”; that is another subterfuge. The secret is that Borden is a set of twins. Each takes turns disguised as Fallon, and each tries to fill the other in on what has transpired while he was Borden. Like her nephew, Sarah intuits the truth, but does not identify it. She continually tells Borden that at times when he says he loves her, he seems to mean it; at other times he does not. When Olivia comes on the scene, she calls Alfred Borden by a pet name, “Freddie”. The twins have even gone to the trouble of amputating the ends of one twin’s fingers to duplicate the amputation caused by Angier’s bullet. They do it to support the act, The Transported Man, but it is clear that it comes natural to them to share a life, to meld into one person, Fallon being a silent, undemonstrative shell.
Borden has distracted Angier by telling him that the cipher key, “Tesla”, is also the secret. Nikola Tesla is an historical figure, a Serbian born genius who invented the prototype for alternating current, was the first to demonstrate “wireless communication (radio)”, but was an eccentric who eventually was perceived as being a “mad scientist” according to a Wikipedia article. Angier pursues him to Colorado, where he finds that Tesla has invented a machine that can reproduce any object placed in its electrical field, sending the double to a new spot at some distance. Angier buys the device to use in his Transported Man act. His plan is not merely to outdo Borden, but to trap him.
In fact, we see Borden and Fallon arguing about Angier’s trick. One, seen as Borden, argues that he must find out what Angier is doing, the other warns him to leave Angier alone. Borden, in disguise, sneaks under the stage where he sees Angier fall into a glass box filled with water, identical to the one that Angier’s wife, Julia, had drowned in at the beginning of the film. As Borden tries to save him, Angier drowns before his eyes. Cutter comes in on the scene, assuming that Borden has contrived to kill Angier.
Angier has allowed himself to drown, knowing that he will continue as the double, the truly identical twin, that will appear several yards away. One twin drowns that the other may survive alone. In fact, we discover that he has always had a double identity. Early in the film, he had told Julia that he used the name Angier because his family would not accept his being a magician. He is a wealthy aristocrat, Lord Caldlow. Angier dies, Borden is tried for his murder, and Lord Caldlow buys all of Angier’s equipment.
As Lord Caldlow, he visits the now condemned Borden in prison. Recognizing him, Borden futilely cries out that the man he has been convicted of killing is alive. As a final act of retribution, Lord Caldlow “benevolently” takes in Borden’s daughter, who will be orphaned with Borden’s death. Borden’s wife Sarah, no longer able to tolerate the incomprehensible fluctuations in her husband, provokes him to tell her the truth, does he love her. He says “not today” and she subsequently hangs herself, evidence of the breakdown of the dual identity.
But the final retribution, and the prestige, goes to Borden. Condemned to death, we see him telling Fallon, “You’ll have to live for both of us now.” He is hung, his last word, “abracabra”. As a “victorious” Angier starts to burn his machine and other artifacts in a hidden warehouse, the remaining Borden comes in, led there by Cutter, who now understands the truth. He shoots Angier, and as he watches him die, he explains that he and his twin had lived one life, but that he had loved Sarah and the twin who was hung, (Freddie), had loved Olivia. They had each taken turns being Fallon and each had been the one to go into the box and the one who came out to take the applause. As he walks off, the camera pans to show us what is being destroyed, a series of glass, water-filled cases containing drowned Angiers. The fratricidal rivalry is demonstrated in a “flashback” to Angier’s first attempt to use Tesla’s machine. He has a pistol by his side to use on himself in case the experiment does him some terrible damage. Instead, his double appears several yards away. Seeing him, Angier shoots him to death.
From that point on, Angier continues to kill himself by drowning, night after night, only to reappear as a new continuation of himself. In this fashion, each incarnation of Angier begins life by receiving the applause and ends it as “the man in the box.” After his wife’s death by drowning, Cutter had told Angier a story about a sailor he’d met who had nearly drowned, but had been revived. He said that the man told him that it was like going home. At the end of the film, he tells him that he had lied; that the man had said it was agony.
The film ends with the scene with which it had begun. Cutter shows the re-found dove to the girl, Borden’s daughter. Then her father, Borden, enters and takes her in his arms. She has no need to see through the subterfuge, with the dove or the man. She is happy to be returned to her rightful father, who will now go on living a single identity.
At this point, the readers, particularly those who have seen the film, are ready to put all the pieces together, but I will nevertheless make the connections (“the prestige”). Glenn had described the twinship relationship as an ambivalent one. The twin is both a rival and a part of oneself. Thornton Wilder’s twin, Theophilus, died in childbirth, and Glenn (1986) demonstrated that he was left with relief as well as guilt at having been the one to survive. In the Borden twins, we see the loss of self and object boundaries represented, as well as the intense attachment to the twin who is viewed as an extension of the self.
But the film more pointedly elucidates a murderous rivalry. For “Borden”, the rivalry was subdued. We do see the breaking apart of the dual identity when Freddie tells Sarah that he does not love her “today”, leading to her suicide. His death, however, is not caused by his twin, but by his other rival, Angier. Nevertheless, one twin dies and the other is left to live life for both.
With Angier, through the device of pure fantasy, we have the extreme of the identical twin, a fantasied double who shares not only the DNA, but also the memories and identity of the original. For him, there can be only one. He does not think to use his double to perform the trick. In fact, he uses his own death to destroy his rival. When we see Angier shoot his first double, we are made graphically aware of the fratricide.
There are a series of deaths in the film. Two women die, Julia by drowning, Sarah by hanging. Similarly, Angier dies by drowning and one of the Borden twins is hung. Repetition provides good dramatic effect, but it also should be a clue to unconscious content. To a psychoanalyst, the multiple images of people drowning in a box may bring up many associations, but one which will consistently appear, particularly in this context, is the image of the water filled womb. In his paper on opposite sex twins, Glenn talks about a patient’s fantasies of being in the womb with the twin. I think it is fair to say, particularly for Angier, that we have a repeated image of one twin surviving while the other dies in the womb.
Arlow (1972) wrote about a fantasy that he witnessed in people who had been an only child, that a twin had been killed in the womb that he or she might survive alone, not unlike Thornton Wilder, whose twin was a stillbirth. Angier is both a twin and an only child, the wealthy Lord Caldlow, who appears to inhabit his estate in solitude except for servants.
In Jules Glenn’s terms, The Prestige presents us with a graphic demonstration of the ambivalent dynamics of the twin. I suspect that he would want me to point out additionally that the deaths of the two women, Julia and Sarah, may represent the twin’s ambivalence towards the mother, who must share her resources between the two loving rivals.
Ordinarily, I would stop at this point. My interest in film, unlike that of many others, is simply to use the film to demonstrate psychoanalytic principles, usually fantasies that are generally unconscious. However, that was not Jules’s primary interest. He was more interested in the creative process and always started with the creative artist. His interest was in discovering more about the artist from the art. He wrote about Sleuth and other plays by the Shaffer brothers not to simply use the plays to demonstrate twinship dynamics, but to help us understand the motivation of the playwrights as well. Similarly, in his paper on Thornton Wilder, his starting point was Wilder’s biography.
I am working backwards in this respect. However, out of respect for Jules, I did decide to do some investigation into the creative artists involved. I did not find detailed biographical information, but some was available on the Internet. I used a combination of IMDb (Internet Movie Database) and biographical web pages.
The film’s director is Christopher Nolan. I found no evidence that he is a twin. … However, he was a co-writer of the film. The principal writer was his younger brother, Jonathan Nolan. The film was written by brothers and directed by one of them. It is not a great stretch to suppose that two brothers, working in the same field, might be drawn to a story about fraternal rivalry and fratricide. IMDb lists as the film’s “tagline”, “A friendship that became a rivalry. A rivalry that turned deadly.”
The film was based upon the novel by the British author, Christopher Priest. Again, I found no evidence from his biography that he is a twin. … However, I did find on the IMDb website that he and his second wife are raising twin daughters. Coincidence? I don’t actually know for a fact that they were born before the book was written, nor do I know if there were other twins in his family or his wife’s. I also found that Priest has one other possible connection to twins. He has his own “evil twin”. The expression is mine, but he essentially confirms the sentiment. From the IMDb website:
“Christopher Priest should not be confused with James Owsley, the American comic book writer who legally changed his name to Christopher James Priest (aka Christopher J. Priest, C. J. Priest, or simply Priest). Unfortunately, the two have been confused by consumers who buy works by one, expecting the works to have been created by the other. In a November 2004 interview, the ‘real’ Priest showed some anger about this confusion, saying he thought it ‘a bit bleeding irritating to have my name pinched by another writer,’ and made an open plea to DC Comics, Inc.: ‘If Jim must use a pseudonym, why doesn’t he pick a really silly one, like, say, Harlan Ellison?'”2
Jules, I can only hope that you would have approved.
Arlow, J.A. (1972). The only child. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 41:507-536.
Glenn, J. (1966) Opposite-sex twins. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 14:736-759.
Glenn, J. (1972) The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study by Otto Rank. Translated and edited, with an introduction by Harry Tucker, Jr. Reviewed in Psychoanalytic Quarterly 41:433-435.
Glenn, J. (1974a) Twins in disguise-A psychoanalytic essay on Sleuth and The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43: 288-302.
Glenn, J. (1974 b) Twins in disguise II: Content, form and style in plays by Anthony and Peter Shaffer. International Review of Psychoanalysis 1:373-381.
Glenn, J. (1986) Twinship themes and fantasies in the work of Thornton Wilder. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 41:627-651.