Nolan Fans

WARNING: This topic will pretty much contain all spoilers about the ending of The Prestige. If you haven't seen the movie, I would advise you to stop reading here.




I just watched The Prestige again, for the first time in like 12 months (which is very long for a movie I like so much!)
Now, the last words that where spoken are these:

Cutter: Now you're looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.

I can't get this off my mind. To me, in the ending, everything is explained. Borden has a twin brother, they both take turns and pretend to be Fallon one at a time, that's his trick on the Transported Man. Algiers uses something different. A machine that hasn't even a name. It's not a transporting device, it's a duplicator. It places a copy of something or someone, on a specific place. Every question raised in the movie, is answered.

Yet still Cutter tries to convince us something we haven't seen.
Is there something in this movie we didn't see. Something that wasn't shown or more likely: was shown, but we didn't see? Is there like a second twist-ending?

I don't think we're missing anything massive like that. I've watched it, oh, at least once a month since I got it on DVD, and I still pick stuff up - how lines of dialogue are connected and so forth - but not really anything in terms of plot points. The ending is perfectly explained for me too.
I think that the line, 'you want to be fooled,' is basically saying that Borden and Angier's audiences didn't want to confront the reality of the trick, that every night Angier was basically killing himself to do it. The audience wanted to be entertained, and such knowledge would, I think, make the trick (the lack thereof, really) much less entertaining. Borden didn't think that Angier knew anything about sacrifice, but yet Angier died like a hundred times. They wanted to be fooled.
Those are my two cents, anyway.

Good point!
Thanks for your input, at least if there is something, I'm not the only one who didn't pick it up

Now I feel like I should watch it again o_o

me2. it's been a year since I last watched it.

I have one question: What did Sarah mean when she said "I know what you really are"?

dagn96 wrote:I have one question: What did Sarah mean when she said "I know what you really are"?

She knew that Borden had a twin and was using him as the prestige in his version of The Transported Man. Later in the film, Olivia mentions that Sarah was going to tell her, however, of course, Sarah took her own life before she had the opportunity.

I imagened it was that. Thanks!

Actress Rebecca Hall stated in the special features on the DVD that the line wasn't in the script and she just said it. While she thought she had given away the ending of the movie, Nolan decided to keep it in the movie.

Erik wrote: Cutter: Now you're looking for the secret. But you won’t find it because of course, you're not really looking. You don't really want to work it out. You want to be fooled.

Is there something in this movie we didn't see. Something that wasn't shown or more likely: was shown, but we didn't see? Is there like a second twist-ending?

The whole point of Caine's monologue at the end is to illustrate how people intentionally deceive themselves and aren't really looking for the truth. That's how Nolan was able to pull of the twist ending with Alfred's twin.

The point is that the secret to the magic trick was being paraded right in front of our eyes for the entire film. Caine's charater, Cutter, knew the truth from the offset but several agents throughout the film intentionally deceive the audience to make them think that it is something more than a simple body double. Just like a magic trick, it distracts you to make you look one way so you won't see how the trick is being done.

In essence, the truth was there, but you just weren't looking for it.