Abracadabra! Hollywood Turns a Scientist into a Sorcerer
Film Review by Howard Schneider
Posted December 15, 2006

TITLE: The Prestige DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan STARRING: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, David Bowie, Scarlett Johansson, Piper Perabo, Andy Serkis, Ezra Buzzington RATING: PG-13 GENRE: Thriller THEATER RELEASE: October 20, 2006 DVD RELEASE: February 20, 2007

The film The Prestige has struck a nerve in audiences, probably because of its blend of Gothic artifice and science, or more precisely, its representation of science as Gothic artifice. The movie depicts the vicious rivalry between two nineteenth-century British magicians, but the story's real magus turns out to be none other than Nikola Tesla, in real life a great and fascinating scientist and inventor. This is likely Tesla's film debut (although he's appeared in fiction), and his portrayal raises disquieting questions about how popular culture distorts and demeans science and those who practice it.

The word genius is doubtless applied far too often to inventors, but it seems appropriate for the Croatian-born Tesla (1856-1943), whose professional achievements changed the world. Tesla's domain was electricity. Among his myriad accomplishments, he played vital roles in the decipherment and implementation of alternating current-endeavors that literally (and figuratively) underpin our modern technological civilization. Even some of Tesla's projects that seemed preposterous in his day, such as his research on particle-beam weaponry and the dissemination of wireless electric power, no longer seem so far-fetched.

Tesla was also extremely eccentric (he was romantically attached to a pigeon), a spendthrift, and ingenuous in his dealings with hardheaded businessmen like J. Pierpont Morgan and George Westinghouse. These unfortunate attributes combined to cause his decline and eventual downfall. The Prestige isn't interested in Nikola Tesla's career or even in his idiosyncrasies.

The filmmakers, realizing that most moviegoers know little about Tesla, felt free to present him as something he emphatically wasn't (despite his mischievous sense of showmanship): a "wizard," as one character says. (In the October issue of Wired magazine the director, Christopher Nolan, is quoted as saying that in Victorian England, "Scientists were presenting their discoveries to the public almost as the magicians of their day.") In The Prestige Tesla (a miscast David Bowie) creates some kind of sinister teleportation-cloning machine for one of the feuding magicians, an incredible (in both senses of the word) contraption that was never part of the actual inventor's teeming agenda. By wrenching Tesla from his life's work, the film caricatures and curtails the man and perverts his science and the history he so powerfully influenced.

Why is this important? Surely when science is already beleaguered in America today, it's not good news that a popular movie is sending a message to its credulous admirers that scientists are shameful shamans and science itself is a locus of hocus-pocus.