“At the end of a Storm” Vol.3
“It was a Christopher Nolan type of a day”
“It was a Christopher Nolan type of a day”
“It was me Murph, I was your ghost!”
Wednesday 26th July 2023
Entering the car and turning the ignition, it wasn’t a huge surprise to me that the radio instantly played “Time To Say Goodbye” by Andrea Bocelli. It was roughly this time yesterday that I’d turned the same ignition on the same car to be greeted by the same song, a favourite of my dear old Mum’s and one which ensured she shone like the sun whenever she listened to it. Maybe that’s the reason for this strange twist of real life or maybe just maybe, this was the final proof that I’m living in a Christopher Nolan movie, and I’m having another Christopher Nolan type of a day.
The astute among you will point to my continual assertion that we all live in a Coen Brothers movie, diving headlong from one pratfall, a suspicious murder or a suitcase full of money to another, and you’d be right. We do. But a “Christopher Nolan type of a day”? Only for the bravest among us I’m afraid. You need an enigma you can’t solve and a riddle your life could really do without. You have a Joker and a Scarecrow, insomnia and interstellar travel, dreams within dreams within time slippages and wormholes, becoming death, destroyer of worlds.
So just be careful what you wish for. Before long you’ll be tattooing clues to a murder you can’t solve and remembering to forget.
These Christopher Nolan type of days can be a heavy crown to wear.
So if today and yesterday, or was it yesterday and the day before? Will it in fact be tomorrow and the day after that in a story and riddle I’m writing ahead of time, in real time, for a day that’s already happened and what happens if that song plays, again? Will you freak out? Or will you question whether or not it’s the first time this song has played and you are in fact in the “today” of the timeline? Will you look forward to the tomorrow of the riddle and the playing of the song again, or will you be driving to the nearest tattoo parlour to have “Never Answer The Phone” inscribed on your thigh in thick black ink?
Ring! Ring!
Saturday was very definitely, and without a shadow of a doubt, a Christopher Nolan type of a day. First viewing of “Oppenheimer” at the cinema and a page full of notes I’ve yet to transcribe into any kind of meaningful review for a film that is just majestic and shot in only 59 days according to Mr Oppenheimer himself, Cillian Murphy. My scribbled notes show “time changes”, “black and white reversed”, “Incredible sound design again”, “Cillian Murphy’s EYES” and “McCarthyism” amongst a plethora of other useless words and phrases that will continue to make no sense to me whatsoever when I do finally pen some words of appreciation for yet another Nolan masterpiece for the ages that will only bloom with further re-watches akin to his 2006 masterpiece “The Prestige”. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves.
We have many more Christopher Nolan type days laid out before us, but are you watching closely?
It might have been Thursday or it may have been the day before the day before, but in preparation for “Oppenheimer” I decided to re-visit his entire back catalogue. As you would expect I dispensed with a linear timeline as well as re-visiting my least favourites first starting with 2020’s “Tenet” before “Insomnia” led me back to his debut film “Following” in 1998. “Tenet” frustrates me as I simply don’t understand it and, whisper it, the film bores me. “Insomnia” is dreadful despite Al Pacino, Hillary Swank and Robin Williams trying gainfully to save it and “Following” is still a gem of a forerunner to “Memento”, which I re-watched in a double-bill with “Dunkirk” and only after spending a beautiful afternoon with my son and the Dark Knight of Gotham City before a triple bill to end them all: “Inception” followed by “Interstellar” and ending with his masterpiece for the ages, “The Prestige”.
As you can see, I’ve been having quite a lot of Christopher Nolan type days recently.
Before Andrea Bocelli makes us all cry again, kicking us all out of our deep sleep state and we have to say goodbye once again, I now cry even earlier during “Interstellar”, I still don’t care what’s happening or who’s sub conscious we’re in during “Inception”, I had the greatest of salted popcorn fun with my son and the Caped Crusader, and “The Prestige” should be hung like a precious artwork in the Tate Gallery.
My son has yet to remember to forget “Memento”, watch worlds being built inside someone else’s mind in “Inception”, seeing me weep like a teenage girl at the beginning to Nolan’s Kubrickian travel into space or the three card trick he pulls on everyone in “The Prestige”. He’s also listening to “Time To Say Goodbye” after he heard me listening to it.
Or did he hear this song somewhere else?
I have more riddles to solve and enigmas to create. It’s a perk of the job when you have a Christopher Nolan type of day as regularly as I do.
And it seems there are many more in the offing in the coming future past too.
“It was a Christopher Nolan type of a day” also moonlights as the very first chapter of my recently self-published book “At the end of a Storm” and here’s some promotional fluff to prove it as well as a bundle of books I’m immensely proud of:
"At the end of a Storm" - available via Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.
You live Christopher Nolan days in England and I live Hanna-Barbera days in Canada.