I have been meaning to catch up with Following (1998), the first full length film directed by Christopher Nolan, ever since I saw a trailer for it on the DVD for Memento (2000; my mainstream review; my Christian review; my 2001 top ten list; my article on memory movies). But it wasn’t until someone mentioned Following in an online discussion of Nolan’s newest film, Batman Begins, that I finally put a hold on it at the library.
As it turns out, the film is so short that you could probably watch it twice in the time it takes to watch Batman Begins once. And so I did; after watching the film itself, I played it again with Nolan’s commentary. I have not yet taken advantage of the special feature which allows you to watch the film — which jumps back and forth in time — in chronological order, but I plan to do that, too.
The film’s original premise is so interesting, it’s a bit of a shame to see it get shunted aside in favour of a more contrived noir-ish double-cross story. The original premise has something to do with a man’s tendency to walk into a crowd, pick someone at random, and then follow that person around; there is an interesting tension there between faceless masses and individual human behaviour that surfaces again in the discussions over corporate and individual responsibility for crime in Batman Begins, and it reminds me of a conversation I had with my wife, long before we were married, when we stood at the north end of Stanley Park and watched the car lights streaming down one of the roads in North Vancouver, way over on the other side of the river, and I asked her if she ever wondered what was going on in the minds or lives of the individual drivers behind those far-off pin-pricks of light.
A more meditative film could have milked this premise for, oh, I don’t know, ten or twenty minutes; but Following zips right through this set-up in its first few minutes so that it can cut to the chase and kick off the real story: Cobb (Alex Haw), one of the men being followed by Bill (Jeremy Theobald), confronts him and then offers to help him achieve even newer levels of voyeurism by showing him how to break into people’s flats and mess with their minds while making a bit of money burgling on the side. This, too, is a precursor to Nolan’s later films: in Memento, Leonard Shelby suspects he is being used by his protector Teddy, and in Batman Begins, Bruce Wayne’s mentor also turns out to be a villain.
Other Chris Nolan motifs make their first appearance here. For example, Cobb tells Bill that “everyone has a box,” i.e. a container in which they keep their most personal objects; this has parallels to the personal effects that Leonard burns in an almost ritualistic fashion in Memento, as well as the case that contains Thomas Wayne’s stethoscope in Batman Begins. And hey, when Bill invites Cobb over to his apartment — which was apparently Theobald’s apartment in real-life! — there’s a very noticeable Bat-signal on the front door. A cute, and eerie, harbinger of things to come.
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