Why Christopher Nolan’s Following is a masterful… | Little White Lies

In Praise Of

Why Christo­pher Nolan’s Fol­low­ing is a mas­ter­ful mod­ern neo-noir

18 Jul 2017

Words by Tom Williams

A black and white photograph showing a man standing in a doorway with a thoughtful expression. He is wearing a suit and tie.
A black and white photograph showing a man standing in a doorway with a thoughtful expression. He is wearing a suit and tie.
This moody mono­chrome thriller from 1998 is an immac­u­late­ly craft­ed tale of crime and obsession.

Every­one has a box,” lec­tures Alex Haw’s Cobb while men­tor­ing The Young Man (Jere­my Theobald) on how peo­ple are inclined to keep pos­ses­sions that rep­re­sent them most truth­ful­ly as an indi­vid­ual. In a sim­i­lar sen­ti­ment, Nolan’s direc­to­r­i­al box” includes sev­er­al notable fea­tures that define his style – all of which are on grand dis­play in this neo-noir chef‑d’euvre.

Fol­low­ing sees The Young Man pick peo­ple out of a crowd and study them as a form of cre­ative voyeurism. This push­es him into the smarmy hands of Cobb who has a sim­i­lar obses­sion with anony­mous mem­bers of the pub­lic, only his infat­u­a­tion man­i­fests itself in low-lev­el socio­path­ic bur­glary. It’s no sur­prise, then, that the film fre­quent­ly draws atten­tion to spe­cif­ic objects, as is typ­i­cal of Nolan’s style – whether it be the miss­ing ear­ring or stolen cred­it card.

These items all play a sub­tle part in the con­clu­sive dou­ble-twist and are made to feel sig­nif­i­cant through inserts, where­by the shot is a close-up dras­ti­cal­ly dif­fer­ent to the mas­ter shot. Nolan uses this tech­nique excel­lent­ly in Fol­low­ing and indeed in the rest of his canon, think of the rub­ber ball in The Pres­tige or Incep­tions icon­ic totems.

By includ­ing these sig­nif­i­cant objects, Nolan allows his char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly non-lin­ear nar­ra­tive to switch from time peri­ods flip­pant­ly, whilst keep­ing the order of events rel­a­tive­ly clear in the audience’s mind. For exam­ple, the vary­ing place­ments of The Blonde’s (Lucy Rus­sell) ear­ring indi­cates the stage of the sto­ry and slow­ly unrav­els The Young Man’s tur­bu­lent jour­ney. Now syn­ony­mous with the director’s style, this ear­ly attempt at a jump­ing chronol­o­gy is exe­cut­ed pre­cise­ly despite bud­getary restric­tions (a mere $6000).

We flash for­ward to our pro­tag­o­nist being inter­ro­gat­ed in the ear­ly stages of the film, which is where the nar­ra­tive even­tu­al­ly ends up via a series of ten­sion-build­ing bur­glar­ies, fights, and dou­ble-cross­ings. In a 2014 Vice inter­view Nolan spoke of the height­ened nat­u­ral­ism” that exists in Fol­low­ing, which is achieved by the genre-spe­cif­ic noir style, set against the back­drop of a famil­iar Lon­don set­ting. This cre­ates an intense atmos­phere with a relat­able yet melo­dra­mat­ic string of events which are typ­i­cal of noir and also have a taut doc­u­men­tary feel, cour­tesy of the low-bud­get hand­held cam­eras used to film almost all of the scenes.

The fre­net­ic ener­gy that anchors the film is also achieved by cross-cut­ting sev­er­al scenes togeth­er, a tech­nique per­haps most famous­ly used by Nolan in the falling minibus scene in Incep­tion. How­ev­er, it is also deployed to great effect in Fol­low­ing with­out the tech­nol­o­gy avail­able. He seam­less­ly merges events from dif­fer­ent stages of the nar­ra­tive to show the inter­con­nect­ed­ness of the char­ac­ters’ actions. Pos­ses­sions are knocked over or moved only to be picked up by oth­er char­ac­ters, or to appear unmoved in oth­er scenes to rein­force the mud­dy time­line. This is often incrim­i­nat­ing, with a minia­ture wood­en man­nequin being key when under­stand­ing the order in which The Young Man’s dingy apart­ment is entered.

The score is also quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Nolan and adds to the fast-paced action of the film, with long-time col­lab­o­ra­tor David Julyan (who worked on Memen­to, Insom­nia and The Pres­tige) using a scin­til­lat­ing mix of harsh reverbs and gen­tle piano. Cobb him­self plays the ivories with gloved hands, which fea­ture ubiq­ui­tous­ly through­out. The film opens with its most icon­ic shot of hands fondling through a box of pos­ses­sions – an image Nolan fre­quent­ly uses to intro­duce his char­ac­ters, be it the bird-cradling fin­gers of Michael Caine in The Pres­tige or Leonar­do DiCaprio’s safe-crack­ing mitts in Inception.

The intri­cate plot­ting is stan­dard Nolan and despite some wob­bly act­ing in parts of the film, his script reigns supreme with an entic­ing men­tor dynam­ic, a smat­ter­ing of romance, and a com­pelling, rule-break­ing pro­tag­o­nist. Nolan often has his char­ac­ters lay out rules for them­selves only for them to be bro­ken lat­er – in this instance The Young Man’s sto­ry gains momen­tum when he breaks his car­di­nal rule: don’t fol­low the same per­son twice. It’s tes­ta­ment to Christo­pher Nolan’s genius that his direc­to­r­i­al hand is so vis­i­ble, regard­less of the finan­cial and tech­no­log­i­cal con­straints he was work­ing under, through­out this mas­ter­ful mono­chrome thriller.

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