Following · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man stands in a London crowd and picks a back to follow. Not the same person twice, he promises himself; never anyone through a private door; it is only a way of touching lives he cannot otherwise reach. He calls it research. Christopher Nolan's first feature — 16mm black-and-white, shot on weekends over the better part of a year for a few thousand pounds — begins as the gentlest sort of trespass and ends as a cage the man walked into on his own two feet.

Watch how the camera watches him. Nolan shot it himself, handheld, holding the lens at the following distance, so that we shadow the watcher exactly as the watcher shadows strangers. Deleuze has a name for that doubling: the dicisign, an image in which the camera perceives someone who is himself perceiving, until you begin to feel the camera as a second, colder watcher in the room. The whole surveillance texture of the film — grey daylight, real crowds, documentary furtiveness — lives in that redoubled gaze. We are never innocent of the following, because the film has made us do it too.

But the real trap is not in the image. It is in the order of the images. Following is told out of sequence, at least three time-strands braided together, and Nolan gives you just enough to navigate: the protagonist is scruffy in one strand, clean-cut in another, battered in a third, so grooming and injury become a clock. Here the film stops being a thriller you watch and becomes one that lies to you. Deleuze calls this falsifying-narration — not a flashback that clarifies a former present, but a telling whose very sequence is a deception, mutually exclusive readings of the same events held true at once. The confessional voice you lean on (the debt is straight out of Double Indemnity, the patsy narrating his own doom) is the voice that betrays you. You trust the order. The order is the con.

And who is running it? Cobb, the soft-spoken burglar who breaks into flats less to steal than to rearrange lives, handling a stranger's photographs and underwear and letters to read the absent owner like a text. Cobb is what Deleuze names le faussaire, the forger — the figure who does not discover truth but manufactures it. He assembles the young man an identity, schools him, and then quietly steals that identity back to frame him for murder. This is the powers of the false raised from a plot device to a principle: in this world truth and falsity are not given and then hidden, they are made, by whoever holds the better story. Cobb holds it. He always did.

Notice that Cobb's method and Nolan's method are the same method. Cobb teaches the young man to read a person from the box of things they keep — objects that mean by their customary chain, what Deleuze calls the mark (you see the relic, you infer the life). Then he weaponizes that reading. The film does this to us. Its pleasure is the relation-image, the mental-image: meaning we assemble ourselves, from relations we hold in our own heads as we knit cause to effect across the broken timeline. We are the knowing third who reasons out the scheme. And because we did the reasoning, the trap, when it shuts, feels like our own fault. Nolan has made the act of understanding the plot indistinguishable from the experience of being conned. That is the single most Nolan thing in the film, and it is already whole here.

This is why Following rewards the second watch, which is the signature of the mind-game film: run it again and the timeline stops lying and starts confessing. The scenes have not changed; your relation to them has. What looked like a lonely man's harmless hobby is revealed, in retrospect, as a script someone else was writing all along.

The lineage is worn openly and paid honestly. From Rear Window, the voyeur-as-investigator, suspense built from a man who watches other lives. From Strangers on a Train, the seductive accomplice who scripts an ordinary man into a crime. From Double Indemnity, the retrospective confession whose ordering we trust and are betrayed by. From Detour, the proof that a fatalist noir with an untrustworthy narrator can be shot for pocket change — the poverty-row economy Nolan revives at feature scale. From Pickpocket, theft rendered as tactile procedural played by non-professionals, which is exactly Cobb's hands-on tutorials. From Breathless, the handheld street noir and elliptical cutting done in monochrome. And what it seeds is not subtle: the reverse-and-forward architecture of Memento is right here, a year of Saturdays before it had a budget.

What did it do to film? It proved that chronology itself could be the delivery mechanism of a con, that editing was not how you tell a noir but the noir — the frame-up performed on the audience. Deleuze located the powers of the false in the great modern time-image, in Welles and Robbe-Grillet. Nolan smuggled them into a genre thriller and made them pay their way as suspense. Follow a stranger, the film says, and you will learn nothing about him and everything about who is following you. Watch it again. This time, watch Cobb.