Following

Christopher Nolan will be remembered most for grand tapestries which convey his profound insights. He has been able to craft very clever and subtle images which pass as blockbuster and teenage-boy summer flicks; yet his Batman reboot is draped in layers of social commentary. Inception too has in itself a feeling of deep reflection on the demands and values of the contemporary society.

Yet fortunately, Mr. Nolan has been able to convey such visceral critiques in a much smaller portrait. At a much earlier time, that is before he became a household name, such an instance of this remark is seen with Following.

In Following, Mr. Nolan addresses an issue, albeit superficially compared to his Batman diagnosis, of the contemporary nihilism of the day. By nihilism, we take the absence of values above what one creates for oneself. Intriguingly, Existentialism in itself is a response to the demise of God in Western Society – while it embraces the nothingness found out there – beyond the walls of the self – it is a philosophy which nonetheless capitulates that sense of meaning or purpose that makes human life one of living and not dying. However, one requires a proper sense of orientation, which returns the individual back to square one, lost in a vortex of empty veracity and platitudes which feign as self-fulfillment. Clearly, then, Following is an anti-Existentialist piece.

Mr. Nolan highlights the absurdity of a decadent Godless society, one which finds no solace in creating a world which is higher than the morals of man. In a preceding epoch of the seasons of civilization, where the value man strives for is established in a higher Being, an appreciably perfect order which he attempts to integrate into, with this absolution, he is left with creating games for himself to pass the time.

One such game is following people. The sense of accomplishment of this “odiousness” highlights the insignificance man now has in his own self. Yet paradoxically his freedom to make his life stems from this pettiness. And, quite poetically, the film demonstrates the inescapable futility of pathetic self-serving.

The main character lacks the awareness, even in the bitter end, that the game he is playing is minuscule to those games being played around him. Mr. Nolan does not suggest that these games are any different or better – in fact quite the opposite. He expounds on the absurdity of a meaningless life, where values created by man in a vacuum arise no higher than what would be dramatized by eloquent simians.

Mr. Nolan’s main triumph in this work is his refusal to predictably cast his protagonist as a higher self, someone who strives to exhaust the ugly pettiness of the mediocrity that consumes everyone, simply because it is easier for people to indulgence than to imbue. Sardonically, we can see the “virtue” of the protagonist do him in at the sudden finale; clearly a sign of his obliviousness to his participation in a meaningless existence for himself, despite a belief in the contrary.

The ethos I find in Following, another striking note from Mr. Nolan, is this: true freedom does not enslave.

Grade: A