And who is the real Angier? These questions echo a millennia-old argument about our very understanding of what defines us as individuals. But in The Prestige , Nolan puts forward his own take on this classic debate: our identity is defined by the function we perform.
We see a basic version of this idea when Angier visits Tesla. Nolan does grant that there are essential differences between these two people. Indeed, each of the two men fall in love with different women: Olivia and Sarah. The part that found you. But in a sense, all three are right. Cutter is correct in that a second man comes out of the cabinet. Borden belongs to whoever is fulfilling his function at a given time.
Robert Angier is an identity that is all appearance and function, with no single, unchanging essence. Robert Angier is not a single man, using multiple identities. In his New Transported Man act, Angier throws his hat to his double, then disappears beneath the stage. And without the hat, the man below ceases to function as Robert Angier. Similarly, a rubber ball transfers Alfred Borden from one man to another, both onstage and off.
They care about the one who comes out the other side. But what about the clones? All of the clones could claim equal rights to the Angier identity. Immediately after the opening scene, the film jumps back in time for at least a decade to begin the story of Angier's downfall.
In the earliest segment in the flashback, audiences meet Borden and Angier before they are accomplished magicians, with the two men working together as plants in another magician's show. When Borden makes a mistake that costs his wife her life, however, the events of The Prestige are truly set in motion. Once Julia Piper Perabo dies, the men are torn apart and go their own separate ways.
From there, the film chronicles each magician beginning his career and moving on with the next phase of his life. Borden meets and falls in love with a woman named Sarah Rebecca Hall , and they have a little girl named Jess Samantha Mahurin. He also develops a wildly successful trick called The Transported Man in contrast with Angier, who now lives in the shadow of Borden's success.
Offstage, Angier is consumed by his obsession with learning the secret to Borden's trick, laying the foundation for The Prestige 's macabre finale to unfold. Years pass, and Angier eventually perfects The Transported Man, with Borden arriving at one of his shows to witness it. He sneaks backstage and appears to witness Angier die performing the trick, mirroring the sequence shown at the beginning of the film, before it's assumed that Borden is responsible and he is arrested for Angier's apparent murder.
Once The Prestige timeline catches up to Borden in jail, the film moves in chronological order as the secret to both men's tricks are eventually revealed. The film ends with Cutter describing the fateful Transported Man magic trick to a little girl, who audiences now know to be Borden's daughter Jess.
Borden and Angier both master a trick called The Transported Man, in which the magician appears to travel between two wardrobes on opposite ends of the stage, almost instantly. The film's final act reveals each man's outlandish take on the trick, with Borden mastering The Transported Man first with a sleight-of-hand strategy.
The ending of the film reveals that the identity of Borden is actually assumed by twin brothers. On stage, one brother is located in each wardrobe. They take the deception so seriously that, when one brother loses a couple of fingers from a gunshot wound, the other cuts off his fingers to match.
In essence, there is nothing flashy about Borden's approach here — the trick is grounded and straight to the point, backed up by the Borden twins' painstaking approach to detail. On the other hand, Angier's mission to master The Transported Man takes him stateside to meet the famed inventor and engineer Nikola Tesla. He believes that Tesla built a transportation machine for Borden - a belief that quickly turns out to be false - but Tesla still manages to build a transportation machine for Angier.
This machine duplicates any object or living being placed inside and drops the copy a short distance away, meaning each time the trick is performed, Angier is cloned. This means the original Angier falls through a trap door into a water tank and drowns each time the trick is performed, with the new duplicate appearing somewhere in the theater to delight Angier's audiences. The trick, or more accurately Faustian-style bargain, is what finally earns Angier's the audience's adoration, which is what his character has long been searching for.
In short, Alfred and Fallon Borden don't technically exist, instead acting as two separate identities taken on by a set of twin brothers. As one brother says in the film, they live two halves of a full life. They're so dedicated to this craft that they each sacrifice a potentially well-rounded life in order to succeed in their chosen career.
Rather than one brother committing to one personality, they each lived half a life. The key difference between the two men is that Borden has made peace with the sacrifice his deception requires. But if you can be truthful with the nature of your deception, then you can find a way to come home like Borden to his daughter or Cobb to his children in Inception. For an explainer on the ending of Inception , click here. Matt Goldberg has been an editor with Collider since
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