On the Border between Fantasy and Reality: Searching for the Subject in Christopher Nolan's Films. The New Studies of English Language & Literature 51 (2012): 135-154. This article proposes to examine the relationship between identity and traumatic me...
On the Border between Fantasy and Reality: Searching for the Subject in Christopher Nolan's Films. The New Studies of English Language & Literature 51 (2012): 135-154. This article proposes to examine the relationship between identity and traumatic memory as a theme consistently found in Christopher Nolan's critically acclaimed movies, Memento (2000), The Dark Knight (2008), and Inception (2010). Facing tragic and traumatic incidents, the main characters in these films are forced to question who they really are and to reintegrate their shattered identities through fantasy and reconstructed reality. Therefore, despite the genre variations, Nolan's films show that the subject can be secured paradoxically through recognizing the ultimate ambiguous boundary between self and other, fantasy and reality. This theme is along the same line with Lacanian analysis of "fragmented subject" and the entailing philosophical questions in the contemporary cultural studies. (Ewha Womans University)