By Peter Krämer
As far as I am concerned, Oppenheimer (2023) has been the most important Hollywood blockbuster of recent years.[1] And by some criteria, Christopher Nolan, a British born and raised filmmaker, who has worked closely with other Brits, including a range of notable women, has outdone, in terms of both box office success and esteem, all other Hollywood filmmakers, not only of recent years, but perhaps even of all time. As he did in Oppenheimer, Nolan has tackled big issues, including stories about historical turning points or existential threats to the future of humanity, in several of his other films, notably in Interstellar (2014), Dunkirk (2017) and Tenet (2020). For these and other reasons, I do think that Nolan’s films really matter. Therefore, I would add, the women in his films (and also his closest female collaborators) matter. And that’s where it gets rather problematic. Doing a Google, or indeed a Google Scholar, search for ‘women in Christopher Nolan’s films’ or some such phrase immediately reveals that many people, including Film Studies academics,[2] have been concerned about, and often enough intensely critical of, this aspect of Nolan’s work.
While not intending to offer a comprehensive defence, I do want to make a rather personal point at the outset, namely that I have been strongly affected, indeed deeply moved, by certain scenes focusing on women in several of Nolan’s films, most especially in Interstellar and Oppenheimer (2023) but also, for example, in Memento (2000). Occasionally, script, casting, acting, direction and everything else work together so as to allow a female performer to make a particularly strong impression in individual scenes, but rarely, if ever, is this sustained across a whole film, not least because in most of Nolan’s films individual female characters, quite unlike the male leads, tend to have little screen time.
This even applies to the female lead role in Oppenheimer, which earned Emily Blunt several nominations for supporting actor awards (for example from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Screen Actors Guild and BAFTA). And Florence Pugh, who, for all kinds of reasons (not just the strength of her performance but also, for example, the controversy, especially in India, surrounding her nude scenes), attracted a lot of attention for her performance in Oppenheimer, was on screen for only a few minutes.
I should add that I am not really a typical long-time admirer and student of Nolan’s work. I came to it rather late, but in recent years I have started to rewatch and occasionally write about some of his films.[3] Given their complexity and the large amount of critical writing about them, I still feel a bit like a novice. For this and other reasons I will not be able to present a detailed analysis of Nolan’s oeuvre here, but I want to offer a sketch of key aspects of his work to do with the role of women (both on screen and off), before taking a closer look at Oppenheimer.
When it comes to women in Nolan’s films, the first thing to note is that there aren’t that many. A look at the IMDb cast lists for his films (which are based on the films’ full cast lists in the end credits) is revealing. For his first two features (Following [1998] and Memento [2000]) things look like what one has come to expect insofar as in each case the first three names include two men and one woman, respectively Lucy Russell (as ‘The Blonde’, a label which sets off alarm bells, and quite rightly so, I would say, given the fact that the whole film revolves around the brutal murder of this character) and Carrie-Ann Moss. General statistical analyses of Hollywood movies and of British cinema across the decades reveal that only about one third of major and minor roles are female. Already with Insomnia (2002), the only film Nolan directed without also having (co)written the script (which was by Hillary Seitz based on a Norwegian film), things start to look very differently: Hilary Swank comes fourth in the cast list, and the next woman (Paula Shaw) comes twelfth. Similarly in Batman Begins (2005) the first woman (Katie Holmes) is at number four and the next (Sara Stewart) at number sixteen.
Some kind of balance is restored in The Prestige (2006); while the top three are male, at least they are followed by four women: Piper Perabo, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson and Samantha Mahurin. The Dark Knight (2008) however resembles Batman Begins: there are only two women in the top eighteen, Maggie Gyllenhaal at number five and Monique Gabriela Curnen at number eight. Inception (2010) has Elliott Page (at that time still identified as a woman and credited as Ellen Page) at number three and Marion Cotillard at number nine. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) has Anne Hathaway at number five and Cotillard at number six (and then no other woman until number twenty).
Interstellar is an exceptional case: the cast list follows the order of appearance, rather than importance, but the posters have four names above the title, one man each on the very left and the very right and Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain in between. Just for once this is a fairly balanced picture (especially if we take into account that, given the importance of her part, Mackenzie Foy would certainly have been added to the names above the title if she had been better known). Similarly, the naming of the main stars in the end credits which precedes the full cast list has Hathaway and Chastain in second and third place, followed by Ellen Burstyn, which suggests that in some ways female characters dominate this story (after all, the film starts with a close-up of Ellen Burstyn, directly addressing the audience and talking, in character, about her father, which appears to set up the whole film as her memories).
Dunkirk goes to the other extreme. There are virtually no women receiving acting credits, despite the fact that this is not only a combat movie but also, to some extent, a film about the home front, which would certainly have allowed for the prominent inclusion of female characters. The cast list for Tenet once again follows the order of appearance with the first woman at number eleven. Some of the posters have five names above the title, all men except for Elizabeth Debicki in third place. In the film’s end credits, before the full cast list, Debicki (in third place) is followed by Dimple Kapadia, establishing at least some semblance of gender balance (two of the top four, albeit the last two). The full cast list of Oppenheimer is also in order of appearance, with Emily Blunt in second place, and the next two women (Emma Dumont and Florence Pugh) at numbers 28 and 29. On posters Blunt and Pugh appear as the second and the fifth name above the title; this is also their billing in the end credits before the appearance of the full cast list.
So there is a notable numerical scarcity of women in Nolan’s films, and they are also scarcely central to the stories the films tell. What is more, there are usually very bad things happening to these few female characters. For example, ‘The Blonde’ in Following and the protagonist’s wife in Memento are murdered (well, the way the latter film self-consciously presents its story as a perhaps unsolvable puzzle creates some doubt about what actually happened to the protagonist’s wife, if she even existed in the first place).
The starting point for the story of Insomnia is the brutal murder of a young woman. Several female characters die in the Dark Knight trilogy, including the ones played by Katie Holmes and Marion Cotillard. The wife of one of the two magicians at the centre of The Prestige drowns and the wife of the other commits suicide. A young girl is abandoned by her father and suffers from this abandonment well into adulthood in Interstellar; another female character is stranded on a distant planet.
The protagonist’s wife commits suicide in Inception. The main character of Tenet (a man called ‘The Protagonist’ in the full cast list) kills the second most important female character so as to prevent her from killing the female lead who in turn has suffered enormously in her marriage. Jean Tatlock commits suicide (or is she perhaps being murdered?) in Oppenheimer and Oppenheimer’s wife appears to have a pretty bad time as well.
Now, it is not the case that the teams making Nolan films are exclusive boys’ clubs. Most importantly, throughout his whole career Nolan has worked closely with Emma Thomas, his producer and wife. The script for Insomnia was written by a woman, although it was based on a film written by two men and all other writing credits for Nolan’s films, both for scripts and for source material, went to men. On three of his films, Nolan worked with a female editor, a particularly important role given his focus on intercutting storylines and timelines.
There are several other women receiving credits for example for producing, casting, production design and art direction on some of his films. But on the whole one gets the impression that, except for his close collaboration with Thomas, Nolan’s production teams are, like his casts, strongly biased towards males, perhaps more so than is usual in a generally male-biased industry. Given Nolan’s close collaboration with his wife, I am particularly struck by the negative representation of marriages in particular, and heterosexual relations in general, in their films.
I have come across something similar in the life and work of a filmmaker to whom I have dedicated the best part of the last fifteen years of my academic life: Stanley Kubrick. He was obviously committed to the institution of marriage (marrying young and then pretty much staying married all his life, but not to the same woman; his third marriage lasted from 1958 to his death in 1999). But the marriages in his films are often quite destructive, even horrendous (or horrific) affairs; and heterosexual relationships in general do not fare much better.
There has also long been a consensus among critics and scholars not only that there are comparatively few female characters in Kubrick’s oeuvre, but also that they are rarely at, or even just near, the centre of the stories his films tell (although there are some surprising twists: for example, the true survivor in Lolita is the title character, as is Wendy in The Shining; and in many intriguing ways Alice seems to control much of the story of Eyes Wide Shut). I guess I would have to say that in my own work on Kubrick I have settled on the explanation that the filmmaker was primarily interested in exploring the male psyche and all the harm men cause (not least to women).
Perhaps one could say something similar about Nolan. His male leads certainly tend to be involved (sometimes only indirectly or just in their imagination rather than in reality) in people’s deaths, among them often women they are or were close to, and they tend to be riddled with guilt and/or grief. And this brings me back to Oppenheimer.
Part two will be published next week.
[1] Cp. Peter Krämer, ‘World on Fire: Reflections on Oppenheimer (2023) and Contemporary Hollywood’, Pop Junctions, 4 March 2024, https://henryjenkins.org/blog/2024/3/3/world-on-fire-reflections-on-oppenheimer-2023-and-contemporary-hollywood?rq=oppenheimer.
[2] See, for example, the essays by Tasha Taylor and Margaret A. Toth in Jacqueline Furby and Stuart Joy (eds.), The Cinema of Christopher Nolan: Imagining the Impossible, London: Wallflower Press, 2015, and chapters by Will Brooker and Miriam Kent in Claire Parkinson and Isabelle Labrouillere (eds), A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023.
[3] See Peter Krämer, ‘An Initial Response to Interstellar’, ThinkingFilmCollective, 17 November 2014, http://thinkingfilmcollective.blogspot.de/2014/11/an-initial-response-to-interstellar.html; and ‘Dark Vision, Global Impact: Christopher Nolan, Box Office Hit Patterns and Interstellar’, in Parkinson and Labouillere (eds), A Critical Companion to Christopher Nolan, pp. 197-211; also my contribution to the online forum ‘“Barbenheimer”: Mass Appeal Cinema and the Evolution of the Blockbuster’, edited by Audrey Mitchell, Australasian Journal of American Studies, vol. 43, no. 1 (July 2024), pp. 129-32.
Peter Krämer is a Senior Research Fellow in Cinema & TV in the Leicester Media School at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). He also is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Media, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK) and a regular guest lecturer at several other universities in the UK, Germany and the Czech Republic. He is the author or editor of twelve academic books, including American Graffiti: George Lucas, the New Hollywood and the Baby Boom Generation (Routledge, 2023). For many years he has published about, and taught courses on, the role of women in Hollywood (both on and off screen).
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