The Invisible People in Christopher Nolan’s Films

For those of you who are not keeping count, I’m proud to say that it wasn’t until this 16th blog post that the entire topic at hand happens to be the films of Christopher Nolan. But fret not, I’m not really interested in talking about the motifs and trademarks that everyone points out and makes fun of. So much has already been said about Nolan’s obsession with time, perception, self-deception, IMAX-cification, homecoming, suits, doubles, nuclear weapons, dead wives, Earl Grey tea, and unintelligible sound mixing (even the world’s biggest Nolan fan can’t deny that the man has a peculiar judgment of how audible dialogue should be in the sound mix).

What I wanted to talk about today is a slightly more recent development, a newer motif that has emerged across the latter half of his filmography: The consistent presence of an invisible group, by which I mean that there’s often a group of supporting characters that are spoken about extensively, and their role is always crucial to the narratives of Nolan’s recent films, but they pointedly remain unseen by the audience, only existing as an abstract notion rather than as tangible human beings. This is a conscious choice on Nolan’s part, as the reason that we don’t see these characters is because they’re not meant to register as fleshed-out characters. They’re meant to be symbols, representatives of an overarching theme that each respective film is dealing with, and so my goal here is to explore how each example of these invisible people carries its own thematic significance and adds emotional resonance to the films in which they appear. Or rather, in which they only technically appear.

Also, it goes without saying that there will be massive SPOILERS for all the Nolan films that I’m about to discuss (with the notable exception of the section discussing The Odyssey, in which I’m really just making educated guesses). So if you haven’t seen one of the films in this blog post, feel free to skip that section, and of course I encourage you to watch that film in question whenever you get the chance. These are all incredibly rewarding motion pictures, offering more and more things to appreciate every time you go back to them.

Interstellar (2014)

This is the very first instance of the invisible people motif in Nolan’s filmography, and it is certainly the most optimistic and the most elaborate iteration of that idea thus far.

The central conceit of Interstellar is that the Earth is dying, that humanity has done far too much damage to save it, and that eventually people in the future will need to find a new home if they want the human race to survive. It’s a sentiment that is expressed most directly in one of the film's most indelible lines, the one that also served as the tagline for the movie: “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.”

As the main characters try to find a habitable planet that could serve as a suitable replacement for Earth, they keep receiving auxiliary assistance from an invisible presence, a seemingly omnipotent force that provides clues and resources. Books keep falling off Murph’s shelf, seemingly trying to spell out a message in Morse code. Cooper receives binary coordinates to NASA’s headquarters through falling lines of dust. A wormhole to another galaxy is placed near Saturn, allowing astronauts to reach potentially habitable planets that would otherwise be too far away. And in the mind-blowing third act of the film, Cooper falls into a black hole and suddenly finds himself in a surreal realm known as a “tesseract,” a higher-dimensional space where time is physicalized, meaning that moments in the past can be revisited, but crucially, they cannot be altered.

So throughout the film, the characters keep wondering about who exactly is helping them. Who is capable of providing all these otherworldly tools that transcend the laws of quantum mechanics as we know them? These invisible people are simply referred to as they, the vaguest possible name. And because this is a sci-fi film set in space, the audience naturally expects that they will end up being extraterrestrials, in a classic scenario of technologically superior aliens helping out desperate humans at a time of need, like in 2001: A Space Odyssey (which is obviously the biggest influence on Interstellar), Contact, Arrival, or the recent Disclosure Day.

That’s why it is such a powerful moment when Cooper finally realizes that they are not extraterrestrials… they are in fact former terrestrials, human beings from an advanced future who have managed to gain control over a lot of the laws of physics that we cannot currently harness, and they have gone back in time to help their ancestors, thus preserving the existence of the human race. To put it in simpler terms, the children of the future are rescuing the elders of the past, and in effect, humanity saves itself.

It’s a beautiful notion that aligns perfectly with the heart of the film, as it becomes increasingly clear that Murph is the true hero of the story, and it’s only through her personal connection with her dad that the human race can be saved from extinction. It’s all in that thesis statement delivered quite poetically by Dr. Amelia Brand: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space.”

It’s the most purely idealistic, unabashedly sentimental concept that Nolan has ever come up with, and it’s no wonder that it resonates with so many people to this day. It’s just such a comforting thought that if people were able to go back in time, they’d do so to genuinely help the species, rather than for more self-serving reasons.

Dunkirk (2017)

I think that out of all the usages of the invisible people motif, Dunkirk is the film with the most fitting and evocative depiction of that notion.

This marks the first time that Nolan has ever made a film entirely based on true events (I emphasized the word entirely because The Prestige does feature the real-life rivalry between Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison as part of an otherwise fictional story), as it depicts a major historical event that occurred in 1940 (on the heels of the start of World War II), and it is essentially a deconstruction of the war movie genre. In fact, around the time that he was promoting the film, Nolan would often say that he preferred to describe the movie as a survival thriller rather than an ordinary war movie, because this is not really a film in which opposing sides fight each other with equal chances of survival. This is a film about a military evacuation, brought about by the fact that the British soldiers that we’re following are decidedly outmatched and surrounded by German forces. There is absolutely no chance of victory at this moment, so the best they can hope for is to survive the treacherous journey home. And what’s most tragic is that the beaches of Dunkirk in which they are stranded happen to be barely within viewing distance of British territory. As Commander Bolton points out early on in the film: “You can practically see it from here… home.”

What’s so interesting about the film’s approach to building tension and staying firmly in the perspective of the British characters is that we never really see the German soldiers. When German snipers shoot down at a bunch of British soldiers in the opening scene, we only see the deadly impact of the bullets. When German planes drop bombs on the beach, we only see the destructive explosions. Even when the pilot Farrier is captured as a prisoner of war at the very end of the film, the German soldiers who hold him at gunpoint are purposely kept out of focus, their faces obscured and abstracted. In fact, the word German is only uttered when Gibson is accused of being a German spy, only to be revealed as a Frenchman trying to escape like the rest of the British soldiers. For the most part, the film refers to the Germans in this context as the enemy, like in the opening text of the film, which states that the collective “enemy have driven the British and French armies to the sea.”

This artistic choice (and the film’s absolute commitment to that choice) makes for quite a haunting viewing experience, as it makes the German soldiers feel more like destructive forces of nature, and the wreckage of their attacks lies amongst the crashing waves of the beaches. It makes the plight of the Allied soldiers, who have no choice but to wait to be rescued, feel like the ultimate existential threat, the horrifying sense that nature itself is against you.

It’s only when the British armada of ordinary civilians finally arrives to help out that we feel some much-needed hope. This time, it’s the elders of the past who have come to the rescue, and it’s particularly moving to think of them as parents picking up their lost children and finally bringing them back home. At a time when young British soldiers felt quite ashamed for having to retreat, collectively feeling as if they had let their country down, what they needed to hear most was that their families were not disappointed in the slightest. They were simply relieved that their children were still alive. All of those feelings are portrayed with beautiful succinctness in perhaps the most powerful exchange in the film, when towards the end one of the dejected British soldiers laments that “All we did is survive.” And a kind, blind elderly man who gives him a blanket replies, “That’s enough.”

TENET (2020)

Here is easily the most divisive film in Nolan’s career, the one that tends to baffle people the most in terms of its mind-bending concepts, to the point where a lot of viewers simply give up in trying to understand any of it, in spite of the film’s verbalized insistence that it’s better to focus on feeling the experience rather than fully understanding it. And while it is indeed the film which arguably demands the closest attention out of Nolan’s filmography, it also contains what is perhaps his sneakiest implementation of certain thematic concerns, and that sneakiness is all too fitting for a film about secret agents who are very deliberate about how much information they can reveal at any given moment.

In many ways, the invisible people in TENET are essentially the evil twins of the invisible people in Interstellar, because they share similar circumstances, yet their goals are entirely opposed. The central conceit of TENET is that people from the future (who we obviously never see) have figured out a way to send objects back in time by inverting them, essentially shifting an object’s flow of time so that its temporal movement is reversed, and thus it moves backwards through time. As the film goes along, it becomes clear that the goal of the future generation is to activate a doomsday device known as “The Algorithm,” which could potentially reverse the temporal flow of the entire world, effectively eradicating all previous life on Earth.

Of course, the concept of someone from the future murdering an ancestor is most famously represented in the “Grandfather Paradox,” which is briefly discussed in the film. For the uninitiated, the paradox refers to a scenario in which someone traveled back in time and killed their grandfather as a young man, which would then mean that the time traveler could never be born in the first place. So with this paradox in mind, the main characters of the film wonder why the future generation would want to destroy the past. After all, wouldn’t they be bringing forth the destruction of their own species?

It is only towards the end of the film that we realize why the future generation is acting so drastically. Andrei Sator, the antagonist of the film and the only person who communicates with this invisible future generation, explains that they are only acting out of pure panic, since the world in the future has been ravaged by environmental collapse, and so their only chance to save themselves is to reverse the effects of climate change. When asked by The Protagonist about the vengeful motivation of the future generation, Sator replies that they’re only doing this “because their oceans rose and their rivers ran dry. Don’t you see? They have no choice but to turn back… We’re responsible.”

It’s quite a devastating reveal for an action film to include near its conclusion, as up until that point TENET plays more like a playful spy film mixed with a surrealistic time travel component. Some have argued that the film does not do enough setup to merit such a depressing plot development, but if you watch the film again, notice how often the main characters find themselves on the ocean, and how much the movement of the waves is emphasized, both in their regular state of forward progression and in their inverted state of backwards regression. It’s like the film is subconsciously asking us to appreciate the nature that we have at the current moment, because if we do not take action to preserve it and nurture it, then it will inevitably come back to haunt us.

If Interstellar presents Nolan’s most optimistic view of future generations, then TENET fittingly presents the exact inverse of that idea, a pessimistic view of the children of the future in which they are desperately and resentfully hellbent on annihilating the elders of the past. In effect, humanity destroys itself.

Oppenheimer (2023)

Speaking of humanity destroying itself… Where do I even begin?

If Dunkirk is easily Nolan’s most minimalist film, featuring very few locations, little dialogue, and a small set of characters whom you only get to know through their actions, then Oppenheimer is probably his most maximalist film (although The Odyssey might surpass it in this regard, as I suspect 😂) featuring countless locations, extensive dialogue, and an overwhelming amount of complex historical figures who at some point interacted with the father of the atomic bomb, the titular character J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The contrast between Dunkirk and Oppenheimer is quite fascinating in ways that don’t get talked about enough; they’re essentially bookends for each other, especially in terms of how they differ in their usage of the invisible people motif. In Dunkirk, the time period is shortly after the start of World War II, and the invisible group is in so many ways the attacker of the picture. In Oppenheimer, the time period is the end of World War II, and the invisible group is actually the victim of the picture.

What I’m referring to is that although the film is ostensibly about the construction of the atomic bomb, we pointedly never see the infamous bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The invisible group in question is the Japanese people, who are only spoken about but never shown on screen. Many critics, audience members, and even certain legendary filmmakers (such as Spike Lee and James Cameron), found this choice to be a severe flaw of the film, as they wanted to see the utter destruction that the atomic bomb brought upon the Japanese people, so that the audience could truly understand the consequences of creating a weapon of mass destruction.

But the point of the film, right down to its deceptively simple title, is that the film is not just about Oppenheimer, but largely told through the eyes of Oppenheimer, and his eyes tend to look away from all the damage that he caused in the first place. The most direct scene that addresses this notion is when all the scientists at Los Alamos are looking at the aftermath pictures of the bombings, describing all the painful devastation that the Japanese people suffered, but instead of us seeing such disturbing imagery, all we see instead is Oppenheimer in the crowd refusing to look at the photos, as his guilty eyes remain looking down at the ground. That’s the fundamental paradox of Oppenheimer’s character, the fact that one of the world’s most scientifically gifted minds created the world’s deadliest weapon because he naively thought that it would definitively end the sheer concept of war, and upon coming to terms with the terrible effect of his actions (not to mention the fact that he ended up fueling the fire of war rather than extinguishing it), he then tried to argue against the use of nuclear weapons. Of course, by that point it was all far too late.

That’s the reason why when the first atomic bomb finally explodes during the show-stopping Trinity Test sequence, we expect to hear a deafening explosion, but what we get instead is a moment of absolute silence, followed by a few haunting breaths of awe, and we get a quiet reprise of Oppenheimer’s infamous quoting of the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become death… the destroyer of worlds.” After a full minute of this eerie hushed tone, only then are we abruptly hit with the startling shockwave that we were dreading. It’s not just a scientifically accurate depiction of how a distant sound travels; it’s the perfect metaphor for the eventual realization of severe consequences, the kinds that are grasped long past the point of no return.

If the film were to show the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki more explicitly, it would run the risk of exploiting such sensitive imagery. By remaining in the complicated perspective of Oppenheimer, the film is not in any way trying to ignore or forget about the pain that the Japanese people felt. It is in fact trying to show that the unimaginable horror that a whole country endured came as a result of a few reckless Americans in positions of power deciding their fate, and that the drastic actions of certain misguided individuals can have disastrous repercussions on the rest of the world as a whole.

I think the best way to conclude this section is with an impeccably phrased quote from the great film critic Justin Chang, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his defense of Nolan’s choice to not show the bombings (I highly recommend reading that article, it’s excellent). “We are sometimes told, in matters of art and storytelling, that depiction is not endorsement; we are not reminded nearly as often that omission is not erasure.”

The Odyssey (2026)

It’s certainly worth noting that I am posting this blog post just a few hours before I finally see The Odyssey for the first time, so needless to say, I am feeling quite normal, calm, reserved, and decidedly not bursting with the most intense excitement you could possibly imagine.

So knowing quite well that I could be fully wrong about this, I did want to present a hunch regarding how I think Nolan will incorporate the motif of the invisible people in his newest film, and I do think that he has chosen yet another fitting scenario to present it.

As soon as it was announced that Nolan was adapting The Odyssey, a lot of people understandably wondered if he was going to retain all the fantastical aspects of the epic myth, simply because he is the kind of filmmaker known for telling stories in a very grounded, realistic manner, even if the subject matter at hand is deliberately heightened, like in the case of The Dark Knight Trilogy. Most people never imagined that a Nolan film would ever feature a giant cyclops, sea monsters, and a witch who turns men into swine.

But I do think that given his most recent work, Nolan would find it interesting to portray the presence of the gods in an invisible manner. By this I mean that I really don’t think Nolan is ever going to cut to Mount Olympus, to show Zeus throwing down lightning bolts at mere mortals. What would feel more fitting for his sensibilities is that he’ll allude to the interference of the gods by once again showcasing the ferocious power of nature, as Odysseus and his men find themselves in the midst of countless lightning storms, the kinds of natural disasters that are brought forth by the tempestuous gods.

Not only would that restrained depiction accurately reflect the kinds of divine signs that people often interpreted at the time that Homer wrote the original epic, it would also continue this layered motif of invisible presences in a way that would serve the story quite naturally.