I took it that sometimes Angier experienced drowning to death but then became conscious as the surviving Angier.
At other times, he enjoyed being teleported as the prestige.
It actually is undefined because in the very first test, the Angier who should drop and drown shoots the teleported Angier.
I think Nolan could have gone one step further, if Angier had made one surviving clone after the final act shown.
Then there would still be one Borden and one Angier.
(Unless, the created clone made his own clone, then killed the original that created the first clone.)
author wrote:I think Nolan could have gone one step further, if Angier had made one surviving clone after the final act shown.Then there would still be one Borden and one Angier.
That would have contradicted, in totality, the character that Angier was. He could not let himself have a clone, however helpful that might have been to his tricks. His hyper-greed turned him inhuman.
Indeed. Angier would basically fuck himself over if he kept a clone. And he was not ready to handle that.
As Mr Tesla said, "Have you considered the cost of such a machine?"
One interesting factor in the Angier copy saga - The Prestige Angier for each performance has never actually had the memory of being the man in the box. As far as he is concerned, he stepping into the machine x nubmer of times, and came out x number of times alive. The Box Angier (who is drowning the first time for each performance) is not around to remember or even relate the horror of drowning to his doppleganger.
Even if who goes where is changing (ie the transported Angier is the original, or vice versa), the fact is that the memory of death dies along with the drowned man. This is why the revelation of how awful drowning acutally is (Cutter retracting his assurance that drowning is like "going home") is horrifiying to Angier - because it takes away the one comfort he had in doing it (that the copy (and his wife) died peacefully at the very end).
AverageDrafter wrote:One interesting factor in the Angier copy saga - The Prestige Angier for each performance has never actually had the memory of being the man in the box. As far as he is concerned, he stepping into the machine x nubmer of times, and came out x number of times alive. The Box Angier (who is drowning the first time for each performance) is not around to remember or even relate the horror of drowning to his doppleganger.
Even if who goes where is changing (ie the transported Angier is the original, or vice versa), the fact is that the memory of death dies along with the drowned man. This is why the revelation of how awful drowning acutally is (Cutter retracting his assurance that drowning is like "going home") is horrifiying to Angier - because it takes away the one comfort he had in doing it (that the copy (and his wife) died peacefully at the very end).
So true. And [that] is the great sacrifice by Angier. The clone that "survived" never experienced drowning. Angier became insane of obsession..
AverageDrafter wrote:One interesting factor in the Angier copy saga - The Prestige Angier for each performance has never actually had the memory of being the man in the box. As far as he is concerned, he stepping into the machine x nubmer of times, and came out x number of times alive. The Box Angier (who is drowning the first time for each performance) is not around to remember or even relate the horror of drowning to his doppleganger.
Even if who goes where is changing (ie the transported Angier is the original, or vice versa), the fact is that the memory of death dies along with the drowned man. This is why the revelation of how awful drowning acutally is (Cutter retracting his assurance that drowning is like "going home") is horrifiying to Angier - because it takes away the one comfort he had in doing it (that the copy (and his wife) died peacefully at the very end).
AverageDrafter wrote:One interesting factor in the Angier copy saga - The Prestige Angier for each performance has never actually had the memory of being the man in the box. As far as he is concerned, he stepping into the machine x nubmer of times, and came out x number of times alive. The Box Angier (who is drowning the first time for each performance) is not around to remember or even relate the horror of drowning to his doppleganger.
Even if who goes where is changing (ie the transported Angier is the original, or vice versa), the fact is that the memory of death dies along with the drowned man. This is why the revelation of how awful drowning acutally is (Cutter retracting his assurance that drowning is like "going home") is horrifiying to Angier - because it takes away the one comfort he had in doing it (that the copy (and his wife) died peacefully at the very end).
So true. And [that] is the great sacrifice by Angier. The clone that "survived" never experienced drowning. Angier became insane of obsession..
Isn't killing yourself a great sacrifice? Not knowing if one becomes the man in the box (which nobody cares for), or The Prestige?
A massive leap of faith for Angier every night until Borden did show up so he could frame him. That is being driven to insanity by obsession. Angier didn't even care for Borden's secret anymore, until he got shot.
Every night, Angier was drowned, and yet, was alive, not knowing which he'd be, since they'd both be him. That's incredibly fucked up, let's be honest. I mean, would you be able to do that? Perform a trick that resulted in you drowning to death every night?
I have to wonder how much of a sacrifice this really is for Angier.
Consider this... You sit a table across from a stranger, and a man with a gun flips a coin - heads you die, tails the stranger get it. The dead man is taken away and the winner starts the game again with a new opponent.
After coming up tails 50 times in a row, you start to see the game as unlosable. You're mind might tell you that you can die with any coin flip, but experience suggests otherwise and you would tend to either see yourself as blessed, or that the game is rigged. I would imagine the Prestige Angier would see the Box Angier as the copy, because he has won the "game" everytime. So while intellectually he might know that he can be the man in the box, emotionally he would see himself as preordained to be the prestige beacuse he hasn't experienced anything else - disptite the number of times the trick had been done.
This is punctuated by the "I'm the real...." right before he is shot during the experimentation. Interesting note, if one is always the original and one is always the copy, then the original Angier dies at least once because it is the "prestige" (ie transported) Angier that gets killed at this point, while during the act it is the other.
Logicaly I would imagine that the one that is on the platform is original, and the copy is transported, but its tough to say (watch the cat change positions during the Telsa demo - it tends to debunk this). I prefer to think that the original is vaporized and both are copies.
