Obsession In The Prestige, Angier And Borden

The Prestige gives the viewer an opportunity to see just how far a passion for self-sacrifice in the search for excellence can become a destructive obsession. Per John Millbank (1999) sacrifice is being willing to give up something good for something better.

To be able to transform a dream into a reality will take sacrificing many things in order to make your goal come to reality. Generally nothing is ever gained without something being sacrificed.

Sacrifice for a person when relating to the context of a dream and a goal will be faced with many obstacles which will require you to give up other things in life that may have been important to you in the past. Your new goal will make you sacrifice something that once mattered to you for something

Single-focused awareness relies on focusing on one subject at a time and being naturally competitive makes you strive to be the best at what you do and winning. A person that is obsessive is wrapped up and so compulsive to gain approval to their success. Eventually, nothing or no one in their lives matters, it is all about them and the need to succeed and/or win. This theme is so evident in The Prestige, Angier and Borden have such an obsessive need to control all the variables in their life and their profession that it fuels the obsession even further. Angier and Borden are in denial of their obsession; they try to rationalize and project blame and dissociate from people that care for them. Angier and Borden are afraid of the threat of failure and distort reality to ignore the impact of their behavior is having on others around them. Their obsessive efforts to succeed at any cost creates a dark side of their character because of their anger and rage toward anyone who threatens to challenge their

Director Christopher Nolan uses his style of sleight-of-hand direction, about a story of two competing magicians trying to make it to the top of their profession at all costs. The Prestige left me guessing not only about how these magic tricks were being accomplished, but also the true meaning as to what was going on behind the stage. Christopher Nolan is known for his cinematic misdirection and that theme is very prevalent throughout The Prestige. Magic involves misdirection to create an illusion to fool the viewer, thus providing an action the viewer could not see by giving the viewer something else to focus on. The Prestige is set up so that you focus on Angier become obsessed with knowing the true nature of Borden's trick. Cutter insists that the only way the trick is possible is with a double, but Angier refuses to believe it. As an audience member, you also want to believe that something more is going on; you want to be fooled. Christopher Nolan does just that in The Prestige, the ending was fantastic. The ending monologue is just a reminder from the beginning regarding what Cutter said, “that magic is better the less you understand.” The Prestige was great; I love movies that make you think and I enjoyed trying to understand what lies beneath the of the assumed movie plot. The ending spelled everything out for me and loved how Nolan